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 with you for missing a deadline or dropping the ball; and when the fully optimized person you’ve become can turn, at long last, to the things life is really supposed to be about. Let’s start by admitting defeat: none of this is ever going to happen.
We’ve been granted the mental capacities to make almost infinitely ambitious plans, yet practically no time at all to put them into action.
Rendering yourself more efficient — either by implementing various productivity techniques or by driving yourself harder—won’t generally result in the feeling of having ‘enough time,’ because, all else being equal, the demands will increase to offset any benefits. Far from getting things done, you’ll be creating new things to do.
As a result we’re in danger of forgetting what a radical notion the Sabbath always was – radical not least because, as the former slaves who inaugurated it were at pains to point out, it applied to everyone without exception. And since the dawn of capitalism, it’s been radical in a second way: while capitalism gets its energy from the permanent anxiety of striving for more, the Sabbath embodies the thought that whatever work you’ve completed by the time Friday (or Saturday) night rolls around might be enough – that there might be no sense, for now, in trying to get any more done.
The point, to be clear, isn’t that freelancing or long-term travel – let alone family-friendly workplace policies – are intrinsically bad things. It’s that they come with an unavoidable flip side: every gain in personal temporal freedom entails a corresponding loss in how easy it is to coordinate your time with other people’s.
– and when it comes to how you’re using your finite time, the universe absolutely could not care less.