Finished reading: Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman 📚

As great as everyone says. It’s striking how much chronic illness and grad school prepped me for accepting rather than struggling with the ideas here. This is a perfect book to read when you’re in your 40s.

Please read today’s Book Riot Literary Activism Newsletter and EveryLibrary’s statement on the appointment of Keith E. Sonderling as Acting Director of the Institute of Museum and Library Services. It’s always a hard time for libraries in the US but it’s been an especially rough couple of weeks.

📚💬 “…having large amounts of time but no opportunity to use it collaboratively isn’t just useless but actively unpleasant…” Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

Oliver Burkeman writes about professor Robert Boice’s attempt to get PhD students to work a little bit daily and take weekends off. The students wouldn’t do it and their desire to rush the work actually got in the way of their progress. I found something similar when I did a dissertation boot camp where for the whole day I was working on my dissertation instead of the small increments that I normally did. I was so exhausted after that week of pushing really hard that I had to take a 2-week break which obviously did not advance me as far as you might hope a boot camp would.

📚💬 “…the presence of problems in your life… isn’t an impediment to a meaningful existence, but the very substance of one.” Oliver Burkeman, Forty Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

📚💬 “…reading Is the sort of activity that largely operates according to its own schedule.” Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

Finished reading: The Perils of Pleasure by Julie Anne Long 📚

A book with an awesome heroine and a delightful hero. Julie Anne Long is new to me and seems bound to become one of my favorite historic romance authors.

📚💬 “Results aren’t everything. Indeed, they better not be, because results always come later—and later is always too late.” Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

📚💬 " …a good hobby probably should feel a little embarrassing; that’s a sign you’re doing it for its own sake rather than for some socially sanctioned outcome." Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

📚💬 " In order to most fully inhabit the only life you ever get, you have to refrain from using every spare hour for personal growth." Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals