Week 1, Day 2

Week 1: Being Finite

Day 2: Summary: Now that we’ve accepted our mortality and the limited time we have at our disposal, we need to decide what to do and spend a little bit of time today doing it. This is harder than it seems, Burkeman suggests, because it means doing something that matters today, and that can be scary.

         When I first read it, I didn’t think that this chapter was going to pose much of a problem. After all, this project was a spur of the moment idea I immediately implemented and put into practice, just because it sounded fun. I almost did go down the path of turning it into a long-term project that Burkeman warns about. I started thinking about how to develop this project into something larger involving much more planning and reading many more books. In the end, I decided to Burkeman’s advice from the book and just do it without knowing whether I would manage to finish it. As a result, I congratulated my self on being so enlightened. Day 2: done. Except.

         Examining the things I would like to do, I discovered several things in my professional life that I would like to accomplish but which I haven’t even started. There are many reasons for this, fear being the largest, but also worries about being unprepared or not knowing exactly what the first step is. Sometimes fear looks like an entire bookshelf filled with books about a project that I have wanted to do for year, but which I haven’t even started. Planning and doing research can be a powerful and deceptive way to procrastinate. I can tell myself that I’m working on the project when, in reality, I’m hiding.

Homework: Start at least one part of the two projects I’ve been thinking about for a long time.