Four Thousand Weeks Time Management for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman

But now here we get to the heart of things, to a feeling that goes deeper, and that’s harder to put into words: the sense that despite all this activity, even the relatively privileged among us rarely get around to doing the right things. We sense that there are important and fulfilling ways we could be spending our time, even if we can’t say exactly what they are—yet we systematically spend our days doing other things instead.
But it is written in the belief that time management as we know it has failed miserably, and that we need to stop pretending otherwise.
The real problem isn’t our limited time. The real problem—or so I hope to convince you—is that we’ve unwittingly inherited, and feel pressured to live by, a troublesome set of ideas about how to use our limited time,
It was because, so far as we can tell, they generally didn’t experience time as an abstract entity—as a thing—at all. If that sounds confusing, it’s because our modern way of thinking about time is so deeply entrenched that we forget it even is a way of thinking; we’re like the proverbial fish
Historians call this way of living “task orientation,” because the rhythms of life emerge organically from the tasks themselves, rather than from being lined up against an abstract timeline, the approach that has become second nature for us today. (It’s tempting to think of medieval life as moving slowly, but it’s more accurate to say that the concept of life “moving slowly” would have struck most people as meaningless.
The details differ from person to person, but the kernel is the same. We recoil from the notion that this is it—that this life, with all its flaws and inescapable vulnerabilities, its extreme brevity, and our limited influence over how it unfolds, is the only one we’ll get a shot at.
This struggle against the distressing constraints of reality is what some old-school psychoanalysts call “neurosis,”
paradox of limitation, which runs through everything that follows: 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. But the more you confront the facts of finitude instead—and work with them, rather than against them—the more productive, meaningful, and joyful life becomes.
It also means resisting the seductive temptation to “keep your options open”—which is really just another way of trying to feel in control—in favor of deliberately making big, daunting, irreversible commitments, which you can’t know in advance will turn out for the best, but which reliably prove more fulfilling in the end.
Richard Bach: “You teach best what you most need to learn.”
possibilities.) But secular modernity changes all that. When people stop believing in an afterlife, everything depends on making the most of this life.
The more we can accelerate our ability to go to different places, see new things, try new foods, embrace various forms of spirituality, learn new activities, share sensual pleasures with others whether it be in dancing or sex, experience different forms of art, and so on, the less incongruence there is between the possibilities of experience we can realize in our own lifetimes and the total array of possibilities available to human beings now and in the future—that is, the closer we come to having a truly “fulfilled” life, in the literal sense of one that is as filled full of experiences as it can possibly be.
Yet because in reality your time is finite, doing anything requires sacrifice—the sacrifice of all the other things you could have been doing with that stretch of time. If you never stop to ask yourself if the sacrifice is worth it, your days will automatically begin to fill not just with more things, but with more trivial or tedious things,
One can waste years this way, systematically postponing precisely the things one cares about the most. What’s needed instead in such situations, I gradually came to understand, is a kind of anti-skill: not the counterproductive strategy of trying to make yourself more efficient, but rather a willingness to resist such urges—to learn to stay with the anxiety of feeling overwhelmed, of not being on top of everything, without automatically responding by trying to fit more in.
Your loyalty to your local taxi firm is one of those delicate social threads that, multiplied thousands of times, bind a neighborhood together; your interactions with the woman who runs the nearby Chinese takeout might feel insignificant, but they help make yours the kind of area where people still talk to one another, where tech-induced loneliness doesn’t yet reign supreme.
Convenience, in other words, makes things easy, but without regard to whether easiness is truly what’s most valuable in any given context.
it isn’t really the thought that counts, but the effort—which is to say, the inconvenience. When you render the process more convenient, you drain it of its meaning.
It’s only by facing our finitude that we can step into a truly authentic relationship with life.
it’s only the guarantee that he definitely won’t have an infinity of them that makes them worth valuing.
Point , but not true . We enjoy at first without thinking about it. It's the hormone
“it gave me a vital bit of perspective: I happen to be alive, and there’s no cosmic law entitling me to that status. Being alive is just happenstance, and not one more day of it is guaranteed.” This kind of perspective shift, I’ve found, has an especially striking effect on the experience of everyday annoyances—on my response to traffic jams and airport security lines, babies who won’t sleep past 5:00
For instance, it’s precisely the fact that getting married forecloses the possibility of meeting someone else—someone who might genuinely have been a better marriage partner; who could ever say?—that makes marriage meaningful.
this truth about finitude has been called the “joy of missing out,” by way of a deliberate contrast with the idea of the “fear of missing out.”
The critical question isn’t how to differentiate between activities that matter and those that don’t, but what to do when far too many things feel at least somewhat important, and therefore arguably qualify as big rocks.
Principle number one is to pay yourself first when it comes to time.
This is the same insight embodied in two venerable pieces of time management advice: to work on your most important project for the first hour of each day, and to protect your time by scheduling “meetings” with yourself, marking them in your calendar so that other commitments can’t intrude.
if you plan to spend some of your four thousand weeks doing what matters most to you, then at some point you’re just going to have to start doing it.
The second principle is to limit your work in progress
his “neuroses are no different from ours, no more freakish: only more intense, more pure … [and] driven by genius to an integrity of unhappiness that most of us never approach.” Like the rest of us, Kafka railed at reality’s constraints. He was indecisive in love, and in much else, because he yearned to live more than one life:
In other words, it’s easy for me to fantasize about, say, a life spent achieving stellar professional success, while also excelling as a parent and partner, while also dedicating myself to training for marathons or lengthy meditation retreats or volunteering in my community—because so long as I’m only fantasizing, I get to imagine all of them unfolding simultaneously and flawlessly.
“and this is why we find more charm in hope than in possession, in dreams than in reality.”
there’s no reason to procrastinate, or to resist making commitments, in the anxious hope that you might somehow be able to avoid those losses. Loss is a given. That ship has sailed—and what a relief.
It’s common, for example, to enter a relationship unconsciously hoping that your partner will provide both an unlimited sense of stability and an unlimited sense of excitement—and then, when that’s not what transpires, to assume that the problem is your partner and that these qualities might coexist in someone else, whom you should therefore set off to find. The reality is that the demands are contradictory. The qualities that make someone a dependable source of excitement are generally the opposite of those that make him or her a dependable source of stability. Seeking both in one real human isn’t much less absurd than dreaming of a partner who’s both six and five feet tall.
when people finally do choose, in a relatively irreversible way, they’re usually much happier as a result.
Yet the capacity to exert some influence over the other part of your attention—the “top-down” or voluntary kind—can make the whole difference between a well-lived life and a hellish one.
Young began to understand that this was precisely the wrong strategy. In fact, the more he concentrated on the sensations of intense cold, giving his attention over to them as completely as he could, the less agonizing he found them—
When he stopped trying to block out those sensations and attended to them instead, the discomfort would evaporate.
you’re forced to face your limits, an experience that feels especially uncomfortable precisely because the task at hand is one you value so much. Unlike the architect from Shiraz, who refused to bring his ideal mosque into the world of time and imperfection, you’re obliged to give up your godlike fantasies and to experience your lack of power over things you care about. Perhaps the cherished creative project will prove beyond your talents, or maybe the difficult marital conversation for which you’d been
The way to find peaceful absorption in a difficult project, or a boring Sunday afternoon, isn’t to chase feelings of peace or absorption, but to acknowledge the inevitability of discomfort, and to turn more of your attention to the reality of your situation than to railing against it.
But the struggle for control over the future is a stark example of our refusal to acknowledge our built-in limitations when it comes to time, because it’s a fight the worrier obviously won’t win. You can never be truly certain about the future. And so your reach will always exceed your grasp.
So a surprisingly effective antidote to anxiety can be to simply realize that this demand for reassurance from the future is one that will definitely never be satisfied
The struggle for certainty is an intrinsically hopeless one—which means you have permission to stop engaging in it.
same advice: that we should aspire to confine our attentions to the only portion of time that really is any of our business—this one,
Rather, a life spent “not minding what happens” is one lived without the inner demand to know that the future will conform to your desires for it—
Joseph Goldstein, “a plan is just a thought.” We treat our plans as though they are a lasso, thrown from the present around the future, in order to bring it under our command. But all a plan is—all it could ever possibly be—is a present-moment statement of intent.
We treat everything we’re doing—life itself, in other words—as valuable only insofar as it lays the groundwork for something else.
Herzen says. “But a child’s purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn’t disdain what only lives for a day. It pours the whole of itself into each moment … Life’s bounty is in its flow. Later is too late.”
Yet usually there’ll be no way to know, in the moment itself, that you’re doing it for the last time. Harris’s point is that we should therefore try to treat every such experience with the reverence we’d show if it were the final instance of it. And indeed there’s a sense in which every moment of life is a “last time.”
Rest is permissible, but only for the purposes of recuperation for work, or perhaps for some other form of self-improvement. It becomes difficult to enjoy a moment of rest for itself alone, without regard for any potential future benefits, because rest that has no instrumental value feels wasteful.
And it makes sense that this feeling might strike in the form of a midlife crisis, because midlife is when many of us first become consciously aware that mortality is approaching—and mortality makes it impossible to ignore the absurdity of living solely for the future.
And so in order to be a source of true fulfillment, 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.
Likewise, Brown argues, we speed addicts must crash to earth. We have to give up. You surrender to the reality that things just take the time they take, and that you can’t quiet your anxieties by working faster, because it isn’t within your power to force reality’s pace as much as you feel you need to, and because the faster you go, the faster you’ll feel you need to go.
Psychotherapists call it a “second-order change,” meaning that it’s not an incremental improvement but a change in perspective that reframes everything. 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.
Peck’s insight here—that if you’re willing to endure the discomfort of not knowing, a solution will often present itself
In practical terms, three rules of thumb are especially useful for harnessing the power of patience as a creative force in daily life. The first is to develop a taste for having problems.
The most generic definition is simply that it’s something that demands that you address yourself to it—and if life contained no such demands, there’d be no point in anything. Once you give up on the unattainable goal of eradicating all your problems, it becomes possible to develop an appreciation for the fact that life just is a process of engaging with problem after problem, giving each one the time it requires
The second principle is to embrace radical incrementalism
They couldn’t stand the discomfort that arose from being forced to acknowledge their limited control over the speed of the creative process—and so they sought to escape it, either by not getting down to work at all, or by rushing headlong into stressful all-day writing binges, which led to procrastination later on, because it made them learn to hate the whole endeavor.
Stopping helps strengthen the muscle of patience that will permit you to return to the project again and again, and thus to sustain your productivity over an entire career.
The final principle is that, more often than not, originality lies on the far side of unoriginality.
To experience the profound mutual understanding of the long-married couple, you have to stay married to one person; to know what it’s like to be deeply rooted in a particular community and place, you have to stop moving around. Those are the kinds of meaningful and singular accomplishments that just take the time they take.
Yet the truth is that time is also a “network good,” one that derives its value from how many other people have access to it, too, and how well their portion is coordinated with yours.
To do countless important things with time—to socialize, go on dates, raise children, launch businesses, build political movements, make technological advances—it has to be synchronized with other people’s.
which is why, for premodern people, the worst of all punishments was to be physically ostracized,
better approached as something to share, even if that means surrendering some of your power to decide exactly what you do with it and when.
every gain in personal temporal freedom entails a corresponding loss in how easy it is to coordinate your time with other people’s.
They derived psychological benefits not merely from vacation time, but from having the same vacation time as other people.
what people need isn’t greater individual control over their schedules but rather what he calls “the social regulation of time”: greater outside pressure to use their time in particular ways.
On the one hand, there’s the culturally celebrated goal of individual time sovereignty—the freedom to set your own schedule, to make your own choices, to be free from other people’s intrusions into your precious four thousand weeks. On the other hand, there’s the profound sense of meaning that comes from being willing to fall in with the rhythms of the rest of the word:
You can grasp the truth that power over your time isn’t something best hoarded entirely for yourself: that your time can be too much your own.
The modern world is especially lacking in good responses to such feelings: religion no longer provides the universal ready-made sense of purpose it once did, while consumerism misleads us into seeking meaning where it can’t be found. But the sentiment itself is an ancient one. The writer of the book of Ecclesiastes, among many others, would instantly have recognized the suffering of Hollis’s patient: “Then I considered all that my hands had done, and the toil I had spent in doing it, and behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun.”
blunt but unexpectedly liberating truth: that what you do with your life doesn’t matter all that much—and when it comes to how you’re using your finite time, the universe absolutely could not care less.
Clearly, it can’t just be ordinary: After all, if your life is as significant in the scheme of things as you tend to believe, how could you not feel obliged to do something truly remarkable with it?
No wonder it comes as a relief to be reminded of your insignificance: it’s the feeling of realizing that you’d been holding yourself, all this time, to standards you couldn’t reasonably be expected to meet.
Cosmic insignificance therapy is an invitation to face the truth about your irrelevance in the grand scheme of things. To embrace it, to whatever extent you can.
refusing to hold them to an abstract and overdemanding standard of remarkableness, against which they can only ever be found wanting, and taking them instead on their own terms, dropping back down from godlike fantasies of cosmic significance into the experience of life as it concretely, finitely—and often enough, marvelously—really is.
Because your quantity of time is so limited, you’ll never reach the commanding position of being able to handle every demand that might be thrown at you or pursue every ambition that feels important; you’ll be obliged to make tough choices instead.
once you’ve implemented a better system of personal organization, or got your degree, or invested a sufficient number of years in honing your craft; or once you’ve found your soulmate or had kids, or once the kids have left home, or once the revolution comes and social justice is established—that’s when you’ll feel in control at last, you’ll be able to relax a bit, and true meaningfulness will be found. Until then, life necessarily feels like a struggle: sometimes an exciting one, sometimes exhausting, but always in the service of some moment of truth that’s still in the future.
Accept the inevitability of the affliction, and freedom ensues: you can get on with living at last.
1. Where in your life or your work are you currently pursuing comfort, when what’s called for is a little discomfort?
James Hollis recommends asking of every significant decision in life: “Does this choice diminish me, or enlarge me?” The question circumvents the urge to make decisions in the service of alleviating anxiety and instead helps you make contact with your deeper intentions for your time.
Choose uncomfortable enlargement over comfortable diminishment whenever you can.
1. Are you holding yourself to, and judging yourself by, standards of productivity or performance that are impossible to meet?
1. In what ways have you yet to accept the fact that you are who you are, not the person you think you ought to be?
This quest to justify your existence in the eyes of some outside authority can continue long into adulthood. But “at a certain age,” writes the psychotherapist Stephen Cope, “it finally dawns on us that, shockingly, no one really cares what we’re doing with our life.
The attempt to attain security by justifying your existence, it turns out, was both futile and unnecessary all along.
1. In which areas of life are you still holding back until you feel like you know what you’re doing?
I sometimes think of my journey through adulthood to date as one of incrementally discovering the truth that there is no institution, no walk of life, in which everyone isn’t just winging it, all the time.
1. How would you spend your days differently if you didn’t care so much about seeing your actions reach fruition?
His sole advice for walking such a path was to “quietly do the next and most necessary thing.
But if you do with conviction the next and most necessary thing, you are always doing something meaningful and intended by fate.”
1. Adopt a “fixed volume” approach to productivity.
1. Serialize, serialize, serialize.
1. Decide in advance what to fail at.
1. Focus on what you’ve already completed, not just on what’s left to complete.
1. Consolidate your caring.
1. Embrace boring and single-purpose technology.
1. Seek out novelty in the mundane.
1. Be a “researcher” in relationships.
1. 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,
1. Practice doing nothing.

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Four Thousand Weeks Time Management for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman #41