Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

HighlightsSection titled Highlights

• Assuming you live to be eighty, you’ll have had about four thousand weeks.
• we’ve been granted the mental capacities to make almost infinitely ambitious plans, yet practically no time at all to put them into action.
• 7. Seek out [[Novelty in the Mundane]].
• Childhood involves plentiful novel experiences, so we remember it as having lasted forever; but as we get older, life gets routinized—we stick to the same few places of residence, the same few relationships and jobs—and the novelty tapers off.
• An alternative, [[Shinzen Young]] explains, is to pay more attention to every moment, however mundane: to find novelty not by doing radically different things but by plunging more deeply into the life you already have.
• Experience life with twice the usual intensity, and “your experience of life would be twice as full as it currently is”—and any period of life would be remembered as having lasted twice as long. Meditation helps here. But so does going on unplanned walks to see where they lead you, using a different route to get to work, taking up photography or birdwatching or nature drawing or journaling, playing “I Spy” with a child: anything that draws your attention more fully into what you’re doing in the present.