It's a self-help cliché that most of us need to get better at learning to say no. But as the writer Elizabeth Gilbert points out, it's all too easy t… - Oliver Burkeman

[W]e’re living in a world with effectively infinite inputs—emails you could receive, demands that could be made of you, or ambitions that you could have. Getting better at moving through them is not going to get you to the end of them, so the promise of reaching a point at which you feel on top of everything is flawed on a math basis from the beginning.

There is a very down-to-earth kind of liberation in grasping that there are certain truths about being a limited human from which you'll never be liberated. You don't get to dictate the course of events. And the paradoxical reward for accepting reality's constraints is that they no longer feel so constraining.

My mom used to get really upset at what she perceived as my half-assing,' reads one splendid anonymous comment on a Washington Post article by the advice columnist Carolyn Hax. 'I'm 48 now, have a PhD and a thriving and influential career, and I still think there is very very little that's worthy of applying my whole entire ass. I'm not interested in burning myself [out] by whole-assing stuff that will be fine if I half- or quarter-ass it. Being able to achieve maximum economy of ass is an important adult skill.