The Key to Time Management for Mortals - Recognise Your Transience

The ability to ignore the right things seems to make sense in any worthwhile time management technique. But most of us struggle with the “right things” piece.

I’m guessing that as contemporary humans you all have a similar to-do list and that I don’t need to convince you just how much there is on your plate. You know all of this already.

But if you’re experiencing the nearing burning out feeling as there’s just not enough time to get it all done, the first half of that equation is one that is worth paying attention to.

The practical solutions have probably already been pointed out to you; Ditch it, delegate it, or do it yourself in the most effective way. So many sensible suggestions but they are so hard to put into practice because the human tendency is towards irrationality and self-sabotage.

Collectively, I see our human illogicality with our own mortality as our biggest hurdle to time management. My message is to make peace with our own finitude. You literally cannot do everything in the time that we have on this earth. The false belief in our infinitude is perpetuating burnout. So many nutritionists and healthy lifestyle advocates promote a belief that we can do more ‘if’ we rearrange to do our meal prep on a non-work day, and/or to bulk cook for ourselves and our families, and/or to learn to say “no”. All these productivity hacks will ultimately allow us to do more in the same hours that we are alive … Voila! If we do all these suggestions we are then led to believe that we will then be able to get more done or something along those lines.

Stop; go back two sentences and re-read whilst sitting in your rational pragmatic seat and consider the logistics of fitting as much productivity as you can in a diminishing (diminishing, being the most salient word here) amount of time?

We need to make peace with the idea that we will never be able to do all, probably not even a fraction of the things that we might like to do in our lives. The recognition of our finitude, the acceptance that our lives are limited and carrying this knowledge throughout our day can be our ascendancy past burnout and overwhelm.

Try it our - accept that you are guaranteed to miss out on some experiences that today has to offer. And let me know if this new ratification brought peace to your overload or if you have other strategies that you can share ♡