and how much easier it gets to do bold and important things once you accept that you’ll never get around to more than a handful of them (and that, strictly speaking, you don’t absolutely need to do any of them at all).

for finite humans, life certainly is a tough challenge: you’ve got severely limited time, and limited control, necessitating hard choices and a tolerance for imperfection and uncertainty.

Collapsing on to the sofa at the end of a long day spent deep-cleaning your home, or organising all your digital files into an orderly hierarchy of folders, it’s easy to conclude that you must have used your time well: consider how exhausted you feel! But perhaps your home could have waited another month for a deep clean. And maybe you should never

the life-enhancing route is to think of decisions not as things that come along, but as things to go hunting for. In other words: to operate on the assumption that somewhere, in the confusing morass of your work or your life, lurks at least one decision you could make, right now, in order to get unstuck and get moving.

The truly valuable skill is the one the three-to-four-hour rule helps to instil: not the capacity to push yourself harder, but the capacity to stop and recuperate, despite the discomfort of knowing that the work remains unfinished.

as Hannah Arendt writes, ‘constantly bound by craving and fear to a future full of uncertainties, we strip each present moment of its calm, its intrinsic import, which we are unable to enjoy. And so, the future destroys the present.’

Eight hundred words per day; one hour on the side business every evening; five potential customers contacted; three pages of the material for the examination turned into flashcards (or the three-hour rule we encountered on Day Thirteen): these are goals anyone with the available time can achieve, so long as you’re willing to accept that, for now,

it’s because intimate relationships are too complex ever to be negotiated entirely smoothly that you might as well commit to one, and see what happens.

To begin with, it acknowledges the reality that most of us don’t have the capacity for more than a few daily hours of intense concentration. But it also respects limitation in another important way: it frees you from the futile perfectionistic struggle to try to make the whole day unfold in accordance with your desires. It respects the fact that