What are you NOT doing today?

The To-Not-Do List, or how to make peace with your inability to do everything. Also: some ways to savour winter

People are feeling stretched too far and spread too thin in this day and age, at least according to a lot of the Substack essays I read at the turn of the year. I live in the same capitalist cyber-dystopian hustle culture as everyone else, so naturally, I share this predicament.

My chosen antidote to it is currently Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman, which I liked so much when I first read it in 2023 that I’ve decided it’s worth revisiting. It’s hardly an original recommendation because everyone who reads this book loves it and it was, rightly, a bestseller. But if you haven’t read it yet — maybe do?

In it, Burkeman gifts us the time management advice to end all time management advice. He rubbishes the cult of productivity tips and tricks; the notion that we should strive to maximise our time in order to squeeze as much into it as we possibly can is, he says, a big lie. In reality, you simply do not have time to do all the things you want to do, or feel you should do, or that other people want you to do. A human lifespan is laughably short (four thousand weeks, if you live to the age of eighty) and there will always, always be more to do than time available in which to do it. You need to stop dreaming of the day when you have finally ‘cleared the decks’, are truly ‘on top of things’, and can, at long last, relax — because this day will never come. The sooner you make peace with this, the sooner you can start enjoying the time you have right now, instead of orientating your life towards some future sunlit uplands destined always to slip from your grasp.

Burkeman calls this a ‘limit-embracing attitude to time’, and it means choosing how to spend your days — and crucially, how not to spend them. ‘Since hard choices are unavoidable,’ he writes, ‘what matters is learning to make them consciously, deciding what to focus on and what to neglect, rather than letting them get made by default.’

It feels in keeping with the spirit of the book to have chosen to reread it — to be consciously returning to ideas I think are valuable, rather than blasting through my to-be-read pile in futile pursuit of the day when I have read All The Things. But the main change this book has inspired in my life is what I like to call the ‘to-not-do’ list (forgive the split infinitive), which I am currently favouring over its more go-get-’em sibling.

The idea isn’t to throw to-do lists completely out of the window, but to whittle them down to a few ‘main events’ for that day, and to make a much longer list of all the things you’re not even going to think about tackling. If you manage to get through the main events, well, great. You can do some extra things. If you don’t manage the main events, perhaps you need to be more realistic tomorrow.

I’m finding it only works semi-well on work days, when ‘fighting inbox fires’ is, for me personally, liable to morph into the main event and subsume all my intended main events. But it can really come into its own on non-work days, especially if you are very devoted to your hobbies, or if you consider your money-work to be a ‘day job’, with your true calling in life relegated to the time around the edges.

It is extremely difficult to give as much time to your side projects as you want to, and feel they need, while also exercising regularly, feeding yourself nourishing meals, getting enough sleep, seeing and/or caring for your family, keeping your pets and plants alive and your home clean and tidy, maintaining a healthy social life, and having down time. Actually, what I meant to say was: it’s impossible. See, I still haven’t learned.

Many a weekend has concluded with me feeling dispirited and disappointed in myself because I didn’t get round to this or that important activity. The point of a to-not-do list is to stop viewing all these un-done things as proof of my terrible inadequacy. Instead of berating myself with thoughts like ‘if I’d ONLY been more efficient’, I can feel calm and reassured in the knowledge that I never planned to do them anyway.

Plus, Burkeman says, it’s not only unrealistic to imagine that you ever could do all the things that matter to you, it’s the very fact of having to choose between them that gives meaning to the ones you do end up doing. If, for example, I consciously choose to sacrifice time I could spend working on my magnum opus to seeing a friend instead, that’s not a failure of time management, but a measure of how much I value the friendship.

And if it seems cruel to be forced into making these choices at all, consider how surprising it is that you even exist! Burkeman quotes Simone de Beauvoir, who reckoned with this in her autobiography. The chances of her being her, living the life she ended up living, ‘had not one chance in hundreds of millions of coming about.’ With that in mind, Burkeman argues, ‘wouldn’t it make more sense to speak not of having to make such choices, but of getting to make them?’

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In the spirit of enjoying my improbable existence right now, instead of waiting on the arrival of some gleamingly improved future, I’m doing my best to treat the beginning of the year as a time to savour rather than a time to be endured. Here are some things that have been helping:

Candlelit showers

This is how I’ve been starting the day lately, and it’s a revelation: a gentler way to transition into the waking world. It also feels incredibly decadent even though I’m saving electricity. I truly don’t know why candlelit baths get all the glory.

Keeping fairy lights up

We’ve taken down all the overtly Christmassy things, but some fairy lights are still up, and there they will remain until the clocks change. The fairy-lit kitchen is my next stop after the candlelit bathroom and it’s such a nice way to surface that it almost makes up for the brutal wrench of getting out of bed in the first place.

Pyjamas

I am now the owner of some proper, matching pyjamas for the first time since my age was in single figures, and they are a joy to wear. I used to think comfort was the only important thing about evening loungewear, but now I realise that comfort + feeling fancy = a sense of deep satisfaction. I get into them immediately after dinner at the latest.

Getting cold so you can enjoy feeling warm again

There are (sadly) many reasons to force yourself out of your door and into the weather, but my favourite is so that I can enjoy the moment I step back through it again. Lately this attitude has been motivating me to swim at the lido on a Sunday morning (the heated lido; I’m not in my Wim Hof era yet) and to go to yoga in a glorified tent on the roof of my local box park. Activities like this magnify all subsequent feelings of cosiness to the power of at least ten, especially if you reward yourself afterwards with something particularly warming, like a fancy latte or fresh baked goods.

If you have more tips to add to the list, I’d love to hear them.

‘Til next time,

Kx

PS. Your weekly reminder that if you like my writing you can support it by buying my book or sharing The Babbling Brook far and wide.