You have to accept that there will always be too much to do; that you can't avoid tough choices or make the world run at your preferred speed; that n… - Oliver Burkeman

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You have to accept that there will always be too much to do; that you can't avoid tough choices or make the world run at your preferred speed; that no experience, least of all close relationships with other human beings, can ever be guaranteed in advance to turn out painlessly and well — and that from a cosmic viewpoint, when it's all over, it won't have counted for very much anyway.

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About Oliver Burkeman

Oliver Burkeman (born 1975) is a British journalist (principally for the British newspaper The Guardian) and writer.

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Additional quotes by Oliver Burkeman

...it pointed to an alternative approach, a ‘negative path’ to happiness, that entailed taking a radically different stance towards those things that most of us spend our lives trying to avoid. It involved learning to enjoy uncertainty, embracing insecurity, stopping trying to think positively, becoming familiar with failure, even learning to value death. In short, all these people seemed to agree that in order to be truly happy, we might actually need to be willing to experience more negative emotions — or, at the very least to learn to stop running quite so hard from them.

Once you stop believing that it might somehow be possible to avoid hard choices about time, it gets easier to make better ones. You begin to grasp that when there's too much to do, and there always will be, the only route to psychological freedom is to let go of the limit-denying fantasy of getting it all done and instead to focus on doing a few things that count.

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The good procrastinator accepts the fact that she can't get everything done, then decides as wisely as possible what tasks to focus on and what to neglect. By contrast, the bad procrastinator finds himself paralysed precisely because he can't bear the thought of confronting his limitations

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