This is the Guardian.

Today, four days in and 361 to go.

How to make the most of your time this year.

The Guardian

Come with me on a journey back into time. 600 years back.

Imagine that you and I are medieval peasants.

We're living a simpler life. There's no alarm clock, no smartphone, no daily podcast even.

We rise with the sun and get to work.

Plowing the fields maybe, drawing water from the well or chopping wood.

We complete the day's tasks as they come and we stop when the work is done.

Medieval people by and large lived in a mindset, I think, that anthropologists have called

a task orientation where the rhythms of the day just sort of emerge from what you're doing.

You're usually very closely yoked to natural rhythms.

So, you know, you milk the cows when they need milking, you harvest the crops when they need harvesting.

And, you know, for productivity guru who would come along and say maybe you should get all of milking

for the month out of the way today so you can save time. Like, obviously, these ideas just

makes no sense at all.

I know, in almost every way, it would have been horrible to be a medieval peasant.

The working conditions were terrible as were the shoes.

But as the writer Oliver Birkman points out, one thing medieval people probably didn't

stress about was time itself, at least not in the way that we do.

So, the invention of clocks naturally leads to this sense of time as a resource to be used,

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