Four Thousand Weeks: Time and How to Use It

by Oliver Burkeman

The fundamental problem is that this attitude towards time sets up a rigged game in which it’s impossible ever to feel as though you’re doing well enough. Instead of simply living our lives as they unfold in time – instead of just being time, you might say – it becomes difficult not to value each moment primarily according to its usefulness for some future goal, or for some future oasis of relaxation you hope to reach once your tasks are finally ‘out of the

Moreover, most of us seek a specifically individualistic kind of mastery over time – our culture’s ideal is that you alone should control your schedule, doing whatever you prefer, whenever you want – because it’s scary to confront the truth that almost everything worth doing, from marriage and parenting to business or politics, depends on cooperating with others, and therefore on exposing yourself to the emotional uncertainties of relationships.

It also means resisting the seductive temptation to ‘keep your options open’ – which is really just another way of trying to feel in control

So, technically, it’s irrational to feel troubled by an overwhelming to-do list. You’ll do what you can, you won’t do what you can’t, and the tyrannical inner voice insisting that you must do everything is simply mistaken. We rarely stop to consider things so rationally, though, because that would mean confronting the painful truth of our limitations. We would be forced to acknowledge that there are hard choices to be made: which balls to let drop, which people to disappoint, which cherished ambitions to abandon, which roles to fail at.

‘Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion,’ the English humorist and historian C. Northcote Parkinson wrote in 1955, coining what became known as Parkinson’s law.

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.

It’s true that everything runs more smoothly this way. But smoothness, it turns out, is a dubious virtue, since it’s often the unsmoothed textures of life that make it liveable, helping nurture the relationships that are crucial for mental and physical health, and for the resilience of our communities.

Better than nothing, perhaps. But sender and recipient both know that it’s a poor substitute for purchasing a card in a shop, writing on it by hand, and then walking to a postbox to post it, because contrary to the cliché, it isn’t really the thought that counts, but the effort – which is to say, the inconvenience.

Any finite life – even the best one you could possibly imagine – is therefore a matter of ceaselessly waving goodbye to possibility.

So 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.

Stepping into the world of finitude, by actually building the mosque, would mean confronting all that he couldn’t do. Better to cherish an ideal fantasy than to resign himself to reality, with all its limitations and unpredictability.

There is a very down-to-earth kind of liberation in grasping that there are certain truths about being a limited human from which you’ll never be liberated. 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.

Worry, at its core, is the repetitious experience of a mind attempting to generate a feeling of security about the future, failing, then trying again and again and again – as if the very effort of worrying might somehow help forestall disaster.

You can never be truly certain about the future. And so your reach will always exceed your grasp.

As the writer David Cain points out, we never have time in the same sense that we have the cash in our wallets or the shoes on our feet. When we claim that we have time, what we really mean is that we expect it. ‘We assume we have three hours or three days to do something,’ Cain writes, ‘but it never actually comes into our possession.’3

You only ever get to feel certain about the future once it’s already turned into the past.

Reflect on this a little, and Heidegger’s idea that we are time – that there’s no meaningful way to think of a person’s existence except as a sequence of moments of time – begins to make more sense. And it has real psychological consequences, because the assumption that time is something we can possess or control is the unspoken premise of almost 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.

So a surprisingly effective antidote to anxiety can be to simply realise 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 – which means you have permission to stop engaging in it. The future just isn’t the sort of thing you get to order around like that, as the French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal understood: ‘So imprudent are we,’ he wrote, ‘that we wander in the times which are not ours

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.

And that you shouldn’t necessarily even want such control, given how much of what you value in life only ever came to pass thanks to circumstances you never chose.

But all a plan is – all it could ever possibly be – is a present-moment statement of intent. It’s an expression of your current thoughts about how you’d ideally like to deploy your modest influence over the future. The future, of course, is under no obligation to comply.

It becomes difficult to enjoy a moment of rest for itself alone, without regard for any potential future benefits, because rest that has no instrumental value feels wasteful.

As long as you’re filling every hour of the day with some form of striving, you get to carry on believing that all this striving is leading you somewhere – to an imagined future state of perfection, a heavenly realm in which everything runs smoothly, your limited time causes you no pain, and you’re free of the guilty sense that there’s more you need to be doing in order to justify your existence.

Taking a walk in the countryside, like listening to a favourite song or meeting friends for an evening of conversation, is thus a good example of what the philosopher Kieran Setiya calls an ‘atelic activity’, meaning that its value isn’t derived from its telos, or ultimate aim.

As the world gets faster and faster, we come to believe that our happiness, or our financial survival, depends on our being able to work and move and make things happen at superhuman speed. We grow anxious about not keeping up – so to quell the anxiety, to try to achieve the feeling that our lives are under control, we move faster.

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.

But his larger point is that it applies almost everywhere in life: to creative work and relationship troubles, politics and parenting. 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 towards 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. So we snap at our partners, rather than hearing them out, because waiting and listening would make us feel – correctly – as though we weren’t in control of the situation. Or we abandon difficult creative projects, or nascent romantic relationships, because there’s less uncertainty in just calling things off than in waiting to see how they might develop.

As a result, most of us treat the problems we encounter as doubly problematic: first because of whatever specific problem we’re facing; and second because we seem to believe, if only subconsciously, that we shouldn’t have problems at all. Yet the state of having no problems is obviously never going to arrive.

If you’ve decided to work on a given project for fifty minutes, then once fifty minutes have elapsed, get up and walk away from it. Why? Because as Boice explained, the urge to push onward beyond that point ‘includes a big component of impatience about not being finished, about not being productive enough, about never again finding such an ideal time’ for work.4 Stopping helps strengthen the muscle of patience that will permit you to return to the project again and again, and thus to sustain your productivity over an entire career.

As with money, it’s good to have plenty of time, all else being equal. But having all the time in the world isn’t much use if you’re forced to experience it all on your own.

But not before the Soviet government had inadvertently demonstrated how much of the value of time comes not from the sheer quantity you have, but from whether you’re in sync with the people you care about most.

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

Other people hold off entirely from starting on important projects or embarking on intimate relationships in the first place because they can’t bear the anxiety of having committed themselves to something that might or might not work out happily in practice.

life spent focused on achieving security with respect to time, when in fact such security is unattainable, can only ever end up feeling provisional –

And so we naturally tend to make decisions about our daily use of time that prioritise anxiety-avoidance instead. Procrastination, distraction, commitment-phobia, clearing the decks and taking on too many projects at once are all ways of trying to maintain the illusion that you’re in charge of things.