7 Time-Management Tips for Busy Mortals - [Lessons from existential psychology]
episode
Growth Mindset Psychology: The Science of Self-Improvement
17 min
1 speaker
6 chapters
transcribed 27 days ago
Transcript
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Why does the efficiency mindset make us less happy and less effective?
The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control. When the flood of emails has been contained, when your to-do lists have stopped getting longer. When you're meeting all your obligations at work and in your home life when nobody's angry for you missing a deadline or dropping the ball sometimes, and when the fully optimized person that you have become can turn at long last to the things that life is really supposed to be about. Let's start by admitting defeat. None of that is ever going to happen. That was a quote from the book 4000 Weeks. By Oliver Berkman, a book about productivity and time management for mortals. It is based on the premise that we are all going to die, and the over-optimised life for work and economic output with time boxing and calendar obsessions is actually a negative sum game.
It's this efficiency mindset that arrived as part of the commercialization of everything that Shifted our priorities away from our social and creative nature and is making our lives worse and inducing existential overwhelm everywhere. Hello and welcome to the Growth Mindset Podcast. Of course, we need to remember that time is our most precious resource. And it's time scarcity that makes it so valuable, yet, time management is a skill that many of us find so difficult to master. Berkman emphasizes that we should culture the opposite, perhaps, of the hustler mentality, because the hustler mentality is just constantly saying to optimize for just achievements that we're told that we should seek at the cost of our own actual life.
Now, whether you agree with this statement or not, I think it's always good to be curious on both sides of the arguments to see what could be learned from whatever you already. Already know. And I found this a really interesting book that I did agree with many of the things to help people become more happy with their lives and really think about the goal of what they are trying to achieve before they sort of waste their life, perhaps achieving the things that they may regret as they're dying. When you consider that it is basically impossible to truly master your time anyway, it does make sense to perhaps spend less of that scarce time prioritizing how to manage. Manage your time and spend more of that time enjoying it.
Now, the book makes many useful points, and instead of trying to say everything in the book, like you could read the book, but I'm going to teach you the seven most valuable tips from the book. Where did our time obsession come from and why? How to balance existential overwhelm? What is the efficiency trap? And how should you avoid its ironic inefficiencies? What can we learn by? embracing procrastination. How can we make our life more fun, plus a few of my own ideas on that, and how to focus on our riching whatever time we might have left. So firstly, where did our efficiency mindsets come from? Because humans actually didn't care that much about time before it was an important factor and was actually something that we invented.
Cats, apes, sharks, they have no concept of time as such besides just days and seasons.
How did the industrial‑age factories create our obsession with time‑boxing?
That's about it. And when you look at history, humans didn't have to observe time as much. Even when it was invented, they still didn't bother to organize time being the same in every single location until it started being important for communications. In medieval times, people were mainly thinking about their main daily life struggles and, okay, they're gonna do some farming today, but that's about it. When we started having factories and the economic output per worker, really started tracking our time to see how people were performing versus how much time they had and how much they were going to get paid. That the whole efficiency mindset really started to build and build. And it was really just a commercialized asset as they realized that time was part of the resource that they wanted to make the most of.
So before that, humans naturally didn't try to organize or optimize everything in their day and their workflow constantly to save time because they just enjoyed doing the thing they were doing until they needed to do something else.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
Why does the efficiency mindset make us less happy and less effective?
0:01–3:14
2
How did the industrial‑age factories create our obsession with time‑boxing?
3:14–5:50
3
What is the “existential overwhelm” that comes from trying to do everything?
5:50–9:35
4
How can Warren Buffett’s 25‑goal method help you focus on what truly matters?
9:35–13:21
5
What is the efficiency trap and why does being more efficient create more work?
13:21–17:17
6
Why should we embrace procrastination as a creative problem‑solving tool?
17:17–17:41
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from Growth Mindset Psychology: The Science of Self-Improvement
How to Shift Your Mindset and Take Control of Your Life - w/ Kyle Livingston
7 Painful Paradoxes of Self-Improvement (And what they teach us)
Seeking Difficulty: The Habit System Behind Three World Records and a Remarkable Life – Jack Cai
Psychology of Mental Strength: 3 Habits to build resilience, Inner toughness & Growth Mindset
A Growth Mindset Alone Won’t Make You a Better Leader: The psychology principles that will /wRyan Gottfredson
Master Finishing Things - Psychology vs Productivity, Perfectionism & Creative Constipation