Attention, not time, is your most valuable resource
Time management is a field that may benefit from philosophical inquiries because we often miss the foundations and look at surface-level tricks to optimize our time. Managing time means choosing what to do with the time you get to have in your life. Your life is finite. So is your attention. But opportunities are almost infinite. There is a constant tension between the finitude of existence and the infinity of potential things to do. Time management means coming to terms with that tension, and contemptibly choosing what not to do.
In his book Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman explores our conception of time management and its relation with finitude. He also develops his conceptual frameworks in this series on the Waking Up app. Time management is the choice of what not to do in the infinite pool of opportunities we are presented with at any time. And being ok with the feeling of missing out.
According to Burkeman, the key struggles with time are busyness (the sense of being overwhelmed with things to do); distraction (the paradoxical feeling that we want to spend our time not on the thing we are spending our time on right now); future-orientation (the belief that this portion of our life isn’t quite it yet; that we are suffering now for some time in the future when we’ll be living an abundant life).
We fear facing our own finitude. The consequence of finitude is that there is much more worth doing than what we have time for. So, we pursue strategies of emotional avoidance to not face our finitude. For example, by juggling multiple tasks at a time we are avoiding finitude by fabricating the feeling that we can do it all, as long as we speed up. We postpone working on something important because “important” tasks require undistracted attention—which we trick ourselves into thinking we’ll get tomorrow, if only we manage to complete all the other unimportant tasks today.
To live a fulfilling life is to internalize and accept our finitude and be delighted of not having enough time to do all the things we would like to do—because there are a ton of those. This is your life. You don’t get another attempt at it. Whatever you have now was once desired. Yet, you keep desiring the next thing, over and over again.
Busyness
Overwhelm, not busyness, is the conundrum of time management, according to Burkeman. Having a lot to do and not enjoying those activities. This is a case of the human encounter with our innate limitations. We feel like we are not spending our time on our potential, but on mundane tasks we do not actually enjoy.
Efficiency is not the answer to getting more things done and eradicating your psychological discomfort when facing the gap between what you deem important and what you are actually allocating time to. Efficiency is a trap. When you become more efficient, you increase your level of busyness on unimportant stuff. If you become more efficient at emails, you increase your time spent on emails because now conversations flow almost instantaneously and you get more emails to answer.
“The reward for good time management is more work”
The key skill to develop against busyness and the efficiency trap is the ability to not do something. The capacity to focus on the one thing you have in front of you, even though you know there are a ton of other things left undone.
The joy of missing out
Missing out is what makes life worth living in the first place. By not doing something, you are choosing to do something else. Possibilities are endless, and your life is finite. Missing out is what makes your life worth living because it lets you accept imperfection. Imperfection is life. When making decisions, you will never have all the information you need, so you are called to satisfice and adjust along the way. That’s the joy of missing out: being happy with the imperfect now instead of craving a utopian perfect future.
In this way, you can get rid of your to-do lists and use a “menu” of things to do instead. A “menu” lets you choose between a vast array of dishes. You usually choose very few items from a menu and miss out on all the other options. Why not treat our to-do list like a menu? In this spirit, you can split your list into “open” and “closed” items. “Closed” items are the ones you decide to work on now. “Open” items are waiting on the menu, ready to upgrade to “closed” status at some point. Every day, you pull 5-10 items from your “open” to your “closed” list and work on them diligently. You cannot add a new task to the “closed” list unless one of the 10 spots becomes free.
Decision making
When you make a decision consciously, you are taking responsibility and owning the fact that you can’t avoid making a decision, no matter what. Even when you avoid making a decision, that’s a decision. Making decisions in the present is frightening because decisions call for personal responsibility. And we fear the thought of failure. And we cling to the illusion of reaching a future point when we will figure it all out and can live the perfect life we envision.
Making decisions is a commitment to imperfect actions in actuality, as opposed to fantasizing about your perfect future without taking any action in the present. Developing a habit of making decisions, even if we will never have all the information needed, is a component of a great life. Decisions bear consequences. Hence they bear responsibility. That’s part of a well-lived life.
Limiting work in progress
Multitasking feels more psychologically comforting than focusing on one single thing. That is one reason why we may multitask. Multitasking is used as a way to escape the pain of being finite, as Oliver Burkeman asserts. This concept reminds me of the difference between strategy and planning (Martin, 2022): strategy is full of assumptions and high risk; planning is linear and lower risk.
It feels like you are in control, but in fact, you are not. According to Burkeman, you need to acquire the discipline to work sequentially on projects and tasks. Other things are inevitably being neglected, and that is ok. Only take a minimal amount of tasks out of your menu at a time. Define one goal in each domain of your life. You can move on to a different project only when you complete that goal. It feels unpleasant. Yet, that’s the key to an examined life.
Distraction
We are distracted from distraction by distraction. There seems to be something in us that wants to be distracted because it feels soothing. That something may be emotional discomfort, as Burkeman posits. Focusing is psychologically hurting, and distractions are great to numb that feeling in the immediate.
There is always a way to distraction. Only confronting the lack of solution against distraction is the solution. Acknowledge your feeling of discomfort, and decide what to do with it, lightly. You only need to gently be willing to let the discomfort be with you, and keep being focused.
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