Thoughts about time & time management

I’ve always taken pride in being a good planner. Planning is how I organize my work and life.

I love to learn about every method and best practice around planning and productivity (to the point to write a newsletter on this topic ??)

So you may suspect that managing my time, or should I say optimizing my time, is vital for me.

My each-day goal: to do as many things as I can in the small amount of time I have (”Good luck with that!” you’d say and you’d be perfectly right ??)

But I’m recently reconsidering how I am thinking about time.

What is time? Can we really manage time?

Oliver Burkeman’s vision of time

Time seems to be an abstract concept. We even say that ‘time flies’ sometimes or ‘time drags’. However, as humans, we made it measurable. We split it into years, months, days, all the way to seconds and more.

Oliver Burkeman proposes a different way to see time:

“We don’t get or have time at all—that instead we are time”

“We are time”… This is an interesting idea ??

The main thesis in his book “Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals” is that, on average, if we live up to 80, we have approximately 4,000 weeks to live.

That’s a lot of little boxes, right?… And at the same time, not that much.

Sorry to break the news, but yes, our life will end at some point.

But that’s it for the depressing moment ??

It’s only human to put this idea in the back of our heads and live our lives as if we had an infinite amount of time. Like if we could always do more, fit more and more into our time.

But we’ll always have more good ideas and things to do than we will have time.

According to Olivier, we’ll never be able to get everything under control and do everything we want, even when applying the best productivity and time management techniques.

You can imagine how this affirmation was hard to hear for me. ^^

But once you realize that doing everything is actually an impossible task, that everybody fails at it because there are always more things to do than time available, it becomes easier to stop beating yourself up for failing at doing all that you wanted to do.

Becoming a better procrastinator

When we decide to do something, we automatically decide not to do a million other things.

So the big question is: What are the most important things for you? How do you want to spend your time?

Olivier’s advice is to apply strategic neglect.

By deciding consciously on what to miss out on and what are your priorities, you’ll feel less in an anxious hurry to optimize time and do as much as you can, even non-important things.

You may even experience the Joy of Missing Out!

Yes, you read well^^ You probably know FOMO, the Fear of Missing Out. Well JOMO 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.”

So it’s now time for you to become a better procrastinator by neglecting the right things and prioritizing limited goals.

I’ll leave you here with one piece of time management advice:

• Step 1: choose a few things that matter more
• Step 2: make some time for those things
• Step 3: enjoy doing these things

and I hope it will help you make the best of your four thousand weeks on this earth. ??

To know more about Oliver Burkeman and his vision of time: