Selected Quotes & Ideas from the Book

Putting Your Life in Perspective

• "The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short...Assuming you live to be eighty, you'll have had about four thousand weeks."
• "We've been granted the mental capacities to make almost infinitely ambitious plans, yet practically no time at all to put them into action."
• "It follows from this that time management, broadly defined, should be everyone's chief concern. Arguably, time management is all life is. Yet the modern discipline known as time management—like its hipper cousin, productivity—is a depressingly narrow-minded affair, focused on how to crank through as many work tasks as possible, or on devising the perfect morning routine, or on cooking all your dinners for the week in one big batch on Sundays. These things matter to some extent, no doubt. But they're hardly all that matters."
• "The problem isn't exactly that these techniques and products don't work. It's that they do work—in the sense that you'll get more done, race to more meetings, ferry your kids to more after-school activities, generate more profit for your employer—and yet, paradoxically, you only feel busier, more anxious, and somehow emptier as a result."

The Pursuit of Leisure and Meaning

• "None of this is how the future was supposed to feel. In 1930, in a speech titled 'Economica Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,' the economist John Maynard Keynes made a famous prediction: Within a century, thanks to the growth of wealth and the advance of technology, no one would have to work more than about fifteen hours a week. The challenge would how to fill all our newfound leisure time without going crazy...But Keynes was wrong. It turns out that when people make enough money to meet their needs, they just find new things to need and new lifestyles to aspire to."
• "To the philosophers of the ancient world, leisure wasn't the means to some other end; on the contrary, it was the end to which everything else worth doing was a means."
• "The Latin word for business, negotium, translates literally as 'not-leisure,' reflecting the view that work was a deviation from the highest human calling."
• "This same essential idea remained intact across centuries of subsequent historical upheaval: that leisure was life's center of gravity, the default state to which work was a sometimes inevitable interruption."
• "But industrialization, catalyzed by the spread of the clock-time mentality, swept all that away...But at the same time, a new hierarchy had been established. Work, now, demanded to be seen as the real point of existence; leisure was merely an opportunity for recovery and replenishment, for the purposes of further work."

Embrace the Idea That You Don't Have Time for Everything

• "The more you try to manage your time with the goal of achieving a feeling of total control, and freedom from the inevitable constraints of being human, the more stressful, empty, and frustrating life gets."
• "In practical terms, a limit-embracing attitude to time means organizing your days with the understanding that you definitely won't have time for everything you want to do, or that other people want you to do—and so, at the very least, you can stop beating yourself up for failing. Since hard choices are unavoidable, what matters is learning to make them consciously, deciding what to focus on and what to neglect, rather than letting them get made by default—or by deceiving yourself that, with enough hard work and the right time management tricks, you might not have to make them at all."
• "So, technically, it's irrational to feel troubled by an overwhelming to-do list. You'll do what you can, you won't do what you can't, and the tyrannical inner voice insisting that you must do everything is simply mistaken."
• "But the other exasperating issue is that if you succeed in fitting more in, you'll find the goalposts start to shift: more things will begin to seem important, meaningful, or obligatory. Acquire a reputation for doing your work at amazing speed, and you'll be given more of it."
• "Think of it as 'existential overwhelm': the modern world provides an inexhaustible supply of things that seem worth doing, and so there arises an inevitable and unbridgeable gap between what you'd ideally like to do and what you actually can do."
• "It's only by facing our finitude that we can step into a truly authentic relationship with life."
• "It is by consciously confronting the certainty of death, and what follows from the certainty of death, that we finally become truly present for our lives."
• "The real measure of any time management technique is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things."
• "You need to learn how to start saying no to things you do want to do, with the recognition that you have only one life." -Elizabeth Gilbert