Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management For Mortals Quotes
"The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short."
"We’ve been granted the mental capacities to make almost infinitely ambitious plans, yet practically no time at all to put them into action."
"Time management, broadly defined, should be everyone’s chief concern."
"The world is bursting with wonder, yet it’s the rare productivity guru who seems to have considered the possibility that the ultimate point of all our frenetic doing might be to experience more of that wonder."
"Life accelerates, and everyone grows more impatient."
"No one would have to work more than about fifteen hours a week. The challenge would be how to fill all our newfound leisure time without going crazy."
"We don’t even realize something is broken until someone else shows us a better way."
"We recoil from the notion that this is it—that this life, with all its flaws and inescapable vulnerabilities, its extreme brevity, and our limited influence over how it unfolds, is the only one we’ll get a shot at."
"Every decision to use a portion of time on anything represents the sacrifice of all the other ways in which you could have spent that time."
"Instead, life accelerates, and everyone grows more impatient."
"The exhilaration that sometimes arises when you grasp this truth about finitude has been called the ‘joy of missing out,’ by way of a deliberate contrast with the idea of the ‘fear of missing out.’"
"The real measure of any time management technique is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things."
"What you pay attention to will define, for you, what reality is."
"Attention, on the other hand, just is life: your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention."
"When you pay attention to something you don’t especially value, it’s not an exaggeration to say that you’re paying with your life."
"The finest meal at a Michelin-starred restaurant might as well be a plate of instant noodles if your mind is elsewhere."
"The ‘purposive’ man is always trying to secure a spurious and delusive immortality for his actions by pushing his interests in them forward into time."
"For him, jam is not jam unless it is a case of jam tomorrow and never jam today."
"The more you try to be here now, to point at what’s happening in this moment and really see it, the more it seems like you aren’t here now."
"But what it really shows, I’d say, is that trying too hard to have a more active sex life is no fun at all."
"Living more fully in the present may be simply a matter of finally realizing that you never had any other option but to be here now."
"What kind of life is that, when holidays come in shifts, and not for all workers together? That’s no holiday, if you have to celebrate it by yourself."
"You cannot downshift casually and easily, the way you might slip into bed at the end of a long day."
"Nothing is more alien to the present age than idleness."
"How can there be play in a time when nothing has meaning unless it leads to something else?"
"We are the sum of all the moments of our lives, all that is ours is in them: we cannot escape it or conceal it."
"It’s like trying too hard to fall asleep, and therefore failing."
"The dominance of this kind of freedom translates into no freedom at all."
"Work seeps through life like water, filling every cranny with more to-dos."
"We’ve constructed lives that can’t be made to mesh."
"Grassroots politics are among the most important coordinated activities that a desynchronized population finds difficult to do."
"Totalitarian movements are mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals."
"You can push your life a little further in the direction of communal sort of freedom."
"Prioritize activities in the physical world over those in the digital one."
"Power over your time isn’t something best hoarded entirely for yourself."
"A successful vice president...was accosted by a thought: 'I hate my life.'"
"Life is a matter of going through the motions, in the fading hope that it might yet pay off in future happiness."
"To realize midway through a business trip that you hate your life is already to have taken the first step into one you don’t."
"Amid the grief and anxiety, people expressed a sort of bittersweet gratitude for what they were experiencing."
"The hazard in any discussion of 'what matters most' is that it tends to give rise to a kind of paralyzing grandiosity."
"A modestly meaningful life doesn’t require cosmically significant accomplishments."
"Your own life will have been a minuscule little flicker of near-nothingness in the scheme of things."
"Cosmic insignificance therapy: When things all seem too much, what better solace than a reminder that they are indistinguishable from nothing at all?"
"The fantasy behind so many of our time-related troubles is the attempt to master it."
"Struggle with time is doomed to fail because your quantity of time is so limited."
"A life spent focused on achieving security with respect to time can only ever end up feeling provisional."
"You get to spend your finite time focused on a few things that matter to you, in themselves, right now."
"Most people mistakenly believe that all you have to do to stop working is not work."
"You can stop doing these things, and you eventually will."
"If, on the other hand, [the human animal] lacks objects of willing."
"The practice of inching toward the car in front."
"I’ve been finding it harder and harder to concentrate on words."
"We admitted," reads the first of the Twelve Steps.
"Includes a big component of impatience about not being finished."
"A person with a flexible schedule and average resources."
"Marching aimlessly about on the drill field."
"The extraordinary psychological benefits of choral singing."
"There is a strange attitude and feeling that one is not yet in real life."
"At a certain age…it finally dawns on us that, shockingly, no one really cares."
"Dear Frau V…. Your questions are unanswerable."
"There's always going to be a babysitter available when we need one."
"You could fill any arbitrary number of hours with what feels to be productive work."
"When you can’t do it all, you feel ashamed and give up."
"After going to grayscale, I’m not a different person."
"As each passing year converts…experience into automatic routine."
"Your experience of life would be twice as full as it currently is."
"To figure out who this human being is that we’re with."
"I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men."