If you try to find time for your most valued activities by first dealing with all the other important demands on your time, in the hope that there’ll be some left over at the end, you’ll be disappointed.
5. How would you spend your days differently if you didn’t care so much about seeing your actions reach fruition?
So maybe it’s not that you’ve been cheated out of an unlimited supply of time; maybe it’s almost incomprehensibly miraculous to have been granted any time at all.
The overarching point is that what we think of as ‘distractions’ aren’t the ultimate cause of our being distracted. They’re just the places we go to seek relief from the discomfort of confronting limitation.
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.
In order to most fully inhabit the only life you ever get, you have to refrain from using every spare hour for personal growth.
Without noticing we’re doing it, we treat the future as intrinsically more valuable than the present. And yet the future never seems to arrive.
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.
I don’t mind what happens.
Principle number one is to pay yourself first when it comes to time.
Being alive is just happenstance, and not one more day of it is guaranteed.
The third principle is to resist the allure of middling priorities.
2. Are you holding yourself to, and judging yourself by, standards of productivity or performance that are impossible to meet?
4. In which areas of life are you still holding back until you feel like you know what you’re doing?
I don’t think the feeling of anxiety ever completely goes away; we’re even limited, apparently, in our capacity to embrace our limitations. But I’m aware of no other time management technique that’s half as effective as just facing the way things truly are.
It is as if a new physical law has been described for us bespoke: absolute as all the others are, yet terrifyingly casual. It is a law of perception. It says, You will lose everything that catches your eye.
Once you stop believing that it might somehow be possible to avoid hard choices about time, it gets easier to make better ones. 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.
Or to put it another way, 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?
We tend to speak about our having a limited amount of time. But it might make more sense, from Heidegger’s strange perspective, to say that we are a limited amount of time. That’s how completely our limited time defines us.
The unconscious is the repository of everything that we’re avoiding.