Making Sense - Sam Harris - #289 — Time Management for Mortals

In this episode, I preview the new course we just launched with Oliver Berkman on time management, titled Time Management for Mechers: How to Live a More Satisfying and Happy Life by Mastering Time Management: The Art of Time Management by Oliver Berkman. In this course, we'll cover a range of topics related to time management and how to make the most of this utterly unlikely gift of getting some time on the planet as conscious creatures. We'll combine some essential philosophical and spiritual insights about time with a whole lot of concrete tactical tools for daily living because of course it's on that daily level of work, family travel, family, travel, housework, finances, and the rest that the rubber meets the road that the real problem is. And it's that we don't have enough time to do all the things we'd like to do in the world, and that's why we need to learn how to manage our time so that we can have enough of it to do what we really want to do. If you're a subscriber to Making Sense, you'll get the first eight lessons presented without break, and there are more lessons coming over at Waking Up, where we'll be covering a whole new category of content called Life where we're going to be covering topics like decision making, leadership, wealth, wealth parenting, parenting, and parenting and really anything else that relates to living a more fulfilling and meaningful life. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast you'll need to subscribe to the making sense podcast, you ll need to become a subscriber. You'll get access to the first-party, where you'll be able to access the first 8 lessons presented by Making Sense's founder, Sam Harris. To access the full archive of all the lessons presented over at waking up, go to makingsense.org.org/Making Sense. It's made possible entirely through the support of our listeners, and all the great resources that help make sense of the world around you. This episode is made possible through the efforts of our sponsors, including: . We don't run ads, we don t run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's possible to support the podcast by becoming a supporter of the podcast and become a member of the community. The Making Sense Club. Want to sponsor Making Sense? Become a Member? Learn more about your ad choices? Get a discount code: Mentioned in this episode?

00:00:00.000 welcome to the making sense podcast this is sam harris just a note to say that if you're hearing

00:00:12.500 this you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part

00:00:16.900 of this conversation in order to access full episodes of the making sense podcast you'll

00:00:21.800 need to subscribe at sam harris.org there you'll find our private rss feed to add to your favorite

00:00:27.020 podcatcher along with other subscriber only content we don't run ads on the podcast and

00:00:32.500 therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers so if you enjoy what

00:00:36.680 we're doing here please consider becoming one well last time around i mentioned that we had added a

00:00:48.760 new category of content to the waking up app called life where we're going to be covering a wider range

00:00:55.120 of topics things like decision making and leadership wealth parenting and really anything

00:01:02.100 else that relates to living a more fulfilling and meaningful life and here i wanted to preview the

00:01:07.620 new course we just launched with oliver berkman on time management titled time management for mortals

00:01:13.660 i really think what oliver is doing here is fantastic and people are already loving this

00:01:18.100 course over at waking up so here if you're a subscriber to making sense you'll get the first

00:01:23.860 eight lessons presented without break on this episode and there are more lessons coming over at waking up

00:01:29.900 and now i give you oliver berkman enjoy

00:01:34.080 welcome my name is oliver berkman and i'm really happy to be working with sam to bring you this course

00:01:46.080 entitled time management for mortals it's something a little different maybe in that we won't be

00:01:53.300 focusing here on meditation or even spirituality per se in fact you'd be forgiven for thinking that time

00:02:01.020 management was the polar opposite of meditation or of spirituality that it was a field concerned not with the

00:02:07.920 deepest questions about human experience but just the shallow stuff how to crank through as many work

00:02:14.560 tasks as possible when you might not even particularly want to do them in the first place or how to save a few

00:02:20.200 hours each week by cooking all your dinners in one big batch on sundays so my very first job is to

00:02:28.340 convince you otherwise to persuade you that time management isn't just about labeling your tasks

00:02:34.080 with a b and c priorities or batch cooking pasta sauce or such like it's vastly more than that arguably time

00:02:43.680 management is all that life is here we are with this terrifyingly short lifespan of little more than

00:02:50.360 four thousand weeks on average and the question of how to use this time wisely and well is the central

00:02:58.180 challenge if we want to live lives of accomplishment and meaning to connect deeply to the wonder the

00:03:04.100 world has to offer and to make the most of this utterly unlikely gift of getting some time on the planet

00:03:11.240 as conscious creatures so the lessons that follow are an attempt to combine certain essential

00:03:19.360 philosophical and spiritual insights about time with a whole lot of concrete usable tactical tools for

00:03:26.980 daily living because of course it's on that daily level of work family travel housework finances

00:03:35.140 morning routines all the rest of it it's on that level that the rubber meets the road

00:03:40.380 i trust you'll agree with me that virtually everyone struggles with time in one way or another

00:03:48.220 the most obvious manifestation of this these days is busyness the sense of being overwhelmed by more

00:03:55.320 things that you have to do than you actually can do distraction is another obvious one this seemingly

00:04:02.160 paradoxical situation that we don't want to spend our time on the things we want to spend our time on

00:04:08.340 but would rather focus on something else anything else so that we never quite get around to what

00:04:14.160 we claim to care about the most and then arising from all this there's also this ubiquitous subtler

00:04:20.840 sense that somehow this portion of our lives right here isn't quite it that everything we're doing is for

00:04:28.720 the purpose of some future time or that we're going to get our lives figured out soon that we'll get on top

00:04:35.040 of things and we'll live as we want to live but that for now many of our tasks are just things we have

00:04:39.600 to get through to get them out of the way so that real life can begin sometime later a lot of people

00:04:47.300 have this feeling as the english novelist arnold bennett put it writing at the dawn of the modern

00:04:52.100 busyness epidemic that the years slip by and slip by and slip by and that they have not yet been able

00:05:00.000 to get their lives into proper working order now the guiding principle of this course and i certainly

00:05:08.700 didn't make it up it's a theme in the work of everyone from seneca the roman stoic to the zen master

00:05:13.940 dogon and the philosopher martin heidegger it's that all of these versions of the feeling of being in a

00:05:20.060 struggle against time arise from a core kind of mistake in how we think about time and how we relate

00:05:26.260 to it now i don't want to imply that this is all just a matter of switching your mindset certainly

00:05:33.560 the situation is made worse by all kinds of cultural and economic pressures so it's definitely

00:05:39.040 not all your personal faults that you're so overwhelmed at work for example or that you can't

00:05:44.640 resist glimpsing at social media but changing our relationship to time into something more fulfilling

00:05:51.600 and energizing i think it does have to start with clearing up this fundamental issue and what is

00:05:58.060 this issue well you could characterize it as an unwillingness to face the reality of our finitude

00:06:04.260 let's talk briefly about finitude i mentioned that we each only get about 4 000 weeks of life on average

00:06:12.380 indeed the whole of human civilization since the ancient sumerians of mesopotamia has unfolded over

00:06:18.580 the span of only about 300 000 weeks to think of this tiny portion of time set against the duration

00:06:26.260 of say the existence of the earth itself on almost any meaningful time scale as the philosopher

00:06:32.420 thomas nagel has written we will all be dead any minute

00:06:35.780 and perhaps the key consequence of this finitude is that it makes our choices matter when it comes to

00:06:45.540 how we use our time because we don't have an endless amount of it something is always at stake

00:06:51.780 every decision to spend a portion of time on one thing is a decision not to spend it on a million other

00:06:58.680 things instead and in a world of effectively infinite inputs limitless emails and articles to read limitless

00:07:06.920 demands from the boss limitless ambitions you might have for your career or people to date or places to

00:07:12.760 visit it's inevitable for a finite human but there will always be vastly more to do and indeed vastly

00:07:20.900 more that's really worth doing than you will ever have time for and that mismatch between what we can

00:07:28.080 conceive of doing and what we can actually do is really painful to make things worse our finitude also

00:07:36.060 means we have very little control over how our brief stretch of time unfolds so yes you have to make

00:07:42.420 choices and your choices matter but you can't ever know what the future holds whether your choices were

00:07:48.560 the right ones or what's coming next down the pike instead in each moment we're just totally vulnerable

00:07:55.220 to events anything could happen at any time and we can never achieve the authentic sense of security in

00:08:03.520 our travels through time that we crave now all of these are just the indisputable facts about being a finite human

00:08:12.400 but they're uncomfortable and they're anxiety inducing facts and so what we do by default is to pursue

00:08:19.300 strategies of emotional avoidance to try to find ways not to have to feel that discomfort for example we might

00:08:28.060 tell ourselves maybe subconsciously that real life is going to begin when we finally graduate college or

00:08:34.160 when we get married or when we have kids or when we retire and that's so that we don't have to face the

00:08:39.840 anxiety of knowing that in fact right now this is our only shot at life that we need to do the things we

00:08:46.680 care most about right now or if you're a so-called productivity geek like i certainly was for many years

00:08:54.020 obsessed with every cool new time management hack well on some level you're probably telling yourself

00:09:00.440 that you're doing all this because you're en route to becoming so efficient so optimized and self-disciplined

00:09:06.540 that you will eventually be able to make time for everything that matters that you'll achieve a kind of

00:09:12.300 mastery of your time that means you won't have to face tough choices or risk the emotional

00:09:18.360 vulnerability of never knowing if things are going to work out as the psychotherapist bruce tift puts

00:09:25.320 it we will do a lot to avoid consciously participating in what it's like to feel claustrophobic

00:09:32.040 imprisoned powerless and constrained by reality we seek ways of managing time that are not really focused

00:09:41.200 on making the best of our little portion of it but rather on making ourselves feel as if we don't

00:09:47.080 only have a little portion of it like actually we are limitless and omnipotent or at least that we're

00:09:53.160 going to become limitless and omnipotent just as soon as we can find the right time management techniques

00:09:58.860 and the necessary reserves of self-discipline as we'll see none of this works because it fails to

00:10:07.060 acknowledge our real situation and if you've ever suspected that pursuing these sorts of productivity

00:10:12.800 methods is actually making you busier more scattered and less fulfilled i'm going to explain why you're

00:10:18.860 completely right and so a big part of the purpose of these lessons is just to get you to give up that

00:10:25.660 impossible quest to put down the heavy burden of attempting to escape your non-negotiable limitations

00:10:32.120 or to put it a little differently it's to point you towards the truth that there will always be too much

00:10:39.140 to do that none of us will ever enjoy certainty about the future and that there is no moment of

00:10:46.640 truth coming sometime later when things will finally make sense and real life can begin at last

00:10:52.900 and that while recognizing this truth does involve a kind of a defeat it's a liberating and empowering

00:11:01.240 defeat it's the kind of defeat that leads very quickly to much better things to ending the struggle

00:11:08.540 with time and to a life of more accomplishment more success more time spent on what matters most

00:11:15.780 and more joy wonder and focus so let's dive in as the saying goes and i think it's a deeper saying

00:11:26.440 than we usually give it credit for there's no time like the present to start going deep into this

00:11:33.880 question of how to manage your time as a finite human being it makes sense to start with a modern

00:11:39.880 problem that has reached epidemic proportions i'm talking about busyness now busyness isn't our only

00:11:47.020 time problem and for some people it isn't really the essence of their struggle with time at all

00:11:51.960 it's entirely possible to feel that you don't have enough to do that you're using up your limited time

00:11:58.280 on insufficiently challenging or meaningful tasks but busyness is a great place to begin this task of

00:12:06.360 undoing the mistake we make in our relationship with time to start dispelling the illusion that the path

00:12:13.500 to peace of mind and to meaningful productivity lies in somehow mastering or dominating time when in fact

00:12:20.920 the answer is to step more fully and wholeheartedly into our non-negotiable human limitations

00:12:27.920 because what do we really mean when we complain about feeling busy these days about the kind of

00:12:34.760 busyness that leaves us feeling out of control or resentful about the demands that the world makes

00:12:40.360 on us or anxious that we're neglecting the truly meaningful stuff it isn't just that we've got lots to do

00:12:47.620 you might be familiar with the busy town series of children's picture books by the american illustrator

00:12:53.440 richard scarry which depict a world full of cats pigs raccoons and other animals who all work at

00:12:59.540 different jobs in a thriving small town they are busy you know they have plenty to do their hours are

00:13:06.960 filled up but it's very clear that they're happy as well perhaps because there's just no sense of any

00:13:12.800 lack of fit between the tasks they have to do and the time that they have to do them this kind of

00:13:19.000 busyness where you have plenty to do and plenty of time to do it that can be delightful our real problem

00:13:25.280 isn't so much that we're busy as that we're overwhelmed we have the feeling that there are

00:13:31.660 more things we need to do than we can do in the available time these are things we might tell ourselves

00:13:38.240 we need to do in order to stay afloat financially to meet our family obligations or to realize our

00:13:44.180 potential whatever is fueling it in each particular case there's this fundamental mismatch between the

00:13:51.140 amount of stuff that feels as though it matters on one hand and the amount of time and stamina that we

00:13:57.160 have available to address it in other words this is a classic case of the human encounter with

00:14:03.940 limitation for a whole variety of reasons we've come to feel that we must do more than we can

00:14:09.620 and we experience psychological pain in confronting that gap and actually a huge amount of mainstream

00:14:16.680 productivity and time management advice i would argue along with all sorts of other ways that we

00:14:21.580 instinctively try to get a grip on our time is dedicated really to holding out the promise to maintaining

00:14:28.340 the promise that there is a way of bridging this gap that if you could only become efficient enough

00:14:34.200 optimized and self-disciplined enough if you could only find exactly the right set of productivity

00:14:39.460 techniques then you'd fit so much more into your time that this sense of mismatch would evaporate

00:14:45.500 you'd finally have time for everything that matters this is a way of thinking about time that we've

00:14:52.160 borrowed essentially from the industrial revolution where it was a pretty good way to squeeze more

00:14:57.080 output from machinery and we've tended to just assume that it must work as well when it's applied

00:15:02.120 to human fulfillment in the 21st century certainly through all my years when i was a hardcore productivity

00:15:08.720 geek that's the feeling i was chasing this idea that soon through becoming more and more efficient

00:15:15.160 and in control i would reach a place where i was on top of everything where i could feel like i was doing

00:15:20.920 enough and actually because i had a lot of my sense of self-worth tied up in all of this that i was

00:15:26.880 justifying my existence on the planet well if you've already listened to lesson one in this series it

00:15:33.860 won't come as a surprise to learn that this approach doesn't work efficiency is never going to be what

00:15:39.380 gets you to peace of mind when it comes to time simply because the supply of incoming things to do

00:15:45.020 tasks obligations goals ambitions is functionally speaking infinite so fitting more of it in isn't going

00:15:53.380 to get you any closer to the end of it but that's not even the whole story here because what you find

00:15:59.860 what i certainly found is that all else being equal the pursuit of efficiency as a way to win the struggle

00:16:06.960 with time will actually make you busier than before more stressed than before less focused on the things

00:16:14.500 that matter to you the most partly this is just a matter of quantity if you get really efficient at say

00:16:21.840 processing your email the main thing you'll find is that you spend more of your time dealing with a

00:16:26.760 greater volume of email because what happens is you reply more swiftly to other people's emails and then

00:16:32.840 they reply to those replies and half the time you probably have to reply to their replies to your

00:16:37.700 replies and on and on and on and meanwhile you'll develop a reputation for being responsive on email so

00:16:43.600 more people will email you in the first place it's like the old saying has it the reward for good time

00:16:49.440 management is more work or if you're the person in your office who is far and away the fastest at handling a

00:16:55.900 certain kind of project well don't be surprised when you're the one who gets all of those projects dumped on

00:17:01.340 your desk there's a close parallel here with the idea of induced demand which refers to the way that you know

00:17:07.840 cities add extra lanes to congested freeways in an effort to make the traffic flow more freely and what often

00:17:14.740 happens instead is that those extra lanes just incentivize more drivers to use that route so more

00:17:20.780 cars flood the system and the congestion stays just as bad as it was but there's another dimension to this

00:17:28.300 pitfall that i'm calling the efficiency trap too which is one not just of the quantity of tasks but the

00:17:34.260 quality if you focus obsessively on trying to fit more and more in as a way to feel in control of your

00:17:41.040 time you're actually likely to end up spending more and more of your time on the least important

00:17:46.600 things that's partly because we tell ourselves that the really important things need our full focus

00:17:52.500 they need plenty of energy and so we postpone them we concentrate instead on clearing the decks that is

00:17:59.400 you know dealing with all the other little tasks that are tugging at our attention so that we can later

00:18:05.060 get the time and the focus that we need for the important ones trouble of course is that the decks

00:18:11.700 are never cleared because the incoming supply of things to fill them is basically infinite so we never

00:18:17.480 get round to the important stuff at all meanwhile if you're convinced that you're en route to a time when

00:18:24.800 you're going to be able to handle everything then when any potential new use for your time arises a new

00:18:30.320 request from a co-worker some new potential business opportunity or social event or something

00:18:36.180 you're going to be much more likely to accept it unquestioningly and less motivated to ask whether

00:18:42.380 it's truly a worthwhile use of your time because after all aren't you someone who's on the way to

00:18:48.440 finding a way to get everything done so what does it matter to add one more thing to the list

00:18:53.720 so systematically efficiency leads to us feeling busier and busier with less important things

00:19:01.280 to be clear i'm not saying that efficiency has no role to play in using time well if it currently

00:19:09.240 takes you half an hour just to find the file you're supposed to be working on or to find a clean

00:19:13.920 pair of socks in the morning then yes there probably are some efficiency improvements you ought to be

00:19:19.180 making in your life and please don't let me dissuade you from making them

00:19:23.720 the point instead is that more efficiency and optimization can never be the main answer to

00:19:30.100 feeling overwhelmed for the simple reason that we are finite creatures swimming in oceans of

00:19:36.320 infinite possibility so there'll always be too much to do and that's why i think the really important

00:19:44.420 skill to be developed here and we'll be looking at some concrete techniques for this in some of the

00:19:49.420 lessons that follow it's actually a kind of anti skill it's the ability to not do something it's

00:19:57.240 the willingness to not clear the decks to be okay with the fact that there will always be a whole bunch

00:20:03.480 of stuff on your to-do list that you're not doing at the moment to know that there is all this other

00:20:08.380 stuff you could meaningfully be doing and yet to be willing to turn your attention for a few hours

00:20:14.320 right now to something that genuinely matters to you this anti skill is similar to the cast of mind

00:20:22.080 that the poet john keats famously called negative capability it's the capacity to stay with one

00:20:28.960 activity despite so many other things feeling unresolved to be present with a project that matters

00:20:35.480 to you or a person who matters to you even though you know there are so many other things calling for

00:20:41.360 your attention of course few of us are in a position to just ignore our email or all those other

00:20:48.240 little tasks that fill up the decks you're still going to have to spend time on that stuff but what

00:20:53.720 you can do is to give up hope of ever getting to the end of all that stuff of ever getting totally

00:21:00.080 on top of it all or thinking that peace of mind lies at the time and the place when you will finally

00:21:06.400 have got on top of it all you can treat all that stuff instead as something that you dip into for

00:21:11.820 a while on a regular basis with no particular expectation of completion so sure maybe you need

00:21:19.500 to give an hour or two hours to email each day but if you can put that time towards the end of your

00:21:25.660 working day and don't necessarily aim to reach inbox zero just aim to spend the prescribed amount of

00:21:31.700 time on that activity before stepping away and if your energy is greatest at the start of the day

00:21:37.260 like mine is well use some of that time for the projects you care about the most even though you'll

00:21:43.320 be doing so in the full knowledge that the decks are not clear see what happens if you can approach

00:21:48.980 life in this way to allow the anxiety that's going to arise from all those undone tasks being on the to-do

00:21:56.680 list and at the same time to just spend a few hours anyway on something that feels truly important

00:22:03.880 there's a sort of surrender involved here a giving up on something but ultimately what you're giving up

00:22:11.920 is the attempt to escape the way that reality actually is and when you drop down into reality

00:22:19.220 instead when you truly grasp that there is no chance ever of getting everything done that's when you can

00:22:27.100 finally get some purchase on reality and get stuck into making the best use of the time that you have

00:22:33.560 in the last session we looked at the ubiquitous modern problem of overwhelm and why the standard

00:22:40.520 response to it which is trying to become ever more efficient isn't going to lead you to peace of mind

00:22:46.080 that in fact left unchecked the pursuit of efficiency will end up draining your life of meaning

00:22:51.420 but to really grasp the shift of perspective that we're exploring here i think it's important to see

00:22:57.640 that this underlying mismatch between the infinite world of possibility and our all too finite time

00:23:04.940 and capacities it isn't confined to the world of emails and work demands and chores and family duties

00:23:12.140 and so on it's really more a basic condition of being alive in the modern world because the modern

00:23:19.520 world provides us with and just as importantly informs us about a truly inexhaustible supply of

00:23:26.560 things that seem worth doing things that seem like they'd enable you to live a truly meaningful life

00:23:32.320 to really suck the marrow out of your limited time so there's an inexhaustible supply of experiences

00:23:39.360 worth having books worth reading people worth getting to know and it often seems like if we

00:23:45.300 could only squeeze in a few more of them then we would finally feel fulfilled at last

00:23:50.240 this morning when i was out on a walk i had the thought seemingly from nowhere but what i really

00:23:56.980 needed what would really enable me to feel like i was living fully was a mountain bike well maybe a

00:24:03.480 mountain bike really would improve my life i don't know but i do know that once i obtain one if i do

00:24:09.520 that there'll be a million other potential versions of that thought what i really need in order to feel

00:24:15.280 fulfilled is waiting in the wings to remind me of all the other things i'm not doing the experiences

00:24:21.700 i'm not having the possessions i don't possess we're in the territory here obviously of the fear of

00:24:29.260 missing out that very contemporary suspicion that other people are living more exciting and fulfilled

00:24:35.780 lives than we are that there's something different we ought to be doing with our time in order to

00:24:41.380 maximize our potential or our happiness the german social theorist hartmut rosa has made the

00:24:48.580 interesting point that this feeling probably didn't afflict people in pre-modern times go back a few

00:24:54.180 centuries and most people either believed in an afterlife so there was less riding on making the

00:24:59.640 most of this life or they believed in some kind of cyclical picture of history so they saw themselves

00:25:05.900 as just playing their role in an endlessly repeating cosmic drama or alternatively maybe it just never would

00:25:13.340 have occurred to them that they had any right to expect anything other than to occupy the social or

00:25:18.560 economic role in which they found themselves by contrast today we are ceaselessly attempting to

00:25:25.180 get the most out of life to seize the day to somehow close the gap between our actual set of experiences and

00:25:32.880 the available world of experiences and then we're ceaselessly discovering that we can't do it

00:25:38.980 i think if you can get a small taste of an alternative way of seeing this the shift from

00:25:47.880 the fear of missing out to what i like to call the joy of missing out that can be a kind of master

00:25:54.320 key for using your time meaningfully and well and to get there i'm afraid i think we're going to have

00:26:01.540 to begin with the incredibly unreadable and incredibly politically unpalatable german philosopher

00:26:07.300 martin heidegger don't worry i'm just going to pluck a couple of the most useful ideas from his work

00:26:13.520 here one of those is just to see the total extent to which we are defined by our finitude by our

00:26:22.360 capacity as we proceed through life only ever to choose one path at a time from a multiplicity of

00:26:29.320 possible paths this is the realization that every decision to use a portion of our time in a certain

00:26:37.280 way an hour a week or a whole lifetime it's by definition a decision not to use it in an infinity

00:26:45.480 of other possible ways and what this means is that any human life even the most successful life you

00:26:53.580 could possibly imagine is inevitably a matter of constantly waving goodbye to possibilities

00:26:59.940 as i go through the day making hundreds of small choices i'm building a life yes but at one and the

00:27:08.800 same time i'm closing off the possibility of countless other lives forever and what heidegger saw

00:27:16.700 was that facing up to that fact even just a little taking responsibility for the situation for the fact that

00:27:24.640 we're always making these choices whether we like it or not is incredibly daunting it's anxiety inducing

00:27:31.380 so we're always trying to find ways to evade taking responsibility instead to avoid having to confront

00:27:38.280 the fact of all these cuttings away of possibility one way we do that is just to numb ourselves with

00:27:46.160 distraction and busyness another is to convince ourselves that actually we don't have choices that in fact we do

00:27:53.280 have so we tell ourselves that we have no option but to pursue a given career or stay married to the

00:28:00.160 person we married or no option to leave the city for the country or the other way around that it's just

00:28:06.640 the dumb thing and we have to go along i also think the modern obsession with personal productivity

00:28:13.240 can often be another way of avoiding responsibility for our choices right you get to dodge the 0.87

00:28:20.020 responsibilities of finitude by convincing yourself that in some sense you're not finite that you're

00:28:25.580 going to be able to do everything so that you won't have to make tough choices with your time

00:28:30.880 and you can probably see how the internet makes all this a lot worse because it promises to help us

00:28:38.660 make better use of our time while simultaneously exposing us to vastly more potential uses for our time

00:28:45.220 and then by the way also offering the perfect source of distraction when it all gets too much

00:28:50.360 and we want to shift our focus from the stress of making choices so the very tool you're using to try

00:28:58.560 to get the most out of life actually makes you feel as though you're missing out on even more of it

00:29:04.080 so for example facebook is a great way to stay informed about events you might like to attend

00:29:10.200 but it's also a guaranteed way to find out about more events you'd like to attend than anyone

00:29:16.000 possibly could ever attend online dating likewise is a fantastic way to find people to date but it's

00:29:23.120 also pretty much a guaranteed way of being constantly reminded about all the other potentially more

00:29:29.120 alluring people you could be dating instead so if you're somebody who is plagued by this fear of

00:29:35.940 missing out it can be surprisingly powerful just to understand that in fact missing out is inevitable

00:29:43.560 it's baked into the human condition that we will miss out on almost everything so that fearing missing

00:29:51.640 out makes no real sense it's like worrying that you might be unable to make two and two add up to five

00:29:58.860 when the truth is you don't need to worry about that because you're definitely not going to manage it

00:30:04.280 but we can go a step even further here i think and see that missing out isn't just unavoidable

00:30:10.380 it's arguably what makes things worth doing what makes life worth living what gives meaning to our

00:30:16.380 experiences in the first place our finitude the fact that we have to miss out on so much

00:30:23.360 is what gives weight to our choices it's what means that something is at stake in how we choose to live

00:30:29.800 our lives think about it if you knew that your life would never end then the answer to the question

00:30:35.460 should i do x or y with my time today would always be who cares doesn't matter because there's always

00:30:41.920 the next day and the next day and the one after that in fact why bother doing anything at all today

00:30:48.140 in a situation like that so the fact that you have to miss out isn't necessarily even something to

00:30:54.760 regret it's perhaps the thing that makes life juicy in the first place i think one final way to help

00:31:03.080 bring all this into focus is to see that there is something rather arrogant and entitled in the way we

00:31:08.700 usually think about our finite time we act as if it's a huge problem that we only get a short amount of

00:31:15.320 time and that it's a kind of insult that it gets taken away from us by death but when we say that our

00:31:22.960 lives are short short compared to what certainly short compared to the life of a hypothetical

00:31:28.960 immortal being but it might make as much sense or even more sense to compare our lives not to a

00:31:35.620 hypothetical immortal being but to all the countless hypothetical people who never got to be born in the

00:31:41.740 first place and to see that from that perspective it's not really cruel that our lives aren't longer

00:31:49.340 rather it's a staggering stupendous bonus that we get any time on the planet as conscious creatures

00:31:56.200 at all and when you see things in this way it starts to make more sense to think of all those

00:32:02.760 inexhaustible experiences that the world has to offer not as existing on some kind of endless to-do list

00:32:10.640 where if you don't make it through the list you'll have missed out on life but more like a different

00:32:16.100 kind of list a menu a list of options you get to choose from and that in that situation having to

00:32:23.420 choose the necessity of choosing it's not a terrible fate you've been sentenced to but rather a wonderful

00:32:29.280 opportunity and a positive affirmation of whatever choices you do end up making in this state of mind

00:32:38.360 you can certainly relish the peak experiences of your life more completely than before but you can

00:32:45.000 also find deep meaning in the other experiences too in the chores and the duties and the myriad ways we

00:32:51.540 just need to maintain our daily lives you can embrace the fact that you're foregoing certain pleasures or

00:32:59.820 certain theoretically rewarding experiences because whatever you've decided to do with your time instead

00:33:06.540 today to earn money to support your family to write your novel to bathe your toddler to pause on a

00:33:13.520 hiking trail to watch a pale winter sun sink below the horizon at dusk that's how you've chosen to spend a

00:33:21.020 portion of time that you never had any right to expect there's one specific skill that has to lie at the heart

00:33:29.440 of any approach to time management that acknowledges the reality of our finitude one tactic arguably more

00:33:36.820 crucial than any other for unlocking accomplishment and a sense of fulfillment for stepping off this

00:33:43.000 anxiety fueled treadmill where we're always trying to get on top of an infinite supply of things we could

00:33:49.380 do with our time that skill is deciding in other words developing the habit of making decisions making

00:33:57.240 more decisions throughout the day throughout our lives now deciding has acquired something of a bad

00:34:04.800 reputation in recent years thanks to the publicity surrounding the phenomenon of decision fatigue that's

00:34:11.280 the claim that making decisions depletes the ego in a way that makes it harder to make further

00:34:16.400 decisions later on this was supposedly why president barack obama wore only gray and blue suits so that he

00:34:24.560 didn't need to use up his decision making capacities on such trivial matters and could store it up for the

00:34:31.640 truly consequential decisions that his role required of him but for now i just want to encourage you

00:34:38.440 to put this idea of decision fatigue to one side to suggest that unless you actually are the leader of a

00:34:45.340 major nation or the ceo of a giant corporation or something like that that it's well worth experimenting

00:34:51.900 with this idea that what you might need in your life isn't to make fewer decisions but to make more of

00:34:58.520 them or maybe i should say more conscious decisions because one ramification of the view we've been

00:35:06.940 exploring in this series is that well there's a sense in which you're making decisions all the time

00:35:11.300 all through the day whether you realize it or not for a finite human being whenever we spend a portion

00:35:18.020 of time on anything we are making a decision not to spend it on a million other things even more than

00:35:24.360 that in each of those moments we're closing off countless whole alternative lives every step you

00:35:31.300 take through your life you're cutting away alternative life paths that's actually the etymology of the

00:35:38.200 word decide it means cutting away slicing off options it's actually related to words like homicide and

00:35:46.300 suicide we are all in the position of the narrator of robert frost's legendary poem the road not taken

00:35:53.780 about choosing between two paths in a wood only we can't know which path will be better we won't

00:36:00.920 even know at the end of the journey if the path we took was the better one and if we just hang

00:36:06.220 around at the fork in the path instead unable or unwilling to make a decision well that's a decision

00:36:12.120 too it's a decision to use up part of our finite life doing that instead of selecting one of the paths

00:36:18.200 if you've listened to some of the other sessions in this series it won't surprise you by now that

00:36:23.300 generally as humans we really don't like this situation that we tend to do all we possibly can

00:36:29.280 not to consciously participate in what it feels like to be in this situation of being compelled to

00:36:36.320 choose at every moment of our lives why well because we don't want to acknowledge that we're missing out

00:36:42.420 on all those unlived lives we don't want to have to sacrifice some options for other options i would

00:36:48.620 love to spend this current season of my life being both a truly engaged parent of a small child and also

00:36:55.460 spend six months every year on solitary meditation retreats in exotic locations but my finitude my inability

00:37:02.580 to be in two places at once means that i do just have to choose and additionally we don't want to

00:37:09.880 experience the inevitable negative aspects of any path we do choose you know that the difficulties that

00:37:16.300 come with any relationship the imperfections that must inevitably afflict any creative project that we

00:37:22.620 bring into the world and so on so we we hang back from making choices partly to hang on to perfect

00:37:30.320 fantasies that could only ever be damaged by making a choice and bringing them into reality

00:37:36.580 so what we do instead in an effort not to feel this discomfort of being limited is we try to cling

00:37:44.680 on to the feeling of control by keeping our options open by not consciously making decisions by staying

00:37:52.740 mired in indecision or procrastination or commitment phobia it's no fun to be mired in indecision or

00:38:01.140 procrastination or commitment phobia but in a very poor way it does feel

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Making Sense - Sam Harris - July 18, 2022

#289 — Time Management for Mortals

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