Book by OliverBurkeman on limitations of managing time

This books describes most of the productivity books as traps in the sense that by promoting optimising time management they increase busyness and reduce happiness.

There is a good fraction of the book dedicated to explain how powerless we are about owning time. How trying to gain absolute control of time is pointless. It compares it explicitly with alcohol recovery groups.

A more interesting topic in my opinion is the idea about societal rhythms; the Sabbath and my own childhood style of Sunday as in nobody has anything to do beyond enjoying themselves.

In fact the book argues that society is going in the opposite direction of eliminating all of these rhythms. There is a remarkable example on the soviet union dividing society in different groups and everybody having holidays on different days. The account of the book is that that made people unhappy.

The book tries to play a fine line between planning as a way to get the things that we want but not to focus on it so much to the point that happiness resides in a perfect unreachable future. A few analogies with relationships and waiting for the “perfect one”

Buddhism was mentioned thoroughly; the idea of stopping being anxious about time and embracing the moment is directly inspired with the cycle of suffering and so is the remedy.

Opinion

Like most self help books the content is stretched out. Examples are repetitive and the structure isn’t particularly well defined. There are a few core ideas that I took with me:

That the anxiety of trying to task better and procrastinate comes from this pressure from the future, like mortgages
That societies used to be better at either not forcing people to be optimal all the time or to simply have certain periods of shared off time
That in line with most of the [[]] advice there is plenty to discard as there is a limited time to life

Some angles of the book where pointless to me:

The sense of powerlessness and time is already there
I haven’t stressed that much about optimising because of inbuilt laziness
The connections to meditation and similar seem out of reach to me

I do think that the book is really effective at empathising with the covid feeling in the first chapter, but then it fizzles out because of how stretched it is.

tags:#book