I've started selection and focus at work.
Workload has been getting heavy, so I began sorting tasks.
Around then I read this book:
Oliver Burkeman, "Four Thousand Weeks" (Japanese title: How to Use Finite Time).
I looked it up expecting another time-management work hack book (those usually aren't reliable) — it isn't.
The premise is that controlling time is impossible, and there's a contradiction: the more efficiently you work, the more work appears.
People often can't stand purposeless leisure, so they fill it with "efficient" "extra" tasks.
The book's broad thrust resembles Koichiro Kokubun's ethics of leisure and boredom.
I'd been buried in urgent but not important tasks.
Urgent means something being asked of you.
There's no room for your own values there; time just gets spent flatly.
Not urgent, but important.
Things where the value is in the process (being involved), not the result.
I'm organizing work around that axis.
Writing this blog, by the way, is also "not urgent but important."
(※ Related: about three years ago I wrote something like this.
Not urgent × important × unknown
Even within "not urgent × important," some things you can anticipate and some you can't — and important things may sit in the latter.)
For now I'm asking others to take some work, and stopping intake when there's a clean break.
That said, making everything "not urgent but important" is hard.
I do keep time margin — but whether I can think at my best in that blank time is also hard.
I'll train little by little to use blank time on not-urgent-but-important things.
For that, turning it into a routine is probably best.
Recently I watched a YouTube video by Trevor Bauer, the former MLB Cy Young pitcher now with the Yokohama DeNA BayStars.
(Incidentally I'm a Hanshin Tigers fan. We did "Are" this year. Happy.)
Bauer's image before coming to Japan was problem-child-like; in contrast he comes across as both decent and highly intelligent.
On YouTube he talks through his own pitching theory, and what stuck was how he stresses the importance of routine.
When something goes wrong, somewhere in the preparation routine up to that point is wrong — so you fix that. That was the idea.
Put differently: reflecting on mindset or the action in the moment itself isn't needed.
You can't control those.
The system is wrong, so don't blame your mindset or behavior.
Focusing on what you can control is obviously important — and what you can control is preparation, which is routine.
Kyohei Sakaguchi has a fun column, "Office work for staying alive".
The thrust is the same: design a routine, do things through the routine, and if you fail, fix the routine — not the mindset.
His essay book "Tips for continuing" is also really good — recommended if the column above hooked you.
That's all for today. (※ As usual, these aren't affiliate links — just a note.)
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