Four Thousand Weeks

#stardust

• “Time feels like an unstoppable conveyor belt bringing us new tasks as fast as we can dispatch the old ones and becoming more productive just seems to cause the belt to speed up” - Edward T, American anthropologist

• We sense that there are important and fulfilling ways we could be spending our time even if we can’t see exactly what they are yet we systematically spend our days doing other things instead

• this year for more meaning can take many forms like the desire to devote yourself to some larger course or frustration at having to work at the job in order to buy leavers of time for the work you love or spend more time with your kids in nature or not commuting

• it becomes impossible to feel like we’re doing well enough when we have to value each moment according to its usefulness for some future goal

• in the middle age there was no such thing as time as a separate entity, but there was Task orientation because the rhythms of life emerged organically from the tasks themselves.

• Deep time

• “ we don’t have to consciously participate in what it’s like to feel claustrophobic, imprisoned, powerless, and constrained by reality” - Bruce Tift

• our troubled relationship with time arises largely from this same effort to avoid the painful constraints of reality.

• productivity as a tool of avoidance of the limitations of reality

• it’s scary to confront the truth. That almost everything worth doing, from marriage and parenting to business of politics, depends on cooperating with others and their exposing yourself to the emotional uncertainties of relationships

• The more you hurry, the more frustrating it is to encounter tasks they won’t be worried hurriedly; the more individual sovereignty you achieve over time, the lonelier you get

• Paradox of limitation

• Eigenzeit: inherent time of a task

• letting time use you: approaching Life not as an opportunity to implement your preterm plans for success but is a matter of responding to the needs of your place and your moment in history

• if you truly don’t have time for everything you want to do you actually in that time no matter how grieve the consequences of failing to do it all might prove to be

• There’s no reason to believe you ever feel on top of things or make time for everything that matters also because matters is subjective so there is no sense to assume that you will have time to do all the important stuff that you or your employer or your culture happens to them important

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• We have an bottomless bucket of things we can do nowadays, also thanks to the internet that opens us to infinite possibilities

• We can only experience a small portion of what’s available in the world. So we can stop thinking that we can experience it all, because it’s impossible and we’ll always be limited to. very small portion

• Culture of convenience made us lose some important experiences with a human side

• Heidegger: we tend to speak about having a limited amount of time, but actually, we are a limited amount of time. We are time.

• Before I can ask a single question about what I should do with my time I find myself already thrown into time into this particular moment with mybefore I can ask a single question about what I should do with my time I find myself already thrown into time into this particular moment with my particular life story which just made me who I am and which I can never get out from under

• The fact that we are time is that our ability to makeThe fact that we are time is that our ability to make any decision is limited of retrospective and moving forward. In retrospective because we are already in a situation by the time is what not the possibilities are open to us and looking forward to science because we haveIn retrospective because we are already in a situation by the time is what the possibilities are open to us and looking forward to science because we have to make some choices about how we want to spend the time sacrificing any other possibilities. even the best life is the result of sacrificing possibility.

• “Get everything done” = not choosing at all

• it is only by consciously confronting the certain you have to have let me finally become truly present from our lives

• Joy of missing out

• Creative neglect:

  • Pay yourself first: first do the activities that are important to you, learn to say no to the rest
  • Reduce work in progress
  • Resist the allure of middling priorities
    • Ex. a mediocre friendship, a just ok job

• Bad procrastinators don’t accept the reality that we have limited resources, so they wait for the perfect moment where we may have these resources (time, talent, external factors)

  • Loss is a given, and that’s a relief

• You must settle to strive. Deciding not to settle is also settling on that idea.

• Attention is life: our experience of being alive consists of nothing more than the sum of everything to which we pay attention. So a job can be a distraction itself, an investment of our attention, that we’re paying with our life

• Nowadays we don’t choose to distract ourselves. External forces do. (Makes me think of Slow Social Media)

• Bottom-up attention: involuntary attention, useful for survival of the species

• Top-down attention: voluntary attention, the one we can control and affects if we can have a well-lived life

• you can’t truly love a partner or a child or did you get yourself to career course except to the extent that you can hold your attention on the object of your devotion to begin with - Mary Oliver

• Social media are designed to hold our attention (persuasive design, from slot machines)

• They decide what we give attention too, even after we get off the apps

• We collaborate with them, because we turn to them when we feel bored or our present moment because unbearable. We should face the urge to go to social media.

• When we feel discomfort or bored, we face our human limitations. Social media is an unbounded stream of possibilities instead.

• Accepting that even experiences that matters can give us discomfort. It’s ok to feel bored. It’s just how life it is. Learn to be uncomfortable.