I say, why wait for retirement? Why I’ve procrastinated on as many as six impossible things before breakfast!
For anyone interested in the philosophy of time management, I cannot recommend Oliver Burkeman’s writings highly enough, including 4,000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals.
I subscribe to his newsletter. Yesterday’s newsletter started like this:
If you’re overwhelmed by the feeling that the world is falling apart – or just overwhelmed by your to-do list, or stuck in any kind of rut – there’s a solid chance you’d benefit from reorienting your life in the direction of what you actually want to be doing with it , instead of how you think you ought to be living it.
It ends with this fascinating quote:
from the book Being Disciples by the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, reflecting on his meetings with Desmond Tutu:
I have a theory, which I started elaborating after I had met Archbishop Desmond Tutu a few times, that there are two kinds of egotists in this world. There are egotists that are so in love with themselves that they have no room for anybody else, and there are egotists that are so in love with themselves that they make it possible for everybody else to be in love with themselves. They are at home in their skins… And in that sense Desmond Tutu manifestly loves being Desmond Tutu; there’s no doubt about that. But the effect of that is not to make me feel frozen or shrunk; it makes me feel that just possibly, by God’s infinite grace, I could one day love being Rowan Williams in the way that Desmond loves being Desmond Tutu.
May I humbly submit that one way we can save time is by just not doing shit that’s not important to us. The reality is we’re probably not going to do it anyway, and there’s peace of mind in just acknowledging that it’s not going to get done and doing something more important instead. Which is why I’m writing this post instead of cleaning my shower for company.
Burkeman talks very candidly about the trade-offs we have to make, the things we have to let go, because it is literally impossible to do it all. The reason I have any free time at all is because I don’t do other things instead. There’s always something I could be doing instead. The task list is bottomless. So maybe start with what we want in there and build around it.