What if you stopped trying to do everything?
I have!
👋🏼👋🏼👋🏼 Hi! I’m so happy to see you. I’m Laura Jane Williams, a UK-based romance author. How to Build a Life launched in August 2024, and now has thousands of readers in over 75 countries (!). You can expect personal stories about life’s mess and mayhem, and the search for a way of living that feels right. I’m almost 40, a solo parent by choice, and for 2025 am committed to stealing back time from my to-do list. I’m just sick of being busy with stuff that doesn’t really matter, you know?
I just revealed all the details about my summer 2025 book. Please do consider pre-ordering: it’s the single best way to help authors you love!
Hi! I’m back after a week off with my kid for half term. It has been restorative and eye-opening, and I have much to say about what it’s like to take time off properly which, for ten years? maybe my whole working life?? I have never actually trained myself to do. More to come on that. First though, every thought and feeling I have right now is coloured by having read Four Thousand Weeks over Christmas break, and I said ages ago that I wanted to tell you about it. So here we are. Two months after finishing I cannot overstate how much it has changed how I think about my life. I mentally refer to it several times a day. I am calmer, less stressed, because of this book.
Okay. Right. So.
Total efficiency in life - the thing I thought made me special and good - is, Burkeman, the author, argues, a fool’s errand.
Why?
Well, because what does the efficient worker get at their job? They get more work to do.
What happens when we tick everything off our to-do list? It just makes room for more things to take their place.
Burkeman says that there is no such thing as “completing life”, an oasis of calm that we reach once we’ve “done” everything.
I did not know that.
Genuinely!
Before I read this book I thought I was allowed to rest only when every dish was cleaned and put away, every birthday card written and car valeted and email answered and cake baked and Times Bestseller List topped. I did loads, was perpetually busy even if that busy-ness was me optimising my relaxation (yes, you read that right), and I figured that one day, once everything was ticked off and squared away, I would finally find peace.
What if you stopped trying to do everything? the blurb asks.
That sounded like a joke at first.
Now it sounds like my new religion.
Let me share my favourite parts, in case you need to hear them too. After all, if you didn’t want to add “read Four Thousand Weeks” to your to-do list, who could blame you? We’re looking to shorten our list, right? Not make it longer.
(But if you do get chance, it’s really very good.)
Here are all the thoughts I had as I read…
Me: Right. I’m here for this, book. I’ve heard great things about you. What’s our jumping off point? What’s our working theory here?
The book: That the more you try to manage your time with the goal of achieving a feeling of total control… the more stressful, empty and frustrating life gets.
Me: Strong start. So doing more simply means… overall doing more, because our work won’t ever be done. Should I just give up now, then?
The book: Learn to stay with the anxiety of feeling overwhelmed, of not being on top of everything… instead of clearing the decks, declining to clear the decks, focussing instead on what’s truly of greatest consequence while tolerating the discomfort of knowing that, as you do so, the decks will be filling up further, with emails and errands and other to-dos, many of which you may never get round to at all.
Me: That makes sense. If I’m going to feel frazzled whether I try to do it all or whether I decide not to… why not decide not to? Do less. I’ve always wanted to do less, but never known which ball is okay to drop.
The book: The core challenge of managing our time isn’t about how to get everything done - that’s never going to happen - but how to decide most wisely what not to do, and how to feel at peace about not doing it… Elizabeth Gilbert points out that it’s all too easy to assume that this merely entails finding the courage to decline various tedious things you never wanted to do in the first place. In fact, she explains, it’s much harder than that. “You need to learn how to start saying no to things you do want to do, with the recognition that you only have one life.”
Me: So wait, even though I want to be a person working out 5 hours a week, seeing friends and socialising four times a month, writing books and also doing soul work outside of the house AND going to bed at 8pm and reading six books a month and being a good daughter/sister/neighbour/friend, whilst also devoting, happily, most of my energy to the son I so desperately love… I may well have to choose just one of those things? Just two?? I can’t do everything I want to do? Huh. HUH.