Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

Moreover, Goodin observes, we tend to contrast a life of settling with a life of what he labels “striving,” or living life to the fullest. But this is a mistake, too, and not just because settling is unavoidable but also because living life to the fullest requires settling. “You must settle, in a relatively enduring way, upon something that will be

maybe it’s almost incomprehensibly miraculous to have been granted any time at all.

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. Nobody in the history of humanity has ever achieved “work-life balance,” whatever that might be, and you certainly won’

the more firmly you believe it ought to be possible to find time for everything, the less pressure you’ll feel to ask whether any given activity is the best use for a portion of your time.

The problem isn’t exactly that these techniques and products don’t work. It’s that they do work—in the sense that you’ll get more done, race to more meetings, ferry your kids to more after-school activities, generate more profit for your employer—and yet, paradoxically, you only feel busier, more anxious, and somehow emptier as a result.

Robert Goodin wrote a whole treatise on this topic, On Settling,

why treat four thousand weeks as a very small number, because it’s so tiny compared with infinity, rather than treating it as a huge number, because it’s so many more weeks than if you had never been born?

In what ways have you yet to accept the fact that you are who you are, not the person you think you ought to be?

having all the time in the world isn’t much use if you’re forced to experience it all on your own.