#oliver burkeman

[luxe-pauvre]

In that predicament, if I'm lucky, I'll remember the observation, usually attributed to Joan Baez, that "action is the antidote to despair." People tend to quote this in the context of political or environmental activism, but it applies to everything else, too: an overfilled inbox, a cluttered garage, an intimidating creative project or overdue tax return. If you can get yourself over the gap between knowing what you need to do and taking an action, things can only get better from there. Which means that at least the nature of the immediate challenge is clear: not to "become more productive" or "get motivated" or "make a plan for the month" or something like that, but just to do one thing to address whatever situation you're in. […] If you can approach your daily life in this way for a while – as a sequence of momentary, self-contained, eminently doable actions, rather than as an arduous matter of chipping away at enormous challenges – you might notice something profound, which is that, in fact, this is all you ever need to do. You can make your way through life exclusively in this manner. (As E. L. Doctorow said of writing, it's "like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.") And not just that: actually, it's all you ever could do. There is no achievement, in the history of human civilisation, that has ever been accomplished by any means other than as a sequence of doable actions. In the end, it isn't really a question of "breaking big projects down into small chunks." It's more a matter of seeing that "big projects" are nothing but psychological constructs, quasi-illusory entities summoned into existence by taking a particular view of what our lives really consist of – which is moments, and the actions that unfold in them. After all, in any given moment, we're never actually "working on a big project" or "addressing a major challenge" or anything similar. We're always just taking an action. And then another. And another.

Oliver Burkeman, How to get out of a rut

[dk-thrive]

Floundering is living, too.

I have always resisted anything that smells a bit self-helpy. Perhaps it’s because I’m pretty content with my pretty average, relatively low-stress life, where days seized and squandered pass in fairly equal number, attended by tides of frustration or mild satisfaction... Floundering is living, too, Burkeman explains. And if there is any key to success, it’s giving up altogether the quest for super-productivity and rejecting the nagging impulse to get on top of things. Instead, we’d all be happier and more productive if we did what we could – and no more – while embracing our imperfections. Now that’s the kind of pep talk I can get on board with.

— Simon Usborne, in his review of "Meditations for Mortals" by Oliver Burkeman. (The Guardian, September 12, 2024)

[winter-tospring]

Four thousand weeks - Oliver Burkeman

On "settling"

[mschocolateworld]

Dopiero kiedy całym sercem pojmiesz, że pewne rzeczy naprawdę są niemożliwe, zdobędziesz siłę, żeby się przeciwstawić.

Oliver Burkeman - “Cztery tysiące tygodni”

[sopstvena]

One antidote is to allow yourself to imagine what it might feel like to know you'd never fully get on top of your work, never become a really disciplined exerciser or healthy eater, never resolve the personal issue you feel defines your life's troubles.

[...] When I let myself be permeated by this thought – that I might be stuck with certain inner disturbances forever – I definitely feel a bit of peevishness in response: "Wait, I'm never going to get to the problem-free phase? That's not what I signed up for!" But then comes the sense of a heavy burden having been lifted. The pressure's off. I get to unclench, relax, and fall back into the life I'm living. Far from this being dispiriting, I find myself much more motivated to get stuck in. It turns out my really big problem was thinking I might one day get rid of all my problems, when the truth is that there's no escaping the mucky, malodorous compost-heap of this reality. Which is OK, actually. Compost is the stuff that helps things grow.

— Oliver Burkeman, Are We There Yet?

[elegance-and-grit]

2/100 days of productivity

13.09.2023

Habits

🚶 1 hour of movement

🏊‍♀️ 30 mins of sports (went swimming, yeah!)

🧘 Yoga (any duration) (nope, not really, just some small stretches)

🥗 Somewhat healthy food (nooppee, stress ate a lot of M&Ms, the ones from my birthday, because of my whole flat situation - me and my flatmates have to leave the flat, I luckily have a new one already, but the whole other people are now coming to look at the flat, and everybody moving out, and cleaning and all thing has me stressed)

Study & Work

📚 Read 30 minutes (Yes! Read Chapter 1 of The Art Of Computer Systems Performance Analysis and it promises to be an interesting read!)

✍️ Wrote 30 minutes (Yes! Got started on a blog post about one of my tech projects, always takes a long while to actually put it down. But I think I should do it more often, as it really forces you to have understood what you do).

💭 Thought 30 minutes (nope)

💻 Concentrated work for 6 hours (Just so, but I am going to take it. :D)

Unluckily my benchmarks showed that my patch is possibly not improving things and perhaps even leads to wrong results on certain workloads. I'll have to investigate today!

Other & New Ideas

Cleaned & washed things, stole me some time yesterday, but will make life easier on the weekend!

Experimented with the 3-3-3 Method proposed by Oliver Burkeman (the one who wrote Four Thousand Weeks). The idea is to:

Spend 3 hours on your most important thing. Complete 3 shorter tasks you've been avoiding. Work on 3 maintenance activities to keep life in order.

I did a TODO list with just 3 small tasks (ok 4), and I actually managed to complete them all! Seems like a much better idea than fooling myself into thinking that I am gonna tackle my whole doom pile in one day besides my day work. Gonna try it again today.

Had a nice late evening with my boyfriend, but was again very late in bed and didn't get a good night's sleep.

[kiki-de-la-petite-flaque]

[tozozozo-x]

Many people (by which I meant me) seem to feel as if they start off each morning in a kind of "productivity debt", which they must struggle to pay off through the day, in hopes of reaching a zero balance by the time evening comes. Few things feel more basic to my experience of adulthood than this vague sense that I'm falling behind, and need to claw my way back up to some minimum standard of output. It's as if I need to justify my existence, by staying "on top of things"

Oliver Burkeman

[cleanarchitectures]

Finishing the anti-productivity Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman and I think some of my mutuals may need it/enjoy it as much as I did.

[lobo1tomia]

Best of 2022 - a 224. epizód

Best of 2022 – a 224. epizód

Üdvözlünk benneteket 2023-ban! Ahogy azt már megszokhattátok tőlünk, az új évet mi mindig az előző kiértékelésével kezdjük, és most sincs ez másképp: legújabb adásunkban kitárgyaljuk, melyek voltak 2022 legjobb könyves, filmes és sorozatos élményei. Találtok majd a listán olyasmiket, amelyekről korábban már beszámoltunk, de számos újdonság is szóba kerül majd. Tartsatok velünk, utána pedig…

[maktbah]

Book Summary: Four Thousand Weeks Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman

[luxe-pauvre]

Almost nobody wants to hear the real answer to the question of how to spend more of your finite time doing things that matter to you, which involves no system. The answer is: you just do them. You pick something you genuinely care about, and then, for at least a few minutes – a quarter of an hour, say – you do some of it. Today. It really is that simple. Unfortunately, for many of us, it also turns out to be one of the hardest things in the world. It’s not that systems for getting things done are bad, exactly. (Rules for meaningful productivity do have a role to play, and we’ll turn to some of them later.) It’s just that they’re not the main point. The main point – though it took me years to realise it – is to develop the willingness to just do something, here and now, as a one-off, regardless of whether it’s part of any system or habit or routine. If you don’t prioritise the skill of just doing something, you risk falling into an exceedingly sneaky trap, which is that you end up embarking instead on the unnecessary and, worse, counterproductive project of becoming the kind of person who does that sort of thing.

Oliver Burkeman, Kayaks and superyachts

[winter-tospring]

Indeed, your present, however it may be, is precious:

but also, when you try too hard to BE IN THE NOW OR ELSE.... you're putting pressure on yourself and the moment too:

So...? Appreciate the moment, without overthinking it so much that you feel like you're failing at that. Just be in it, see it as unique, as The Moment of truth, the ever flowing moment of life itself, and be yourself in it, and that'll be enough. There's no extra magical thing you need to give it other than your attention.

Quotes are from Four Thousand Weeks, by Oliver Burkeman

[mschocolateworld]

Tym, co sprawia, że życie bywa znośne, często jest właśnie chropowata faktura rzeczywistości, która pomaga budować związki międzyludzkie o kluczowym znaczeniu dla zdrowia psychicznego i fizycznego oraz dla siły naszych społeczności.

Oliver Burkeman - “Cztery tysiące tygodni”