Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

“Arguably, time management is all life is. Yet the modern discipline known as time management – like its hipper cousin, productivity – is a depressingly narrow-minded affair, focused on how to crank through as many work tasks as possible, or on devising the perfect morning routine, or on cooking all your dinners for the week in one big batch on Sundays. These things matter to some extent, no doubt. But they’re hardly all that matters.”

While Burkeman agrees that time management is a fundamental component of any human life, he is critical of how modern self-help literature handles the topic. The anthropomorphized notion of a “hipper cousin” called productivity conveys how superficial and mundane he thinks the concerns of modern time-management gurus are. The run of duties including an ability to perform more work tasks or to save time by batch-cooking meals seem joyless and little to do with what life is all about.

“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. Once time is a resource to be used, you start to feel pressure, whether from external forces or from yourself, to use it well, and to berate yourself when you feel you’ve wasted it.”

Burkeman shows that the separation of time from life was the initiator of the modern anxiety about using time well. Whereas in a primarily agrarian labor force tasks took the time they needed organically, when people felt that they were up against the clock, the idea of external assessment came in, along with the negative feelings around things not being efficient enough. Burkeman’s rhetorical repetition of “once” makes a connection between the Industrial Revolution and the present-day experience of guilt around wasting time.

“As long as I was always just on the cusp of mastering my time, I could avoid the thought that what life was really demanding from me might involve surrendering the craving for mastery and diving into the unknown instead.”

Burkeman shows how an obsession with mastering time and productivity while doomed to fail, is an avoidance tactic for dealing with the thorniest, most challenging questions about the directions of our lives. The release of surrender is the opposite of the control of mastery; however, the “unknown” it permits enables us to engage better with life’s mysterious wonders. He therefore implies that those obsessed with scheduling as much into life as possible are missing out on the whole point of life itself.

“The more you confront the facts of finitude […] and work with them, rather than against them – the more productive, meaningful and joyful life becomes. I don’t think the feeling of anxiety ever completely goes away; we’re limited, apparently, in our capacity to embrace our limitations. But I’m aware of no other time management technique that’s half as effective as just facing the way things truly are.”

Here, Burkeman advocates letting go of perfection, both in our expectation that we will ever be able to do the potentially infinite number of desirable or necessary things on our list and in being completely relaxed and happy about our limitations. Still, acceptance creates a type of contentment that is elusive when we are chasing the illusion that we will one day be able to make time for everything.

“Once you truly understand that you’re guaranteed to miss out on almost every experience the world has to offer, the fact that there are so many you still haven’t experienced stops feeling like a problem. Instead, you get to focus on fully enjoying the tiny slice of experiences you actually do have time for – and the freer you are to choose, in each moment, what counts the most.”

Burkeman here advises adopting the opposite of a bucket-list approach. Instead of filling our to-do lists with exciting things to do in the future, once we accept our finitude we can more fully embrace the present, in all its minute intricacies. He promises that there is a freedom in this paradox of constraint. While the use of the word “once” indicates future-orientated promise, it also conveys the simplicity of the life-changing choice.

“Frequently, the effect of convenience isn’t just that a given activity starts to feel less valuable, but that we stop engaging in valuable activities altogether, in favor of more convenient ones.”

Here, Burkeman draws attention to the pitfalls of convenience, a quality we normally think of as advantageous, as it rescues us from spending too much time on mundane tasks. First, we miss out on engaging in the flow of a time-consuming process and cut ourselves off from some valuable daily activity that engages us with the stuff of life itself. Then, convenience can have dystopian connotations when we begin to short-circuit more rewarding social engagements for solo ones that help us let off steam in a less time-consuming way. Ultimately, we have overrated convenience.

“They’re living in denial of the fact that their time is limited; so when it comes to deciding how to use any given portion of that time, nothing can genuinely be at stake for them. 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.”

Ironically, it is by facing up to the facts of death and finitude that we can get the most out of life. This is because by confronting our limits, we will purposefully fill our days with the things that matter the most, conscious that we will be giving up the majority of lived experiences. In contrast, those who labor under the delusion that they will have time for everything important and are in denial of their finitude exist in a sort of bland eternity, which is as devoid of both risk and real reward.

“Wouldn’t it make more sense to speak not of having to make such choices, but of getting to make them? From this viewpoint, the situation starts to seem much less regrettable: 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.”

Instead of regarding our finitude as a position of lack, Burkeman challenges us to adopt the more abundant standpoint of being grateful that we got to be on the planet on the first place. When starting from the premise that we might have had nothing as opposed to the one that we might have had everything, we begin to contemplate life and the decisions that we need to make from a place of gratitude.

“The point isn’t to eradicate procrastination, but to choose more wisely what you’re going to procrastinate on, 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.”

Burkeman reverses the common wisdom that procrastination is an evil that needs to be eliminated with the acceptance that it is inevitable. We thus ought to be looking at our to-do list with a mind to what we will put off as much as with an emphasis on what we can embrace. It is only through a process of deciding what we will put off that we can crack on with what is most important to us.

“We mustn’t let Silicon Valley off the hook, but we should be honest: much of the time, we give in to distraction willingly. Something in us wants to be distracted, whether by our digital devices or anything else – to not spend our lives on what we thought we cared about the most. The calls are coming from inside the house.”

While people love to blame the persuasive design mechanisms of technology for their becoming distracted from the most important work in their lives, in the horror-film metaphor of a call from the killer “coming from inside the house,” he alerts us to our role as co-conspirators in this situation. Distraction then, far from being an invasive outsider that scuppers our best intentions, is an aspect of how our brains work.

“Whenever we succumb to distraction, we’re attempting to flee a painful encounter with our finitude – with the human predicament of having limited time, and more especially, in the case of distraction, limited control over that time, which makes it impossible to feel certain about how things will turn out.”

Here, Burkeman argues that distraction happens to save us the pain of facing up to our limits, both in terms of time and the uncertainty of how a particular cherished project will turn out. Our discomfort with this uncertainty and feeling of powerlessness sees us reaching for the avoidance tactic of a distraction that will give us the illusion of greater possibility again.

“Despite everything I’ve been saying, nobody ever really gets four thousand weeks in which to live – not only because you might end up with fewer than that, but because in reality you never even get a single week, in the sense of being able to guarantee that it will arrive, or that you’ll be in in a position to use it precisely as you wish.”

At around the midpoint of his book, Burkeman subtracts from our allotted 4,000 weeks by acknowledging that unexpected events will always make unwanted demands on our time. This requires another form of surrender to limitation.

“The assumption that time is something we can possess or control is the unspoken premise of all our thinking about the future, our planning and goal-setting and worrying. So it’s a constant source of anxiety and agitation, because our expectations are forever running up against the stubborn reality that time isn’t in our possession and can’t be brought under our control.”

The illusion that we can own time deludes us into thinking that we have more control over the future than we do. In contrast, Burkeman makes it clear that the opposite is true, and that we neither own time nor control it. Interestingly, while such delusions are supposed to be reassuring, Burkeman shows that they can be a source of anxiety, as we expect that we should be able to control time and outcomes and are frustrated when we cannot.

“We go through our days fretting because we can’t control what the future holds; and yet most of us would probably concede that we got to wherever we are in our lives without exerting much control over it at all. 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, and that you certainly can’t alter retrospectively now.”

Here, Burkeman alerts us to the general truth that the things we value most about our lives are likely not strictly programmed and scheduled, but instead, the spontaneous result of circumstances that arose by chance. The word “jumble” signals the messiness of real life and makes us appreciate the preciousness of the gifts we have received without our input.

“It turns out to be perilously easy to over-invest in this instrumental relationship to time – to focus exclusively on where you’re headed, at the expense of focusing on where you are – with the result that you find yourself living mentally in the future, locating the ‘real’ value of your life at some time that you haven’t yet reached, and never will.”

Burkeman gives the common predicament of living in a hypothetical future as opposed to the present moment a name—an “instrumental relationship to time.” In his emphasis that we have not yet arrived at this moment and likely never will, he shows the futility of this future-oriented endeavor. We are not so much planning as living in an intangible fantasy realm.

“To try to live in the moment implies that you’re somehow separate from ‘the moment’, and thus in a position to either succeed or fail at living in it. For all its chilled-out associations, the attempt to be here now is therefore still another instrumentalist attempt to use the present moment purely as a means to an end, in an effort to feel in control of your unfolding time.”

While the reader might expect that given Burkeman’s admonishment of future-orientated living, he might advocate a mindful focus on entering the present moment, he instead identifies this approach as yet another attempt to have control over the uncontrollable. He draws attention to the fact that “trying” to be present is another way to bargain with reality, as we forget the Heideggerian truth that we are time and replace it with the effort to be inside time. No matter how mindful being present seems, the effort to get there makes it another source of anxiety.

“To rest for the sake of rest – to enjoy a lazy hour for its own sake – entails first accepting the fact that this is it: that your days aren’t progressing towards 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.”

Burkeman shows that to be one of the rare people who can enjoy rest for its own sake, we also must be comfortable with finitude and the fact that we cannot fully control the future by our present actions. His evocation of the notion of a Promised Land of “perfectly invulnerable happiness” indicates the high stakes that some people invest in work and productivity, namely that it will protect us from unforeseeable harm. Instead, to rest we must be comfortable with the truth that there are no such guarantees.

“Since the beginning of the modern era of acceleration, people have been responding not with satisfaction at all the time saved but with increasing agitation that they can’t make things move faster still.”

Burkeman shows that far from alleviating people’s anxiety, the timesaving devices of modern technology have been contributing to anxiety and feelings of powerlessness because they have created a compulsion for speed in people’s psyches. Ironically, in making people just that bit more powerful over their time, the technological devices have created an appetite that cannot be satisfied.

“It’s not so much that we’re too busy, or too distractible, but that we’re unwilling to accept the truth that reading is the sort of activity that largely operates according to its own schedule. You can’t hurry it very much before the experience begins to lose its meaning; it refuses to consent, you might say, to our desire to exert control over how our time unfolds.”

Once again, Burkeman shows how we cannot wholly blame modern technology for our failure to give ourselves over to old-fashioned tasks, such as reading. It is not only that technology distracts us but that its increase over the speed of life, and the illusion of being able to control our time means that we are unwilling to devote more of it than we would ideally like to a task that dictates its own parameters.

“It’s a principle common to virtually all productivity advice that, in an ideal world, the only person making decisions about your time would be you: you’d set your own hours, work whenever you chose, take holidays when you wished, and generally be beholden to nobody. But there’s a case to be made that this degree of control comes at a cost that’s ultimately not worth paying.”

Here, Burkeman lays out the dream of independence and control touted by the productivity gurus in the self-development world. He questions the common belief that other people’s demands are a key obstacle to our enjoyment of life. He argues that this freedom comes at a cost, as he alludes to the fact that he is about to dispel still another illusion about productivity.

“There’s the profound sense of meaning that comes from being willing to fall in with the rhythms of the rest of the world: to be free to engage in all the worthwhile collaborative endeavors that require at least some sacrifice of your sole control over what you do and when.”

Burkeman takes the independence-touting productivity gurus’ concept of freedom and turns it on his head when he reminds us that we ought to ensure that we are free enough in our minds to recognize that collaboration with others is the most valuable use of our time. The kind of flexibility we need to do this is a willingness to be versatile with our schedule and accommodate the needs of others.

“It’s useful to begin this last stage of our journey with a blunt but unexpectedly liberating truth: that 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.”

Burkeman confronts the reader with the notion of how minuscule their lifespan is in the history of the universe to relieve their stress over time management. This is not to say that individual lives have no meaning or purpose, but that thinking of life on a cosmic scale can help us let go of guilt about wasting time.

“Once you’re no longer burdened by such an unrealistic definition of a ‘life well spent’, you’re freed to consider the possibility that a far wider variety of things might qualify as meaningful ways to use your finite time. You’re freed, too, to consider the possibility that many of the things you’re already doing with it are more meaningful than you’d supposed – and that until now, you’d subconsciously been devaluing them, on the grounds that they weren’t ‘significant’ enough.”

Burkeman offers the reader a glimpse of the freedom and peace that can come from accepting their mediocrity when compared with the lofty expectations of themselves. He points out that wanting to excel in a particular area that will make you famous is a narrow definition of success, and that instead letting go of this unrealistic hope will free the reader to appreciate the contribution they are already making. In a persistently aspirational culture, the freedom to be oneself is a radical message.

“Being unable to escape from the problems of finitude is not, in itself, a problem. The human disease is often painful, but as the Zen teacher Charlotte Joko Beck puts it, it’s only unbearable for as long as you’re under the impression that there might be a cure. Accept the inevitability of the affliction, and freedom ensues: you can get on with living at last.”

Letting go of the hope for a cure for the problems of finitude is the cure itself. To be able to live with problems and accept that you will always have them requires relinquishing perfectionism and the aspiration for a better future once and for all. This denial of the hope that things will be better at some future point releases more energy for living in the present, which is in fact the only temporal dimension in which living is possible.