Something You Should Know
Always in a Hurry: The Illusion of Urgency & What You Never Knew About Your Neck
17 Apr 2025
What is time anxiety and how does it affect us?
And as for like, you know, waking up and there's all these, all these things. Yeah. I mean, that's like, that's the modern world that we live in. And I think we live in this culture in which there is only one speed, you know, there's only one pace.
Like if you, if you're getting directives from different people or you're working collaboratively collaboratively with, with folks, then there is this kind of, insistence that everything is urgent. And as you said, obviously, everything is not urgent. And so beginning to understand what is truly urgent, which is a very small, you know, number of things and what could be done at any point.
And that third category, I think you clued into this as well, when you said some stuff might just disappear, the third category of stuff you could just not do. I think that is a really helpful thing to begin like finding some relief in this process. There's so much I have to do, but what actually really matters here?
What is something that I probably should do at some point, but the time of it is not that important. And what could I just not do? And maybe it'll go away and not come back to me.
Well, another part of it, I think it's part of it, is this idea that people are expecting me to do something. They're waiting to hear from me or that the ball's in my court and I need to hit it back. And maybe they're waiting for me, but probably they're not sitting around going, God, where is he? I really haven't heard from him.
you know even if they are mike uh you know i guess this is time this is one of those things where it's like it's helpful to have a big picture view of like imagine that they actually are nevertheless you know what is the goal of your life you know is the goal of your life to be the most responsive person for every person who's waiting for you to hit the ball back and
you know, if you get really good at doing that, then you're going to have more balls coming your way. That's the whole problem with this process of like, I'm just going to become super efficient and I'm going to use all these tools. And now we have AI and, you know, and I like some of the stuff, but like,
Just making it your mission to become hyper responsive is kind of like the mission of accumulating wealth. It's good to have money, right? But if your life goal is to accumulate as much wealth as possible, I think that's not ultimately a very satisfactory goal. So the same thing with being responsive. It's much better big picture to goal to be like, what do I actually want to do with my life?
What is the purpose of my life? How can I then Try to align my day to day with that as much as possible while recognizing that, of course, there are expectations of me and I'm going to need to respond to some of them. But I don't want to start with the goal of like I need to be as responsive as possible because that is ultimately a losing battle. Talk about your idea of the eighth day of the week.
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