Time Management -- What's Really Important?

Avoiding doing some things you love -- so you can do the ones you love more.

In my Books of 2023 post, I said I wanted to write a bit more about Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management For Mortals.

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals — Oliver Burkeman (2021). This is the extremely rare self-help book that immediately made sense to me. If you are fortunate enough to celebrate your 80th birthday, you will have lived 4,000 weeks, which Burkeman rightly says is “absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short”. Making the most of the limited time we have has been a serious concern of humans for thousands of years. Seneca: “This space that has been granted to us rushes by so speedily and so swiftly that all save a very few find life at an end just when they are getting ready to live.” I hope to write more about this book and its ideas in the coming months.

In Four Thousand Weeks, Burkeman tells a story attributed to Warren Buffett, who was asked by his personal pilot how to set priorities.

[Buffett] tells the man to make a list of the top twenty-five things he wants out of life and then to arrange them in order, from the most important to the least. The top five, Buffett says, should be those around which he organizes his time. But contrary to what the pilot might have been expecting to hear, the remaining twenty, Buffett allegedly explains, aren’t the second-tier priorities to which he should turn when he gets the chance. Far from it. In fact, they’re the ones he should actively avoid at all costs — because they’re the ambitions insufficiently important to him to form the core of his life yet seductive enough to distract him from the ones that matter most.

Many people, unsatisfied with how they spend their time, realize they have to get better at saying “no” to things they really don’t want to do. According to writer Elizabeth Gilbert, what a person has to learn is far more difficult than that. “You need to learn how to start saying no to things you do what to do, with the recognition that you have only one life.”

That’s the point of the Buffett story. It might be fairly easy to ignore #24 and #25 on your ultimate list of priorities, but staying away from items #6, #7, and #9 is a whole other battle. So #6 is not “sufficiently important”, but #5 is? Really? (I know that’s not the point, but actively avoiding the important things that failed, through no fault of their own, to make the top five has to be impossible for most mortals.) It requires setting severe limits and sticking to them — even though every item is fun and enjoyable.

This is the problem I have been facing for the last few years my entire adult life.

Since the start of the 2020 pandemic, I have spent a lot of time reading U.S. news and posting either my thoughts or simple recaps of what I find interesting or noteworthy. These posts have centered on Donald Trump, who I admit is a “fascinating” subject. That word was used by a prospective (and eventually dismissed) juror last week and it stood out to me. The man did not elaborate, so what his opinions of Trump’s beliefs and actions is a mystery. Four years ago, I was interested in the deterioration of Trump’s mind, and his warped self-image and bottomless stupidity. His evolution into a cult leader certainly has been fascinating (and horrifying). I’ve long wondered how much of his own ramblings he truly believes. His stated plan, if elected again, is to remake the country in his image, and rule without any limits on his power, just as the men he has greatly admired for years/decades (Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, Kim Jong Un, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini) have done. There’s nothing special about the United States that would make it immune to authoritarian rule and destruction. Trump’s goal is entirely possible.

All that aside, there are two things I want to accomplish in the coming years: (a) write (and publish) the book I have been on-and-off researching for far too long; and (b) continue learning how to play the electric guitar. Writing a book and playing guitar are difficult things — but they’re very important to me. To accomplish these goals, I need to do is drastically reduce the time I spend online. I need to (more or less) stop doing something I enjoy doing. If I think ahead to October 2028, as I celebrate my 65th birthday, what do I most want to have accomplished?

I like reading and condensing and posting news, and I love the feeling of schadenfreude I get knowing Trump is growing increasingly terrified and spinning out of control. The direction of his life is no longer within his control, and his growing desperation makes him more dangerous. I really hope he loses in November, but he’s going to stir up an endless amount of shit no matter which way the election goes. (Christ, even passively rooting for Joe Fucking Biden and the weak-ass-complicit-in-evil Democrats feels like such debasement.)

If I’m being totally honest, I most want to see the absolute ruin of Rudy Giuliani. To be sure, Trump is one of the most vile and disgusting human beings I’ve ever read about, but, man, I fucking despise Giuliani. I hate that motherfucker. If there’s any justice in the world (and there most certainly is not), Rudy would end up penniless, sleeping in a damp cardboard box on the sidewalk, begging for spare change as a squeegee guy at New York intersections, before freezing to death in Central Park and being eaten by wild coyotes (who really should make better food choices, but they’re wild and have to eat whenever they can).

These Trump trials are historic. Although the possibility of Trump becoming president should cause journalists to abandon any reverence they might have for the office. As soon as any clown can get elected to the highest office in the country, it should no longer be seen and special or held in high esteem. I find it silly to listen to journalists talk about the office with awe and gravity.

Sometime late last year, I realized that Trump’s trials (and myriad appeals) will dominate the news for years and years — likely only stopping when he drops dead. That’s why I’ve got to do something about it now. (How long will Trump live, though, do you think? (Is Ronnie the Drunk still going with 200?) He’ll be 78 in June. I can’t see him reaching 85. Maybe 80-82?)

For decades, this loop has been playing in my head, constantly, when I consider how to spend my free time:

If I spend time reading, I’ll be upset that I ignored my creative work.
If I spend time doing my creative work, I’ll be upset that I have no time to read.

I should admit I just censored myself. At the end of the second sentence, I had typed — quite naturally and without thinking about it — “no time for myself”. I stopped and decided on “no time to read” instead. . . . Why do I consider working on my book project to not be using “my time”?

I won’t go on about it, but crafting a book proposal is an enormous hurdle. It’s easily the worst part of the process. I don’t fully understand why, but I do know that I’m making it a much larger obstacle than it has to be. I don’t believe I’ve avoided it out of a fear of failure. I find it nearly impossible to write a 30-page sample chapter when I have done perhaps only 10% of my research. The sample is bound to cover a span of time than might actually end up being five or six chapters in the finished manuscript. At that point, it reads more like an overview. Plus, when I add things to the chapter or try to take it in another direction, it gets away from me and becomes a lumpy mess. (Okay, so I did go on about it.)

The excuse I have given for poor time management in the past has been a lack of a deadline. If no one has assigned something and no one is waiting for anything, I often put off things that are difficult.

Also: An important element in this stew is the fatigue I’ve been dealing with for 25 years or so. After more than a decade of waking up far more tired than I was when I went to bed and realizing I would wake up equally “destroyed” whether I had slept 4 hours or 14 hours, I went for a sleep study and was diagnosed with sleep apnea in 2008. Using a CPAP machine helped, but not nearly enough. (About 10 years ago, thinking the fatigue might be a side effect of medication, I changed all of my meds, but there was no change to the level of fatigue.) I’m tired most of the day and find it difficult to concentrate for any length of time; I often cannot read for more than five minutes without non-stop yawning and teary eyes. If we watch a 45-minute tv show, I feel normal, but as soon as it ends, I start yawning incessantly. If concentrating while passively watching tv wipes me out, trying to write and structure a sample chapter will be many levels harder. Motivation, never one of my strengths, is tough to summon these days because it’s hard work to stay focused and the end result is frustrating.

So that’s what I’m fighting with at the moment. I’m going to re-read portions of Four Thousand Weeks.