I read this book in December 2022 at which point I have lived ~1700/4000 weeks. Here are my summary notes for every chapter as well as some overall takeaways and questions for the author.

Introduction: In the long run, we’re all dead

• Most people live only 4000 - 4700 weeks. This seems short or limited during one’s own lifetime. It is almost negligible at the cosmic timescale.
• This means that proper time management should be on our mind and one of our major concerns.
• Modern time management advice focuses on how to get more done in the same time. The author thinks this is a flawed approach as he describes time as an unstoppable conveyor belt (Edward T. Hall).
  • It brings new tasks as quickly as we can dispatch old ones
  • Becoming more productive just causes the belt to speed up
  • New work appears magically as we tick things of the to-do list. Someone who appears to answer quick to email requests at work, will get a reputation and receive more requests.

Part 1: Choosing to Choose

1. The limit embracing life

• This chapter shows us that our time and what we can do with it is very limited. Instead of pretending that we can have everything we want (in the future) through ever more work, we should embrace the limitedness and dedicate more time thinking about what matters to us and how to spend our time wisely and in the moment. We should not live for a future version of our life that might not materialize because we will always shift the goal post further.

• Instead of just living our lives as they unfold, it is difficult not to value each moment according to how useful it will be in the future. We prioritise future benefits over current enjoyment.

  • e.g. using spare time to study a topic that might help at work

• Our relationship with time is the result of us avoiding to face the painful constraints of reality. We need to confront ourselves with the limitedness of time and that at every point we need to make tough choices that limit the set of things we can do or experience

  • e.g. visiting “all” of India, SE Asia, sailing everywhere in the Mediterranean, hiking in the Alps/Pacific Crest Trail/Dolomites, seeing the French, Italian, Spanish countryside

• Procrastination and working hard can both be seen as an avoidance strategy to keep feeling limitless

2. The efficiency trap

• Accept that you can only focus on a small slice of the experiences the world has to offer. Accept that there will be more work tasks on your desk than you could ever complete. Instead focus both in work and in spare time on the few meaningful activities that matter most to you and that have the greatest consequences.
• Trying to complete your to-do-list fully probably means that you are working on low-effort, low-value tasks a lot and push the important, hard tasks to the back. Take the time to evaluate the order of tasks on your list.
• Daniel Markovits (Yale University): Even the winners who make it to elite universities and then reap the highest salaries, find that their reward is the unending pressure to work with high intensity in order to maintain their income and status that have come to seem like prerequisities for the lives they want to lead ( Markovits: How the Life Became an Endless, Terrible Competition - The Atlantic   )
• If you succeed to fit more work into your time, the goalpost starts to shift. New goods, desires, tasks start to become important or obligatory. If your boss notices that you do great work quickly, they will give you more tasks and responsibility. (Note: Getting more responsibility might be desired at the beginning of a career.)

3. Facing Finitude

• We should marvel at the fact that we exist and that no next day is guaranteed. Moreover, the very fact that our experiences are transient and not containable or extendable (like the exact feeling of watching a sunset during a holiday) gives them value. If we were able to replay the experiences infinitely they would lose their preciousness. The amazing fact that we are alive now, puts small day-to-day annoyances into perspective.

4. Becoming a better procrastinator

• A good procrastinator focuses on the important items and decides what tasks to neglect. They also focus only on up to three important (high not medium-value) tasks at a time They also accept that whatever task they will attempt, it will fall short of their perfect standards. Therefore, there is no reason not to start it.
• The author also advocates that one should settle in one’s romantic life. Mostly, because one eventually has to settle (the fantasy of a limitless perfect life will not come), but also because people that do settle are generally happier once they have done it. You should also make it difficult for yourself to back out of the relationship by committing fully: house, family, marriage.
• 3 principles:
  1. Pay yourself first when it comes to time. Jessica Abel: “If you try to find time for your most valued activities by first dealing with everything else, in the hope that some time will be left at the end of the day, you’ll be disappointed.” There is no moment in future when you’ll magically be done with everything and have loads of free time.
  2. Limit your work in progress. Focus on no more than 3 items on your list at the same time. Otherwise you’ll switch to easier tasks when the meaningful once get difficult.
  3. Resist the allure of middling priorities: Don’t do the kind-of-important tasks as they will distract you from the truly meaningful ones.

5. The Watermelon Problem

• You won’t be able to have full control over your attention, but you should be able to retain some control over it in order to have meaningful experiences. This means limiting social media usage and only using it deliberately as you won’t be able to win against an army of paid experts trying to steal your attention (it’s just too good).

6. The intimate interrupter

• When we stop work to look at social media it is true that social media apps are exploiting us. It is also true that we have an intimate interrupter in us that promises us an easier life if only we avert attention from the current challenging tasks to something mindless.
• When you try to focus on something important, you are forced to face your limits, an experience that is uncomfortable because precisely the task at hand is so important.
• Zen Buddhist say that “the entirety of human suffering can be explained by the effort to resist paying full attention to the way things are going, because we wish they were going differently.”

Part 2: Beyond control

7. We never really have time

• The future is not guaranteed, so we should stop spending our time worrying about whether it will confirm to our desire and instead focus on the only bit we can control which is the present moment.
• Plans should be viewed as a statement of intend instead of a contract with the future. The future does not have to comply both in personal life and at work.
• Hofstadter’s Law   , i.e. “Any task you are planning to tackle will always take longer than you expect, ’even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.’”, should be taken into account when planning out a task with a deadline.

8. You are here

• We are focusing too much on our future and view the present only as a means to reach that better, less stressful, fantasy future that never arrives, thereby missing life. (When-I-finally mindset)
• We should treat any meaningful activity as if it was the last instance of it, because inevitably it will be true at some point (last time talking to someone, last time seeing the sea, last time visiting a place).
• Contrary to the above: Don’t try too hard to make an experience meaningful, you are setting yourself up for failure. Realise that you are living in the moment anyway, whether you want it or not. No reason to force it.

9. Rediscovering Rest

• Use at least some sizeable amount of your leisure time on atelic activities, i.e. things we enjoy for their own sake, e.g. hiking, meeting friends or pursuing a random hobby. It should not have any goals attached like to profit from it in the future (networking) or personal growth (studying Bayesian statistics).
• This is against the modern trend to invest leisure time to get future payoff, which is against ancient (Aristotles) wisdom.
• Rest for the sake of rest and enjoy lazy hours for their own sake. A good hobby should probably feel a bit embarrassing; that’s a good sign you are doing it for its own sake.

10. The Impatience Spiral

• We are becoming more impatient and have shorter attention.
• A good example is reading, people report feeling overpowered when trying to pick up a book. One reason seems to be that the act of reading takes longer than they would like (in fact the reading time is not in the reader’s control). We are too impatient to let loose and give ourselves to the task.
• When you finally face the truth that you can’t dictate how fast things go, you stop trying to outrun your anxiety, and your anxiety is transformed.

11. Staying on the Bus

• We are made so uneasy by the experience of allowing reality to unfold at its own speed that when we are faced with a problem we rush towards a resolution - any resolution, as long as we can tell ourselves we are dealing with the situation, thereby maintaining our feeling of staying in control.
• Three principles of patience:

1. Accept that there is no state of ‘having no problems’. Therefore, stop trying to reach that state by working too much. What is a problem, really? It’s simply something that you address yourself to it.
2. Embrace radical incrementalism. Make the task a smaller part of your daily routine.
3. Stay on the bus. Everyone stats out badly, and has to grow by failing, copying others and accumulating experience. Only with a lot of patience will you reach the state where distinctive work begins.

12. The Loneliness of the Digital Nomad

• The value of time depends also on it’s network value. How close are your friends and family? Do you have time off when they have time off?
• Study: People in long-term unemployment get a happiness boost when the weekend arrives, e.g. when their friends become available.
• Your time should be in sync with the time of people you care about.
• You can push your life further into the direction communal sort of freedom (rather than the individual freedom):
  • remove flexibility from your schedule by joining local sport teams or campaign groups
  • prioritise activities in the physical instead of the digital world
  • let your friends and family every once in a while dictate your schedule

13. Cosmic Insignificance Therapy

• Human history has the time span of the blink of an eye in cosmic terms. If you are stressed by work, relationship, daily encounters, you can focus on zooming out to realize that all these problems shrink to irrelevance.
• Humans have an ’egocentricity bias’, i.e. over-estimating their relevance and existence in the world. This unfortunately leads to an unrealistic definition of what it means to use your finite time well.
• Once you realise your own insignificance you realise that you are holding yourself at too high standards. This is liberating because you might realise that many ordinary things you are already doing can be meaningful and you have just devalued them so far: preparing meals for your children, or that any career that makes the world a tiny bit better is worth pursuing without career aspiration.

14. The Human Disease

• Accept that you can and will fail in relationships, work, etc. because it is often out of your control.
• A life spent on achieving security with respect to time when it is unattainable can only ever feel provisional.
• Marie-Louise von Franz (psychologist): “There is a strange attitude and feeling that one is not yet in real life, For the time being one is doing this or that, but whether it is a woman or a job, it is not yet what is really wanted, and there is always the fantasy that sometime in the future the real thing will come about… The one thing dreaded throughout by such a type of man is to be bound to anything whatever. There is a terrific fear of being pinned down, of entering space and time completely, and of being the unique man that one is.” (Quote)
• You have to admit defeat. In exchange for acceptance you get to actually be there.

Afterword

• We are giving up the master hope: That somehow this isn’t it, that this is just a dress rehearsal, and that one day you’ll feel truly confident that you have what it takes.
• The average human lifespan is absurdly terrifyingly, insultingly short. But that isn’t a reason for living in anxiety about how to spend your limited time. It’s a cause of relief, you can give up the quest to become the optimised, infinitely capable person you are supposedly to be. Instead you can roll up the sleeves and work on what is gloriously possible.

10 Tools for Embracing Your Finitude

1. Have a fixed volume approach to productivity
   • Keep 2 to-do lists: one open (everything) and one closed (only 10 tasks at most)
   • Establish pre-determined time boundaries for work
2. Focus on one project at a time.
3. Decide in advance what to fail at
4. Keep a done list to focus on what you have already completed
5. Consciously pick your battles in activism and charity
6. Use boring, single-purpose technology
7. Pay more attention to every moment
8. Be a ‘researcher’ in relationships. Try to determine ‘who is this person that sits next to me?’
9. If a generous impulse arrives in your mind, check in on a friend, give money, act right away on it instead of putting it off for later
10. Practice doing nothing through meditation

Reader’s notes

• I sometimes suffer from analysis paralysis. For example, it’s difficult for me to make vacation decisions because I always feel that I need to use my free time optimally to get the best experience, e.g. trying to find the best, most authentic country, hotel, activity, restaurant.

• I suffer from the behaviour discussed in Chapter 8. I focus a lot on the road to get to a fantasy future instead of properly valuing the present. In some healthy dose I believe this is my strength and has led me to some personal and academic success. However, I see that this can become harmful or regrettable quickly.

• I really like the concept of atelic activities and that a good way of identifying them is that it’s probably the slightly embarrasing hobbies.

• Fitting quote from a hacker notes thread on the book: “If you are depressed you are living in the past. If you are anxious you are living in the future. If you are at peace you are living in the present.” – Lao Tzu

Questions for the author

• How do you balance the invested time in the “now” vs. invested time in the future? How do you know what the right level is? There must be an optimal path, e.g. if you have to work hard for one year to make enough money to retire afterwards, that should be considered worthwhile? The advice of the book seems dedicated to people with comfortable and converged careers or self-employed people, like the author.