The Unbearable Lightness of Not Getting Things Done
Time is running out, death is getting closer, so there’s no point in stressing yourself out: there’s no point in constantly beating yourself up over the pile of rocks lying around outside your house. The bowl that represents the things that will fill the day will never be bigger.
In a 1994 book, Stephen Covey recommended thinking about working with priorities as if it were a bowl or a container in which we first put large stones (i.e. main tasks), followed by the smaller ones, and then fill the rest in with sand (i.e. small tasks). It all works out perfectly! When Covey’s coach finishes his demonstration, the container is filled with a neat pile and the spectator is stunned and humbled, by how stupidly he has managed his time up to now. He rushes home for his own elegant container to fill.
In the book Four Thousand Weeks, which proved to be a big game changer (not only) for me in how I think about time, life, work and everything over the last year, its author Oliver Burkeman calls this depiction a lie (and I do literally mean: a lie). And I, for one, agree with him.
Burkeman argues: the stones for the demonstration were prepared so that there were just enough to fit beautifully. But what about us real people who have too many stones, or at least a lot more in our lives than we can fit in the tiny vessels of our day? Unlike Covey’s coach, we just desperately sort through the rocks all day, choosing which ones to put in the container and which ones we won’t be able to, leaving us and with a sense of being a failure in life. According to Burkeman, each method should be judged on how well it helps us to choose beforehand what not to do and what to procrastinate about, and not by how much we supposedly manage to get done.
The main lesson for me is a somewhat tautological reconciliation with the things that I can’t get done — I can’t do more in an hour than I can do in an hour. I visualize this like the bowl in the picture. Most of our productive lives are actually lived in a kind of state of madness in which we believe that we have an unlimited amount of time (= every hour is infinite).
For a couple of months I’ve been perfecting an algorithm that helps me to prioritize some important things and throw away other important things — without succumbing to regret or guilt. Kindly, but uncompromisingly, I try to suppress the illusion that I’ll ever get my hands on all the exciting plans, interests, and projects — and with that goes the guilt that I haven’t done them yet. It’s hard, but I’m getting better. But part of my algorithm is a certain amount of chaos: some things become important only in retrospect by piquing my curiosity and perhaps leading me somewhere into the unknown. I’ve given myself a sort of general pardon.
Life is a finite set, so why the nerve: there’s no point in blaming yourself for the pile of rocks lying in front of the house. The bowl that represents the day will never be bigger. On the contrary, it will tend to shrink as our life energy decreases. I have learned to admit defeat first thing in the morning (“You definitely won’t have enough time to do all these tasks today:”), and then I focus on a subset of everything important (“…and remind myself, you’ll barely manage to do one of them.”). What a relief, what a sense of liberation. The unbearable lightness of not getting things done.
Photo by Susan Wilkinson / Unsplash | Translation from Czech by Scott Hudson
