#oliver burkeman

[luxe-pauvre]

But there’s one piece of advice I’m confident applies to basically everyone: as far as you can manage it, you should make sure your psychological centre of gravity is in your real and immediate world – the world of your family and friends and neighborhood, your work and your creative projects, as opposed to the world of presidencies and governments, social forces and global emergencies. […] Here’s what I mean by “your psychological centre of gravity”: I’ve been puzzling for a few years now over a shift I first noticed around 2016, when various acquaintances – and me too, in some ways – started doing what I called “living inside the news.” They seemed to view the world they accessed through news sites and social media as somehow more real than their immediate surroundings. The latter was a place they merely dropped into from time to time, before hurrying back to the main event. […] Keeping your centre of gravity immediate and local is the opposite of all that. It means treating the world of national and international events as a place that you visit – to campaign or persuade, donate or volunteer, to do whatever you feel is demanded of you – and that you then return from, in order to gain perspective, and to spend time doing some of the other things a meaningful life is about.

Oliver Burkeman, Reality is right here

[maaarine]

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

"Just because certainty about the future is off the table, though, it doesn’t mean you can’t feel confident in your abilities to deal with the future when it does eventually arrive.

As the celebrated Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius reassures readers of his Meditations:

‘Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.’

You could say the worrier gets things exactly backwards.

He’s so terrified that he might not be able to rely on his inner resources, later on, when he reaches a bridge that needs crossing, that he makes superhuman efforts to bring the future under his control right now.

In fact he should devote less energy to manipulating the future, and have more faith in his capacity to handle things once the challenge actually arrives.

If it arrives, that is.

Marcus’s phrase ‘if you have to’ is a useful reminder that most of the bridges we worry about never end up needing to be crossed at all.

The fact that you can’t cross bridges before you come to them is liable to seem dispiriting, as if it leaves us with no option but to keep trudging vulnerably into the fog, trying not to think about sinkholes.

But it contains a hidden gift.

After all, if you’re hopelessly trapped in the present, it follows that your responsibility can only ever be to the very next moment – that your job is always simply to do what Carl Jung calls ‘the next and most necessary thing’ as best you can.

Now and then, to be sure, the next most necessary thing might be a little judicious planning for the future.

But you can do that, then let go of it, and move on; you needn’t try to live mentally ten steps ahead of yourself, straining to feel sure about what’s coming later."

[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"

[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

[kjmckendry]

Book Review: Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman

I've been reading a lot more this year than I have in a while and I thought I'd share some of my favorite books every now and then.

Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman is an eye opening look at how we really think about what we do each day and how we end up spending most of our time. The average person lives approximately 4,000 weeks and that of course is if you're lucky to live into your 80s. That doesn't really seem like very many weeks. For me, that means I'm more than half done. I only have about 1296 weeks left.

My task is to think about how I really want to spend those. Maybe some days I still want to sit back and watch some football with my husband or take a nice long nap, but for me the point is that I want to be consciously making those decisions. I want to be present and choose what is important to me each moment.

[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]

[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.

[justwatchmyeyes]

The pursuit of perfection can be a beautiful prison, but the willingness to simply begin is the key to unlocking the garden.

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

[maaarine]

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

"Consequences aren’t optional.

It’s in the nature of being finite that every choice comes with some sort of consequences, because at any instant, you can only pick one path, and must deal with the repercussions of not picking any of the others.

Spending a week’s holiday in Rome means not spending that same week in Paris; avoiding a conflict in the short term means dealing with whatever might result from letting a bad situation fester.

Freedom isn’t a matter of somehow wriggling free of the costs of your choice – that’s never an option – but of realizing, as Kopp points out, that nothing stops you doing anything at all, so long as you’re willing to pay those costs.

Unless you’re literally being physically coerced into doing something, the notion that you ‘have to do it’ in truth means that you’ve chosen not to pay the price of refusing; just as the notion that you absolutely can’t do something generally means you’re unwilling to pay the price of doing it.

You could quit your job with no backup plan. You could book a one-way ticket to Rio de Janeiro, or rob a bank, or tell your social media followers your honest views.

The conservative American economist Thomas Sowell summed things up with a bleakness I appreciate, insisting that there are no solutions, only trade-offs.

The only two questions, at any moment of choice in life, is what the price is, and whether or not it’s worth paying.

This can come as a revelation and a liberation to the anxious among us – partly because it cuts genuinely agonizing choices down to a more manageable number, but also because it reminds us that most of the potential consequences we find ourselves agonizing about don’t remotely justify such angst."

[themindtools]

4,000 weeks sounds like a lot until you do the math. Why your calendar is lying to you, and how to stop pretending you’re immortal. #TimeManagementTruths #FourThousandWeeks #LifeHacks

[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

[litandlifequotes]

When you give up the unwinnable struggle to do everything, that’s when you can start pouring your finite time and attention into a handful of things that truly count. When you no longer demand perfection from your creative work, your relationships, or anything else, that’s when you’re free to plunge energetically into them. And when you stop making your sanity or self-worth dependent on first reaching a state of control that humans don’t get to experience, you’re able to start feeling sane and enjoying life now, which is the only time it ever is.

Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts by Oliver Burkeman