Acknowledging Our Limits: An Exclusive Guest Post from Oliver Burkeman, Author of Four Thousand Weeks, Our July Nonfiction Pick 

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As a recovering “productivity geek”, I understand the intoxicating promise of becoming more efficient, optimizing your life to the point where you could meet every demand, pursue every ambition, and generally make time for everything. Only you never quite get there  —  and in the meantime, stress and anxiety grow worse. It turns out that the surest path to meaningful productivity and a fulfilling life lies not in attempting to outrun our limits, but acknowledging them, dropping back down into a real experience of finite human life. Here are five practical techniques that can help: 

Plan your day “volume first, tasks second”: 

The standard question many of us ask ourselves at the start of the day is “what needs to get done?”, which is a recipe for stress, because the answer will almost always exceed your capacities — so you’re building in a sense of defeat before you’ve finished your first coffee. Instead, try calculating how much time you realistically have at your disposal for work, once appointments are accounted for. Suppose it’s four hours. Think of this as a container of fixed volume: which of your hundreds of tasks are important enough to put into it today? You’ll have to leave plenty of things out. But (spoiler alert) that was always going to be the case anyway.  

Keep a “done list”: 

It’s easy to fall into a dispiriting mindset where you’re focusing exclusively on the list of what’s still left to be done — which is always effectively infinite. So, redress the balance by keeping a list of what you’ve already completed today, which gets longer as the day unfolds. (If you really need a boost, add things you wouldn’t usually count as accomplishments, like taking a shower or tidying your desk.) A “done” list unconsciously prompts you to compare your real output to the hypothetical case in which you stayed in bed and did nothing — as opposed to the hypothetical case in which you were a hyper efficient superhuman who got everything done. 

Give up clearing the decks: 

If you approach work as a matter of getting all the small and annoying things “out of the way”, so you can find long stretches of time for deep focus, you’ll never get there, because the list of small things is endless. (Indeed, trying to get them done often creates more of them: getting faster at answering email, for example, just generates more email.) So, make it your practice to put in some deep focus first, wherever possible, at the start of the day or week. You’ll probably feel some anxiety at knowing the decks aren’t clear, but tolerating that anxiety is the whole point. If instead you try to eliminate it by eliminating the outstanding tasks, you’ll be fighting an unwinnable battle.  

Beware “middling priorities”:  

We’re told it’s important to “learn to say no”, but it’s easy to imagine that this only means saying no to tedious or irrelevant tasks. In fact, it means saying no to things that do matter, simply because there are more things that matter than our finite time can contain. So the real hazard is those goals, tasks, friendships and experiences that feel genuinely meaningful — but not quite meaningful enough to be worth our limited time. Take a clear-eyed look at those projects, friendships or hobbies that seem only partially alive for you and ask if it might be time to gracefully let them go. 

Remember it’s always now:

We’re urged to be more present in the moment but trying too hard to “be in the moment” is a recipe for self-consciousness, as you find yourself constantly wondering if you’re really being mindful enough. A useful shift of perspective is to realize you’re always present in the moment anyway, whether it feels that way or not; there’s nowhere else you could be. Even your plans or worries about the future, or regrets about the past, exist in this moment, the only time a meaningful life could ever be created. The liberating result is that you needn’t feel like you have a responsibility to make good use of your life, but only this precise moment of it. Then the next. Then the next.