9 Time Management Mistakes You’re Making

Time management mistakes you’re making and questions to reflect on from “Four Thousand Weeks” by Oliver Burkeman

7 min readOct 29, 2023

1. You try to do more and don’t decide what to focus on

“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.” — Edward T. Hall

When people make enough money to meet their needs, they just find new things to need and new lifestyles to aspire to.

The real problem isn’t our limited time. The real problem is that we’ve unwittingly inherited, and feel pressured to live by, a troublesome set of ideas about how to use our limited time, all of which are pretty much guaranteed to make things worse.

Since hard choices are unavoidable, what matters is learning to make them consciously, deciding what to focus on and what to neglect, rather than letting them get made by default.

Warren Buffet’s advice: make a list of the top 25 things you want out of life and then arrange them in order, from the most important to the least. The top 5 should be those around which you organize your time. The remaining 20 should be actively avoided at all costs — because they’re the ambitions insufficiently important to you. They distract you from the core of your life that matters the most.

What are your top priorities?

2. You focus on the future

Instead of simply living our lives as they unfold in time, it becomes difficult not to value each moment primarily according to its usefulness for some future goal, or for some future oasis of relaxation you hope to reach once your tasks are finally “out of the way.”

It wrenches us out of the present, leading to a life spent leaning into the future, worrying about whether things will work out, experiencing everything in terms of some later, hoped-for benefit, so that peace of mind never quite arrives.

“We labour at our daily work more ardently and thoughtlessly than is necessary to sustain our life because to us it is even more necessary not to have leisure time to stop and think. Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself.” — Nietzsche

How are you feeling at this moment? What do you need to do right now?

3. You ignore your limitations

There is no time management technique that’s half as effective as just facing the way things truly are.

Once you become convinced that something you’ve been attempting is impossible, it’s a lot harder to keep on berating yourself for failing.

A limit-embracing attitude to time means organizing 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.

Technically, it’s irrational to feel troubled by an overwhelming to-do list. You’ll do what you can, you won’t do what you can’t, and the tyrannical inner voice insisting that you must do everything is simply mistaken.

When there is too much to do, the only route to psychological freedom is to let go of the limit-denying fantasy of getting it all done and instead focus on doing a few things that count.

It’s not an incremental improvement but a change in perspective that reframes everything.

Once you no longer need to convince yourself that you’ll do everything that needs doing, you’re free to focus on doing a few things that count.

What limitation have you been avoiding and how can you accept it?

4. You seek out pleasure and experiences

Stuffing your life with pleasurable activities often prove less satisfying than you’d expect.

The more wonderful experiences you succeed in having, the more additional wonderful experiences you start to feel you could have, or ought to have, on top of all those you’ve already had, with the result that the feeling of existential overwhelm gets worse.

For existential overwhelm, what’s required is the will to resist the urge to consume more and more experiences, since that strategy can only lead to the feeling of having even more experiences left to consume.

You get to focus on fully enjoying the tiny slice of experiences you actually do have time for — and the freer you are to choose, in each moment, what counts the most.

What experiences can you let go of?

5. You don’t prioritize yourself

If you don’t save a bit of your time for you, now, out of every week, there is no moment in the future when you’ll magically be done with everything and have loads of free time.

Pay yourself (time) first.

Spending at least some of your leisure time wastefully, focused solely on the pleasure of the experience, is the only way not to waste it — to be truly at leisure, rather than convert my engaged in future-focused self-improvement.

To rest for the sake of rest entails first accepting the fact that this is it: that your days aren’t progressing toward a future starts of perfectly invulnerable happiness, and that to approach them with such an assumption is systematically to drain our four thousand weeks of their value.

“Nothing is more alien to the present age than idleness. How can there be play in a time when nothing has meaning unless it leads to something else?” — John Gray

We might seek to incorporate into our daily lives more things we do for their own sake alone — to spend some of our time on activities in which the only thing we’re trying to get from them is the doing itself.

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.

What activity do you want to do to enjoy the present?

6. You are easily distracted

The ancient Greeks say distraction as a systematic inner failure to use one’s time on what one claimed to value the most.

What you pay attention to will define, for you, what reality is.

Your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention.

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.

To have any meaningful experience, you must be able to focus on it, at least a bit. Can you have an experience you don’t experience?

Because the attention economy is designed to prioritize 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’s not simply that our devices distract us from more important matters. It’s that they change how we’re defining “important matters” in the first place.

What do you value the most? What do you want to stop doing?

7. You need to keep up with everyone

As the world gets faster and faster, we come to believe that our happiness, or our financial survival, depends on our being able to work and move and make things happen at superhuman speed. We grow anxious about not keeping up — so to quell the anxiety, to try to achieve the feeling that our lives are under control, we move faster.

Speed addiction tends to be socially celebrated. Your friends are more likely to praise you for being “driven.”

Patience is the least fashionably but perhaps most consequential superpower.

In a world headed for hurry, the capacity to resist the urge to hurry — to allow things to take the time they take — is a way to do the work that counts, and derive satisfaction from the doing itself, instead of deferring all your fulfillment to the future.

We’re made so uneasy by the experience of allowing reality to unfolds at its own speed that when we’re faced with a problem, it feels better to race toward a resolution, really, so long as we can tell ourselves we’re “dealing with” the situation, thereby maintaining the feeling of being in control.

What activities have you been rushing? How can you be more patient?

8. You try to do too much

Embrace radical incrementalism: focus on making small progress consistently.

The most productive and successful academics made writing a smaller part of their daily routine than the others, so that it was much more feasible to keep going with it day after day.

What goal can you break down into a consistent habit?

9. You don’t allow yourself to do one thing at a time

“The individual path is the one you make for yourself, which I’d 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. Quietly do the next and most necessary thing. 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.” — Carl Jung

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.

Working within the limits of your moment in history, and your finite time and talents, you actually got around to doing — and made life more luminous for the rest of us by doing — whatever magnificent task or weird little thing it was that you came here for.

What’s the next most important thing you can do?

Read all of my notes for “Four Thousand Weeks” by Oliver Burkeman:

Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman - Twos

Time Management for Mortals. Introduction: In the Long Run, We're All Dead. Living till eighty is four thousand weeks…

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