Four Thousand Weeks (Oliver Burkeman)
OVERVIEW
Never in human history has the average person been gifted so many weeks to live. If you make it to 80, you’ll get more than four thousand – an unprecedented amount of time. And yet, our lives don’t seem to feel any more fulfilled. Busier, certainly. But not fuller. Science and technology have given us longer lifespans and more convenience, ways to do more things in less time, yet somehow life just feels more accelerated, not more enriched. We’re more efficient, but does anyone really feel like they have a surplus of time?
In “Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals,” Oliver Burkeman presents a novel view of time management. Burkeman won’t tell you that you should wake up earlier, or meal prep on Sunday. He won’t teach you how to clear your inbox, how to maximize your lunch break, or how to finally get to the bottom of your to-do list. Burkeman’s approach to time management is not about productivity or performance, but rather about recognizing your limitations and your finitude. The truth is, your time is short and there are an infinite number of things you could try to fill it with… but trying to do all those things means you never really do any of those things, and certainly none of the things that matter.
So, what should we do? Give up? Well, yes (and no). Admitting defeat is a good place to start, but it’s not the whole story. To get the rest, let’s look at some hard truths.
Efficiency
Hard truth: You’ll never be efficient enough to get everything done because it’s impossible to get everything done. There are an infinite number of tasks, things you could be doing (and maybe feel you should be doing), but you’ll never fit them all in.
Harder truth: The more you try to be efficient, the worse the situation will get. Burkeman calls this the “efficiency trap,” and it goes like this: the more you think you can get done, the more you have to get done… and the more you actually get done, the more you convince yourself (and others) that you can (and should) get everything done. Rinse and repeat. But that’s just the positive feedback loop. The actual tragedy is that in believing you have time for everything, you miss this: choosing one thing means sacrificing something else. And as long as you fail to realize that, you’ll end up sacrificing the important things in your quest to do everything. Tedious and trivial matters will start to crowd out the important projects/tasks/activities, and there will never seem to be enough time to do the things that matter.
Silver lining: You can’t cram everything in, so stop trying. “The reason isn’t that you haven’t yet discovered the right time management tricks or applied sufficient effort, or that you need to start getting up earlier, or that you’re generally useless. It’s that the underlying assumption is unwarranted: there’s no reason to believe you’ll ever feel “on top of things,” or make time for everything that matters, simply by getting more done.” Develop instead the anti-skill of being okay with the anxiety and overwhelm you feel at not being on top of things. Some stuff just isn’t going to get done. Pretending otherwise will crowd the meaningful things out of your life.
Okay, we’re feeling good! We’re feeling like maybe we can give up trying to get through our chores list, or all those other mundane, never-ending tasks… maybe we can even accept that our inbox will always be full of unread emails, or that we’ll never actually get around to vacuuming behind the fridge. What a relief! But we can still get everything we want out of life, right?
Limitations
Hard truth: There’s not enough time to do all the things you want to do.
Harder truth: There’s not enough time even to do all the important things you want to do. It’s not just that you should cut yourself some slack at work or accept that your house may always be a bit messy, it’s that all those “big things” you want out of life too – the amazing career, the adventures, the experiences, the relationships, the stuff – you can’t have all those things either. Maybe not even most of them. This is what Burkeman calls “existential overwhelm.” It’s not only that you must decide what’s important… it’s that after doing that there will be way too many things that are important. You will have to choose what gets your time and what doesn’t, among all these important things (and no, you can’t plan your way into getting them all done).
Silver lining – We could never do all the things we want to do – that was never going to happen. Admitting defeat is not failing, it’s embracing what was always true. So, now that we know we’re never going to get through our bucket list, we can instead choose to do a few things that count. This will require self-reflection and authenticity. What important things are you going to choose to do with your finite life? Do you want to travel, or do you want to spend more time with family? Do you want to have kids, or is it more important to have freedom? Do you want to spend your free time volunteering, or do you want to start your own charity? You will have to pick, and you can’t pick everything.
Now that you’re thinking about choices and time running out, let’s strike while the iron is hot.
Mortality
Hard truth: You’re going to die. Maybe not today or tomorrow (but then again… maybe today or tomorrow). Your life is inescapably finite. Every human life, including yours, is brief.
Harder truth: Living in denial of your finitude means that you can’t think honestly about how best to live your finite life. The truth is: this is it. This is all you get. To answer your question: yes, this is all there is. Your four thousand weeks have already started running out. Most of you are in the middle, or maybe even at the end.
Silver lining: It’s the finitude of life that makes everything matter. We think of our lives as being insultingly short, but without limited time, without limits, nothing matters at all. This idea is fleshed out fully in Martin Hägglund’s “This Life” (read the review here), which Burkeman summarizes nicely. Finitude forces us to make choices, and choices make us anxious because they foreclose possible futures. You can’t spend your life travelling and putting down deep roots. You can’t live the bustling city life and enjoy the quiet country life. You can’t keep your job security and strike out on your own. Some of us choose to manage this anxiety by trying to do everything. Some of us choose not to choose at all (and end up doing none of the things that matter). But rather than becoming a commitment-phobe, or experiencing FOMO, Burkeman offers instead JOMO – the joy of missing out. Relish in the fact that you get to make a commitment, that you were born and have time and can choose what to do with it. It’s your commitments that bring meaning into your life.
Okay, so we can’t do all the big things and we certainly can’t do all the small things… and we’re going to die, probably sooner than we’d like… but our lives can still have meaning, right?
Meaning
Hard truth: Most of us aren’t spending our lives doing things that we feel are meaningful. We push out fulfillment to some imagined future state… when we’ll finally have it all together, when we’ll finally start (or finish) something worthwhile.
Harder truth: By deferring meaningful work and projects to the future, you never actually live meaningfully now. If later is always too late, and now is all you ever get, then if you’re not discovering meaning in your living now, when are you discovering it?
Hardest truth: “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.” As Rachel and Ross Menzies said, “You are a mortal ape and, soon enough, you will be dead. You will not be remembered.” Let than sink in.
Silver lining: You can reset your expectations. Most of us have grand plans for ourselves. We imagine stunning achievements and engrossing adventures – a life lived well above average. But if Burkeman is right, almost all of us are going to fall short of this bar… so why set it this high? Why set the bar for anyone this high? Consider instead what Burkeman calls “cosmic insignificance therapy,” a constant reminder that you are, in fact, not very important. Overvaluing your existence sets unrealistic expectations that lead to very real disappointments, the feeling that we didn’t live the life we could have (or should have). What if, instead, we let go of the belief that we had to do anything extraordinary? Even more enticing, maybe some of the things you’re already doing are enough. Maybe making nutritious meals for your kids, or taking your dog to the beach, or filling your bird feeder, or teaching your neighbour piano… maybe all of that is enough… maybe it can be enough right now. Maybe those things are significant, maybe they are what make a meaningful life.
“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. (Isn’t it hilarious, in hindsight, that you ever imagined things might be otherwise?) Truly doing justice to the astonishing gift of a few thousand weeks isn’t a matter of resolving to “do something remarkable” with them. In fact, it entails precisely the opposite: 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.”
The time economy
We speak of the “time economy” and the “attention economy” as if time and attention are resources we possess. We speak of wasting time or spending it well; of time as something we can get or have more of. Attention too can be “wasted,” mindlessly scrolling through social media or bouncing around online from one ad or article to the next. Like time, attention is something we (presumably) use, and so it can be used well or poorly. But Burkeman offers that this is the wrong way to think about things. Time isn’t something you possess, time is what you are. Attention isn’t just what you’re focusing on… you are what you pay attention to. Time and attention are not like money – they are not resources that we can hoard or spend. They are our lives, our moment-to-moment experience.
And what’s the problem especially with treating time like a resource? Well, like money, it becomes more valuable to treat time as if its real value is its future value (Martin Hägglund pointed this out too). If we invest our time in the trivial and tedious today, tomorrow we might reap the reward… only to find that we never seem to get around to what matters. We’re always putting things off to tomorrow, and then we do the same thing with tomorrow, and eventually with all our tomorrows (until all that’s left is to look back and try to cobble together a meaning that didn’t exist in the moment… a sort of regretful, retrospective construction). It’s what John Maynard Keynes called “purposiveness” and what Moritz Schlick called living “under the curse of purposes.” It’s been called a future-focused-mindset, or “when-I-finally” mind. You might think of it as an “any-day-now” attitude – if I can just get through this week, next week there will be time for the things that really matter. If I could only get to the bottom of this damned to-do list, then I could really start living. Any day now…
Have you ever spent a day off work doing nothing at all, only to lament later that you didn’t get anything accomplished? Have you ever struggled to just relax and be at peace with being unproductive? Then you’ve seen this first-hand. Our time has become so commodified that leisure time doesn’t really feel leisurely. It rather starts to feel like we’re failing, like we’re not doing enough. Modern day leisure is one of the best ways to see clearly how we treat the present moment as if its only purpose is to create value for the future. When is what you’re doing right now ever going to be enough? Burkeman is right, later is too late. And if it is, then “you had better stop postponing the “real meaning” of your existence into the future, and throw yourself into life now.”
You’re never going to feel on top of things. You’re never going to feel like you finally have it all together. And if that’s true, then now is all you ever get, and so you’d better start living right now. The best way to do that is “time management for mortals.” Embrace your finitude and the prospect of your death. There is nothing that drives a knife through the tedium of existence like contemplating your own personal annihilation.
"...mortality makes it impossible to ignore the absurdity of living solely for the future. Where's the logic in constantly postponing fulfillment until some later point in time when soon enough you won't have any "later" left?"
WHAT NOW? (actions for mortal atheists)
Make time for play
Play, in the strictest sense of the word, is activity that’s fun. It carries its own intrinsic value and is not undertaken solely for some future achievement. To get out from under the “curse of purposes” is to get into something you enjoy right now, like play, or making time for hobbies. But what’s more, if your hobbies are slightly embarrassing and if you’re mediocre at them, even better! If you find your hobby a little embarrassing – if you worry that people might quip “that’s what you choose to do with your time?” – that’s exactly the right hobby, because you must be doing it for its own sake, for its own fulfillment. And you don’t have to be any good at your hobbies. We’re so obsessed with productivity and performance that doing something you’re only mediocre at because you like it is an act of defiance, and you’ll be happier for it. Experience what Karen Rinaldi called “the freedom to suck without caring.” Burkeman caps off: “Results aren’t everything. Indeed, they’d better not be, because results always come later – and later is always too late.”
Ask yourself these 5 questions:
1. Where in your life are you too comfortable? Where should you be pursuing discomfort? (risking failure, disappointment, embarrassment, or difficulty?)
2. Are you holding yourself to impossible standards of productivity and performance? If you could accept that these standards were unreasonable, what would you choose to do instead?
3. Have you accepted that you are who you are, or are you still hung up on becoming the person you think you ought to be? The person who will finally have permission to enjoy life? Why do you struggle to justify your existence, to yourself and to others in this way?
4. What important things are you waiting to start, or finish, until you feel more “on top of things?” If that perfect state of readiness is never coming, what would you do today?
5. What would you do differently if you didn’t care whether your actions today produced their desired results tomorrow? If you stopped living provisionally, what would you choose to do in this moment?
Embrace your finitude
Here are some tools Burkeman gives you to start:
· Focus on a few things at a time, and don’t start anything new until you finish something else.
· For big projects, pick one and don’t start any new projects until you finish that one.
· Decide what you’re going to fail at – strategic underachievement. You can’t excel at everything, so decide in advance what balls you’re going to drop.
· Don’t forget what you’ve already completed! We’re so forward-facing that we sometimes forget to appreciate all we have accomplished.
· Pay more attention in each moment. If you can take time to enjoy catching up with your spouse after work, your morning tea, your wait at the grocery store, etc. your life will naturally be more fulfilled.
· Practice doing nothing. If it’s impossible for you to simply sit and do nothing, chances are you’ll always be grabbing for something to do, and this is how your time fills up with poor choices.
· The things you really want to do you should start now. You will never feel like there’s enough time to learn Spanish, begin painting, or start writing that novel. The only way to ensure you get around to the really important things is to get around to them today (and remember, this will require you say no to several things you do also want to do; you can’t do all the important things, but you can do some, and you can’t make sure they happen if you don’t start today).
IN SUM:
Is this book entirely secular? No (a few religious stories and passages are included – mostly to illustrate points, not to suggest divine truths).
If I had to describe the book in one sentence? You can’t do everything, and now is all you ever get.
Who should read this book? Mortals who don’t spend enough time thinking about their finitude.