1: “Suppose it’s 4.10 pm, on a day when it’s not my turn for school pickup,” Oliver Burkeman writes in Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts.

“I’m focusing hard in my office at home,” Oliver notes, “when my son bursts in, to tell me excitedly of his preparations for the school play.”

Here is one of those moments of wonderful … continue reading

1: It was the early 1970s, and cognitive psychologist Virginia Valian was stuck.

She “found herself so paralyzed by work anxiety that she couldn’t write a word of her PhD thesis,” Oliver Burkeman writes in Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts.  

Our lives can be shaped by what it is we are trying to avoid, Oliver observes. “We talk about … continue reading