Tips: On How To Survive A Busy Week

ACCEPT DEFEAT

“There are no solutions; there are only trade-offs,” said the economist Thomas Sowell – meaning that with resources such as time or money, spending some of it on one thing always entails not spending it on something else. It’s literally impossible to get everything done – time is limited; “everything” isn’t – and that’s great news, because it means you needn’t feel guilty for failing. You can turn, instead, on the far more manageable question of which things to deliberately neglect.

RESPECT YOUR RHYTHMS

If you want more output from a machine or a computer, you just run it for more hours, and it’s tempting to assume that humans are the same. But in fact, we’re creatures of rhythm: two hours of intense work, when you’re at your most focused and refreshed, can be vastly more worthwhile than six when you’re feeling depleted.

STOP BUSY-BRAGGING

Moaning about how busy you are is “pretty obviously a boast disguised as a complaint,” in the words of the essayist Tim Kreider: “Your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day.” But the truth is that all that boasting probably makes you feel even busier, because we believe the things we tell ourselves, while making others feel rushed, too.

BEWARE ‘PROCRASTINATION’

A uniquely tricky cause of busyness is the opposite of procrastination – not leaving them too late, but doing them too early, just to have them done with, even though waiting might have meant less effort overall. That’s how you end up wasting a whole day on trivialities, in search of that satisfying sensation of having cleared the decks – when all the while, more important stuff is mounting up.

SLOW DOWN, HOWEVER WRONG THAT FEELS

The last thing you want to hear, when you’re drowning in to-dos, is that cultivating patience might be part of the solution. But our urgency-addicted culture is at the core of the busyness problem, according to the addiction researcher Stephanie Brown. We’re convinced that with just a bit more speed we could stay in control – and so we grow unwilling to tolerate the discomfort of slowing down.

GIVE YOUR TIME AWAY

When you’re rushed, it seems sensible to hoard your minutes, safeguarding as many of them as possible. Yet research on the experience of time suggests we’ve got things back-to-front: a better way to gain a sense of “time abundance” is to give some away, for example through volunteering.

WATCH OUT FOR TIME DEBTS

Time debt, as the computer programmer Patrick McKenzie describes it, is what accrues whenever you do work that feels productive, but that in reality has the effect of generating more work, later on. This is why clearing your inbox is often a false victory: eliminating all those emails means replying to lots of them, thereby generating replies to your replies, and thus more email in the long run.

Credit: Leadership