Four Thousand Weeks

The same goes for existential overwhelm: what’s required is the will to resist the urge to consume more and more experiences, since that strategy can only lead to the feeling of having even more experiences left to consume.

We treat everything we’re doing – life itself, in other words – as valuable only insofar as it lays the groundwork for something else.

As convenience colonises everyday life, activities gradually sort themselves into two types: the kind that are now far more convenient, but that feel empty or out of sync with our true preferences; and the kind that now seem intensely annoying, because of how inconvenient they remain.

The trouble with attempting to master your time, it turns out, is that time ends up mastering you.

The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control – when the flood of emails has been contained; when your to-do lists have stopped getting longer; when you’re meeting all your obligations at work and in your home life; when nobody’s angry with you for missing a deadline or dropping the ball; and when the fully optimised pers

the bad procrastinator finds himself paralysed precisely because he can’t bear the thought of confronting his limitations. For him, procrastination is a strategy of emotional avoidance – a way of trying not to feel the psychological distress that comes with acknowledging that he’s a finite human being.

all a plan is – all it could ever possibly be – is a present-moment statement of intent. It’s an expression of your current thoughts about how you’d ideally like to deploy your modest influence over the future. The future, of course, is under no obligation to comply.

Before, time was just the medium in which life unfolded, the stuff that life was made of. Afterwards, once ‘time’ and ‘life’ had been separated in most people’s minds, time became a thing that you used – and it’s this shift that serves as the precondition for all the uniquely modern ways in which we struggle with time today.

borrow from the language of economics, Salcedo sees time as a regular kind of ‘good’ – a resource that’s more valuable to you the more of it you command. (Money is the classic example: it’s better to control more of it than less.) Yet the truth is that time is also a ‘network good’, one that derives its value from how many other people have access