Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals – Oliver Burkeman
Date read: 9/18/21. Recommendation: 9/10.
I started this book while standing in a two-hour-long security line at Denver International Airport and there was perhaps no better book I could have chosen at that moment. Burkeman is a tremendous writer. He reaches surprising depth in such a short amount of time by distilling his ideas into their simplest form. The Antidote is the same way and was one of my favorite books for years. In this book, he addresses the anxiety that’s built from our own busyness and the shortness of life. While we obsess over an imaginary future state where we’ve escaped all problems and mastered our time, we’re actually missing out on life’s most meaningful moments. Burkeman rejects productivity gurus and time management hacks as making matters worse by further fueling our anxiety. Instead, he suggests letting go of the futile attempts to master our time. This starts with reconciling what’s within our control, taking ownership of those things, improving our decision-making, and embracing the art of patience. It’s a refreshing take on how to make the most of our time here.
See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.
My Notes:
The Efficiency Trap:
The more efficient you get, the more you become a “limitless reservoir for other people’s expectations.” Jim Benson
To avoid the efficiency trap, you need an anti-skill—a willingness to avoid such urges—“to learn to stay with the anxiety of feeling overwhelmed, of not being on top of everything, without automatically responding by trying to fit more in.” OB
“Convenience culture seduces us into imagining that we might find room for everything important by eliminating only life’s tedious tasks. But it’s a lie. You have to choose a few things, sacrifice everything else, and deal with the inevitable sense of loss that results.” OB
“But the undodgeable reality of a finite human life is that you are going to have to choose.” OB
Ownership:
“Rather than taking ownership of our lives, we seek out distractions, or lose ourselves in busyness and the daily grind, so as to try to forget our real predicament. Or we try to avoid the intimidating responsibility of having to decide what to do with our finite time by telling ourselves that we don’t get to choose at all.” OB
Expectations vs. reality:
“When you’re trying to Master Your Time, few things are more infuriating than a task or delay that’s foisted upon you against your will, with no regard for the schedule you’ve painstakingly drawn up in your overpriced notebook. But when you turn your attention instead to the fact that you’re in a position to have an irritating experience in the first place, matters are liable to look very different indeed.” OB
“You don’t get to dictate the course of events. And the paradoxical reward for accepting reality’s constraints is that they no longer feel so constraining.” OB
“Really, no matter how far ahead you plan, you never get to relax in the certainty that everything’s going to go the way you’d like. Instead, the frontier of your uncertainty just gets pushed further and further toward the horizon.” OB
“A most surprisingly effective antidote to anxiety can be to simply realize that this demand for reassurance from the future is one that will definitely never be satisfied—no matter how much you plan or fret, or how much extra time you leave to get to the airport. You can’t know that things will turn out all right. The struggle for certainty is an intrinsically hopeless one.” OB
“Your days aren’t progressing toward a future state of perfectly invulnerable happiness, and that to approach them with such an assumption is systematically to drain our four thousand weeks of their value.” OB
Procrastination:
Success isn’t preventing everything from falling through the cracks, it’s knowing what to let fall through. “The real measure of any time management technique is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things.” OB
“The good procrastinator accepts the fact that she can’t get everything done, then decides as wisely as possible what tasks to focus on and what to neglect. By contrast, the bad procrastinator finds himself paralyzed precisely because he can’t bear the thought of confronting his limitations. For him, procrastination is a strategy of emotional avoidance—a way of trying not to feel the psychological distress that comes with acknowledging that he’s a finite human being.” OB
“Since every real-world choice about how to live entails the loss of countless alternative ways of living, there’s no reason to procrastinate, or to resist making commitments, in the anxious hope that you might somehow be able to avoid those losses. Loss is a given. That ship has sailed—and what a relief.” OB
When faced with a significant decision in life, ask “Does this choice diminish me, or enlarge me?” Comfortable often equals diminishing. Uncomfortable often equals growth.
Awareness:
“We cannot get anything out of life. There is no outside where we could take this thing to. There is no little pocket, situated outside of life, to which we could steal life’s provisions and squirrel them away. The life of this moment has no outside.” Jay Jennifer Matthews
Impatience:
People complain that they no longer have “time to read” but the reality is not that they don’t have time, but when they find time they’re too impatient to give themselves over to the task.
“In a world geared for hurry, the capacity to resist the urge to hurry—to allow things to take the time they take—is a way to gain purchase on the world, to do the work that counts, and to derive satisfaction from the doing itself, instead of deferring all your fulfillment to the future.” OB
Three principles of patience:
Develop a taste for having problems.
“Yet the state of having no problems is obviously never going to arrive. And more to the point, you wouldn’t want it to, because a life devoid of all problems would contain nothing worth doing and would therefore be meaningless.” OB
“I was peeling a red apple from the garden when I suddenly understood that life would only ever give me a series of wonderfully insoluble problems. With that though an ocean of profound peace entered my heart.” Christian BobinEmbrace radical incrementalism .
Create small habits that you can sustain even on your worst days. Persistence is what matters, start small, show up every day.Originality lies on the far side of unoriginality.
Arno Minkkinen, Finnish American photographer, power of patience parable: At Helsinki’s main bus station, there are two dozen platforms with several different bus lines. You pick a route, but it follows most of the other buses on its first few stops through the city. In your career, after a couple of years of following that route, you’re dismayed your work isn’t as original as you hoped so you go back to the bus station and pick a different route. Instead, Minkkinen says the solution is to “Stay on the fucking bus.” Because after the buses get through the first leg of their journey, their routes begin to diverge, plunging off to unique destinations as they head through the suburbs to the countryside. That’s where the original, distinct work begins. “But it begins at all for those who can muster the patience to immerse themselves in the earlier stage—the trial-and-error phase of copying others, learning new skills, and accumulating experience.” OB