Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

Four Thousand Weeks Summary

Considering that the average life span of 80 years translates into four thousand weeks, it highlights how short our lives really are. Many of us pursue relentless productivity to make a substantial difference in our limited time.

In “Four Thousand Weeks”, Author Oliver Burkeman addresses our limited lives and how we might use our time to live a more fulfilled life. The constant pursuit of productivity focuses on controlling time. However, because time is uncontrollable and we are unable to accurately predict the future, this attempt is futile. As we get more done in less time, more busy work piles up to keep us busy. There is no escape.

Instead, we should focus less on time and more on experiences that make time fall away. We should spend time doing things we love. Activities or work that allow us to lose ourselves in time. We should also focus on impacting the lives of those we are closest to rather than trying to make an impact on the world.

We can approach our decisions better by realizing we can never experience everything. Fear of missing out is inevitable because there are things that we just will never have the time to accomplish or participate in. Accepting and embracing this limitation again helps us to make decisions that will have the greatest impact on our lives.

Burkeman mentioned that content in life and decision-making can be approached by focusing mostly on the next most necessary or right thing to do. Everything else after that falls into line so that you are only focusing on the things you can immediately impact.  

Four Thousand Weeks Notes

In the long run, we’re all dead

• Living to the age of 80 gives us four thousand weeks of life.
• Productivity is seen by many as a way to get more things done rather than make time to experience more of the world.

Life on the Conveyor Belt

• Because our time is limited, we get frustrated by “wasting it.”
• As we get more efficient at things, we figure ways to fill the extra time with more activities. Constantly chasing the next level. This creates an endless cycle of busyness that never abates

On Getting the Wrong Things Done

• Even as we engage in this busyness, we experience a sense of things we could be doing that have more meaning. However, we fail time and time again to follow that sense.
• Task lists and productivity become a barrier to us getting to that meaningful time.

Choosing to Choose

The Limit Embracing Life

• The problem is not that our time is limited but that we have been trained to misuse our limited time.

Time before Timetables

• In modern days our sense of time has become heightened so much. Our calendars, clocks, etc., constantly make us aware of time and its passing.
• In medieval days task orientation was the only sense of time, and people sensed time accruing more slowly.

The End of Eternity

• In contrast, without time tracking, we are unable to coordinate more significant groups of people to progress industry
• Time has become a resource rather than a medium in which life unfolds.

Confessions of a Productivity Geek

• Productivity tools give us a feeling that we are on the cusp of feeling caught up. However, this never happens.
• The more we try to control time, the more we avoid recognizing and embracing our limitations of ourselves.

An Icy Blast of Reality

• Organize your days knowing that you won’t be able to get everything done.
• Instead of expecting things to be done in a specific time, let them occur through time naturally

The Efficiency Trap

• Busyness is a universal feeling. People in poverty have to work extra jobs to make ends meet. Or stress over having enough. Those into careers work so hard and so long that they rarely have time to see their children. We all have things we want to fit into our lives but can’t

Sisyphus’s Inbox

• As we catch up with everything that feels important, the goals posts will shift, and we will suddenly find or be given more stuff to do that is deemed necessary.
• “Work expands to fill the time available for its completion” Parkinson’s Law
• The fallacy of efficiency is that as we figure out how to do more in less time, people see us as efficient and more likely to get the job done. The problem is there is always a breaking point.

The Bottomless Bucket List

• Because the experiences we can have are limitless, it means we will never be able to experience everything that life has to offer.
• Trying to cram experiences can be just as overwhelming as work.

Why You Should Stop Clearing the Decks

• Having an importance filter is essential for tasks. If something is not important enough to spend time on or is only benefiting someone else, then you are only making their lives easier and not your own
• Don’t focus on clearing the decks of all the small tasks. Instead, focus on the tasks that have the most significant consequence or reward for you.

The Pitfalls of Convenience

• As tasks/errands become more convenient, they tend to lose the novelty which makes them valuable in the first place. When a job takes a bit more effort, it is more memorable and more open to other worthy experiences.

Facing Finitude

Thrown into Time

• By understanding that every decision we make cuts out a near endless supply of opportunities, we embrace the finitude of our choices. Each choice is a vote on the life we want to lead.

Getting Real

• The fact that life is limited is what makes all of our experiences valuable. If you could live forever, experiences would lose their value because you could experience them infinite times.
• As people near almost certain death from a terminal illness, these individuals have a new respect for the sense of time and a newfound outlook on their experiences.

Everything is borrowed time

• We must shift our perspectives from FOMO to JOMO or the joy of missing out. Because missing whatever other experience you could have had is less valuable than the decision or requirement to do what you are doing instead.

Becoming a Better Procrastinator

The objective measure of any time management technique is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things

The Art of Creative Neglect

• If a particular activity means a lot to you, then you need to make time for it every day. Otherwise, you will never get to it at a later point.
• Schedule time with yourself to make time for this important project
• Limit in-progress items to a max of three. No other task can be taken until one of your other three is completed.
• Avoid tasks that are not in your top percentage of priorities. These tasks just become suckers of your time that you are not very passionate about anyhow.

Perfection and Paralysis

• We cannot let the idea of perfection prevent us from progressing toward the areas we are most passionate about. Delaying progress until you can perfect something surely means it will never occur.

The Watermelon Problem

• Distraction, where we are not actively making a choice, is essentially us giving away bits of our life.
• Distraction has become a bad word thanks to social media and other technology that thrives off our attention. However, distraction is how we live as humans. If it weren’t for distractions, we would overlook beautiful sunsets while out on a walk. Or see that the rustling in the bushes might be a predator.
• Even with distraction, we must be able to focus on our experiences to enjoy them.

A Machine for Misusing your Life

• In social media usage or consumption, our focus is the product sold to marketers. The algorithms of social media are geared to identify the areas we spend the most time. However, these algorithms also identify the topics that elicit an emotional response from us to maintain our attention.
• Over time social media can carve our mood and personality with consistent psychological biases and exposure to topics or conversations that make us upset.

The Intimate Interrupter

The Discomfort of What Matters

• Boredom can occur when we are doing a task that forces us to confront our limitations. If our talents do not live up to what we expect, then we are more easily distractible.
• When much of your willpower is focused on avoiding discomfort or boredom, you limit the remaining will you have to accept the situation.

We Never Really Have Time

• As we add more time to a task, Hofstadter’s law makes that task take up the time you’ve planned and a little more.
• Planning extremely far ahead only makes you anxious about what the future holds.

Anything Could Happen

• Saying we have time for something is more like saying we accept it.
• The only time we are sure about the future is after it has already become the past.
• Much if what we value in our lives occurred due to circumstances outside of our control

Mind Your Own Business

• We can only control the present and our actions or reactions to it. We can plan for the future, but the future has no obligation to follow our plans.

You are Here

• Live life at the moment and don’t focus so much on the future that you are only using the current state to progress your future state.

The Last Time

• Most of us don’t approach life with pure appreciation and attention. We don’t notice that every activity could be out last.
• We pursue endless busyness with the end goal of being able to relax and enjoy life when you could instead have been enjoying life throughout with less busyness.

Absent in the Present

• On the contrary, if you focus too hard on being present in each moment, you lose the point. You are actively in the moment whether you want to be or not. Interacting with a moment without forcing is the goal.

Rediscovering Rest

The Decline of Pleasure

• Our leisure time has become a task in and of itself. When we feel like there is a way that you waste your time off it means we have our priorities set incorrectly.
• True leisure is not dictated by a list of activities. It is a right to be lazy and disconnect from all forms of work or obligation.

Rules for Rest

• We don’t have to expect rest to feel good. In an age when idleness is considered taboo it can be hard to psychologically get past the hurdle and allow yourself to rest.

Hiking as an End in Itself

• Spend more time doing activities without an end goal in mind. Do them just to do them.

Rod Stewart, Radical

• Hobbies allow us to do something for the joy of doing it. A true hobby has no underlying ulterior motive tied to a productive outcome.
• We don’t actually have to be good at a hobby in order for there to be benefits of the hobby.

The Impatience Spiral

Escape Velocity

• The phenomenon where people are still impatient even though daily life has become more and more efficient though technology can be explained by the frustration that a task can’t occur instantaneously. For example, dinner can take as little as 60 seconds to prepare, but this amount of time is frustrating because it is close to zero but not absolute zero.
• Many people report that they do not have time to read but the truth is more that because reading cannot really be sped up in meaningful way it looses the battle to the other distractions

Must stop, Can’t stop

• Living life in the fast lane has become as bad as any other addiction. We pursue speed and efficiency to avoid other emotions or fears. As we speed up we create additional emotional fuel by missing out on other aspects of our lives. This causes us to double down on speed and the spiral continues.

Staying on the Bus

• An exercise in patience and it’s difficulty is focusing on a piece of art for three hours. Avoiding all distractions and only taking time cow bathroom breaks you go through a phase of initial frustration at how slowly time is going by. After a certain point you mind gives in and you can experience the moment and the art with a whole new focus and clarity.

Watching and Waiting

• Often when we are confronted with a problem in an unfamiliar area if we are willing to accept being uncomfortable and sit with the issues and think through the roots we will be able to slowly see a solution come into view.

Three Principles of Patience

• if you can continue to pursue a passion or decision far enough your work or experience will begin to diverge from the paths that others have taken. In the early stages of career development or experience you tend to take a similar path that others have taken and you are unlikely to produce unique work or meaningful experiences.

The Loneliness of the Digital Nomad

In and Out of Sync

• Being able to sync up communal schedules with those you care about and spend the most time with is import to a sense of good use of time. When no one else is available when you are there becomes a lack of opportunity for social events.
• Digital nomads suffer for a sense of community when their lives are not connected to the time of others.

The Freedom to Never See Your Friends

• When you hoard you time so much that you give up on important social interactions you move too far to the other side of time management.

Cosmic Insignificance Therapy

The Great Pause

• At the start of the pandemic the stopping of the economy caused us to pause and realize a world outside is the fast lane. It allowed us to observe the things that really mattered for us.

A Modestly Meaningful Life

• It is empowering to realize that the likelihood of your life having impact equal to an Einstein is low. Yet regardless of this the activities we pursue with our days can be just as meaningful. We don’t have to make a dent in the universe. We can live a good life pursuing things that we value.

The Human Disease

• We will never be able to be in command of all of the opportunities that come our way. We have to make tough choices because we simply are not able to pursue them all.

Five Questions

• Sometimes we have to be uncomfortable in our decisions because it means we are taking risks. Reasonable risks that have rewards are worth pursuing if the enlarge you versus diminish you.
• Do not hold yourself to standards that are impossible to meet
• Don’t try to be someone you are not. Lean into your skills and values to contribute in ways that make sense for you. Don’t try to contribute the same as someone else
• Everyone is winging it in some way. Knowing that you don’t necessarily have to be all knowing go take action lowers the perceived risk to action.
• Know that seeing the outcome of a project is not required to start a project. We can start things in our lives that will never finish

The Next Most Necessary Thing

• With each moment, if we focus only on doing the next most necessary thing or the most right thing, we will be more content. Accept that knowing the right thing in every decision is impossible as well.

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Source

Burkeman, O. (2021). Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.