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

In fact, your situation is worse than you think – because the truth is that the incoming supply of things that feel as though they genuinely need doing isn’t merely large, but to all intents and purposes infinite. So getting through them all isn’t just very difficult. It’s impossible.

Often think of the rapidity with which things pass by and disappear…For substance is like a river in continual flow, and the activities of things are in constant change, and the causes work in infinite varieties; and there is hardly anything which stands still. And consider this which is near to thee, this boundless abyss of the past and of the fut

What seems to work much better is to encourage mentors to be more candid about their own failures and struggles: true confidence is kindled not by witnessing it in others, but by realising you aren’t alone in lacking it.

‘When my husband does the dishes he always leaves some platter in the sink, some surface unwiped. I tried to correct the behavior until I remembered that if I finish everything in my Work in Progress folder I’m afraid I’ll die.’ – SARAH MANGUSO

The true insight of Frost’s poem, on this interpretation, isn’t that you should opt for an unconventional life. It’s that the only way to live authentically is to acknowledge that you’re inevitably always making decision after decision, decisions that will shape your life in lasting ways, even though you can’t ever know in advance what the best cho

The Canadian writer David Cain envisions a different way of doing things: Imagine if all the available ‘public concern’ for a given issue could be collected in a huge rain barrel…and redistributed among fewer people. Instead of having 50 million people care seriously about an issue for all of six hours, you could distill that 300 million hours of p

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

Imposter syndrome? You might believe you need more experience or qualifications in order to feel confident among your peers; but the truth is that even the most experienced and qualified people feel as though they’re winging it, much of the time – and that if you’re ever going to make your unique contribution to the world, you’ll probably have to d

The trick to finishing things when the prospect seems overwhelming is simply to redefine what counts as finished. Instead of viewing the completion of a project as something that happens only occasionally, after days or weeks of work, think of your days as consisting in the sequential completion of a series of small ‘deliverables.’ ‘Deliverables’ i