Four Thousand Weeks: Time and How to Use It

by Oliver Burkeman

Societal pressures used to make it relatively easy to take time off: you couldn’t go shopping when the shops weren’t open, even if you wanted to, or work when the office was locked. Besides, you’d be much less likely to skip church, or Sunday lunch with the extended family, if you knew your absence would raise eyebrows. Now, though, the pressures all push us in the other direction: the shops are open all day, every day (and all night, online). And thanks to digital technology, it’s all too easy to keep on working at home.

As Setiya recalls in his book Midlife, he was heading towards the age of forty when he first began to feel a creeping sense of emptiness, which he would later come to understand as the result of living a project-driven life, crammed not with atelic activities but telic ones, the primary purpose of which was to have them done, and to have achieved certain outcomes.

There’s a less fancy term that covers many of the activities Setiya refers to as atelic: they are hobbies. His reluctance to use that word is understandable, since it’s come to signify something slightly pathetic; many of us tend to feel that the person who’s deeply involved in their hobby of, say, painting miniature fantasy figurines, or tending to their collection of rare cacti, is guilty of not participating in real life as energetically as they otherwise might. Yet it’s surely no coincidence that hobbies have acquired this embarrassing reputation in an era so committed to using time instrumentally. In an age of instrumentalisation, the hobbyist is a subversive: he insists that some things are worth doing for themselves alone, despite offering no pay-offs in terms of productivity or profit.

In practical terms, three rules of thumb are especially useful for harnessing the power of patience as a creative force in daily life. The first is to develop a taste for having problems.

The second principle is to embrace radical incrementalism

The psychology professor Robert Boice spent his career studying the writing habits of his fellow academics, reaching the conclusion that the most productive and successful among them generally made writing a smaller part of their daily routine than the others, so that it was much more feasible to keep going with it day after day.

The final principle is that, more often than not, originality lies on the far side of unoriginality.

‘Stay on the bus. Stay on the fucking bus.’

To borrow from the language of economics, Salcedo sees time as a regular kind of ‘good’ – a resource that’s more valuable to you the more of it you command. (Money is the classic example: it’s better to control more of it than less.) 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. Telephone networks are the obvious example here: telephones are valuable to the extent that others also have them.

On a work trip to Sweden a few years ago, I experienced a micro-level version of the same idea in the form of the fika, the daily moment when everyone in a given workplace gets up from their desks to gather for coffee and cake. The event resembles a well-attended coffee break, except that Swedes are liable to become mildly offended – which is the equivalent of a non-Swede becoming severely offended – if you suggest that’s all it is. Because something intangible but important happens at the fika. The usual divisions get set aside; people mingle without regard for age, or class, or status within the office, discussing both work-related and nonwork 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.

Josef Stalin’s chief economist, Yuri Larin, concocted what seems in hindsight like a ludicrously ambitious plan to keep Soviet factories running every day of the year, with no breaks. Henceforth, he announced in August 1929, a week would be not seven but five days long: four days of work, followed by one day’s rest. Crucially, though, the idea was that not all workers would follow the same calendar. Instead, they’d be divided into five groups, identified by a colour – yellow, green, orange, purple, red – each of which would then be assigned a different four-day workweek and one-day weekend, so that operations would never have to cease, even for a day.

The experience stuck with McNeill, and after the war, when he became a professional historian, he returned to the idea in a monograph called Keeping Together in Time. In it, he argues that synchronised movement, along with synchronised singing, has been a vastly underappreciated force in world history, fostering cohesion among groups as diverse as the builders of the pyramids, the armies of the Ottoman Empire, and the Japanese office workers who rise from their desks to perform group calisthenics at the start of each workday.

To remember how little you matter, on a cosmic timescale, can feel like putting down a heavy burden that most of us didn’t realise we were carrying in the first place.

But the deeper truth behind all this is to be found in Heidegger’s mysterious suggestion that we don’t get or have time at all – that instead we are time. We’ll never get the upper hand in our relationship with the moments of our lives because we are nothing but those moments. To ‘master’ them would first entail getting outside of them, splitting off from them. But where would we go? ‘Time is the substance I am made of,’ writes Jorge Luis Borges.

James Hollis recommends asking of every significant decision in life: ‘Does this choice diminish me, or enlarge me?’6 The question circumvents the urge to make decisions in the service of alleviating anxiety and instead helps you make contact with your deeper intentions for your time. If you’re trying to decide whether to leave a given job or relationship, say, or to redouble your commitment to it, asking what would make you happiest is likely to lure you towards the most comfortable option, or else leave you paralysed by indecision. But you usually know, intuitively, whether remaining in a relationship or job would present the kind of challenges that will help you grow as a person (enlargement) or the kind that will cause your soul to shrivel with every passing week (diminishment). Choose uncomfortable enlargement over comfortable diminishment whenever you can.

Are you holding yourself to, and judging yourself by, standards of productivity or performance that are impossible to meet?

There is a sort of cruelty, Iddo Landau points out, in holding yourself to standards nobody could ever reach (and which many of us would never dream of demanding of other people).7 The more humane approach is to drop such efforts as completely as you can. Let your impossible standards crash to the ground. Then pick a few meaningful tasks from the rubble and get started on them today.

Not knowing what’s coming next – which is the situation you’re always in, with regard to the future – presents an ideal opportunity for choosing curiosity (wondering what might happen next) over worry (hoping that a certain specific thing will happen next, and fearing it might not) whenever you can.