Four Thousand Weeks: Time and How to Use It

by Oliver Burkeman

‘This space that has been granted to us rushes by so speedily and so swiftly that all save a very few find life at an end just when they are getting ready to live,’ lamented Seneca, the Roman philosopher, in a letter known today under the title On the Shortness of Life.

Surveys reliably show that we feel more pressed for time than ever before; yet in 2013, research by a team of Dutch academics raised the amusing possibility that such surveys may understate the scale of the busyness epidemic – because many people feel too busy to participate in surveys.

Recently, as the gig economy has grown, busyness has been rebranded as ‘hustle’ – relentless work not as a burden to be endured but as an exhilarating lifestyle choice, worth boasting about on social media. In reality, though, it’s the same old problem, pushed to an extreme: the pressure to fit ever-increasing quantities of activity into a stubbornly non-increasing quantity of daily time.

Meanwhile, no catalogue of our time-related troubles would be complete without mentioning that alarming phenomenon, familiar to anyone older than about thirty, whereby time seems to speed up as you age – steadily accelerating until, to judge from the reports of people in their seventies and eighties, months begin to flash by in what feels like minutes. It’s hard to imagine a crueller arrangement: not only are our four thousand weeks constantly running out, but the fewer of them we have left, the faster we seem to lose them.

And it felt as though the future had been put on hold, leaving many of us stuck, in the words of one psychiatrist, ‘in a new kind of everlasting present’ – an anxious limbo of social media scrolling and desultory Zoom calls and insomnia, in which it felt impossible to make meaningful plans, or even to clearly picture life beyond the end of next week.

All of which makes it especially frustrating that so many of us are so bad at managing our limited time – that our efforts to make the most of it don’t simply fail but regularly seem to make things worse.

In the modern world, the American anthropologist Edward T. Hall once pointed out, time feels like an unstoppable conveyor belt, bringing us new tasks as fast as we can dispatch the old ones; and becoming ‘more productive’ just seems to cause the belt to speed up.

This is the maddening truth about time, which most advice on managing it seems to miss. It’s like an obstreperous toddler: the more you struggle to control it, to make it conform to your agenda, the further it slips from your control. Consider all the technology intended to help us gain the upper hand over time: by any sane logic, in a world with dishwashers, microwaves and jet engines, time ought to feel more expansive and abundant, thanks to all the hours freed up. But this is nobody’s actual experience. Instead, life accelerates, and everyone grows more impatient. It’s somehow vastly more aggravating to wait two minutes for the microwave than two hours for the oven – or ten seconds for a slow-loading web page versus three days to receive the same information by post.

It turns out that when people make enough money to meet their needs, they just find new things to need and new lifestyles to aspire to; they never quite manage to keep up with the Joneses, because whenever they’re in danger of getting close, they nominate new and better Joneses with whom to try to keep up.

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, and that we need to stop pretending otherwise.

Productivity is a trap. Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster.

Before, time was just the medium in which life unfolded, the stuff that life was made of. Afterwards, 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.

We recoil from the notion that this is it – that this life, with all its flaws and inescapable vulnerabilities, its extreme brevity, and our limited influence over how it unfolds, is the only one we’ll get a shot at. Instead, we mentally fight against the way things are – so that, in the words of the psychotherapist Bruce Tift, ‘we don’t have to consciously participate in what it’s like to feel claustrophobic, imprisoned, powerless, and constrained by reality’.

After all, it’s painful to confront how limited your time is, because it means that tough choices are inevitable and that you won’t have time for all you once dreamed you might do.

In practical terms, a limit-embracing attitude to time means organising your days with the understanding that you definitely won’t have time for everything you want to do, or that other people want you to do – and so, at the very least, you can stop beating yourself up for failing.

Which isn’t actually a problem anyway, it turns out, because ‘missing out’ is what makes our choices meaningful in the first place. 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, but didn’t – and to willingly make that sacrifice is to take a stand, without reservation, on what matters most to you.

This confrontation with limitation also reveals the truth that freedom, sometimes, 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 – participating in forms of social life where you don’t get to decide exactly what you do or when you do it.

So long as you continue to respond to impossible demands on your time by trying to persuade yourself that you might one day find some way to do the impossible, you’re implicitly collaborating with those demands. Whereas once you deeply grasp that they are impossible, you’ll be newly empowered to resist them, and to focus instead on building the most meaningful life you can, in whatever situation you’re in.

maybe making sufficient time in the week for your creative calling means you’ll never have an especially tidy home, or get quite as much exercise as you should, and so on.

‘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.

In ancient Greek myth, the gods punish King Sisyphus for his arrogance by sentencing him to push an enormous boulder up a hill, only to see it roll back down again, an action he is condemned to repeat for all eternity. In the contemporary version, Sisyphus would empty his inbox, lean back and take a deep breath, before hearing a familiar ping: ‘You have new messages …’

And once you stop investing in the idea that you might one day achieve peace of mind that way, it becomes easier to find peace of mind in the present, in the midst of overwhelming demands, because you’re no longer making your peace of mind dependent on dealing with all the demands.

But there’s a deeper sense in which merely to be alive on the planet today is to be haunted by the feeling of having ‘too much to do’, whether or not you lead a busy life in any conventional sense. Think of it as ‘existential overwhelm’: the modern world provides an inexhaustible supply of things that seem worth doing, and so there arises an inevitable and unbridgeable gap between what you’d ideally like to do and what you actually can do.

When people stop believing in an afterlife, everything depends on making the most of this life. And when people start believing in progress – in the idea that history is headed towards an ever more perfect future – they feel far more acutely the pain of their own little lifespan, which condemns them to missing out on almost all of that future.

Perhaps it goes without saying that the internet makes this all much more agonising, because it promises to help you make better use of your time, while simultaneously exposing you to vastly more potential uses for your time – so that the very tool you’re using to get the most out of life makes you feel as though you’re missing out on even more of it.

As convenience colonises everyday life, activities gradually sort themselves into two types: the kind that are now far more convenient, but that feel empty or out of sync with our true preferences; and the kind that now seem intensely annoying, because of how inconvenient they remain.

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.

As I make hundreds of small choices throughout the day, I’m building a life – but at one and the same time, I’m closing off the possibility of countless others, forever. (The original Latin word for ‘decide’, decidere, means ‘to cut off’, as in slicing away alternatives; it’s a close cousin of words like ‘homicide’ and ‘suicide’.) Any finite life – even the best one you could possibly imagine – is therefore a matter of ceaselessly waving goodbye to possibility.

We must live out our lives, to whatever extent we can, in clear-eyed acknowledgement of our limitations, in the undeluded mode of existence that Heidegger calls Being-towards-death’, aware that this is it, that life is not a dress rehearsal, that every choice requires myriad sacrifices, and that time is always already running out – indeed, that it may run out today, tomorrow, or next month. And so it’s not merely a matter of spending each day ‘as if’ it were your last, as the cliché has it. The point is that it always actually might be.

But such experiences, however wholly unwelcome, often appear to leave those who undergo them in a new and more honest relationship with time. The question is whether we might attain at least a little of that same outlook in the absence of the experience of agonising loss. Writers have struggled to convey the particular quality that this mode of being infuses into life, because while ‘happier’ is wrong, ‘sadder’ doesn’t convey it, either. You might call it ‘bright sadness’ (as does the priest and author Richard Rohr), ‘stubborn gladness’ (the poet Jack Gilbert), or ‘sober joy’ (the Heidegger scholar Bruce Ballard).9, 10, 11 Or you could just call it finally encountering real life, and the brute fact of our finite weeks.

Surely only somebody who’d failed to notice how remarkable it is that anything is, in the first place, would take their own being as such a given – as if it were something they had every right to have conferred upon them, and never to have taken away. So maybe it’s not that you’ve been cheated out of an unlimited supply of time; maybe it’s almost incomprehensibly miraculous to have been granted any time at all.

Principle number one is to pay yourself first when it comes to time.

After years of trying and failing to make time for her illustration work, by taming her to-do list and shuffling her schedule, Abel saw that her only viable option was to claim time instead – to just start drawing, for an hour or two, every day, and to accept the consequences, even if those included neglecting other activities she sincerely valued. ‘If you don’t save a bit of your time for you, now, out of every week,’ as she puts it, ‘there is no moment in the future when you’ll magically be done with everything and have loads of free time.’

The second principle is to limit your work in progress.

The third principle is to resist the allure of middling priorities.

he tells the man to make a list of the top twenty-five things he wants out of life and then to arrange them in order, from the most important to the least. The top five, Buffett says, should be those around which he organises his time. But contrary to what the pilot might have been expecting to hear, the remaining twenty, Buffett allegedly explains, aren’t the second-tier priorities to which he should turn when he gets the chance. Far from it. In fact, they’re the ones he should actively avoid at all costs – because they’re the ambitions insufficiently important to him to form the core of his life yet seductive enough to distract him from the ones that matter most.

if you’re procrastinating on something because you’re worried you won’t do a good enough job, you can relax – because judged by the flawless standards of your imagination, you definitely won’t do a good enough job. So you might as well make a start.

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.

The reality is that the demands are contradictory. 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. Seeking both in one real human isn’t much less absurd than dreaming of a partner who’s both six and five feet tall.

The great irony of all our efforts to avoid facing finitude – to carry on believing that it might be possible not to have to choose between mutually exclusive options – is that when people finally do choose, in a relatively irreversible way, they’re usually much happier as a result.

At the end of your life, looking back, whatever compelled your attention from moment to moment is simply what your life will have been. So when you pay attention to something you don’t especially value, it’s not an exaggeration to say that you’re paying with your life. Seen this way, ‘distraction’ needn’t refer only to momentary lapses in focus, as when you’re distracted from performing your work duties by the ping of an incoming text message, or a compellingly terrible news story. The job itself could be a distraction – that is, an investment of a portion of your attention, and therefore of your life, in something less meaningful than other options that might have been available to you.

Mary Oliver calls this inner urge towards distraction ‘the intimate interrupter’ – that ‘self within the self, that whistles and pounds upon the door panels’, promising an easier life if only you’d redirect your attention away from the meaningful but challenging task at hand, to whatever’s unfolding one browser tab away.

This is why boredom can feel so surprisingly, aggressively unpleasant: we tend to think of it merely as a matter of not being particularly interested in whatever it is we’re doing, but in fact it’s an intense reaction to the deeply uncomfortable experience of confronting your limited control. Boredom can strike in widely differing contexts – when you’re working on a major project; when you can’t think of anything to do on a Sunday afternoon; when it’s your job to care for a two-year-old for five hours straight – but they all have one characteristic in common: they demand that you face your finitude. You’re obliged to deal with how your experience is unfolding in this moment, to resign yourself to the reality that this is it.

The cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter is famous, among other reasons, for coining ‘Hofstadter’s law’, which states that any task you’re planning to tackle will always take longer than you expect, ‘even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law’.

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.

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.’

Likewise, and 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 a position to use it precisely as you wish. Instead, you just find yourself in each moment as it comes, already thrown into this time and place, with all the limitations that entails, and unable to feel certain about what might happen next. 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.

What we forget, or can’t bear to confront, is that, in the words of the American meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein, ‘a plan is just a thought’.

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, and that you’ll probably never get to a point where you feel you have things in perfect working order.

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. In order to most fully inhabit the only life you ever get, you have to refrain from using every spare hour for personal growth.