⭐⭐⭐ Four Thousand Weeks by Burkeman

Full Title	Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
Authors	Oliver Burkeman
Year Published	2021
Date Read	November 21, 2022
Rating	3/5 stars

Useful reminder that productivity is not about getting more done, it’s about deciding what few things actually matter and being comfortable throwing the rest away. Makes me think of the concept of “maintenance syndrome”; the gist reproduced below:

Constantly cleaning up, organizing files on our hard drive, running errands, putting out little fires and making inconsequential project todo lists: these are all symptoms of Maintenance Syndrome.

Maintenance tasks in our life and in our projects are usually very clear-cut. They seductively offer a clear problem and a clear solution. The structure-seeking part of or brain loves this and will endlessly procrastinate important ambiguous tasks in favour of taking these on.

When we are pulled into this game we usually think: “let me just check all these things off my list first, then I’ll do the hard thing”. There’s one big problem with that: there’s absolutely no end to these kinds of minor tasks in life. They will grow to take as much space as we have to offer — completely crowding out creation.

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