The Limit-Embracing Life
“task orientation,” because the rhythms of life emerge organically from the tasks themselves, rather than from being lined up against an abstract timeline

a farmer’s work is infinite: there will always be another milking and another harvest, forever, so there’s no sense in racing toward some hypothetical moment of completion.

The boundary separating the self from the rest of reality grows blurry, and time stands still. “The clock does not stop, of course,” Eberle writes, ‘but we do not hear it ticking.’

Surrendering to what in German has been called Eigenzeit, or the time inherent to a process itself.

It becomes difficult not to value each moment primarily according to its usefulness for some future goal, or for some future oasis of relaxation you hope to reach once your tasks are finally “out of the way.”

Using these (productivity) techniques often made me feel as if I were on the verge of ushering in a golden era of calm, undistracted productivity and meaningful activity. But it never arrived.

We recoil from the notion that this is it—that this life, with all its flaws and inescapable vulnerabilities, its extreme brevity, and our limited influence over how it unfolds, is the only one we’ll get a shot at.

Every decision to use a portion of time on anything represents the sacrifice of all the other ways in which you could have spent that time, but didn’t—and to willingly make that sacrifice is to take a stand, without reservation, on what matters most to you.

The Efficiency Trap
premodern people weren’t much troubled by such thoughts of efficiency, partly because they believed in an afterlife: there was no particular pressure to “get the most out of” their limited time, because as far as they were concerned, it wasn’t limited, and in any case, earthly life was but a relatively insignificant prelude to the most important part.

the more firmly you believe it ought to be possible to find time for everything, the less pressure you’ll feel to ask whether any given activity is the best use for a portion of your time.

it grew painfully clear that the things I got done most diligently were the unimportant ones, while the important ones got postponed—either forever or until an imminent deadline forced me to complete them, to a mediocre standard and in a stressful rush.

instead of clearing the decks, declining to clear the decks, focusing instead on what’s truly of greatest consequence while tolerating the discomfort of knowing that, as you do so, the decks will be filling up further

Once you truly understand that you’re guaranteed to miss out on almost every experience the world has to offer, the fact that there are so many you still haven’t experienced stops feeling like a problem.

the smoother life gets, the more perverse you’ll seem if you insist on maintaining the rough edges by choosing the inconvenient way of doing things.

You have to choose a few things, sacrifice everything else, and deal with the inevitable sense of loss that results.

Facing Finitude
to be, for a human, is above all to exist temporally, in the stretch between birth and death, certain that the end will come, yet unable to know when.

The original Latin word for “decide,” decidere, means “to cut off,” as in slicing away alternatives;

the undeluded mode of existence that Heidegger calls “Being-towards-death,” aware that this is it, that life is not a dress rehearsal, that every choice requires myriad sacrifices, and that time is always already running out—indeed, that it may run out today, tomorrow, or next month.

I can’t entirely depend upon a single moment of the future.

it’s only the guarantee that he definitely won’t have an infinity of them that makes them worth valuing.

If our earthly existence were merely the prelude to an eternity in heaven, threats to that existence couldn’t matter in any ultimate sense.

Why assume that an infinite supply of time is the default, and mortality the outrageous violation? Or to put it another way, why treat four thousand weeks as a very small number, because it’s so tiny compared with infinity, rather than treating it as a huge number, because it’s so many more weeks than if you had never been born?

the “joy of missing out,” by way of a deliberate contrast with the idea of the “fear of missing out.” It is the thrilling recognition that you wouldn’t even really want to be able to do everything, since if you didn’t have to decide what to miss out on, your choices couldn’t truly mean anything.

Becoming a Better Procrastinator
The real measure of any time management technique is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things.

Principle number one is to pay yourself first when it comes to time.

The second principle is to limit your work in progress.

fix a hard upper limit on the number of things that you allow yourself to work on at any given time.

The point isn’t to force yourself to finish absolutely everything you start, but rather to banish the bad habit of keeping an ever-proliferating number of half-finished projects on the back burner.

The idea of the future, pregnant with an infinity of possibilities, is thus more fruitful than the future itself,” Bergson wrote, “and this is why we find more charm in hope than in possession, in dreams than in reality.

The Watermelon Problem
what you pay attention to will define, for you, what reality is.

your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention. At the end of your life, looking back, whatever compelled your attention from moment to moment is simply what your life will have been. So when you pay attention to something you don’t especially value, it’s not an exaggeration to say that you’re paying with your life.

After all, to have any meaningful experience, you must be able to focus on it, at least a bit. Otherwise, are you really having it at all?

Because the attention economy is designed to prioritize whatever’s most compelling—instead of whatever’s most true, or most useful—it systematically distorts the picture of the world we carry in our heads at all times.

The only faculty you can use to see what’s happening to your attention is your attention, the very thing that’s already been commandeered. This means that once the attention economy has rendered you sufficiently distracted, or annoyed, or on edge, it becomes easy to assume that this is just what life these days inevitably feels like.

The Intimate Interrupter
The more intensely he could hold his attention on the experience of whatever he was doing, the clearer it became to him that the real problem had been not the activity itself but his internal resistance to experiencing it.

what we think of as “distractions” aren’t the ultimate cause of our being distracted. They’re just the places we go to seek relief from the discomfort of confronting limitation.

We Never Really Have Time
We go through our days fretting because we can’t control what the future holds; and yet most of us would probably concede that we got to wherever we are in our lives without exerting much control over it at all.

a life spent “not minding what happens” is one lived without the inner demand to know that the future will conform to your desires for it—and thus without having to be constantly on edge as you wait to discover whether or not things will unfold as expected.

But all a plan is—all it could ever possibly be—is a present-moment statement of intent. It’s an expression of your current thoughts about how you’d ideally like to deploy your modest influence over the future. The future, of course, is under no obligation to comply.

You Are Here
We treat everything we’re doing—life itself, in other words—as valuable only insofar as it lays the groundwork for something else.

to sap childhood of any intrinsic value, by treating it as nothing but a training ground for adulthood.

treat every such experience with the reverence we’d show if it were the final instance of it.

The more you try to be here now, to point at what’s happening in this moment and really see it, the more it seems like you aren’t here now—or alternatively that you are, but that the experience has been drained of all its flavor.

You’re so fixated on trying to make the best use of your time—in this case not for some later outcome, but for an enriching experience of life right now—that it obscures the experience itself. It’s like trying too hard to fall asleep, and therefore failing.

To try to live in the moment implies that you’re somehow separate from “the moment,” and thus in a position to either succeed or fail at living in it.

Living more fully in the present may be simply a matter of finally realizing that you never had any other option but to be here now.

Rediscovering Rest
she has convinced herself that running is a meaningful thing to do only insofar as it might lead toward a future accomplishment.

leisure wasn’t the means to some other end; on the contrary, it was the end to which everything else worth doing was a means.

To rest for the sake of rest—to enjoy a lazy hour for its own sake—entails first accepting the fact that this is it: that your days aren’t progressing toward a future state of perfectly invulnerable happiness, and that to approach them with such an assumption is systematically to drain our four thousand weeks of their value.

Taking a walk in the countryside, like listening to a favorite song or meeting friends for an evening of conversation, is thus a good example of what the philosopher Kieran Setiya calls an “atelic activity,” meaning that its value isn’t derived from its telos, or ultimate aim.

In an age of instrumentalization, the hobbyist is a subversive: he insists that some things are worth doing for themselves alone, despite offering no payoffs in terms of productivity or profit.

Results aren’t everything. Indeed, they’d better not be, because results always come later—and later is always too late.

The Impatience Spiral
what has become the least fashionable but perhaps most consequential of superpowers: patience.

Staying on the Bus
develop a taste for having problems. embrace radical incrementalism. originality lies on the far side of unoriginality.

The Loneliness of the Digital Nomad
time is also a “network good,” one that derives its value from how many other people have access to it, too, and how well their portion is coordinated with yours.

Cosmic Insignificance Therapy
When things all seem too much, what better solace than a reminder that they are, provided you’re willing to zoom out a bit, indistinguishable from nothing at all? The anxieties that clutter the average life—relationship troubles, status rivalries, money worries—shrink instantly down to irrelevance.

The Human Disease
The peace of mind on offer here is of a higher order: it lies in the recognition that being unable to escape from the problems of finitude is not, in itself, a problem. The human disease is often painful, but as the Zen teacher Charlotte Joko Beck puts it, it’s only unbearable for as long as you’re under the impression that there might be a cure.”

1. Where in your life or your work are you currently pursuing comfort, when what’s called for is a little discomfort?
2. Are you holding yourself to, and 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 are who you are, not the person you think you ought to be?
4. In which areas of life are you still holding 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 reach fruition?

This is a most unsettling discovery to those of us who have lived someone else’s life and eschewed our own: no one really cares except us.

We’re all in the position of medieval stonemasons, adding a few more bricks to a cathedral whose completion we know we’ll never see. The cathedral’s still worth building, all the same.