Precious-Time

We try so hard to accomplish as much as possible. To be efficient. Get more done. Plan your downtime. We hear all this in countless books, videos, podcasts, and who knows where else. We squeeze ourselves dry to get more done and extract more from our time. Have you ever been truly bored? So bored that you have absolutely nothing to do? If you have, we often quickly find something to occupy ourselves with. Most likely, we grab our smartphones, or a housewife always finds some extra chores to do around the house. Nowadays, we’ve completely forgotten how to be bored. ...

Many people have likely gone through a period in their lives when life started demanding more than before. To meet these new demands, you need different tools for managing time and tasks. People start buying various task management, project management, and note-taking apps, and so on. What’s the result? Burnout. Sound familiar? Collecting Everything We Can. Why Does It Feel Like a Burden? Have you read David Allen’s book GTD (Getting Things Done)? It’s possibly one of the first books recommended by bloggers for becoming a productivity guru. There’s a piece of advice in it about the Inbox—recording everything that comes to mind in the “Inbox” folder to deal with later. Then, during the weekly review, we distribute tasks into folders, dates, and labels. The tasks pile up so much that it becomes overwhelming, and a slight sense of anxiety creeps in as soon as we open our task vault. Adding a task to the system is very (too) easy, but deleting it? Not so much, because there’s always a reason to come back to it later. ...

Yes - today, without offloading information from our central processor (the brain) to an external medium, it’s impossible to manage. There’s just too much information, and we can’t keep everything in our heads. With a phone at hand, we can easily record a smart thought at any moment so it doesn’t slip away—or we can easily open Instagram and check out what’s new there. Advantages of Technology An amazing tool for finding and organizing information. The only problem is that everyone online is trying to grab our attention, anyone who can. Unfortunately, those who create content that isn’t genuinely useful to us are often better at this. Nevertheless, some have managed to achieve the opposite. Here’s an example: How to Make Learning as Addictive as Social Media | Luis Von Ahn | TED. ...