not only are our four thousand weeks constantly running out, but the fewer of them we have left, the faster we seem to lose them. (Location 79)
In 1930, in a speech titled “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” the economist John Maynard Keynes made a famous prediction: Within a century, thanks to the growth of wealth and the advance of technology, no one would have to work more than about fifteen hours a week. (Location 118)
for almost the whole of history, the entire point of being rich was not having to work so much. (Location 126)
Or we procrastinate, which is another means of maintaining the feeling of omnipotent control over life—because you needn’t risk the upsetting experience of failing at an intimidating project, obviously, if you never even start it. (Location 333)
putting my faith in the words of the author Richard Bach: “You teach best what you most need to learn.” (Location 366)
So long as you continue to respond to impossible demands on your time by trying to persuade yourself that you might one day find some way to do the impossible, you’re implicitly collaborating with those demands. Whereas once you deeply grasp that they are impossible, you’ll be newly empowered to resist them, and to focus instead on building the most meaningful life you can, in whatever situation you’re in. (Location 382)
You’ll do what you can, you won’t do what you can’t, and the tyrannical inner voice insisting that you must do everything is simply mistaken. We rarely stop to consider things so rationally, though, because that would mean confronting the painful truth of our limitations. (Location 415)
But the other exasperating issue is that if you succeed in fitting more in, you’ll find the goalposts start to shift: more things will begin to seem important, meaningful, or obligatory. (Location 449)
You begin to grasp that when there’s too much to do, and there always will be, the only route to psychological freedom is to let go of the limit-denying fantasy of getting it all done and instead to focus on doing a few things that count. (Location 489)
Commonly, these will be things that other people want you to do, to make their lives easier, and which you didn’t think to try to resist. The more efficient you get, the more you become “a limitless reservoir for other people’s expectations,” in the words of the management expert Jim Benson. (Location 541)
The same goes for existential overwhelm: what’s required is the will to resist the urge to consume more and more experiences, since that strategy can only lead to the feeling of having even more experiences left to consume. (Location 562)
Once you truly understand that you’re guaranteed to miss out on almost every experience the world has to offer, the fact that there are so many you still haven’t experienced stops feeling like a problem. Instead, you get to focus on fully enjoying the tiny slice of experiences you actually do have time for—and the freer you are to choose, in each moment, what counts the most. (Location 564)
“I prefer to brew my coffee,” the law professor Tim Wu writes in an essay on the pitfalls of convenience culture, “but Starbucks instant is so convenient I hardly ever do what I ‘prefer.’” (Location 598)
It is by consciously confronting the certainty of death, and what follows from the certainty of death, that we finally become truly present for our lives. (Location 711)
This is the same insight embodied in two venerable pieces of time management advice: to work on your most important project for the first hour of each day, and to protect your time by scheduling “meetings” with yourself, marking them in your calendar so that other commitments can’t intrude. Thinking in terms of “paying yourself first” (Location 835)
In their book Personal Kanban, which explores this strategy in detail, the management experts Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry suggest no more than three items. Once you’ve selected those tasks, all other incoming demands on your time must wait until one of the three items has been completed, thereby freeing up a slot. (Location 845)
I was obliged to contemplate all those I’d inevitably be neglecting in order to focus on it. And yet precisely because I was being forced to confront reality in this way—to see that I was always neglecting most tasks, in order to work on anything at all, (Location 852)
Attention, on the other hand, just is life: your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention. (Location 1030)
So it’s not simply that our devices distract us from more important matters. It’s that they change how we’re defining “important matters” in the first place. (Location 1097)
It’s true that killing time on the internet often doesn’t feel especially fun, these days. But it doesn’t need to feel fun. In order to dull the pain of finitude, it just needs to make you feel unconstrained. (Location 1208)
There is a very down-to-earth kind of liberation in grasping that there are certain truths about being a limited human from which you’ll never be liberated. You don’t get to dictate the course of events. And the paradoxical reward for accepting reality’s constraints is that they no longer feel so constraining. (Location 1237)
Our efforts to influence the future aren’t the problem. The problem—the source of all the anxiety—is the need that we feel, from our vantage point here in the present moment, to be able to know that those efforts will prove successful. (Location 1311)
the more you focus on using time well, the more each day begins to feel like something you have to get through, en route to some calmer, better, more fulfilling point in the future, which never actually arrives. (Location 1377)
“Because children grow up, we think a child’s purpose is to grow up,” Herzen says. “But a child’s purpose is to be a child. (Location 1460)
As long as you believe that the real meaning of life lies somewhere off in the future—that one day all your efforts will pay off in a golden era of happiness, free of all problems—you get to avoid facing the unpalatable reality that your life isn’t leading toward some moment of truth that hasn’t yet arrived. (Location 1504)
The more you try to be here now, to point at what’s happening in this moment and really see it, the more it seems like you aren’t here now— (Location 1529)
A more fruitful approach to the challenge of living more fully in the moment starts from noticing that you are, in fact, always already living in the moment anyway, whether you like it or not. (Location 1556)
The regrettable consequence of justifying leisure only in terms of its usefulness for other things is that it begins to feel vaguely like a chore—in other words, like work in the worst sense of that word. (Location 1598)
Aristotle argued that true leisure—by which he meant self-reflection and philosophical contemplation—was among the very highest of virtues because it was worth choosing for its own sake, (Location 1610)
that leisure was life’s center of gravity, the default state to which work was a sometimes inevitable interruption. (Location 1616)
So now the whole of life—work and leisure time alike—was to be valued for the sake of something else, in the future, rather than for itself. (Location 1637)
To rest for the sake of rest—to enjoy a lazy hour for its own sake—entails first accepting the fact that this is it: that your days aren’t progressing toward a future state of perfectly invulnerable happiness, (Location 1692)
Walter Brueggemann describes the sabbath as an invitation to spend one day per week “in the awareness and practice of the claim that we are situated on the receiving end of the gifts of God.” (Location 1723)
hurrying a toddler to get dressed, in order to leave the house, is all but guaranteed to make the process last much longer. (Location 1841)
(It has been calculated that if Amazon’s front page loaded one second more slowly, the company would lose $1.6 billion in annual sales.) (Location 1845)
But as society accelerates, something shifts. In more and more contexts, patience becomes a form of power. In a world geared for hurry, the capacity to resist the urge to hurry—to allow things to take the time they take—is a way to gain purchase on the world, to do the work that counts, and to derive satisfaction from the doing itself, instead of deferring all your fulfillment to the future. (Location 1951)
When you take a class with Roberts, your initial assignment is always the same, and it’s one that has been known to elicit yelps of horror from her students: choose a painting or sculpture in a local museum, then go and look at it for three hours straight. (Location 1954)
Peck’s insight here—that if you’re willing to endure the discomfort of not knowing, a solution will often present itself— (Location 2018)
But the pattern keeps on repeating: nothing you produce ever gets recognized as being truly your own. What’s the solution? “It’s simple,” Minkkinen says. “Stay on the bus. Stay on the fucking bus.” (Location 2070)
As in Jennifer Roberts’s three-hour painting-viewing exercise, this begins with the willingness to stop and be where you are—to engage with that part of the journey, too, instead of always badgering reality to hurry up. (Location 2079)
As with money, it’s good to have plenty of time, all else being equal. But having all the time in the world isn’t much use if you’re forced to experience it all on your own. (Location 2111)
It turned out, for example, that many people could perform their jobs adequately without an hour-long commute to a dreary office, or remaining at a desk until 6:30 p.m. solely in order to appear hardworking. (Location 2314)
But the deeper truth behind all this is to be found in Heidegger’s mysterious suggestion that we don’t get or have time at all—that instead we are time (Location 2435)
we don’t get or have time at all—that instead we are time. We’ll never get the upper hand in our relationship with the moments of our lives because we are nothing but those moments. (Location 2436)
Let your impossible standards crash to the ground. Then pick a few meaningful tasks from the rubble and get started on them today. (Location 2505)
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? (Location 2507)
Following the same logic, focus on one big project at a time (or at most, one work project and one nonwork project) and see it to completion before moving on to what’s next. (Location 2662)