Four Thousand Weeks - Time Management for Mortals — Book Summary
The average life has about four thousand weeks. What do you do with them? And how? Four Thousand Weeks — Time Management for Mortals is a book by Oliver Burkeman, published in 2021.
There are three macro sections in the book, each one split into sub-sections. The first part reminds you that “In The Long Run, We’re All Dead”. The second part deals with “Choosing to Choose”. The third component delves into “Beyond Control”. Finally, the book provides some actionable protocols and tools for implementing the principles of time management for mortals.
The leading theory of the book is this: your time is finite, and yet you treat it as if it was infinite, so stuck in the traps of efficiency and busyness you are. When you contend with and wholly accept the reality that you are a finite and insignificant being in the vastness of the cosmos, you can start dropping your impulses to control every second of your day in favor of selecting carefully very few, high-impact projects and tasks to focus on at one time.
“[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.”
Part 0: In the long run, we’re all dead
Time management is a highly popular sub-category of the productivity niche, which is wildly popular. Our main time management focus so far has been mostly based on tricks to become more efficient and productive. Such a focus has driven the busyness and anxiety crisis among (knowledge) workers, fueled by the inherently mimetic belief that it is never enough and we should strive for more, better, bigger, faster. When you dissect the average lifespan of a human being, you will quickly notice its shortness and insignificance in the grand scheme of things. Striving for never-ending productivity is a trap, and more efficiency leads to more work accumulated instead of less. It’s a never-ending cycle that may prevent you from living your finite existence on Earth.
Part 1: Choosing to choose
When you try to master time—or anything in life—time ends up mastering you, because you cling to an ideal that is far beyond your control. Clinging and attaching your identity to something is a source of suffering. When you let go of attempting to master time, life may feel more joyful, meaningful, and productive. The “efficiency trap” is a principle stating that the more efficient you make yourself (e.g., responding to emails within the first hour of reception), the busier your life becomes, because the demands from others will increase proportionately, and you may get trapped in the identity of “the kind of person who is very responsive”. This may make your life a bit more miserable because you don’t want to betray your identity, so you stay connected every hour of the day fearing you may miss something on your plate.
In truth, freedom can begin when you realize that you can’t escape making hard choices in life. You can focus on low-priority, busy-work tasks all day long, but the high-impact project that makes you feel discomfort is still there, staring at you while waiting to be picked up to begin its journey of expression. In such situations, what’s needed is an “anti-skill” (Burkeman, 2021): accepting and welcoming the feeling of overwhelm and anxiety, without attempting to extinguish it by burying your head in more busyness.
“The real measure of any time management technique is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things.”
The first principle of being a “good procrastinator” (Burkeman, 2021) is to pay yourself first when it comes to time. Your existence is more important than that of others. When you accept your finite time and put yourself first, you can make time-management decisions based on your well-being instead of others’ well-being. The second principle is to limit “work in progress”. You may focus on one or two big projects at a time, and forget about anything else for the necessary period. Great work happens with a consistent, light-hearted, fully committed focus for a stretched period of time. The third principle is to stop having multiple “priorities” in favor of choosing very few, selected priorities, and eliminating anything else on your infinite-life bucket list. This is in line with the famous tale attributed to Warren Buffet.
“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.”
Part 2: Beyond control
Here is a liberating, possibly also terrifying truth: at the macro level, what you do with your life does not matter much at all. The universe does not care about how you spend your time, because your life is a tiny dot in a boundariless space of dots. Meaning and joy in life can be achieved by letting go of the idea that you can control your life meticulously, and accept your imperfection instead. Then you can truly commit to a few things, and do them with the utmost focus and care of an experienced monk in meditation. When you try to fight your cosmic anxiety by going faster and becoming more efficient, anxiety pushes back, and it is stronger than you.
Patience and acceptance of reality as is (not as you wish it to be) are necessary ingredients for a meaningful life. There are three principles for cultivating such patience: to develop a taste for having problems, since life is a journey from problem to problem; to embrace radical incrementalism, which means establishing consistent small habits instead of occasional big lifts; to understand that originality lies on the far side of unoriginality, that implies you need lots of low-quality work in order to stumble upon high-quality work at some point in the process.
Tools
Finally, there are some tools and techniques you can use to practice the philosophical principles offered in the book.
Adopt a fixed volume approach to productivity. Keep three to-do lists: one for open tasks, one for closed tasks, and one for waiting-on tasks. Open tasks are anything you have on your mind or metaphorical plate. Closed tasks are the finite number of those you decide to work on at any one time. “Waiting-on” tasks are endeavors on hold because you are waiting for someone else’s input. According to Burkeman, only keep ten items at most on your closed list (this teaches you to prioritize). Only add a task to your closed list when you complete one of the existing tasks. And be content with enough.
Serialize. Only focus on one (or two in different domains) big projects at a time. Projects are overarching objectives with a clear output and a (sometimes not) well-defined timeline. Let go of the seeming urgency to get anything else done. Focus on the rock in front of you before you move on to cleaning up the pebbles on the ground around it.
Decide in advance what to fail at. Accepting your finite attention and time means letting go of the insecure belief that you can be good at everything you do. Decide what to be mediocre—or fail—at in order to gain the necessary energy and focus to place on your most important domains right now.
Focus on what you’ve already completed, not just on what’s left to complete. Keep a list of “done” tasks. Make it as mundane as it needs to be depending on the energy levels and life period you are currently in. Remind yourself you have completed things, before resolving to stop completing more things for the day or continuing to complete more things for the day.
Consolidate your caring. Similar to #2, but on a grander scale. You can only pay attention to a few selected battles in life. Start small. Accept your smallness. Choosing one situation to improve (e.g., charity at your local organization) is much more meaningful and feasible than spreading your attention to multiple worldwide causes you can’t even articulate. You may move on progressively on the impact scale as you achieve success on the more immediate causes first.
Embrace boring and single-purpose technology. Such as an e-reader for reading books, or your phone for communicating with people. A boring life may be one worth living if you decide so.
Seek out novelty in the mundane. Paying attention to every moment like an experienced monk sweeping the floor. Such an attitude can stretch out time, and you may find out that novelty is where you seek it.
Be a researcher in relationships. Adopt an “attitude of curiosity” (Burkeman, 2021). Evaluate others as enigmas to unlock and discover. Such a process can also help you discover yourself through the practice of open attention and genuine curiosity.
Cultivate instantaneous generosity. Inspired by meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein, this practice involves expressing your gratitude to other people and things as soon as the thought of it arises. No rumination allowed. Immediate and unapologetic generosity can pay off in greater life satisfaction and good opportunities.
Practice doing nothing. Accept the vastness and clarity of stopping action for the sake of temporary inaction, where thoughts and sensations are noticed and welcome, before being put away gently.
