#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"

[maaarine]

Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts (Oliver Burkeman, 2024)

"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 realize 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 prioritize 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.

The problem I’m referring to arises like this: you want the peace and clarity you believe you’d derive from meditation, say, so you resolve to become a meditator.

You purchase a book on changing your habits, skim through it, then start figuring out how best to make a meditation habit stick.

You order a meditation cushion. Perhaps you even get as far as sitting down to meditate. But then something goes wrong.

Maybe the sheer scale of the project of ‘becoming a meditator’ – that is, meditating day after day for the rest of your life – strikes you as daunting, so you decide to postpone the whole affair to some point in the future, when you expect to have more energy and time.

Alternatively, maybe the novelty of becoming a meditator positively thrills you – until a week or two later, when monotony sets in, and the letdown feels so intolerable that you throw in the towel.

What you could have done instead was to forget about the whole project of ‘becoming a meditator,’ and focus solely on sitting down to meditate. Once. For five minutes.

It’s worth mentioning another version of this problem, in which people try to become a different kind of person as a way to unconsciously avoid doing the activity in question."

[mercerislandbooks]

Our Favorite Nonfiction of 2024

It's very nearly the last minute, and, just in the nick of time, we have our list of favorite nonfiction from 2024. I will admit that this area is not my strong suit, so my coworkers are doing the heavy lifting. These are for the readers who want to more deeply understand the world around us, the history behind us, and the future to come. Brave readers all.

If you're looking for a behind the scenes peek at the giants of the American writing scene, pick up one of Brad's favorites, A Chance Meeting. Brad says, "American Luminaries... they're just like us! They hang out, have coffee together and get into arguments. In Rachel Cohen's wonderful new book, we eavesdrop on artists and writers from Henry James to James Baldwin and witness the impact these men and women had on each other."

As for the editing and publishing side, Caitlin loved The Editor: How Publishing Legend Judith Jones Shaped Culture in America. "Judith Jones was the legendary editor at Knopf. She shaped the careers of Julia Child, Madhur Jaffrey, Anne Tyler and John Updike. Early in her career Jones saved The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank from the slush pile. What a life!"

Speaking of Julia Child, many of us love to cook (as well as read) at Island Books, and Laurie highly recommends Seriously, So Good by Carissa Stanton. She says anyone can cook from it and the food is delicious, which is exactly how I like my cookbooks!

Laurie also found Ina Garten's memoir, Be Ready When the Luck Happens "full of humor and dishy storytelling. The Barefoot Contessa entertains as she weaves the story of her childhood meeting Jeffrey and becoming THE Ina Garten. You'll enjoy this from start to finish!"

As for Cindy, her favorite nonfiction was Doppelganger by Naomi Klein. She says, "In Doppelganger, Canadian author, activist and cultural analyst Naomi Klein tours the persistence of The Doppelganger in history and literature while reckoning with her personal doppelganger, Naomi Wolf, author of The Beauty Myth turned conspiracy theorist ("Other Naomi"), with whom she is chronically confused or interchanged with by the public, mainly online. Part memoir, part social critique, Klein touches upon on issues of self-identity, self-presentation, online identity, the rapid dissemination of bad information, news, fake news, and the simmering entry of AI into our online constructs among many other factors that over the last few decades have contributed to the accelerated political polarization and societal disparity we are experiencing today."

Back to the realm of what we can control, from the author of Four Thousand Weeks, Victor highly recommends Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman. "The perfect book for embracing and accepting your imperfections." Sounds like a good way to start out the new year!

Looking for a seafaring adventure to fill the void left by David Grann's The Wager? Brad says, look no further! "Hampton Sides brings Captain James Cook's final voyage to life in The Wide Wide Sea, while thoughtfully addressing the moral complexity of Cook's encounters with the indigenous populations of the Pacific Ocean."

If you'd like to explore a little closer to home, Nancy can't stop talking about Born of Fire and Rain. She says it's for the reader who is interested in the science and ecology of the Northwest. Plus it's beautifully written and illustrated. Come for the cover, stay for the words.

And for the micro-ecology of our own backyards, Backyard Bird Chronicles is perfect. Nancy says, "This is a great gift for anyone who likes to look out the window. Tan is showing us how to observe with no ulterior motive. Just the birds and beautiful drawings provide wonderful entertainment."

Caitlin loved There's Always This Year, saying it's "a book of fathers, sons, life, and, of course, basketball." And she picked Bluff, by Danez Smith, as a standout poetry collection from this year. She says she often read through individual poems multiple times, and calls it a "deeply thought-provoking look at civil action."

My own contribution is How to Winter, which I enjoyed so much that I wrote a whole blog about it. It's perfect for this time of year, but has tools that can help us shift our mindsets during any challenging times.

I hope one of these catches your eye, either for you, or for the nonfiction reader in your life! This link will take you to the book list on our website:

2024: Our Favorite Nonfiction

Happy perusing!

-- Lori

[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.

[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.

[tozozozo-x]

I think virtually everyone, except perhaps the very Zen or very old, goes through life haunted to some degree by the feeling that this isn't quite the real thing, not just yet – that soon enough, we'll get everything in working order, get organised, get our personal issues resolved, but that till then we're living what the great Swiss psychologist Marie-Louise von Franz called the "provisional life." ("There is a strange feeling that one is not yet in real life. For the time being, one is doing this or that… [but] there is always the fantasy that sometime in the future the real thing will come about.")

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

[maktbah]

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

[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

[maaarine]

Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts (Oliver Burkeman, 2024)

"Fortunately, there are three pieces of advice for navigating a world of infinite information that are more genuinely helpful.

The first is to treat your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket.

That is to say: think of your backlog not as a container that gradually fills up, and that it’s your job to empty, but as a stream that flows past you, from which you get to pick a few choice items, here and there, without feeling guilty for letting all the others float by.

In any case, when you stop to think about it, there’s something slightly arbitrary about which repositories of information we define as guilt-inducing buckets in the first place.

I know several older people who appear to believe that if a physical newspaper or magazine makes its way into their home, they have a moral duty to read it.

I’ve felt similarly tormented by long lists of web-browser bookmarks.

Yet none of us seems remotely bothered that we’ll never make it through the 25 million books currently held by the Library of Congress.

(They’re housed, along with other printed matter, on more than 800 miles of shelves.)

Clearly, the mere existence of something readable creates no obligation to read it – and nor does the fact that it’s entered your awareness, your web browser, or your home."

[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”