…the more you focus on your long-term goals, “the more of your daily life you spend feeling vaguely despondent that you have not yet achieved them”

…virtually every time management expert’s first piece of advice is to keep a detailed log of your time use, but doing so just heightens your awareness of the minutes ticking by, then lost forever. As for focusing on your long-term goals: the more you do that, the more of your daily life you spend feeling vaguely despondent that you have not yet achieved them. Should you manage to achieve one, the satisfaction is strikingly brief – then it’s time to set a new long-term goal. The supposed cure just makes the problem worse.

Oliver Burkeman, “Why time management is ruining our lives”, The Guardian (22 December 2016) [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/22/why-time-management-is-ruining-our-lives]