There is an alternative: the unfashionable but powerful notion of letting time use you, approaching life not as an opportunity to implement your predetermined plans for success but as a matter of responding to the needs of your place and your moment in history.

Rather, a life spent ‘not minding what happens’ is one lived without the inner demand to know that the future will conform to your desires for it – and thus without having to be constantly on edge as you wait to discover whether or not things will unfold as expected.

the unending pressure to work with ‘crushing intensity’ in order to maintain the income and status that have come to seem like prerequisites for the lives they want to lead.2

I still think it’s the single best antidote to the feeling of time pressure, a splendidly liberating first step on the path of embracing your limits: the problem with trying to make time for everything that feels important – or just for enough of what feels important – is that you definitely never will.

we try to avoid the intimidating responsibility of having to decide what to do with our finite time by telling ourselves that we don’t get to choose at all – that we must get married, or remain in a soul-destroying job, or anything else, simply because it’s the done thing.

The technologies we use to try to ‘get on top of everything’ always fail us, in the end, because they increase the size of the ‘everything’ of which we’re trying to get on top.

Productivity is a trap. Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster.

contrary to the cliché, it isn’t really the thought that counts, but the effort

if you didn’t have to decide what to miss out on, your choices couldn’t truly mean anything. In this state of mind, you can embrace the fact that you’re forgoing certain pleasures, or neglecting certain obligations, because whatever you’ve decided to do instead – earn money to support your family, write your novel, bath the toddler, pause on a