Four Thousand Weeks

I read this as the description really spoke to my todo-list overwhelm and feeling that everything needed to be done.

This book reminds you of the obvious - we're all finite, todo lists are always infinite. You were never going to get everything done anyway, so stop worrying about it. Instead, prioritise ruthlessly, choose things that you're willing to let go or fail at, and value the "now" over the unreachable future that you think will exist when you finish your todo list.

Overall, the book does what it sets out to achieve fairly well. Unfortunately it has a narrowly neurotypical view and doesn't really give space for those of us who struggle to let things go and often fall into absolutist thinking about their todo list. It also makes assumptions that everyone wants similiar things in a few places, especially when it talks about relationships - we don't all want a life time monogamous relationship with children and a white picket fence. IMHO a book like this should just avoid talk of relationships if it's going to spend too few pages on them to do them justice.

For me, this books has provided a much needed alternative perspective on things and there are some suggestions which I will take away and try to implement.

As a philosophical read about our perception of time and how we spend it, this is a very good book. As a practical read for embracing and living with the book's stoic worldview, where time is fleeting and we will do very few things in our life, little guidance is provided. There's good philosophical discussion about time and how we use it. There's good advice on how to prioritize what's important to us. But I guess my main irk was that so many of these passages are drenched in nihilism. I genuinely couldn't tell if the author thought that our more "meaningful" lives amounted to anything worthwhile, or if he felt that life was completely devoid of any meaning. So I recommend this, but be in the right headspace for it.

Burkeman skips the block scheduling and singletasking to remind us that we're all dead soon and should settle on a few things to focus on what's important. He's already been through a history of over-optimization and hyper-productivity, and has come to the apparent realization that none of it matters. Our need to feel more and more productive leaves us living in an existential and anxious state. The more we're able to confront our finitude (and uselessness?), "the more productive, meaningful, and joyful life becomes". I liked his different ways of putting time in perspective, like how the Renaissance was six (centenarian) lifetimes ago. Some related topics covered were procrastination, prioritization, and patience.

This book challenges many of my views on efficiency, getting things done, distraction, etc. Besides offering a philosophical, historical, and down-to-earth perspective on life, it has solid advice.

About increasing the quality of the time you spend: 1) "cut out time for yourself first", 2) limit work in progress, 3) resist the allure of seductive but not essential priorities.

About patience: 1) develop a taste for having problems (it will always be that we have problems); 2) embrace radical incrementalism (small, constant work VS. big-bang work); 3) originality lies on the far side of unoriginality (the metaphor is those of busses leaving from a train station, that follow the same route initially, only to diverge later).

Five questions to contemplate in order to get closer to living more: 1) Where in your life or your work are you pursuing comfort when what's called for is discomfort? Does this choice diminish me or enlarge me? 2) Are you judging yourself by standards of productivity or performance that are impossible to meet? 3) In what ways have you yet to accept the fact that you're who you are and not the person you think you ought to be? 4) In which areas of your life are you still handling back until you feel like you know what you're doing? 5) How would you spend your days differently if you didn't care so much about seeing your actions seeing fruition?