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.

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.

And as long as I was always just on the cusp of mastering my time, I could avoid the thought that what life was really demanding from me might involve surrendering the craving for mastery and diving into the unknown instead. In my case, that turned out to mean committing to a long-term relationship and, later, making the decision with my wife to

Or perhaps your problem isn’t being too busy but insufficiently busy, languishing in a dull job, or not employed at all. That’s still a situation made far more distressing by the shortness of life, because you’re using up your limited time in a way you’d rather not. Even some of the very worst aspects of our era—like our viciously hyperpartisan

So maybe it’s not that you’ve been cheated out of an unlimited supply of time; maybe it’s almost incomprehensibly miraculous to have been granted any time at all.

Denying reality never works, though.

It’s a principle common to virtually all productivity advice that, in an ideal world, the only person making decisions about your time would be you: you’d set your own hours, work wherever you chose, take vacations when you wished, and generally be beholden to nobody. But there’s a case to be made that this degree of control comes at a cost that’s

(It’s tempting to think of medieval life as moving slowly, but it’s more accurate to say that the concept of life “moving slowly” would have struck most people as meaningless. Slowly as compared with what?)

A Life’s Work,