Book Review
“When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing” explores the profound impact of timing on life, blending research with real-world examples and practical insights.
“When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing” explores the profound impact of timing on life, blending research with real-world examples and practical insights.
And so we naturally tend to make decisions about our daily use of time that prioritise anxiety-avoidance instead. Procrastination, distraction, commitment-phobia, clearing the decks and taking on too many projects at once are all ways of trying to maintain the illusion that you’re in charge of things. In a subtler way, so too is compulsive worrying, which offers its own gloomy but comforting sense that you’re doing something constructive to try to stay in control.
“The cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter is famous, among other reasons, for coining ‘Hofstadter’s law’, which states that any task you’re planning to tackle will always take longer than you expect, ‘even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law’. In other words, even if you know that a given project is likely to overrun, and you adjust your schedule accordingly, it’ll just overrun your new estimated finishing time, too. It follows from this that the standard advice about planning – to give yourself twice as long as you think you’ll need – could actually make matters worse.”
Excerpt From: Oliver Burkeman. “Four Thousand Weeks.”