Hey Friends,
I was listening to ‘Four thousand weeks’ and something which Mr OLIVER BURKEMAN said and it really resonated with me:-
Consider all the technology intended to help us gain the upper hand over time: by any sane logic, in a world with dishwashers, microwaves, and jet engines, time ought to feel more expansive and abundant, thanks to all the hours freed up. But this is nobody’s actual experience. Instead, life accelerates, and everyone grows more impatient.
Is not it surprising that despite all the tech at our disposal, we still find time becoming more and more inadequate? I am not suggesting that our troubles with time are somehow all in the mind, or that a simple change of outlook will cause them all to vanish. Time pressure comes largely from forces outside ourselves:– from a cutthroat economy; from the loss of the social safety nets and family networks that used to help ease the burdens of work and childcare; and from the uber expectation that women must excel in their careers while assuming most of the responsibilities at home. None of that will be solved by self-help alone.
The paradox of limitation is that the more you try to manage your time with the goal of achieving a feeling of total control, and freedom from the inevitable constraints of being human, the more stressful, empty, and frustrating life gets. Contrary to this if you consider that time is finitude and work with it, you would feel a more productive, meaningful, and joyful life becomes.
What it essentially means is that ‘Organising your days with the understanding that you definitely won’t have time for everything you want to do, or that other people want you to do and so, at the very least, you can stop beating yourself up for failing on numerous count’. So the hack is:-
- Since hard choices are unavoidable, what matters is learning to make them consciously, deciding what to focus on and what to neglect, rather than letting them get made by default.
- And it also means standing firm in the face of the “fear of missing out,” because you come to realize that missing out on something—indeed, on almost everything—is basically guaranteed.
Be mindful of ‘Parkinson’s law:
“Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion,” the English humorist and historian Parkinson wrote in 1955. And it doesn’t apply only to work. It applies to everything that needs doing.
Beware of the bottomless bucket list
The modern world provides an endless supply of things that seem worth doing, and so there arises an inevitable and unbridgeable gap between what you’d ideally like to do and what you actually can do.
The internet makes this all much more difficult because it promises to help you make better use of your time, while simultaneously exposing you to vastly more potential uses for your time—so that the very tool you’re using to get the most out of life makes you feel as though you’re missing out on even more of it.
So in order to focus on what matters most. The real measure of any time management technique is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things.
- The good procrastinator accepts the fact that you can’t get everything done, then decides as wisely as possible what tasks to focus on and what to neglect.
- The bad procrastinator finds himself paralyzed; here, procrastination is a strategy of emotional avoidance.
Take good care & enjoy reading your dose of cerebral happiness.
JOE
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