Four Thousand Weeks

Oliver Burkeman (2021). Four thousand weeks: Time management for mortals. Allen Lane: Penguin Canada

6 our attention spans have shriveled to such a degree that even those of us who were bookworms as children now struggle to make it through a paragraph without experiencing the urge to reach for our phones … this … represents a failure to make the best use of a small supply of time

7 It’s because our time and attention are so limited, and therefore valuable, that social media companies are incentivized to grab as much of them as they can, by any means necessary – which is why they show users material guaranteed to drive them into a rage, instead of the more boring and accurate stuff

10 Getting Things Done, by … David Allen … there’ll always be too much to do

11-12 We sense that there are important and fulfilling ways we could be spending our time … yet we systematically spend our days doing other things instead

12-13 Our days are spent trying to “get through” tasks, in order to get them “out of the way,” with the result that we live mentally in the future, waiting for when we’ll finally get around to what really matters … “The spirit of the times is one of joyless urgency,” … Marilynne Robinson

13 Four Thousand Weeks is yet another book about making the best use of time. But it is written in the belief that time management as we know it has failed miserably … Productivity is a trap

17 The real problem isn’t our limited time. The real problem … is … a troublesome set of ideas about how to use our limited time

19 you … experience time as an abstract entity … something separate from us and from the world around us

20 “task orientation” … the rhythms of life emerge organically from the tasks themselves, rather than being lined up against an abstract timeline

21 Richard Rohr … “living in deep time.” … we still occasionally encounter islands of deep time today – in those moments when, to quote the writer Gary Eberle, we slip “into a realm where there is enough of everything, where we are not trying to fill a void in ourselves or the world.”

22-23 As soon as you want to coordinate the actions of more than a handful of people, you need a reliable, agreed-upon method of measuring time

23 From thinking about time in the abstract, it’s natural to start treating it as a resource, something to be bought and sold and used as efficiently as possible

24 Before, time was just the medium in which life unfolded, the stuff that life was made of. Afterward, once “time” and “life” had been separated in most people’s minds, time became a thing that you used – and it’s this shift that serves as the precondition for all the uniquely modern ways in which we struggle with time today

25 it becomes a lot more intuitive to project your thoughts about your life into an imagined future, leaving you anxiously wondering if things will unfold as you want them to. Soon, your sense of self-worth gets completely bound up with how you’re using time

26 This trouble with attempting to master your time … is that time ends up mastering you

26 this book is an explanation of a saner way of relating to time … it sketches a kind of life that’s vastly more peaceful and meaningful, while also … being better for sustained productivity over the long haul

29 most of us invest a lot of energy … in trying to avoid fully experiencing the reality in which we find ourselves

30 Our troubled relationship with time arises largely from this same effort to avoid the painful constraints of reality

31 almost everything worth doing … depends on cooperating with others, and therefore on exposing yourself to the emotional uncertainties of relationships

31 the more individual sovereignty you achieve over your time, the lonelier you get

32 the paradox of limitation … the more you try to manage your time with the goal of achieving a feeling of total control, and freedom from the inevitable constraints of being human, the more stressful, empty, and frustrating life gets. But the more you confront the facts of finitude instead – and work with them, rather than against them – the more productive, meaningful, and joyful life becomes

32  you definitely won’t have time for everything you want to do, or that other people want you to do … so … stop beating yourself up for failing

33 Every decision to use a portion of time on anything represents the sacrifice of all the other ways in which you could have spent that time

33 freedom … is to be found not in achieving greater sovereignty over your own schedule but in allowing yourself to be constrained by the rhythms of community … meaningful productivity often comes not from hurrying things up but by letting them take the time they take … German … Eigenzeit … the time inherent to a process itself  

42 “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion,” … C. Northcote Parkinson … 1955 … Parkinson’s law

42 getting better at processing your email is like getting faster and faster at climbing up an infinitely tall ladder

43 (… negligent emailers frequently find that forgetting to reply ends up saving them time …)

44 stop believing you’ll ever solve the challenge of busyness by cramming more in, because that just makes matters worse … instead … focus on doing a few things that count

45 when people start believing in progress … they feel far more acutely the pain of their own little lifespan

47 The more wonderful experiences you succeed in having, the more additional wonderful experiences you start to feel you could have

47 The technologies we use to try to “get on top of everything” always fail us … because they increase the size of the “everything” of which we’re trying to get on top

48 The harder you struggle to fit everything in, the more of your time you’ll find yourself spending on the least meaningful things

48 doing anything requires sacrifice

52 smoothness … is a dubious virtue, since it’s often the unsmoothed textures of life that make it livable, helping nurture the relationships that are crucial for mental and physical health, and for the resilience of our communities

52 contrary to the cliché, it isn’t really the thought that counts, but the effort – which is to say, the inconvenience

55 the undodgeable reality of a finite human life is that you are going to have to choose  

60 (The original Latin word for “decide,” means “to cut off,” as in slicing away alternatives …)

62 [Martin Heidegger] It’s only by facing our finitude that we can step into a truly authentic relationship with life

63 [Martin Hägglund] … It is by consciously confronting the certainty of death, and what follows from the certainty of death, that we finally become truly present for our lives

63 This is the kernel of wisdom in the cliché of the celebrity who claims that a brush with cancer was “the best thing that ever happened” to them: it pitches them into a more authentic mode of being, in which everything suddenly feels more vividly meaningful

65 if you can hold your attention … on the sheer astonishingness of being, and on what a small amount of that being you get – you may experience a palpable shift in how it feels to be here, right now, alive in the flow of time

68 “your whole life is borrowed time,” … [David] Cain … each moment of decision becomes an opportunity to select from an enticing menu of possibilities, when you might easily never have been presented with the menu to begin with. And it stops making sense to pity yourself for having been cheated of all the other options

69 it’s precisely the fact that I could have chosen a different and perhaps equally valuable way to spend this afternoon that bestows meaning on the choice I did make … it’s precisely the fact that getting married forecloses the possibility of meeting someone else – someone who might genuinely have been a better marriage partner … that makes marriage meaningful .. the “joy of missing out,” … a deliberate contrast with the idea of the “fear of missing out.”

71-72 the core challenge of managing our limited time [is] … how to decide most wisely what not to do, and how to feel at peace about not doing it … Gregg Krech … we need to learn to get better at procrastinating … in order to focus on what matters most. The real measure of any time management technique is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things

72-73 Perhaps you’re familiar with the extraordinarily irritating parable of the rocks in the jar … but it’s a lie … The real problem … [is] that there are too many rocks – and most of them are never making it anywhere near that jar

73-78 this dilemma … three main principles … Principle number one is to pay yourself first when it comes to time … The second principle is to limit your work in progress … book Personal Kanban … Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry suggest no more than three items … The third principle is to resist the allure of middling priorities … most of us need to get better at learning to say no … Elizabeth Gilbert … “… You need to learn how to start saying no to things you do want to do, with the recognition that you have only one life.”

78 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

83-84 Henri Bergson … “The idea of the future, pregnant with an infinity of possibilities, is thus more fruitful than the future itself … and this is why we find more charm in hope than in possession, in dreams than in reality.” … there’s no reason to procrastinate … to avoid those losses. Loss is a given … what a relief

84 “settling” – the ubiquitous modern fear that you might find yourself committing to a romantic partner who falls short of your ideal … You should definitely settle

85 [Robert] Goodwin … living life to the fullest requires settling … careers … relationships

86 people are sometimes guilty of spectacularly bad choices in love, and other domains as well. But more often, the real problem is just that the other person is one other person

86 The qualities that make someone a dependable source of excitement are generally the opposite of those that make him or her a dependable source of stability

87 when people finally do choose, in a relatively irreversible way, they’re usually much happier as a result

88 In consciously making a decision … the “joy of missing out” … When you can no longer turn back, anxiety falls away, because now there’s only one direction to travel: forward into the consequences of your choice

91 distraction … 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

92 the crucial point … the distracted person isn’t really choosing at all

92 achieving total sovereignty over your attention is almost certainly impossible … it would be highly undesirable to be able to do exactly as you wished with your attention

94 “Attention is the beginning of devotion,” … Mary Oliver … distraction and care are incompatible with each other

94 “attention economy,” … a giant machine for persuading you to make the wrong choices about what to do with your attention

95 All the feuds and fake news and public shamings on social media … aren’t a flaw … they’re an integral part of the business model

96 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

98 The only faculty you can use to see what’s happening to your attention is your attention … T.S. Eliot … we are “distracted from distraction by distraction.”

99 much of the time, we give in to distraction willingly

103 [Steve] Shinzen Young … 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

105 boredom … When you try to focus on something you deem important, you’re forced to face your limits, an experience that feels especially uncomfortable precisely because the task at hand is one you value so much

106 Bruce Tift … you’ll have had to allow yourself to risk feeling “claustrophobic, imprisoned, powerless, and constrained by reality.” … boredom … is … an intense reaction to the deeply uncomfortable experience of confronting your limited control

106-107 James Duesterberg. It’s true that killing time on the internet often doesn’t feel especially fun, these days. But it doesn’t need to feel fun. In order to dull the pain of finitude, it just needs to make you feel unconstrained … “distractions” [are] … just the places we go to seek relief from the discomfort of confronting limitation

108-109 The way to find peaceful absorption in a difficult project … [is] to acknowledge the inevitability of discomfort, and to turn more of your attention to the reality of your situation than railing against it … the paradoxical reward for accepting reality’s constraints is that they no longer feel so constraining

113 Douglas Hofstadter … “Hofstadter’s law,” … any task you’re planning to tackle will take longer than you expect, “even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.”

117-118 You can never be truly certain about the future … You only ever get to feel certain about the future once it’s already turned into the past

119 The struggle for certainty is an intrinsically hopeless one – which means you have permission to stop engaging in it

119 Whatever you value most about your life can always be traced back to some jumble of chance occurrences you couldn’t possibly have planned for

121 much of what you value in life only ever came to pass thanks to circumstances you never chose

122 Jiddu Krishnamurti … late 1970s … ‘Do you want to know what my secret is? … You see, I don’t mind what happens.’

123 Joseph Goldstein, “a plan is just a thought.” … The future … is under no obligation to comply

125 There’s another sense in which treating time as something that we own and get to control seems to make life worse … The problem is one of instrumentalization. To use time, by definition, is to treat it instrumentally, as a means to an end

132 play The Coast of Utopia, Tom Stoppard … Alexander Herzen … “Because children grow up, we think a child’s purpose is to grow up … But a child’s purpose is to be a child …”

134  the notorious case of corporate lawyers … Cathleen Kaveny has argued that the reason so many of them are so unhappy … is the convention of the “billable hour,” which obliges them to treat their time, and thus really themselves, as a commodity to be sold off in sixty-minute chunks

135-136 Our obsession with extracting the greatest future value out of our time blinds us to the reality that, in fact, the moment of truth is always now – that life is nothing but a succession of present moments, culminating in death … throw yourself into life now

139 it turns out that trying to have the most intense possible present-moment experience is a surefire way to fail

143 The regrettable consequence of justifying leisure only in terms of its usefulness for other things is that it begins to feel vaguely like a chore

143-144 Defenders of modern capitalism enjoy pointing out that despite how things might feel, we actually have more leisure time than we did in previous decades – an average of about five hours per day for men, and only slightly less for women. But perhaps one reason we don’t experience life that way is that leisure no longer feels very leisurely

144 Aristotle argued that true leisure – by which he meant self-reflection and philosophical contemplation – was among the very highest of virtues because it was worth choosing for its own sake, whereas other virtues, like courage in war, or noble behavior in government, were virtuous only because they led to something else

144 The Latin word for business, negotium, translates literally as “not-leisure,” reflecting the view that work was a deviation from the highest human calling

145 Some historians claim that the average country-dweller in the sixteenth century would have worked for only about 150 days each year, and while those figures are disputed, nobody doubts that leisure lay near the heart of almost every life

147 The truth, then, is that 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 covertly engaged in future-focused self-improvement

156 Taking a walk … is … a good example of what … Kieran Setiya calls an “atelic activity,” meaning that its value isn’t derived from its telos, or ultimate aim

156 telic [activities] … the primary purpose of which was to have them done, and to have achieved certain outcomes

157 when your relationship with time is almost entirely instrumental, the present moment starts to lose its meaning

157 midlife crisis … mortality makes it impossible to ignore the absurdity of living solely for the future

158 In an age of instrumentalization, the hobbyist is a subversive: he insists that some things are worth doing for themselves alone, despite offering no payoffs in terms of productivity or profit

159 There’s a second sense in which hobbies pose a challenge to our reigning culture of productivity and performance: it’s fine, and perhaps preferable, to be mediocre at them

162 Taoism … Things just are the way they are … no matter how vigorously you might wish they weren’t – and your only hope of exercising any real influence over the world is to work with that fact, instead of against it

162 traffic research long ago established that impatient driving behavior tends to slow you down

165-166 People complain that they no longer have “time to read,” but the reality … is … they’re too impatient to give themselves over to the task … reading something properly just takes the time it takes

166-168 In the late 1990s … Stephanie Brown began to notice … that … The high achievers of Silicon Valley reminded Brown of herself in her days as an alcoholic … her point isn’t that compulsive hurry is as physically destructive as an excess of alcohol. It’s that the basic mechanism is the same

169 there’s an intoxicating thrill to living at warp speed … But as a way of achieving peace of mind, it’s doomed to fail

170-171 speed addicts … you can’t quiet your anxieties by working faster … a “second-order change,” meaning that it’s not an incremental improvement but a change in perspective that reframes everything. When you finally face the truth that you can’t dictate how fast things go, you stop trying to outrun your anxiety, and your anxiety is transformed … you begin to acquire what has become the least fashionable but perhaps most consequential of superpowers: patience

173-174 patience has a terrible reputation … it’s disturbingly passive … But as society accelerates … patience becomes a form of power … 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

178-180 book The Road Less Travelled … M. Scott Peck … “… I’ve never been able to fix those kinds of things!” “That’s because you don’t take the time,” … 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 unfold at its own speed that when we’re faced with a problem, it feels better to race toward a resolution – any resolution, really, so long as we can tell ourselves we’re “dealing with” the situation, thereby maintaining the feeling of being in control … Or we abandon difficult creative projects, or nascent romantic relationships, because there’s less uncertainty in just calling things off than waiting to see how they might develop

180-184 three rules of thumb … for harnessing the power of patience as a creative force in daily life. The first is to develop a taste for having problems … a life devoid of all problems would contain nothing worth doing …

The second principle is to embrace radical incrementalism … Robert Boice … the most productive and successful among them generally made writing a smaller part of their daily routine than others, so it was much more feasible to keep going with it day after day. They cultivated the patience to tolerate the fact that they probably wouldn’t be producing very much on any individual day, with the result that they produced much more over the long term … sometimes as short as ten minutes, and never longer than four hours – and they religiously took weekends off … the students’ impatient desire to hasten their work … was impeding their progress … One critical aspect … be willing to stop when your daily time is up … Stopping helps strengthen the muscle of patience …

The final principle is that … originality lies on the far side of unoriginality … Arno Minkkinen … “Stay on the bus …” … muster the patience … in the earlier stage – the trial-and-error phase of copying others, learning new skills, and accumulating experience

184 To experience the profound mutual understanding of the long-married couple, you have to stay married to one person

186-187 a misunderstanding about the value of time … time as a regular kind of “good” … Yet the truth is that time is also a “network good,” one that derives its value from how many other people have access to it, too, and how well their portion is coordinated with yours

188-189 basic mistake – of treating our time as something to hoard, when it’s better approached as something to share, even if that means surrendering some of your power to decide exactly what you do with it and when … every gain in personal temporal freedom entails a corresponding loss in how easy it is to coordinate your time with other people’s … the shared rhythms required for deep relationships to take root

191-192 Sweden … fika, the daily moment when everyone in a given workplace gets up from their desks to gather for coffee and cake … people mingle without regard for age, or class, or status within the office, discussing both work-related and non-work matters: for half an hour or so, communication and conviviality take precedence over hierarchy and bureaucracy. One senior manager told me it was by far the most effective way to learn what was really going on in his company

196 research has indicated that conforming to an external rhythm renders one’s gait imperceptibly more efficient

199 We live less and less of our lives in the same temporal grooves as one another. The unbridled reign of this individualist ethos, fueled by the demands of the market economy, has overwhelmed our traditional ways of organizing time, meaning that the hours in which we rest, work, and socialize are becoming ever more uncoordinated

200 political implications … grassroots politics … a vacuum of collective action … gets filled by autocratic leaders, who thrive on the mass support of people who are otherwise disconnected – alienated from one another … a captive audience for televised propaganda

201 prioritize activities in the physical world over those in the digital one

204 consumerism misleads us into seeking meaning where it can’t be found

205 What would it mean to spend the only time you ever get in a way that truly feels as though you are making it count?

208-209 Bryan Magee … Human civilization is about six thousand years old … your own life will have been a minuscule little flicker of near-nothingness in the scheme of things

211 self-centered judgments … the “egocentricity bias,” make good sense from an evolutionary standpoint

212 it comes as a relief to be reminded of your insignificance

213 Cosmic insignificance therapy is an invitation to face the truth about your irrelevance in the grand scheme of things

218 You have to accept that there will always be too much to do; that you can’t avoid tough choices or make the world run at your preferred speed; that no experience, least of all close relationships with other human beings, can ever be guaranteed in advance to turn out painlessly and well – and that from a cosmic viewpoint, when it’s all over, it won’t have counted for very much anyway

219 none of this is an argument against long-term endeavors like marriage or parenting, building organizations or reforming political systems, and certainly not against tackling the climate crisis; these are among the things that matter most … now is all you ever get

219 The human disease is often painful … Charlotte Joko Beck … it’s only unbearable for as long as you’re under the impression that there might be a cure

220-227 Five Questions … to make the most of your finite time.

1.     Where in your life or your work are you currently pursuing comfort, when what’s called for is a little discomfort? … 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? …

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? … Stephen Cope … “…no one really cares what we’re doing with our life …” … Once you no longer feel the stifling pressure to become a particular kind of person, you can confront the personality, the strengths and weaknesses, the talents and enthusiasms you find yourself with, here and now, and follow where they lead …

4.     In which areas of life are you still holding back until you feel like you know what you’re doing? … there is no institution, no walk of life, in which everyone isn’t just winging it, all the time … you might never truly feel as though you know what you’re doing, in work, marriage, parenting, or anything else. But it’s liberating, too …

5.     How would you spend your days differently if you didn’t care so much about seeing your actions reach fruition?

227 Carl Jung … “quietly do the next and most necessary thing … if you do with conviction the next and most necessary thing, you are always doing something meaningful and intended by fate.”

229 everything is screwed

230 it’s hard to remain entirely confident that everything will turn out fine

230-231 People sometimes ask Derrick Jensen … how he manages to stay hopeful … But he tells them he doesn’t – and he thinks that’s a good thing … To give up hope … is to reinhabit the power that you actually have … “… start working to resolve it.” 

231 You could think of this book as an extended argument for the empowering potential of giving up hope

232 The question of how ill-qualified you can be for the American presidency yet still end up in the White House has already been definitively answered

233 “Abandoning hope is an affirmation, the beginning of the beginning,” [Pema] Chödrön … focus on doing what you can to help … focus on doing a few things that count

233 Jensen … when you’re open enough to confront how things really are, you’re open enough to let all the good things in more fully, too

237 focus on one big project at a time

238 replace the high-pressure quest for “work-life balance” with a conscious form of imbalance, backed by your confidence that the roles in which you’re underperforming right now will get their moment in the spotlight soon

240 consciously pick your battles in charity, activism, and politics

242 Shinzen Young … pay more attention to every moment, however mundane

243 [Tom Hobson] try deliberately adopting an attitude of curiosity

243-244 Joseph Goldstein: whenever a generous impulse arises in your mind … act on the impulse right away … the only donations that count are the ones you actually get around to making. And while your colleague might appreciate a nicely worded message of praise more than a hastily worded one, the latter is vastly preferable to what’s truly most likely to happen if you put it off, which is that you’ll never get around to sending that message … generous action reliably makes you feel much happier

244 Practice doing nothing … the capacity to do nothing is indispensable, because if you can’t bear the discomfort of not acting, you’re far more likely to make poor choices with your time, simply to feel as if you’re acting

245 “Nothing is harder to do than nothing,” … Jenny Odell