The Weeks

La Villette

We walked along the Seine earlier in the week, under cloudless blue sky.  I read somewhere that people will be able to swim in the Seine by 2024.  Unlike Joe Manchin and a bunch of other bozos, France is actually doing stuff to improve the environment and work against climate change.

 

Started the day by reading Popova's essay about the book, 4000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals.  I've had a contentious relationship with time almost from the get go.  I remember talking at my women's group a million years ago about how I wish I could have just one or two hours extra in each day.  If I could have that, all would be perfect!  A friend said, "Sorry, but we all get the same amount and we all get exactly the amount we need."  I've found this difficult to accept. Even as a kid I was fascinated with efficiency.  I was enthralled with Cheaper by the Dozen, both the book and the movie.  The story is about an efficiency expert father and his industrious wife who are parents to twelve children.  I loved this fictional family.  I was one of 7 children, so you could see how this story might appeal.  When it was my time to pack the lunches, or wash the dishes, I would experiment with ways to increase efficiency.  As a grown up teacher I have consistently taken on way too many tasks with the constant hope, or some might say delusion, of someday figuring out the right way to get things done, leading me eventually to achieve the elusive "work life balance."

 

The author of 4000 Weeks says that a focus on efficiency or productivity is a rigged shell game and no one in the world has work life balance so we should give up on that. We get about 4000 weeks if we reach our 80th birthdays, so I have about 1000 weeks left to live.  

It's time for me to throw efficiency and productivity out the window and to remember that "the price of higher productivity is always lower creativity." Time and I are about to embark on a whole new relationship and from here on out we'll be playing by different rules. Get ready, Time.  There's a new sheriff in town.