“But the choice you can make is to stop believing you’ll ever solve the challenge of busyness by cramming more in, because that just makes matters worse.”

Oliver Burkeman

I started reading Oliver Burkeman’s wonderful and enlightening book Four Thousand Weeks: Time and How To Use It.

The book’s title refers to the average amount of weeks a person lives on Earth and the age-old problem of time, and how to best use our brief time in this world.

The quote above is very insightful as it is something we often overlook – what’s the point of all this busyness if we rush through it all just to become even busier. For example, you build a reputation as a quick responder to email, so you get more emails from other people and spend more time responding to email. Is that really what you want to be known for in life?

You could apply this thinking to many other areas of your life where you may be “efficient”, but it might not be the best use of your time. Often these tasks are not in line with our values and the goals we would like to achieve.

“Once you stop believing that it might somehow be  possible to avoid hard choices about time, it becomes easier to make better ones.”

Oliver Burkeman

Often we just procrastinate as we can’t face the tough decision about what is the right thing to do. We bury our heads in the sand. We feel the guilt and unworthiness of not achieving what we set out to do or what was expected of us.

There always will be too much to do. Maybe we should admit that to ourselves.

“The only route to psychological freedom is to let go of the limit-denying fantasy of getting it all done and instead to focus on doing a few things that count.”

Oliver Burkeman

So that brings me to my question – what are the few things that count for you? 

And – Are you doing them?