Old school book report
Remember the days of “book reports”? I love to read, and have since I was probably mid-elementary school, but I remember the days of having to give reports on books, and often they weren’t ones I was all that interested in.
Nowadays, though, I usually can’t shut up about whatever I am reading and what I’m learning from it. Oh, how times have changed.
Last month, I read a philosophical book about time and how we regard it called Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. There are dozens of nuggets throughout the book that have kept me thinking since I read it, but one of them was top of mind on a recent Friday as things were winding down for the week.
I had finished with my last client in the early afternoon and it was a beautiful, sunny, and warm afternoon (a rarity for late February). There were a couple things left on my to-do list for the day (and of course many things already on the list for the following week). I had the thought that I’m sure you’re familiar with: There are still a few hours left in the workday, I could probably knock these out, and I could maybe even get a headstart on next week.
But I took one look outside as the breeze blew gently through my window and thought in that moment: Nope. Instead, I decided to head to my local nearby biergarten for a late-lunch smashburger and to read my book outside.
A line from Burkeman’s book encapsulates this moment so beautifully:
You begin to grasp that when there’s too much to do, and there always will be, the only route to psychological freedom is to let go of the limit-denying fantasy of getting it all done and instead to focus on doing a few things that count.
Those two components are so simple and yet so crushingly complicated: accepting the reality that there is no such thing as “getting everything done” and doing the uncomfortable work of identifying the truly few things that really matter.
We can argue ourselves around and around about all this (“But if I just get these few more things done, everything will be so much better!” and “Everything is important! They’re all a priority!”), but wouldn’t it be so much easier to accept reality and release that myth of completion that weighs us down?
If you could accept that it’ll never all get done, what would you drop right now and go do instead?
