Productivity Rule #1: Accept Your Finitude

In his series and book “Time Management for Mortals”, Oliver Burkeman makes one essential proposition: you feel overwhelmed with busyness because you haven’t accepted your finitude. You are a finite human being (with finite time, and finite decision-making power) in an infinite world of opportunities. The infinite world of opportunities calls for your attention all of the time. Unless you internalize the knowledge that you will never complete all the tasks on your to-do list, you won’t overcome the existential battle with time.

Being busy is not a problem per se. It is great to have enough things to do that you don’t need to sit with your thoughts for too long. Especially if you are busy making progress on activities you enjoy, more power to you. The issue with busyness, as Burkeman points out, is “overwhelm”: having too much to do and not finding meaning in any of those activities.

The feeling of overwhelm often leads to the efficiency trap. Instead of recalibrating our own motives and beliefs in time management, we attempt to become faster at doing tasks, so we can fit more of them in one day, and finally complete our entire to-do list once and for all. In fact, when you become more efficient, you are increasing your level of busyness on unimportant stuff. If you get faster at answering emails, you’ll likely increase your overall time spent on emails because conversations now flow almost instantaneously. The reward for good time management is more work.

The efficiency trap may have you believe that the truly important tasks require deep attention and focus. So, you postpone them until after you complete the less important and shallow tasks. Only once you complete the more shallow tasks can you gain the freedom to do deep work, you may think. That’s an illusion. The time to do important tasks is now. And the most valuable skill you can develop is learning to not do something; to commit to the one thing even though you know there are many others calling for your attention.

Decide means “cutting away”; it is a commitment to making imperfect progress in the present instead of fantasizing about perfect progress at some point in the future. Ultimately, you will not finish your to-do list, ever. So, why not complete the most important—but uncomfortable—things in it, right now?