… just finished this book… i liked it very much and found it inspiring at times… its idea about time management is that it is less about your system for moving to do’s to done, than about choosing what is truly important to you and limiting your focus to a small selection of that at any given moment in time…

… it felt to me that there were some places where the philosophy presented was not completely worked out… in particular, the suggestions on how to execute appendix seemed a little anticlimactic… even so, i think it is well worth spending a few of your limited hours of attention on it…

… these are my main take aways…

• life is ridiculously limited… the average human has four thousand weeks to live and we burn through them at the rate of 52 a year…
• you can’t do it all… be a perfect worker, spouse, parent, solve all the worlds problems, write the great American novel… you must choose a few things on which to focus your attention and energy and each choice leaves any number of other choices behind…
• a meaningful life is one in which you make choices and leave possibilities behind… you make peace with your limitations and choose a few important-to-you places to apply time, energy and attention, and let go of all the other possibilities… you let yourself be mediocre at some things… you live as much as possible in full appreciation of the present moment…

OMG, this is a must read! Against the Trap of Efficiency: Mortality, Meaning, and the Antidote to the Time-Anxiety that Syphons the Joy of Life, Maria Popova, The Marginalist…

… MP is one of my main spiritual guides and in this post she strikes spiritual gold, so to speak:

The exercise instantly clarifies — and horrifies, with the force of its clarity — the empty atoms of automation and unexamined choice filling modern life with busyness while hollowing it of gladness. What emerges is the sense that making a meaningful life is less like the building of the Pyramids, stacking an endless array of colossal blocks into a superstructure of impressive stature and on the back of slave labor, than like the carving of Rodin’s Thinker, cutting pieces away from the marble block until a shape of substance and beauty is revealed. What emerges, too, is the sense that the modern cult of productivity is the great pyramid scheme of our time.

… and then there is this quote from the book MP is telling us about:

Most other resources on which we rely as individuals — such as food, money, and electricity — are things that facilitate life, and in some cases it’s possible to live without them, at least for a while. Attention, on the other hand, just is life: your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention. At the end of your life, looking back, whatever compelled your attention from moment to moment is simply what your life will have been.

… this is the foundational idea of what this blog is about!…