What this book is about

There are two usual explanations for why you are tired, and this book accepts neither.

The first says you lack discipline. More structure, a better system, an earlier alarm. You have tried this. It works for about nine days.

The second says the world is too much and the answer is to want less of it — to step back, slow down, and find peace somewhere off to the side of your actual life. You have probably tried that too, somewhere between a retreat and a weekend, and come back to the same inbox.

This book proposes something plainer: you are not short of time, attention or willpower. You are paying for things you are not using.

Everything you have opened and not closed is still charging you — quietly, continuously, without appearing anywhere you can see it. The message you read and did not answer, the decision deferred four times, the argument that was never finished, only abandoned. Not one of them is worth a moment's thought. Together they are most of what is exhausting you.

So this is not a book about doing more, and it is not a book about wanting less. It is about finding out what is being charged, deciding what is actually yours, and closing what can be closed — which turns out to be almost everything, and far sooner than you would think.

Nothing in it takes longer than tonight.

How to read it

Part I (chapters 1 to 3) shows you what is actually being charged, and who the account belongs to. Read these in order; everything else rests on them.

Part II (chapters 4 to 7) is the working half: how to close an account, what to do about the bills that arrive anyway, how to tell a real charge from noise, and what to do about the accounts that have somebody else's name on them as well as yours.

Part III (chapters 8 to 11) is what it was all for.

Each chapter ends with one thing to do, usually tonight, usually in under fifteen minutes — every chapter except the eleventh, which asks for nothing, because by then there is nothing to ask for. There is no system here, nothing to keep up daily until chapter 10, and nothing to be behind on. If you miss a day, there is no streak to lose, because this book does not keep one.