Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts - By Oliver Burkeman
Date read: 2025-07-16How strongly I recommend it: 10/10
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A must read for all the time management and efficiency gurus and wanna be experts out there. Most of this will seem counter-productive to the inbox zero, getting thing done crowd, but if you start to apply his recommendations, you'll find you'll be even more productive and satisfied with your life.
My Notes
The greatest achievements often involve remaining open to serendipity, seizing unplanned opportunities, or riding unexpected bursts of motivation. To be delighted by another person, or moved by a landscape or a work of art, requires not being in full control. At the same time, a good life clearly isn’t about giving up all hope of influencing reality. It’s about taking bold action, creating things, and making an impact – just without the background agenda of achieving full control.
When you give up the unwinnable struggle to do everything, that’s when you can start pouring your finite time and attention into a handful of things that truly count. When you no longer demand perfection from your creative work, your relationships, or anything else, that’s when you’re free to plunge energetically into them. And when you stop making your sanity or self-worth dependent on first reaching a state of control that humans don’t get to experience, you’re able to start feeling sane and enjoying life now, which is the only time it ever is.
With this comes the bracing understanding that you might as well get on with life: that it’s precisely because you’ll never produce perfect work that you might as well get on with doing the best work you can; and that it’s because intimate relationships are too complex ever to be negotiated entirely smoothly that you might as well commit to one, and see what happens. There are no guarantees – except the guarantee that holding back from life instead is a recipe for anguish.
Because our problem, it turns out, was never that we hadn’t yet found the right way to achieve control over life, or safety from life. Our real problem was imagining that any of that might be possible in the first place for finite humans, who, after all, just find themselves unavoidably in life, with all the limitations and feelings of claustrophobia and lack of escape routes that entails.
The main point – though it took me years to realize it – is to develop the willingness to just do something, here and now, as a one-off, regardless of whether it’s part of any system or habit or routine.
You always have a choice. You’re pretty much free to do whatever you like. You need only face the consequences.
The only two questions, at any moment of choice in life, is what the price is, and whether or not it’s worth paying.
It was a central insight of the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre that there’s a secret comfort in telling yourself you’ve got no options, because it’s easier to wallow in the ‘bad faith’ of believing yourself trapped than to face the dizzying responsibilities of your freedom.
Whatever choice you make, so long as you make it in the spirit of facing the consequences, the result will be freedom in the only sense that finite humans ever get to enjoy it. Not freedom from limitation, which is something we unfortunately never get to experience, but freedom in limitation. Freedom to examine the trade-offs – because there will always be trade-offs – and then to opt for whichever trade-off you like. The key is to have the "right" type of problems.
On the problem of trying to consume too much information: The first is to treat your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket. That is to say: think of your backlog not as a container that gradually fills up, and that it’s your job to empty, but as a stream that flows past you, from which you get to pick a few choice items, here and there, without feeling guilty for letting all the others float by.
The second piece of advice is to resist the urge to stockpile knowledge. At least where non-fiction sources are concerned, it’s easy to fall into the assumption that the point of reading or listening to things is to add to your storehouse of knowledge and insights, like a squirrel hoarding nuts, in preparation for a future when you’ll finally get to take advantage of it all.
Most of the long-term benefits of reading arise not from facts you insert into your brain, but from the ways in which reading changes you, by shaping your sensibility, from which good work and good ideas will later flow. ‘Every book makes a mark,’ says the art consultant Katarina Janoskova, ‘even if it doesn’t stay in your conscious memory.’
Pick your battles, and don’t feel bad about doing so. By embracing your limitations in this way, you’ll be in a position to do more to fight the battles you do pick, and also thereby to feel better about yourself, than the person who tries to care about everything.
In an age of attention scarcity, the greatest act of good citizenship may be learning to withdraw your attention from everything except the battles you’ve chosen to fight.
Marcus Aurelius reassures readers of his Meditations: ‘Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.’
Far more frequently, though, the life-enhancing route is to think of decisions not as things that come along, but as things to go hunting for. In other words: to operate on the assumption that somewhere, in the confusing morass of your work or your life, lurks at least one decision you could make, right now, in order to get unstuck and get moving.
The only way to live authentically is to acknowledge that you’re inevitably always making decision after decision, decisions that will shape your life in lasting ways, even though you can’t ever know in advance what the best choice might be. In fact, you’ll never know in hindsight, either – because no matter how great or appalling the consequences of heading down any given path, you’ll never learn whether heading down a different one might have brought something better or worse. Even so, to move forward, you still have to choose, and keep on choosing.
Getting into the habit of finishing what you start creates fuel for further meaningful productivity.
To define your next deliverable, clarify some outcome you could attain in a single sitting – in the next few minutes, say, or over an hour or two at most. Then work until you reach it.
For bigger projects, break off a piece: finish the research for the first section of the report; finalize the paint colors for the living room; select a workout plan and schedule your first session at the gym. Do it and be done with it. Put it on your done list, if you like. Then move on.
How can you identify your current life task? That must always be a matter of intuition. But there are two signposts that may help. The first is that a life task will be something you can do ‘only by effort and with difficulty,’ as Jung puts it – and specifically with that feeling of ‘good difficulty’ that comes from pushing back against your long-established preference for comfort and security. In the words of another Jungian, James Hollis, it may be the kind of endeavor that ‘enlarges’ you, rather than making you feel immediately happy.
The second signpost is that a true life task, though it might be difficult, will be something you can do and doesn't require a massive investment in money or an extreme life change.
For when you're avoiding doing something important: The advice here is: go into the shed. Don’t do anything yet, just look around. Observe and take stock. Make the space your own. And the first solutions will present themselves. A number of items will change hands and be donated to others. Other things will wait until that Saturday afternoon when you say to yourself, ‘And now it’s time to clean out the shed.’ You don’t dread it any more, but are actually looking forward to it.
The point isn’t to spend your life serving rules. The point is for the rules to serve life.
You’ll make the most progress, and cover the most ground, if you limit yourself to about three or four hours of intense mental focus each day.
Life is an unending series of complications, so it doesn’t make any sense to be surprised by the arrival of the next one.’
Coming up against your limitations, and figuring out how to respond, is precisely what makes a life meaningful and satisfying.
Instead of asking how to summon the energy or motivation or self-discipline to do something that matters to you, it’s often more helpful to ask: What if this might be a lot easier than I’d been assuming?
And so one day, feeling she had little to lose from trying something different, she asked herself what would happen if she did what she felt like doing, when she felt like doing it – which is another way of asking the question we encountered yesterday: What if this were easy?
Being a better or more loving person is another thing you can’t make happen. You have to let it happen – which you can do by first recognizing that some part of you already feels the emotions you believe you ought to be feeling. After that, your main job is to avoid overcomplicating things.
The point isn’t to try to render yourself more generous than you already are, but just to notice the moments when you naturally and effortlessly feel that way anyway, then not to screw it up with overthinking. The simplest way to do that is to move fast. ‘Each time the thought to give arises, act on it.'
Other people’s negative emotions are ultimately a problem that belongs to them. And you have to allow other people their problems. This is one more area in which the best thing to do, as a finite human with limited control, is usually not to meddle, but to let things be.
‘It’s weird how when I don’t respond to someone’s email, it’s because I’m busy,’ observes the novelist Leila Sales, poking fun at this tendency in herself, ‘but when other people don’t respond to my emails, it’s because they hate me.’
The value and depth of the experience relies on that unknowability. Maybe you’ll get what you wanted, or maybe you won’t – and sometimes, not getting what you wanted will leave life immeasurably better.
‘Perfectionism is your brain trying to protect you from harm. From coming up with an idea that is embarrassing and stupid and could cause you to suffer pain. We like the brain. But you have to shut the brain off to come up with ideas.’
A quantity goal puts you back in the driver’s seat: instead of hoping you produce something good, you get to know you’ll produce something.
It’s fine to have strong preferences for how you’d like your day to unfold. But at the very least, it’s a reminder not to cling so confidently to those preferences that you turn life into a constant struggle against events you’ve decided, futilely, shouldn’t be happening. Or that you close off the possibility that what looks like an interruption might in fact prove a welcome development.
Really, though, showing up more fully in the present is about how you pursue your plans for the future; it certainly doesn’t require that you abandon them. It means letting go of the notion that you can’t quite allow yourself to feel fully immersed in life before those plans are realized, and coming to understand on the contrary that the pursuit of ambitious goals is one excellent way to be fully immersed in life.
Looking back, I see that I was always telling myself that once I figured out how to be a national newspaper journalist, or a good partner, or the best possible parent, I’d let myself relax into those roles; now, at least on my better days, I realize that the activity of figuring such things out is the substance of an absorbing life, not something I need to do in order to prepare for one.
‘Operating from sanity,’ on the other hand, means embodying a certain kind of orientation towards life first, one that treats the present moment as a place where peace of mind might, in theory, be attainable – and then going about your life from that orientation, rather than treating the activities of your life as things you’re doing in order to one day reach it.
One: ‘Decide who you want to be.’ Two: ‘Act from that identity immediately.’
Operating from sanity, when it comes to backlogs, means following the advice of the time management expert Mark Forster instead. First, sequester all those emails in a separate folder, or the tasks on a separate to-do list. (And just like that, your inbox is empty!) Thereafter, your priority isn’t to blast through the backlog, but to stay up to date on new incoming emails or tasks, so as to prevent another backlog developing. Chip away at the old one a little per day – or, if you think you can get away with it, just forget about it entirely.
A to-do list is by definition really a menu, a list of tasks to pick from, rather than to get through. And operating from sanity means treating it that way: starting with the acknowledgment that you won’t complete everything you might wish, then making your selections from the menu. Obviously, not every task on every to-do list will be as appetizing as the restaurant analogy suggests. But it’s surprising how many things do become more appetizing once you’re encountering them not as chores you have to plow through, but as options you get to pick.
Scruffy hospitality means you’re not waiting for everything in your house to be in order before you host and serve friends in your home. Scruffy hospitality means you hunger more for good conversation and serving a simple meal of what you have, not what you don’t have. Scruffy hospitality means you’re more interested in quality conversation than in the impression your home or lawn makes.
Spending your days trying to get experiences ‘under your belt,’ so as to maximize your collection of them, or to feel more confident about their future supply, means you never get to enjoy them properly because another agenda is at play.
It’s nice to collect memories, of course, but the way to do that isn’t to go about trying to collect them. It’s living them as fully as possible, so as to remember them vividly later.
Real wisdom doesn’t lie in getting life figured out. It lies in grasping the sense in which you never will get it completely figured out.
So there need be no shame in the feeling that you don’t yet fully understand the field you work in, or how to date, or be in a relationship, or be a parent. It doesn’t mean something’s wrong, and it doesn’t mean you can’t take constructive action – or, alternatively, relax – until all the answers are in. It just means that we’re limited in our capacity to get a grip on our infinitely complex reality. It makes little sense to let that hold you back from living in it.
‘C’est fait par du monde.’ Roughly: ‘People did that.’ It’s a truth that can’t be disputed: if something exists in reality, and it wasn’t already a part of the natural environment, then it must have been made by one or more flawed and finite people – not one of whom had any greater ability to overcome their built-in human limitations than you.
‘The good thing about everything being so fucked up is that no matter where you look, there is great work to be done.’