Not only a matter of having time to get things done, it’s also a matter of having the energy.
More closely your schedule of rest & activity corresponds to your natural peaks & valleys throughout the day, the more productive your many efforts will be.
Karl Benjamin (1957)
Cells in embryos make their way across a steep “developmental landscape” to their eventual fate.
Embryonic cells continuously monitor their changing surroundings and make small corrective adjustments, optimizing as development proceeds, locking in on their planned identity relatively late.
Processing positional information makes genes variously switch on and off throughout the embryo, giving cells distinct identities based on their location. (Some cells unfortunately take the wrong paths and are unable to get back on track.)
All the information is there in the landscape and processing that information effectively may be the phenomenon that makes a bunch of loosely stuck-together atoms behave like the thing we call life.
Had I been like a man living in a wood from which he knows there is no exit, I could have lived; but I was like one lost in a wood who, horrified at having lost his way, rushes about wishing to find the road.”
-Leo Tolstoy
Chess skills are most helpful when you are playing chess. However, when you climb & jump on rocks, your entire brain & body are put to work.
The board & pieces are all the material, but the METAGAME dynamic is certainly a factor in competition. The Royal Game by Stefan Zweig is about losing the battle to a weaker player who uses a novel psychology.
That’s me at the board, on the right, maybe 20 years ago.
Forge your own path, trust in the magic of individuality.
Though the methods vary, the mission is the same: to realize that we are all of us temporary & fragile beings.
Shot here from who knows where, bound for who can tell, we can love ourselves and each other while we’re here.
Elizabeth Berg
My Tasks ToDo tracking list has 28 items. Starting at the top row, it’s nice to know, without having to decide, what’s to be worked on next.
All 28 tasks in the sequence can be done in one day, but completing the entire list, even at nine minutes per item, would be 252 minutes, or 4.2 hours out of the 16 available to me.
–Neuharth
At the approach of danger there are always two voices that speak with equal power in the human soul:
one very reasonably tells a man to consider the nature of the danger and the means of escaping it;
the other, still more reasonably, says that it is too depressing and painful to think of the danger since it is not in man’s power to foresee everything and avert the general course of events.
Therefore, better to disregard what is painful till it comes.
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Oliver Burkeman provides an important and insightful reassessment of productivity. The drive to get more done can become an excuse to avoid figuring out what we actually want to accomplish. By confronting this question, we unlock a more meaningful approach to organizing our time.
Cal Newport