Book Freak #102: Productivity Is A Trap
Four pieces of advice from Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, by Oliver Burkeman
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Here are four pieces of advice from Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, by Oliver Burkeman
Choose Curiosity
“Choose curiosity (wondering what might happen next) over worry (hoping that a certain specific thing will happen next, and fearing it might not) whenever you can.”
Treat every experience as though it is the last time you will have it
“There will be a last time that you visit your childhood home, or swim in the ocean, or make love, or have a deep conversation with a certain close friend. Yet usually there’ll be no way to know, in the moment itself, that you’re doing it for the last time. Harris’s point is that we should therefore try to treat every such experience with the reverence we’d show if it were the final instance of it. And indeed there’s a sense in which every moment of life is a “last time.” It arrives; you’ll never get it again—and once it’s passed, your remaining supply of moments will be one smaller than before. To treat all these moments solely as stepping-stones to some future moment is to demonstrate a level of obliviousness to our real situation that would be jaw-dropping if it weren’t for the fact that we all do it, all the time.”
Choose a few things to do and sacrifice everything else
“Convenience culture seduces us into imagining that we might find room for everything important by eliminating only life’s tedious tasks. But it’s a lie. You have to choose a few things, sacrifice everything else, and deal with the inevitable sense of loss that results.”
Break free of the productivity trap
“Rendering yourself more efficient — either by implementing various productivity techniques or by driving yourself harder—won’t generally result in the feeling of having ‘enough time,’ because, all else being equal, the demands will increase to offset any benefits. Far from getting things done, you’ll be creating new things to do.”
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