the more that you remain aware of life's finitude, the more you will cherish it, and the less likely you will be to fritter it away on distractions. - Oliver Burkeman

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.

(A writer's working space, Montaigne also believed, ought to have a good view of the cemetery; it tended to sharpen one's thinking.)

Or to put it another way, why treat four thousand weeks as a very small number, because it's so tiny compared with infinity, rather than treating it as a huge number, because it's so many more weeks than if you had never been born?