Your One Precious Life
A radical approach to productivity & time management
One of the most transformative things I’ve ever done is to replace consuming self-help content and listening to productivity gurus with deeply reading poetry and listening to poets.
The place this has made the greatest difference is in the way I see productivity and time management. Instead of making to-do lists or building the perfect system that will somehow unlock my potential and allow me to get more work done, I approach each day with a single question borrowed and adapted from a Mary Oliver poem.
What do I plan to do with my one wild and precious life?
Life is about more than what you make or what tasks you complete. Life is meant to be lived, and we only get one shot at each day. Instead of meticulously planning out my day, blocking time for this or that, creating lists, or picking the most important task, I lay in bed each morning and ask, What do I plan to do with my one wild and precious life?
I know how I spend each day is how I spend my life. What should my life be spent doing?
The poem that I took this question from is Mary Oliver’s The Summer Day. The last several lines of the poem read:
I don’t know exactly what…
