Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts

Operating from sanity, when it comes to backlogs, means following the advice of the time management expert Mark Forster instead. First, sequester all those emails in a separate folder, or the tasks on a separate to-do list. (And just like that, your inbox is empty!) Thereafter, your priority isn’t to blast through the backlog, but to stay up to dat

Life edges ever closer to being a dull, solitary, and often infuriating chore, something to be endured, in order to make it to a supposedly better time, which never quite seems to arrive.

But the near-uniformity of their hours of deep focus suggests what I’ve come to think of as the ‘three-to-four-hour rule’ for getting creative work done. It has two parts. The first is to try – to whatever degree your situation permits – to ringfence a three- or four-hour period each day, free from appointments or interruptions. The equally importa

Freedom isn’t a matter of somehow wriggling free of the costs of your choice – that’s never an option – but of realising, as Kopp points out, that nothing stops you doing anything at all, so long as you’re willing to pay those costs. Unless you’re literally being physically coerced into doing something, the notion that you ‘have to do it’ in truth

‘My mom used to get really upset at what she perceived as my half-assing,’ reads one splendid anonymous comment on a Washington Post article by the advice columnist Carolyn Hax. ‘I’m 48 now, have a PhD and a thriving and influential career, and I still think there is very very little that’s worthy of applying my whole entire ass. I’m not interested

The most remarkable part is that while you might have assumed that complying with a life task would feel oppressive – you’re ‘complying’ with a ‘task,’ after all – it never does. It gives you the feeling of getting a handle on life, because the life to which you’re addressing the question is the one you actually have. It is never the case that ther

At other times, though, you’ll go ahead and do the undesired thing anyway, because you understand the cost and you don’t want to incur it. Notice how different that is – how different it feels – from grudgingly saying yes because you ‘feel you have no choice,’ then resenting it for days. For example, perhaps you care enough about the friend who’s a

Susan Piver, that helped me understand why. Honestly, the title was enough. It was ‘Getting stuff done by not being mean to yourself.’ Piver was another fan, in theory, of Chuck Close’s inspiration-is-for-amateurs philosophy. But she brilliantly evoked its unfortunate flipside, which is that it all too easily morphs into the barked internal command

Really, though, showing up more fully in the present is about how you pursue your plans for the future; it certainly doesn’t require that you abandon them. It means letting go of the notion that you can’t quite allow yourself to feel fully immersed in life before those plans are realised, and coming to understand on the contrary that the pursuit of

Befriending your rats is a gentle strategy, but there’s nothing submissive about it. It’s a pragmatic way to maximise your room for manoeuvre, and your capacity to make progress on the work you care about, by becoming ever more willing to acknowledge that things are as they are, whether you like it or not.