Last month I posted about the book “Meditations for Mortals,” by Oliver Burkeman, which I loved.
The book is to meant to be read one short chapter each day.
There were too many takeaways for me to share in one post, so last month I shared a bunch of my favorite excerpts, with my thoughts added in parentheses at the of several of the entries, and here are some more…
- The only two questions, at any moment of choice in life, is what the price is, and whether or not it’s worth paying. “I can’t relax in the evening until the children’s toys are tidied away!” But the reality, of course, is that you absolutely can relax with the toys not tidied away. There is no 11 p.m. home inspection, with someone coming round to see if all the toys are picked up. You need only be willing to pay the price of relaxing in such circumstances (in your) less-than-pristine home.
- My favorite way of combating the feeling of productivity debt in everyday life is to keep a ‘done list,’ a record of the tasks you’ve completed so far today. (I’ve been doing that at work for years. I love my list. Anytime I think, “I feel like I got nothing done this week,” I look at the list and I feel good.)
- Treat your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket: think of your backlog not as a container that gradually fills up, and that it’s your job to empty, but as a stream that flows past you, from which you get to pick a few choice items, here and there, without feeling guilty for letting all the others float by. (It’s very freeing to know I will never read everything I’d like to, and I’ll never watch every show, or see every movie, I’d like to. I also give up on shows and books that aren’t grabbing me.)
- You can stay informed in ten minutes a day; scrolling any more than that risks becoming disempowering and paralyzing, and certainly eats up time you could have spent making a difference.(I spend more than 10 minutes a day, but I limit my time becoming informed to early in the day, with a bit more of an update early in the evening, and then I let it go again until the next morning.)
- Pick your battles, and don’t feel bad about doing so. By embracing your limitations in this way, you’ll be in a position to do more to fight the battles you do pick, and also thereby to feel better about yourself, than the person who tries to care about everything.
- ‘If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention’ is a relic of a time when people had attention to spare. The greatest act of good citizenship may be learning to withdraw your attention from everything except the battles you’ve chosen to fight.
- We can’t possibly think of every challenge we might end up facing. Seeking to reassure myself on a question about which, as philosophers like to say, there was no ‘fact of the matter’. Even if we could, the solace we crave could only come from knowing we’d made it safely over the bridges in question – which we can’t ever know until we’ve actually crossed them.
- The trick to finishing things when the prospect seems overwhelming is simply to redefine what counts as finished. Instead of viewing the completion of a project as something that happens only occasionally, after days or weeks of work, think of your days as consisting of the sequential completion of a series of small ‘deliverables’.
- The more you organize your life around not addressing the things that make you anxious, the more likely they are to develop into serious problems – and even if they don’t, the longer you fail to confront them, the more unhappy time you spend being scared of what might be lurking in the places you don’t want to go.
I highly recommend this book. If you choose to read it, I hope you enjoy it.
All my best,
David