500 Words a Week - Book Recommendation
With the approaching summer months, in which I hope you will have some rest and downtime, I thought I’d recommend a book that I enjoyed this year.
“Four Thousand Weeks – Time Management for Mortals” by Oliver Burkeman.
I wrote about some of the great points from this book in the past. A central theme throughout this book is to embrace our limited self. This is how it differs from many time management/ productivity books we have read before. We put far too much pressure on ourselves to accomplish a certain amount of tasks a day or expect we can bend and master time to our will.
Some of the wonderful points in the book that I enjoyed are the following:
We must embrace how the average human lifespan is terrifyingly short, but it’s not a reason for us to panic. It’s a relief. “You get to give up on something that was always impossible – the quest to become the optimised, infinitely capable, emotionally invincible, fully independent person you’re officially supposed to be. Then you get to roll up your sleeves and start to work on what’s gloriously possible instead.”
Do the next most necessary thing. How often do we write endless to-do lists, accomplishing only a few and feeling awful for that we did not do? How often do we feel lost and unsure about what next to do or pursue? Burkeman recommends that we focus on the next most necessary thing. “If you do with conviction the next and most necessary thing, you are always doing something meaningful and intended by fate.” – Carl Jung. If you can embody this and accept the condition of being a limited human – “you will reach the greatest heights of productivity, accomplishment, service and fulfilment.” Through this your life will begin to meet “the only definitive measure of what it means to have used your weeks well …… that working within your limits of your moment in history, and your finite time and talents, you actually got round to doing – and made life more luminous for the rest of us by doing – whatever magnificent task or weird little thing it was that you came here for.”
At times, we can feel uncertain and out of control, as we haven’t achieved what we wanted too or we are holding off enjoying the current moment by repeating the mantra “I’ll be happy when….” We must come to the realization that no one really cares what we are doing with our life except us. “There’s no point in waiting to live until you’ve achieved validation from someone or something else. Peace of mind, and an exhilarating sense of freedom, comes not from achieving the validation but from yielding to the reality that is wouldn’t bring you security if you got it.”
