Autorentext

Chris Guillebeau

Klappentext

A powerful antidote to deadline dread, time guilt, and chronic rushing—from the New York Times bestselling author of The $100 Startup

In a world obsessed with squeezing the most out of every moment, the fear of falling behind can trap us in a paralyzing stress cycle. Incomplete to-do lists, unanswered emails, and unmet life goals haunt our thoughts, leaving us overstimulated and exhausted. 

In Time Anxiety, Chris Guillebeau, author of the popular newsletter A Year of Mental Health, reveals that this pervasive sense of time scarcity stems not from a lack of hours in the day but from unrealistic expectations and misaligned priorities. Weaving together eye-opening research on time perception, executive functioning challenges, and the psychological roots of avoidance, he offers a bold path for redefining our relationship with the clock. 

The first step is to build a tolerance for incomplete to-do lists and the inevitability of disappointing people, abandoning the goal of "catching up.” We have to set our own limits because no one else will. From there, Guillebeau guides readers through a process of:

• Identifying cognitive distortions that make routine tasks feel high-stakes, regulating the nervous system through grounding techniques and breathwork, and embracing the goal of “good enough”

• Uncovering the unwritten "time rules" that govern our days (“I return phone calls within an hour” or “I reply to every email the same day, without exception”) and creating new rules that better serve us 

• Weighing the trade-offs between competing values and priorities so we can invest our finite energy wisely, operating out of an empowered rather than a fear-based state
  Ultimately, Time Anxiety is a call to wake up from the trance of busyness and reclaim our most precious resource. By breaking the habits of overstressing, overdoing, and underliving, we can start savoring our limited time on earth.

Leseprobe
1

Start by Giving Yourself More Time

Before you can make big decisions about your life, you need to reduce the immediate pressure you feel.

When I started writing this book, I first outlined lots of ideas about mortality, leaving a legacy, and how to complete big projects.

We’ll come back to some of that later. But as my editor and I poured over the survey results, we realized that time anxiety prevents people from moving forward in some very basic operations of life.

Over and over, readers said things like:

“I get absolutely frozen and can’t make simple decisions.”

“I’ve had the same important task at the top of my to-do list for ten days in a row, but I just can’t bring myself to face it.”

“It feels like everyone else understands something very simple that I don’t get at all.”

They also tended to use absolute terms such as “always,” “never,” and “constantly” to describe their struggles with time. They’ve always felt this way, they would never be better, and they constantly felt the pull of wondering if they were spending their time well.

Anxiety inhibits your ability to think clearly in the moment. When you feel anxious, you don’t always make rational decisions. Sometimes you know what you should do, but you feel incapable of doing it. Other times, you don’t have any idea what you should do—you just know what you’re doing now isn’t good.

Either way, you feel trapped. And when you’re trapped, the first step is to locate an escape route.

You would not tell a person experiencing a panic attack that they need to get to work on filing their taxes, break up with their boyfriend, and mail off an overdue rent check. Perhaps they need to do all of those things eventually, but they first need to deal with what feels like an emergency. (And simply telling them to “calm down” probably won’t help much.)

They need to learn to address their breathing, lower their heart rate, and understand that even though what they are feeling seems overwhelming, it will get better. Only once they’re able to do these things will they be able to deal with more systemic problems.

Those actions I mentioned—lowering your heart rate, noticing your breath patterns—are part of regulating your nervous system, the essential part of your body that allows you to do any sort of cognitively intensive work. When this delicate ecosystem is in balance, you’re at your best. You’re able to make decisions, plan ahead, and manage your emotions with relative ease. Throw in stress or anxiety, however, and suddenly the ecosystem is under threat.

When you’re struggling with time anxiety, you need to deal with the immediate symptoms first. One of the reasons why you experience distress is because you perceive a time shortage in your life. Therefore, let’s help you achieve a time surplus, where more time is available to you, even in the midst of a busy life.

I’ll show you some strategies for this in the chapters that follow, including:

1. When to do things poorly (Not everything needs to be done with excellence or even done well.)

2. Why not finishing things is perfectly acceptable (Many things can be left undone, often permanently.)

3. How to decide “What is enough?” for any type of project or creative work, so that you always have an end point in mind

But for now, try taking some quick actions that can help you right away. These actions will give you space to make bigger decisions and figure out how you really want to spend your time.

1. Practice “Time Decluttering”

Home-organizing guides often focus on decluttering, the act of removing items from your home or work space that don’t have a useful or joyful purpose. It can be a useful habit at times.

But while physical decluttering and improving your environment can help some-what, time anxiety usually stems from worries in our mind or commitments that occupy our schedule. It’s a little different from, “I’ve got too many socks, so I should pare down.”

That’s why, in addition to any physical tidying up that you do, look at your calendar for the next few weeks and challenge yourself to remove a few items. Most likely, you can find some upcoming appointments that seemed like a good idea when you added them but now feel less important.

Later I’ll show you a concept called rules of engagement that will help you make fewer commitments in the first place, but you can practice time decluttering without any further knowledge.

Go through your schedule and ask, “Do I need to do this thing? Is it serving a purpose in my life? Do I still want to do it?”

See what you can remove, and notice how it feels to reclaim that time as a gift to yourself. It’s an easy but powerful way to multiply the time that’s available to you in the near future.

ACTION: Can you clear at least two items from your calendar for the next week?

2. Put a Brick in Your Inbox

How accessible are you right now? How many people have a direct line to your attention span?

Most of us have multiple “inboxes” where people can reach us. I don’t just mean any email inboxes you have, although those certainly count. But in addition, we have voicemail and voice memos, social media profiles that allow for direct messaging, apps with communication features, and more. Then of course, there are work networks (Teams, Slack, WhatsApp, others) that many employees are expected to participate in. For you, there might be something else I haven’t mentione…