Quick update today, because I have to get back to the Things that Must Get Done.
In the couple weeks I’ve read a lot of Merlin Mann’s writing, in coffee breaks at work. In addition to having a name that makes him sound like a time traveler in disguise, Merlin spends a lot of time thinking about how to be better, happier, and more productive, only not in a creepy Radiohead-esque way. If your attention is in high demand every day, you could do much worse than watching this improvised talk he gave at Rutgers on Time & Attention.
Among other things, what really strikes me about Merlin’s work is his emphasis on how non-renewable a resource like Time is. Me being me, I extrapolate this out from petty day-to-day concerns to big, long-term questions: our time is really limited, unless we get blasted by some sort of posthuman immortality gun. We have fourscore and ten, or twenty, or whatever, if we’re lucky, and that’s it. No matter what you find important in this life, be it your writing, your friends, your love life, your family, the sight of sunrise on a new horizon or your rocking chair, when your hour glass runs out, it’s out.
I don’t mean for this to be depressing, though at first brush it was for me: you mean I’m never going to get these eight hour days I spend at the office back? But, from a different perspective, it can be heartening: given that limitation, the question is, what do I want to be doing right now, and how can I do it? How can I use my time and my life as well as possible, without being bowled over by my own schedule? In this light, managing my own time and my own creative work lies on the other side of the fuzzy shadow-line separating chores from holy obligations.
And on that note, back to work.