Are you overwhelmed by an endless list of commitments that drain your energy? What if there was a way to find more fulfillment by doing less?
Oliver Burkeman’s Meditations for Mortals explores the counterintuitive path to happiness by limiting our commitments and information intake. He reveals how overcommitment and information overload prevent us from living meaningful lives.
Discover how narrowing your focus can lead to greater satisfaction and success in life.
Narrow Your Scope
Burkeman’s strategy for working within your limitations is avoiding overcommitment—that is, limiting the commitments you spend time and energy on and the amount of information you consume. Why narrow your scope?
First, Burkeman says that making progress toward happiness and success requires you to quit unfulfilling obligations. Most people have a list of commitments they don’t find satisfying and beneficial—these waste time and emotional energy you should be putting toward things that bring you fulfillment. To quit these burdens, Burkeman recommends you identify the consequences of quitting, determine whether you’re willing to face those consequences, and then face them head-on. This will prevent you from continuing in a state of indecision and inaction.
(Shortform note: Deciding which commitments are truly beneficial can be harder than it seems. While Burkeman recommends narrowing your commitments by focusing only on what you find fulfilling, Matthew Dicks suggests in Someday Is Today that doing so might steer you in the wrong direction. Sometimes, commitments feel important or fulfilling in the present but aren’t actually beneficial in the long run. So to ensure you’re choosing the right things to focus on, Dicks recommends considering what your 100-year-old self would think. If your 100-year-old self would be glad you did it, you should probably stick with it; if not, you can probably let it go.)
Second, Burkeman says you need to limit the amount of information you consume and pay attention to. In the modern age, the constant flood of information through news and social media diverts our attention in a million different directions, preventing us from absorbing truly useful information. To avoid splintering your attention, Burkeman makes two recommendations: First, only pay attention to the information that interests you and that is useful now—don’t collect information for some undetermined future situation. Second, focus on one or two social issues that you can make a difference in. This will prevent you from being burdened by the inability to address every injustice.
| Managing Information in the Modern World In Building a Second Brain, Tiago Forte reiterates that the human mind can’t handle the amount of information we have access to in the digital age—it overwhelms us and causes us to fall short of our potential. However, Forte says that the solution to this is not limiting how much information we consume, but implementing an organization system so we can use information effectively. For example, rather than ignoring information that might be useful to you in the future, as Burkeman recommends, Forte says to save that information in a digital “hold” folder where you keep currently irrelevant material. You’ll then be able to access that information in the future when it becomes useful, or delete it if you decide it’s truly irrelevant to you. Further, Forte recommends organizing information into multiple folders, which can help you juggle more projects than you would otherwise be able to. So rather than having to pick one or two causes that are meaningful to you, as Burkeman recommends, you could put effort toward several causes that matter to you. |
