Time Management for Mortals
My notes from “Four Thousand Weeks” by Oliver Burkeman
Introduction: In the Long Run, We’re All Dead
Living till eighty is four thousand weeks.
“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
Economist John Maynard Keynes made a famous prediction in 1930: within a century, thanks to the growth of wealth and the advance of technology, no one would have to work more than about fifteen hours a week.
When people make enough money to meet their needs, they just find new things to need and new lifestyles to aspire to.
“Life, I knew, was supposed to be more joyful than this, more real, more meaningful, and the world was supposed to be more beautiful. We were not supposed to hate Mondays and life for the weekends and holidays. We were not supposed to have to raise our hands to be allowed to pee. We were not supposed to be kept indoors on a beautiful day, day after day.” — Charles Eisenstein
Part 1: Choosing to Choose
Chapter 1: The Limit-Embracing Life
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.
Until we get them into schedules, babies are the ultimate “task-oriented” beings.
Your 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.
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.”
Most of us were raised to prioritize future benefits over current enjoyments.
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.
Once you become convinced that something you’ve been attempting is impossible, it’s a lot harder to keep on berating yourself for failing.
“We don’t have to consciously participate in what it’s like to feel claustrophobic, imprisoned, powerless, and constrained by reality.” — Bruce Tift
“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
The most individual sovereignty you achieve over your time, the lonelier you get.
There is no time management technique that’s half as effective as just facing the way things truly are.
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.
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.
Focus on building the most meaningful life you can, in whatever figuration you’re in.
Fulfillment might lie in embracing, rather than denying, our temporal limitations.
The noblest of human goals wasn’t to become godlike, but to be wholeheartedly human instead.
Chapter 2: The Efficiency Trap
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.
Parkinson’s law: work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
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 the demands will increase to offset any benefits.
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.
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.
The more firmly you believe it ought to be possible to find time for everything, the less pressure you’ll feel to ask whether any given activity is the best use for a potion of your time.
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.
Chapter 3: Facing Finitude
Since finitude defines our lives, Heidegger argues that living a truly authentic life — becoming fully human — means facing up to that fact.
Each moment of decision is an opportunity to select from an enticing menu of possibilities, when you might easily never have been presented with the menu to begin with.
Chapter 4: Becoming a Better Procrastinator
If you make time for the most important things first, you’ll get them all done and have plenty of room for less important things besides.
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.
Limit your work in progress.
Only have 3 tasks ongoing at a time.
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.
Most of us need to get better at saying no.
If you’re procrastinating on something because you’re worried you won’t do a good enough job, you can relax — because judged by the flawless standards of your imagination, you definitely won’t do a good enough job. So you might as well make a start.
Chapter 5: The Watermelon Problem
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?
A friendship to which you never actually give a moment’s thought is a friendship in name only.
The current online attention economy is a giant machine for persuading you to make the wrong choices about what to do with your attention, and therefore with your finite life, by getting you to care about things you didn’t want to care about.
The technology companies’ profits come from seizing our attention, then selling it to advertisers.
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.
The only faculty you can use to see what’s happening to your attention is your attention, the very thing that’s already been commandeered.
“We are distracted from distraction by distraction.” — T. S. Eliot
Chapter 6: The Intimate Interrupter
The more intensely he could hold his attention on the experience of whatever he was doing, the clearer it became to him that the real problem had been not the activity itself but his internal resistance to experiencing it. When he stopped trying to block out those sensations and attended to them instead, the discomfort would evaporate.
Listening takes effort and patience and a spirit of surrender, and because what you hear might upset you, so checking your phone is naturally more pleasant.
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.
The less attention you devote to objecting to what is happening to you, the more attention you can give to what is actually happening.
Part 2: Beyond Control
Chapter 7: We Never Really Have Time
Hofstadter's law is any task you’re planning to tackle will always take longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's law.
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.
The problem is the need that we feel, from our vantage point here in the present moment, to be able to know that those efforts to plan will prove successful.
You can’t know that things will turn out all right.
“So imprudent we are that we wander in the times which are not ours… We try to [give the present the support of] the future, and think of arranging matters which are not in our power, for a time which we have no certainty of reaching.” — Blaise Pascal
Despite our total lack of control over any of these occurances, each of us made it through to this point in our lives — so it might at least be worth entertaining the possibility that when the uncontrollable future arrives, we’ll have what it takes to weather that as well.
You shouldn’t necessarily even want such control, given how much of what you value in life only ever came to pass thanks to circumstances you never chose.
We should aspire to confine our attentions to the only portion of time that really is any of our business — this one, here in the present.
“Do you want to know what my secret is? You see, I don’t mind what happens.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
None of this means we can’t act wisely in the present to reduce the chances of bad developments later on. And we can still respond, to the best of our abilities, should bad things nonetheless occur; we’re not obliged to accept suffering or injustice as part of the inevitable order of things. But to the extent that we can stop demanding certainty that things will go our way later on, we’ll be liberated from anxiety in the only moment it ever actually is, which is this one.
Planning is an essential tool for constructing a meaningful life, and for exercising our responsibilities toward other people.
“A plan is just a thought.” — Joseph Goldstein
A plan is a present-moment statement of intent. It’s an expression of your current thoughts about how you’d ideally like to deploy your modest influence over the future. The future, of course, is under no obligation to comply.
Chapter 8: You Are Here
We treat everything we’re doing as valuable only insofar as it lays the groundwork for something else.
“Take education. What a hoax. People are like donkeys running after carrots that are hanging in front of their faces from sticks attached to their own collars. They are never here. They never get there. They are never alive.” — Alan Watts
We should treat every experience with the reverence we’d show if it are the final instance of it.
People in less economically successful countries are better at enjoying life — which is another way of saying that they’re less fixated on instrumentalizing it for future profit, and are thus more able to participate in the pleasures of the present.
Living more fully in the present may be simply a matter of finally realizing that you never had any other option but to be here now.
Chapter 9: Rediscovering Rest
You can do whatever you want with your free time off, so long as it doesn’t damage your usefulness on the job.
Work 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.
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.
“We are the sum of all the moments of our lives.” — Thomas Wolfe
“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
Mortality makes it impossible to ignore the absurdity of living solely for the future.
It’s inherently painful for humans to have things you want to do, or to have, in life because not yet having them is bad, but getting them is arguably even worse.
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.
Chapter 10: The Impatience Spiral
Working too hastily means you’ll make more errors, which you’ll then be obliged to go back to correct.
Alcoholism is fundamentally a result of attempting to exert a level of control over your emotions that you can’t ever attain.
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.”
Surrender to the reality that things just take the time they take.
It’s not an incremental improvement but a change in perspective that reframes everything.
“You cultivate an appreciation for endurance, hanging in, and putting the next foot forward. You give up demanding instant resolution, instant relief from discomfort and pain, and magical fixes.” — Stephanie Brown
Patience is the least fashionably but perhaps most consequential superpower.
Chapter 11: Staying on the Bus
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.
“They needed someone to give them permission to spend this kind of time on anything. Somebody had to give them a different set of rules and constraints than the ones that were dominating their lives.” — Jennifer Roberts
If you’re willing to endure the discomfort of not knowing, a solution will often present itself.
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.
How to develop patience:
1. Develop a taste for having problems
2. Embrace radical incrementalism
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.
3. Originality lies on the far side of unoriginality
Endure the trail-and-error phase of copying others, learning new skills, and accumulating experience.
Chapter 12: The Loneliness of the Digital Nomad
Soldiers can walk further without being fatigued when walking in unison with other soldiers or with music.
People who do things with others are happier.
Release your need for everything being perfect to be with people.
Chapter 13: Cosmic Insignificance Therapy
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.
Chapter 14: The Human Disease
1. Where in your life or your work are you currently pursuing comfort, when what’s called for is a little discomfort?
You usually know, intuitively, whether remaining in a relationship or job would present the kind of challenges that will help you grow as a person or the kind that will cause your soul to shrivel with every passing week.
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?
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 yet to accept the fact that you are who you are, not the person you think you ought to be?
4. In which areas of life are you holding back until you feel like you know what you’re doing?
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.
Everyone else is in the same boat, whether they’re aware of it or not.
5. How would you spend your days differently if you didn’t care so much about seeing your actions reach fruition?
There is a sense in which all work has this quality of not being compostable within our own lifetimes.
What actions — what acts of generosity or care for the world, what ambitious schemes or investments in the distant future — might it be meaningful to undertake today, if you could come to terms with never seeing the results?
“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.
Afterword: Beyond Hope
Once you no longer need to convince yourself that the world isn’t filled with uncertainly and tragedy, you’re free to focus on doing what you can to help.
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.
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