Four Thousand Weeks

The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short. But that isn’t a reason for unremitting despair, or for living in an anxiety-fuelled panic about making the most of your limited time. It’s a cause for relief. You get to give up on something that was always impossible – the quest to become the optimised, infinitely capable, e

feeling you ought to spend every moment being productive in the service of future goals, thereby postponing fulfilment to a time that never arrives

Practise doing nothing.

Part of the problem here is an unhelpful assumption that you begin each morning in a sort of ‘productivity debt’, which you must struggle to pay off through hard work, in the hope that you might reach a zero balance by the evening. As a counterstrategy, keep a ‘done list’, which starts empty first thing in the morning, and which you then gradually

replace the high-pressure quest for ‘work–life balance’ with a conscious form of imbalance, backed by your confidence that the roles in which you’re underperforming right now will get their moment in the spotlight soon.

even in these essential domains, there’s scope to fail on a cyclical basis: to aim to do the bare minimum at work for the next two months, for example, while you focus on your children,

Decide in advance what to fail at.

consciously postponing everything you possibly can, except for one thing.

focus on one big project at a time (or at most, one work project and one non-work project) and see it to completion before moving on to what’s next.