Ten Ways to Make Your Time Matter

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Ten Ways to Make Your Time Matter

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Accepting our mortality helps us let go of busyness and focus on what’s most important to us in order to live a happier, more meaningful life.
By Oliver Burkeman | October 13, 2021

The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly finite. If you’re lucky and you live to 80, you will have lived about four thousand weeks. This truth, which most of us ignore most of the time, is something to wrestle with if we want to spend our limited time on this earth well.

Given that, it follows that time management, broadly defined, should be everyone’s chief concern. Yet the modern discipline of time management (or productivity) is depressingly narrow-minded, focused on devising the perfect morning routine or trying to crank through as many tasks as possible, while investing all your energy on reaching some later state of well-being and accomplishment. It ignores the fact that the world is bursting with wonder—and that experiencing more of that wonder may come at the cost of productivity.

As a recovering “productivity geek,” I know how it feels to become swept up in the idea of discovering the perfect system of time management. But I was eventually forced to accept that my struggles to achieve a sense of perfect control or mastery of my time were counterproductive, leading not to a life of more meaning but one of more overwhelm and stress. I came to see that I needed to give up the quest for that kind of control, letting go of the impossible goal of becoming perfectly efficient and embracing my limitations instead, so as to make more time for what was really valuable.

Part of that embrace of limitation involves facing the anxiety that comes with acknowledging mortality. When we recognize the shortness of life—and accept the fact that some things have to be left unaccomplished, whether we like it or not—we are freer to focus on what matters. Rather than succumbing to the mentality of “better, faster, more,” we can embrace being imperfect, and be happier for it.

Here are 10 suggestions I make in my book, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, about how to live with your limited time in mind.
1. Adopt a “fixed volume” approach to productivity

We all need to make tough choices about what we can realistically get done, so that we can prioritize the activities that matter most, instead of reacting to a constant barrage of demands.

That was just the into & number one. For the rest of the article
https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/articl ... ket-newtab

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