Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
Radically Condensed Instructions for Being Just as You Are,
Oliver Burkeman • Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
when he stopped fighting the facts and allowed himself to more fully feel the icy water on his skin. The less attention he devoted to objecting to what was happening to him, the more attention he could give to what was actually happening. My powers of concentration might not come close to Young’s, but I’ve found the same logic applies. The way to
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In 1862, Emily Dickinson said, “The sailor cannot see the North, but knows the needle can.” And I think she was acutely aware, based on other things she said, about the slipping of external authorities, of the religion of her family, and of other points of reference of Western culture. She was saying: You better have a compass. And if you have a
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We mustn’t let Silicon Valley off the hook, but we should be honest: much of the time, we give in to distraction willingly. Something in us wants to be distracted, whether by our digital devices or anything else—to not spend our lives on what we thought we cared about the most.
Oliver Burkeman • Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
Increasingly, we’re also the kind of people who don’t actually want to rest—who find it seriously unpleasant to pause in our efforts to get things done, and who get antsy when we feel as though we’re not being sufficiently productive.
Oliver Burkeman • Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
The fuel behind worry, in other words, is the internal demand to know, in advance, that things will turn out fine: that your partner won’t leave you, that you will have sufficient money to retire, that a pandemic won’t claim the lives of anyone you love, that your favored candidate will win the next election, that you can get through your to-do
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Choose uncomfortable enlargement over comfortable diminishment whenever you can.
Oliver Burkeman • Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
we’ve been granted the mental capacities to make almost infinitely ambitious plans, yet practically no time at all to put them into action.
Oliver Burkeman • Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
The most fundamental thing we fail to appreciate about the world, Heidegger asserts in his magnum opus, Being and Time, is how bafflingly astonishing it is that it’s there at all—the fact that there is anything rather than nothing.