How To Be Your Most Productive Self Without Letting Time Be The Master Of Everything

As we age, we view time as something we control — as if time is a resource to be used.

Once we do, we feel pressure to use time well and criticize ourselves when we think we’re wasting it.

As Oliver Burkeman writes, “When you’re faced with too many demands, it’s easy to assume that the only answer must be to make better use of time, by becoming more efficient, driving yourself harder, or working for longer…instead of asking whether the demands themselves might be unreasonable.”

Your self-worth becomes tightly wound up in how you use your time.

“It stops being merely the water in which you swim and turns into something you feel you need to dominate or control if you’re to avoid feeling guilty, panicked, or overwhelmed.”

Instead of simply living our lives as it unfolds in time, we put pressure on every second of the day.

“It becomes difficult not to value each moment primarily according to its usefulness for some future goal, or for some future oasis of relaxation you hope to reach once your tasks are finally ‘out of the way.’”

But, it eventually backfires.

It wrings us dry from the present moment, forcing us to into the perpetual future, “worrying about whether things will work out, experiencing everything in terms of some later, hoped-for benefit, so that peace of mind never quite arrives.”

The problem with trying to master your time is time ends up mastering you.

We invest a lot of energy in trying to avoid our current reality.

We don’t want to risk failing professionally, we don’t want to get hurt in a relationship, we fear we might fail our parents, and we definitely would prefer not to get sick or die.

It’s painful to confront the truth; how limited our time is. Because when we do, “it means that tough choices are inevitable and that you won’t have time for all you once dreamed you might do,” writes Oliver Burkeman.

So what do we do?