With each new year comes the pull to plan more and manage my time better. Recently, I came across the book 4,000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman. Wow, this is the book I have been waiting for most of my life! While every other time management book tells me how to fit MORE into my day/life, this book invites me to acknowledge that time IS limited and that I will never be able to do everything that I want to do. Burkeman invites me to get clear on what matters most and “decide what [I] am going to fail at” so that I can live more intentionally each day unencumbered by society’s every shifting view of success. This invitation also enables me let go of my guilt around THE (impossible) LIST that I never seem to get to. What a relief! Let’s face it, the more I accomplish the more I think I need to accomplish and the more pressure there is to exceed my current benchmark toward “pathological productivity”. Get more efficient at answering those emails or accomplishing more tasks and these will simply be replaced by even more of the same. Help!
This book gives me permission to step away from focusing on the end game of productivity and embrace the idea that, just maybe, what I AM doing is already ENOUGH and that my enough IS meaningful. If, as Burkeman states, I could recognize my own “cosmic insignificance” (what we do really doesn’t matter all that much in the grand scheme of time), the pressure of accomplishing some great thing could replaced by a peace that accompanies a “modestly meaning life” of being over striving. Aiming for a modestly meaningful life could allow my (anxious) pull to do more and be more to fade. I might then find myself in a better place to notice my life as it unfolds and the joy that is all around me. Sounds like a great plan for 2023! So, as Burkeman puts it, “[o]nce you no longer feel the pressure to become a particular kind of person, you can confront the personality, the strengths and weaknesses, the talents and enthusiasms you find yourself with, here and now, and follow where they lead”.
