Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman
Time Management for Mortals
The Book in ‘Three’ Sentences
The average human span is absurdly, terrifyingly and insultingly short; assuming you live to be eighty, you’ll have had about four thousand weeks. The problem of human existence is that we’ve been granted the mental capabilities to make almost infinitely ambitious plans, yet practically not time at all to put them to action.
Arguably, time management is all life is. Yet the modern discipline known as time management - like its hipper cousin productivity - is a depressingly narrow minded affair, focused on how to crank through as many work tasks as possible, or devising the perfect morning routine, or on cooking all your dinners for the week in one big batch on Sundays. These things matter to some extent, no doubt. But they’re hardly all that matters.
Four Thousand Weeks Summary
This is my book summary of Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman My notes contain best quotes from the book and the key lessons in my view.
Table of Contents
The Problem with Time Management
Treating Time as a Resource to be Managed
We all face a problem: the pressure to fit ever-increasing quantities of activity into a stubbornly non-increasing quantity of daily time. Time feels like an unstoppable conveyor belt, bringing us new tasks as fast as we can dispatch the old ones; and becoming ‘more productive’ just seems to cause the belt to speed up.
Once time is a resource to be used, you start to feel pressure, whether from external forces or from yourself, to use it well, and to berate yourself when you feel you’ve wasted it.
When you’re faced with too many demands, it’s easy to assume that the only answer must be to make better use of time, by becoming more efficient, driving yourself harder, or working for longer – as if you were a machine in the Industrial Revolution – instead of asking whether the demands themselves might be unreasonable.
Soon, your sense of self-worth gets completely bound up with how you’re using time: it stops being merely the water in which you swim and turns into something you feel you need to dominate or control, if you’re to avoid feeling guilty, panicked or overwhelmed
The trouble with attempting to master your time, it turns out, is that time ends up mastering you.
Escaping Reality
The universal truth behind our productivity specific issues is that most of us invest a lot of energy, one way or another, in trying to avoid fully experiencing the reality in which we find ourselves. We don’t want to feel the anxiety that might arise if we were to ask ourselves whether we’re on the right track, or what ideas about ourselves it could be time to give up.
Our troubled relationship with time arises largely from this same effort to avoid the painful constraints of reality. And most of our strategies for becoming more productive make things worse, because they’re really just ways of furthering the avoidance.
Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself.
The paradox of limitation: the more you try to manage your time with the goal of achieving a feeling of total control, and freedom from the inevitable constraints of being human, the more stressful, empty and frustrating life gets.
Facing Reality
In Practical terms, a limit-embracing attitude to time means organising your days with the understanding that you definitely won’t have time for everything you want to do, or that other people want you to do – and so, at the very least, you can stop beating yourself up for failing.
It means standing firm in the face of FOMO, the ‘fear of missing out’, because you come to realise that missing out on something – indeed, on almost everything – is basically guaranteed.
Every decision to use a portion of time on anything represents the sacrifice of all the other ways in which you could have spent that time.
This confrontation with limitation reveals the truth that freedom, is not found is not found in achieving greater control over your own schedule but in allowing yourself to be constrained by the rhythms of community - participating in forms of social life where you don’t get to decide exactly what you do or when you do it.
Meaningful productivity often comes not from hurrying things up but from letting them take the time they take.
When you finally face the truth that you can’t dictate how fast things go, you stop trying to outrun your anxiety, and your anxiety is transformed.
There is an alternative: the unfashionable but powerful notion of letting time use you, approaching life not as an opportunity to implement your predetermined plans for success but as a matter of responding to the needs of your place and your moment in history.
The Efficiency Trap
Rendering yourself more efficient - either by implementing various productivity techniques or by driving yourself harder - won’t generally result in the feeling of having ‘enough time’, because, all else being equal, the demands will start to increase to offset any benefits. Far from getting things done, you’ll be creating new things to do.
Productivity is a trap. Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster.
Nobody in the history of humanity has ever achieved ‘work–life balance’, whatever that might be, and you certainly won’t get there by copying the ‘six things successful people do before 7 a.m’.
The harder you struggle to fit everything in, the more of your time you’ll find yourself spending on the least meaningful things.
Our limited time is the thing that defines us as humans, before we start coping with anything at all. Before I can ask a single question about what I should do with my time, I find myself already thrown into time, into this particular moment, with my particular life story, which has made me who I am and which I can never get out from under.
One critical aspect of the radical incrementalist approach, which runs counter to much mainstream advice on productivity, is thus to be willing to stop when your daily time is up, even when you’re bursting with energy and feel as though you could get much more done.
Distraction and Attention
Rather than taking ownership of our lives, we seek out distractions, or lose ourselves in busyness and the daily grind, so as to try to forget our real predicament. We embark on the futile attempt to ‘get everything done’, which is really another way of trying to evade the responsibility of deciding what to do with your finite time – because if you actually could get everything done, you’d never have to choose among mutually exclusive possibilities.
The core challenge of managing our limited time isn’t about how to get everything done – that’s never going to happen – but how to decide most wisely what not to do, and how to feel at peace about not doing it.
The real problem of time management today, though, isn’t that we’re bad at prioritising the big rocks. It’s that there are too many rocks – and most of them are never making it anywhere near that jar.
Philosophers have been worrying about distraction since the time of the ancient Greeks, who saw it less as a matter of external interruptions and more as a question of character - a systematic inner failure to use one’s time on what one claimed to value the most.
Their reason for treating distraction so seriously was straightforward:
What you pay attention to will define, for you, what reality is.
Attention is life: your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention. So when you pay attention to something you don’t especially value, it’s not an exaggeration to say that you’re paying with your life
Because the attention economy is designed to prioritise whatever’s most compelling – instead of whatever’s most true, or most useful – it systematically distorts the picture of the world we carry in our heads at all times. It influences our sense of what matters, what kinds of threats we face, how venal our political opponents are, and thousands of other things – and all these distorted judgements then influence how we allocate our offline time as well.
When we succumb to distraction, we’re motivated by the desire to try to flee something painful about our experience of the present.
The overarching point is that what we think of as ‘distractions’ aren’t the ultimate cause of our being distracted. They’re just the places we go to seek relief from the discomfort of confronting limitation.
The most effective way to sap distraction of its power is just to stop expecting things to be otherwise – to accept that this unpleasantness is simply what it feels like for finite humans to commit ourselves to the kinds of demanding and valuable tasks that force us to confront our limited control over how our lives unfold.
We Don’t Have Time
Hofstadter’s law’, states that any task you’re planning to tackle will always take longer than you expect: the activities we try to plan for somehow actively resist our efforts to make them conform to our plans.
The obsessive planner, essentially, is demanding certain reassurances from the future – but the future isn’t the sort of thing that can ever provide the reassurance he craves, for the obvious reason that it’s still in the future
Worry, at its core, is the repetitious experience of a mind attempting to generate a feeling of security about the future, failing, then trying again and again and again – as if the very effort of worrying might somehow help forestall disaster
In the four thousand weeks, you never get a single week of being able to guarantee that it will arrive, or you will be in a position to use it precisely as you wish. Instead, you just find yourself in each moment as it comes, already thrown into this time and place, with all the limitations that entails, and unable to feel certain about what might happen next. In that sense, we don’t have time.
We are time – there’s no meaningful way to think of a person’s existence except as a sequence of moments of time.
The more you focus on using time well, the more each day begins to feel like something you have to get through, en route to some calmer, better, more fulfilling point in the future, which never actually arrives.
Our lives, thanks to their finitude, are inevitably full of activities that we’re doing for the very last time.
Our obsession with extracting the greatest future value out of our time blinds us to the reality that, in fact, the moment of truth is always now – that life is nothing but a succession of present moments, culminating in death, and that you’ll probably never get to a point where you feel you have things in perfect working order
Therefore, you had better stop postponing the ‘real meaning’ of your existence into the future, and throw yourself into life now.
Enjoying Leisure
The regrettable consequence of justifying leisure only in terms of its usefulness for other things is that it begins to feel vaguely like a chore
To the philosophers of the ancient world, leisure wasn’t the means to some other end; on the contrary, it was the end to which everything else worth doing was a means.
Work, now, demanded to be seen as the real point of existence; leisure was merely an opportunity for recovery and replenishment, for the purposes of further work.
Sabbath: Walter Brueggemann describes the Sabbath as an invitation to spend one day per week ‘in the awareness and practice of the claim that we are situated on the receiving end of the gifts of God’.
A good hobby probably should feel a little embarrassing; that’s a sign you’re doing it for its own sake, rather than for some socially sanctioned outcome.
Five Questions to Make the Most of Your Finite Time
#1: Where in your life or your work are you currently pursuing comfort, when what’s called for is a little discomfort?
Pursuing the life projects that mater to you the most will almost entail not feeling fully in control of your time, immune to the painful assaults of reality, or confident about the future.
It means embarking on ventures that might fail, perhaps because you lacked sufficient talent; it means risking embarrassment, holding difficult conversations, disappointing others, and getting so deep into relationships that additional suffering - when bad things happen to those you care about - is all but guaranteed.
James Hollis recommends asking of every significant decision in life: Does this choice diminish me, or enlarge me?
Choose uncomfortable enlargement over comfortable diminishment whenever you can.
#2: Are you holding yourself to, and judging yourself by, standards of productivity or performance that are impossible to meet?
One common symptom of the fantasy of someday achieving total mastery over time is that we set ourselves inherently impossible targets for our use of it - targets that must always be postponed into the future, since they can never be met in the present.
What would you do differently with your time, today, if you knew in your bones that salvation was never coming - that your standards had been unreachable all along, and that you’ll therefore never manage to make time for all you hoped you might?
The more humane approach is to drop such efforts as completely as you can. Let your impossible standards crash to the ground. Then pick a few meaningful tasks from the rubble and get started on them today.
#3: In what ways have you to accept the fact that you are who you are, not the person you think you ought to be?
A closely related way to postpone the confrontation with finitude - with the anxiety inducing truth that this is it - is to treat your present-day life as part of a journey towards becoming the kind of person you believe you ought to become, in the eyes of society, a religion, or your parents.
But at a certain age, it finally dawns on us that no one really cares what we’re doing with our life; no one really cares except us.
Once you no longer feel the stifling pressure to become a particular kind of person, you can confront the personality, the strengths and weaknesses, the talents and enthusiasms you find yourself with, here and now, and follow where they lead.
#4: In which areas of life are you still holding back until you know what you are doing?
It’s easy to spend years treating your life as a dress rehearsal on the rationale that what you’re doing, for the time being, is acquiring the skills and experience that will permit you to assume authoritative control of things later on.
But I sometimes think of my journey through adulthood to date as one of incrementally discovering truth that there is no institution, no walk of life, in which everyone isn’t just winging it, all the time.
It’s alarming to face the prospect that you might never truly feel as though you know what you’re doing, in work, marriage, parenting or anything else. But it’s liberating, too, because it removes a central reason for feeling self-conscious or inhibited about your performance in those domains in the present moment.
#5: How would you spend your days differently if you didn’t care so much about seeing your actions reach fruition?
A final common manifestation of the desire for time mastery arise from the causal catastrophe: the idea that the true value of how we spend our time is always and only to be judged by the results.
Yet there is a sense in which all work – including the work of parenting, community-building and everything else – has this quality of not being completable within our own lifetimes.
Do The Next Most Necessary Thing
Your questions are unanswerable, because you want to know how to live. One lives as one can. There is no single, definite way … If that’s what you want, you had best join the Catholic Church, where they tell you what’s what.’
By contrast, the individual path ‘is the way you make for yourself, which is never prescribed, which you do not know in advance, and which simply comes into being itself when you put one foot in front of the other’
So long as you think you don’t yet know what that is, you still have too much money to spend in useless speculation. But if you do with conviction the next and most necessary thing, you are always doing something meaningful and intended by fate.’
The next and most necessary thing is all that any of us can ever aspire to do in any moment. And we must do it despite not having any objective way to be sure what the right course of action even is, precisely because that’s all you can do, it’s also all that you ever have to do.
Ten Tools for Embracing your Finitude
Adopt a ‘fixed volume’ approach to productivity. Establish predetermined time boundaries for your daily work.
Serialise, serialise, serialise. Focus on one big project at a time (or at most, one work project and one non-work project) and complete it before moving on.
Decide in advance what to fail at. nominate in advance whole areas of your life in which you’ll strategically under-achieve.
Focus on what you’ve already completed, not what’s left to complete. Keep a ‘done list’ which starts empty first thing in the morning, and which you gradually fill with whatever you accomplish through the day.
Consolidate your caring. Consciously pick your battles in charity, activism and politics: decide that your spare time, for the next couple of years will be spent doing a specific activity, not that other things don’t matter, but because you understand that to make a difference, you must focus your finite capacity for care.
Embrace boring and single-purpose technology. Remove social media apps from your phone, even email if you dare, the switch your screen from color to grayscale. Choose devices with only one purpose to help you focus.
Seek novelty in the mundane. Pay more attention to every moment, however mundane: to find novelty not by doing radically different things but by plunging more deeply into the life you already have.
Be a ‘researcher’ in relationships. When presented with a challenging or boring moment in your interaction with others, try deliberately adopting an attitude of curiosity, in which your goal isn’t to achieve any outcome, or successfully explain your position, but to figure out who this human being is.
Cultivate instantaneous generosity. Whenever a generous impulse arises in your mind – to give money, check in on a friend, send an email praising someone’s work – act on the impulse right away, rather than putting it off until later.
Practise doing nothing. The capacity to do nothing is indispensable, because if you can’t bear the discomfort of not acting, you’re far more likely to make poor choices with your time, simply to feel as if you’re acting.
Conclusion
When we stop hoping that the awful situation we’re in will somehow resolve itself, when we stop hoping the situation will somehow not get worse, then we are finally free – truly free – to honestly start working to resolve it.’
You could think of this book as an extended argument for the empowering potential of giving up hope.
Embracing your limits means giving up hope that with the right techniques, and a bit more effort, you’d be able to meet other people’s limitless demands, realise your every ambition, excel in every role, or give every good cause or humanitarian crisis the attention it seems like it deserves.
It means giving up hope of ever feeling totally in control, or certain that acutely painful experiences aren't coming your way. And it means giving up, as far as possible, the master hope that lurks beneath all this, the hope that somehow this isn’t really it - that this is just a dress rehearsal, and that one day you’ll truly feel confident that you have what it takes.
Your four thousand weeks have always been running out. When you begin to internalise all this even just a bit, the result is not despair, but an energising surge of motivation.
This is a timely post. It has given me a perspective that I will consider when setting new resolutions for the coming year.