How To Be Your Most Productive Self Without Letting Time Be The Master Of Everything

As we age, we view time as something we control — as if time is a resource to be used.

Once we do, we feel pressure to use time well and criticize ourselves when we think we’re wasting it.

As Oliver Burkeman writes, “When you’re faced with too many demands, it’s easy to assume that the only answer must be to make better use of time, by becoming more efficient, driving yourself harder, or working for longer…instead of asking whether the demands themselves might be unreasonable.”

Your self-worth becomes tightly wound up in how you use your time.

“It stops being merely the water in which you swim and turns into something you feel you need to dominate or control if you’re to avoid feeling guilty, panicked, or overwhelmed.”

Instead of simply living our lives as it unfolds in time, we put pressure on every second of the day.

“It becomes difficult not to value each moment primarily according to its usefulness for some future goal, or for some future oasis of relaxation you hope to reach once your tasks are finally ‘out of the way.’”

But, it eventually backfires.

It wrings us dry from the present moment, forcing us to into the perpetual future, “worrying about whether things will work out, experiencing everything in terms of some later, hoped-for benefit, so that peace of mind never quite arrives.”

The problem with trying to master your time is time ends up mastering you.

We invest a lot of energy in trying to avoid our current reality.

We don’t want to risk failing professionally, we don’t want to get hurt in a relationship, we fear we might fail our parents, and we definitely would prefer not to get sick or die.

It’s painful to confront the truth; how limited our time is. Because when we do, “it means that tough choices are inevitable and that you won’t have time for all you once dreamed you might do,” writes Oliver Burkeman.

So what do we do?

We numb ourselves emotionally with busyness and distraction.

“We labour at our daily work more ardently and thoughtlessly than is necessary to sustain our life…because to us it is even more necessary not to have leisure to stop and think. Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself,” wrote Nietzsche.

As we get older, we force ourselves to believe that to succeed; we must “fit it all in.”

But when you do, “the more commitments you naturally take on, and the less you feel the need to ask whether each new commitment is truly worth a portion of your time — and so your days inevitably fill with more activities you don’t especially value.”

We chase one task after another.

It all leads us to the truth about The Paradox of Limitation:

“The more you try to manage your time with the goal of achieving a feeling of total control, and freedom from the inevitable constraints of being human, the more stressful, empty, and frustrating life gets.”

You must become comfortable with the truth.

Once you start to break free and confront the facts of your finitude and work with them, not against them, “the more productive, meaningful, and joyful life becomes.”

When you accept your limitations, it means you organize your days with “the understanding that you definitely won’t have time for everything you want to do, or that other people want you to do — and so, at the very least, you can stop beating yourself up for failing.”

You accept that making hard choices is unavoidable and accept you’re going to have to get clear on what’s most important.

You learn to make conscious decisions on what to focus on and what to neglect, “rather than letting them get made by default — or deceiving yourself that, with enough hard work and the right time management tricks, you might not have to make them at all.”

You learn to accept that FOMO is a part of life — missing out on something, damn near everything, is guaranteed.

Missing out makes the choices we have to make more meaningful. We get to decide.

“Every decision to use a portion of time on anything represents the sacrifice of all the other ways in which you could have spent that time, but didn’t — and to willingly make that sacrifice is to take a stand, without reservation, on what matters most to you.”

Meaningful productivity often doesn’t come from hurrying things up but trusting the process and letting them take the time they take, surrendering yourself to Eigenzeit, “the time inherent to a process itself.”