MAKE YOUR HOURS MATTER MORE

Your time is your most precious resource. So why not hoard it, just a little?

- BY AMY MACLIN

FOR JUST ABOUT EVERY MOMENT of our adult lives, we’re acutely aware of time— how we can maximize it, savor it, finagle more of it by multitasking. But during the pandemic, time got... weird. It stretched into eternity, like one Groundhog Day looped into another. It speed forward, and we forgot what life was like in the Great Before. It flattened as our lives turned into scheduleless, sometimes showerless limbo.

And once time stopped meaning anything, we realized it meant everything. Even now, postpandemic, many of us feel that there are parts of our pre-Covid lives we want to give up forever: crazy commutes, PTA meetings held at the most inconvenient times, the endless checklists that once made us feel “productive.”

The fact that our time is limited can be both daunting and freeing. Oliver Burkeman, a former better-living columnist for the Guardian who’s tried every timemanagement technique in the book, decided to call his own book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. That 4,000 weeks translates to 76.9 years, close to the average human life span. “When I'd ask friends to guess how many weeks we get, one put it in the six figures. But 310,000 weeks is basically all of human history, from the ancient Sumerians in Mesopotamia," Burkeman says. Though the idea of a paltry 4,000 weeks made him "queasy" at first, he now says, "I like that number because it shows how short our time is."

Time no longer seems like a thing to be managed (as if we were ever really in charge) but a precious resource. Here, experts share wisdom on how to make your hours feel more like your own.

Eschew the Old To-Do List