We’ve been granted the mental capacities to make almost infinitely ambitious plans, yet practically no time at all to put them into action.

Productivity is a trap. Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster… The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control.

My productivity obsession had been serving a hidden emotional agenda… But it also held at bay certain scary questions about what I was doing with my life, and whether major changes might not be needed. If I could get enough work done, my subconscious had apparently concluded, I wouldn’t need to ask if it was all that healthy to be deriving so much of my sense of self-worth from work in the first place.

It’s painful to confront how limited your time is, because it means that tough choices are inevitable and that you won’t have time for all you once dreamed you might do.

Our culture’s ideal is that you alone should control your schedule, doing whatever you prefer, whenever you want - because it’s scary to confront the truth that almost everything worth doing, from marriage to parenting to business or politics, depends on cooperating with others, and therefor on exposing yourself to the emotional uncertaintaies of relationships.

The more you believe you might succeed in “fitting everything in,” 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.

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.

I still think it’s the single best antidote to the feeling of time pressure, a splendidly liberating first step on the path of embracing your limits: the problem with trying to make time for everything that feels important - or just for enough of what feels important - is that you definitely never will.

The only route to psychological freedom is to let go of the time-denying fantasy of getting it all done and instead to focus on doing a few things that count.

The harder you struggle to fit everything in, the more of your time you’ll find yourself spending on the least meaningful things.

The most fundamental thing we fail to appreciate about the world, Heidegger asserts in his magnum opus, Being and Time, is how baffingly astonishing it is that it’s there at all - the fact that there is anything rather than nothing

If you can hold your attention, however briefly or occasionally, on the sheer astonishingness of being, and on what a small amount of that being you get - you may experience a palpable shift in how it feels to be here, right now, alive in the flow of time.

The core challenge of managing our limited time isn’t about how to get everything done - that’s never going to happen - but how to decide most wisely what not to do, and how to feel at peace about not doing it.

So if a certain activity really matters to you - a creative project, say, though it could just as easily be nurturing a relationship, or activism in the service of some cause - the only way to be sure it will happen is to do some of it today, no matter how little, and no matter how many other genuinely big rocks may be begging for your attention.

In a world of too many big rocks, it’s the moderately appealing ones - the fairly interesting job opportunity, the semi-enjoyable friendship - on which a finite life can come to grief.

Our lives, thanks to their finitude, are inevitably full of activities that we’re doing for the very last time

Patience isn’t merely a more peaceful and present-oriented way to live but a concretely useful skill.

The most productive and successful among them generally made writing a smaller part of their daily routine than the others, so that it was much more feasible to keep going with it day after day.

As with money, it’s good to have plenty of time, all else being equal. But having all the time in the world isn’t much use if you’re forced to experience it all on your own.

What would it mean to spend the only time you ever get in a way that truly feels as though you are making it count?

Because your quantity of time is so limited, you’ll never reach the commanding position of being able to handle every demand that might be thrown at you or pursue every ambition that feels important; you’ll be obliged to make tough choices instead.

If you can step more fully into the condition of being a limited human - you will reach the greatest heights of productivity, accomplishment, service, and fulfillment that were ever in the cards for you to begin with.