Four Thousand Weeks: Time and How to Use It

by Oliver Burkeman

Productivity geeks are passionate about crossing items off their to-do lists. So it’s sort of the same, except infinitely sadder.

There is an alternative: the unfashionable but powerful notion of letting time use you, approaching life not as an opportunity to implement your predetermined plans for success but as a matter of responding to the needs of your place and your moment in history.

But when you turn your attention instead to the fact that you’re in a position to have an irritating experience in the first place, matters are liable to look very different indeed. All at once, it can seem amazing to be there at all, having any experience, in a way that’s overwhelmingly more important than the fact that the experience happens to be an annoying one.

The most effective way to sap distraction of its power is just to stop expecting things to be otherwise – to accept that this unpleasantness is simply what it feels like for finite humans to commit ourselves to the kinds of demanding and valuable tasks that force us to confront our limited control over how our lives unfold.

The way to find peaceful absorption in a difficult project, or a boring Sunday afternoon, isn’t to chase feelings of peace or absorption, but to acknowledge the inevitability of discomfort, and to turn more of your attention to the reality of your situation than to railing against it.

Inevitably, we become obsessed with ‘using it well’, whereupon we discover an unfortunate truth: the more you focus on using time well, the more each day begins to feel like something you have to get through, en route to some calmer, better, more fulfilling point in the future, which never actually arrives.

Why, its members wanted to know, should holidays by the sea, or meals with friends, or lazy mornings in bed need defending in terms of improved performance at work? ‘You keep hearing people arguing that more time off might be good for the economy,’ fumed John de Graaf, an ebullient seventy-ish film-maker and the driving force behind Take Back Your Time. ‘But why should we have to justify life in terms of the economy?

that you can’t truly hope to beat alcohol until you give up all hope of beating alcohol.

above all, the reality that, in his case, there’s no level of moderate drinking that’s compatible with living a functioning life – then working, slowly and soberly, to fashion a more productive and fulfilling existence.

call it 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. Digging in to a challenging work project that can’t be hurried becomes not a trigger for stressful emotions but a bracing act of choice; giving a difficult novel the time it demands becomes a source of relish. ‘You cultivate an appreciation for endurance, hanging in, and putting the next foot forward,’ Brown explains. You give up ‘demanding instant resolution, instant relief from discomfort and pain, and magical fixes’. You breathe a sigh of relief, and as you dive into life as it really is, in clear-eyed awareness of your limitations, you begin to acquire what has become the least fashionable but perhaps most consequential of superpowers: patience.

In more and more contexts, patience becomes a form of power. In a world geared for hurry, 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 fulfilment to the future.

Your reward for surrendering the fantasy of controlling the pace of reality is to achieve, at last, a real sense of purchase on that reality – of really getting stuck in to life.

The second principle is to embrace radical incrementalism.

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. They wrote in brief daily sessions – sometimes as short as ten minutes, and never longer than four hours – and they religiously took weekends off. The panicked PhD students in whom Boice tried to inculcate this regimen rarely had the forbearance to hear it.

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.

From this new perspective, it becomes possible to see that preparing nutritious meals for your children might matter as much as anything could ever matter, even if you won’t be winning any cooking awards; or that your novel’s worth writing if it moves or entertains a handful of your contemporaries, even though you know you’re no Tolstoy. Or that virtually any career might be

worthwhile way to spend a working life, if it makes things slightly better for those it serves. Furthermore, it means that if what we learn from the experience of the coronavirus pandemic is to become just a little more attuned to the needs of our neighbours, we’ll have learned something valuable as a result of the ‘Great Pause’, no matter how far off the root-and-branch transformation of society remains.

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.

Choose uncomfortable enlargement over comfortable diminishment whenever you can.

‘Do the next right thing’, has since become a slogan favoured among members of Alcoholics Anonymous, as a way to proceed sanely through moments of acute crisis. But really, the ‘next and most necessary thing’ is all that any of us can ever aspire to do in any moment. And we must do it despite not having any objective way to be sure what the right course of action even is.