According to Oliver Burkeman — in his new book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals — 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.
“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” says Oliver Burkeman.
Here are 10 suggestions 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.
2. Serialize
Focus only on one big project at a time. Though it’s alluring to try to alleviate the anxiety of having too many responsibilities or ambitions by getting started on them all at once, you’ll make little progress that way. Multitasking rarely works well—and you’ll soon find that serializing helps you to complete more projects anyway, thereby helping relieve your anxiety.
3. Decide in advance what to fail at
You’ll inevitably underachieve at something, simply because your time and energy are finite. But strategic underachievement—nominating in advance areas of your life in which you won’t expect excellence—helps you focus your time and energy more effectively.
4. Focus on what you’ve already completed, not just what’s left to do
Since the quest to get everything done is interminable by definition, it’s easy to grow despondent and self-reproachful when you can’t get through your whole to-do list. One counter-strategy is to keep a “done list,” which starts empty first thing in the morning, but which you can gradually fill in throughout the day as you get things done. It’s a cheering reminder that you could have spent the day doing nothing remotely constructive…yet you didn’t.
5. Consolidate your caring
Social media is a giant machine for getting you to spend your time caring about the wrong things—and too many of them at once. Once you grasp that fact fully, it’s good to consciously pick your battles in charity, activism, and politics—and devote your spare time
6. Embrace boring and single-purpose technology
Digital distractions allow us to escape to a realm where painful human limitations don’t seem to apply. You can combat this by making your devices as boring as possible, removing social media apps and, if you dare, email. Otherwise, temptations will be only a swipe away, and you’ll feel the urge to check your screens anytime you’re bored or facing a challenge in your work.
7. Seek out novelty in the mundane
Time seems to speed up as we age, likely because our brains encode the passage of years based on how much information we process in any given interval. The routinization of older people’s lives means that time seems to pass at an ever-increasing rate. The standard advice is to combat this by cramming more novel experiences into your life. An alternative is to pay more attention to every moment, however mundane—to find novelty by plunging more deeply into your present life.
8. Be a researcher in relationships
The desire to feel in control of our limited time causes numerous problems in relationships, resulting not only in controlling behavior, but also commitment-phobia, the inability to listen, boredom, and missing out on the richness of communal experiences with others. When faced with a challenging or boring moment in a relationship, try being curious about the person you’re with, rather than controlling. Curiosity is a stance well-suited to the inherent unpredictability of life with others, because it can be satisfied by their behaving in ways you like or dislike—whereas if you demand a certain result instead, you’ll often be frustrated.
9. Cultivate instantaneous generosity
Whenever a generous impulse arises in your mind, give in to it right away rather than putting it off. Don’t wait to figure out if the recipient deserves your generosity or if you really have the time to be generous right now. Just do it. The rewards are immediate, too, because generous action reliably makes you feel much happier.
10. Practice doing nothing
Doing nothing means resisting the urge to manipulate your experience or the people and things in the world around you, and to let things be as they are. You can try the “do-nothing” meditation, where you set a timer for 5-10 minutes and then try doing nothing; if you catch yourself doing something—thinking, say, or even just focusing on your breath—gently let go of doing it. As you keep letting go, you’ll increase your ability to do nothing, and gradually regain your autonomy. You’ll no longer be so motivated by the attempt to evade how reality feels here and now; instead, you’ll learn to calm down, and to make better choices with your brief allotment of life.