Four Thousand Weeks: Time and How to Use It

by Oliver Burkeman

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.

to miss. It’s like an obstreperous

Joneses,

Life, I knew, was supposed to be more joyful than this, more real, more meaningful, and the world was supposed to be more beautiful.14 We were not supposed to hate Mondays and live for the weekends and holidays. We were not supposed to have to raise our hands to be allowed to pee. We were not supposed to be kept indoors on a beautiful day, day after day.

‘The spirit of the times is one of joyless urgency,’ writes the essayist Marilynne Robinson,

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. Nobody in the history of humanity has ever achieved ‘work–life balance’, whatever that might be, and you certainly won’t get there by copying the ‘six things successful people do before 7 a.m’. The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control – when the flood of emails has been contained; when your to-do lists have stopped getting longer; when you’re meeting all your obligations at work and in your home life; when nobody’s angry with you for missing a deadline or dropping the ball; and when the fully optimised person you’ve become can turn, at long last, to the things life is really supposed to be about. Let’s start by admitting defeat: none of this is ever going to happen.

We imagine time to be something separate from us and from the world around us, ‘an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences’, in the words of the American cultural critic Lewis Mumford.2

Gary Eberle, we slip ‘into a realm where there is enough of everything, where we are not trying to fill a void in ourselves or the world’.5

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.

‘Eternity ceased gradually to serve as the measure and focus of human actions.’11

‘we don’t have to consciously participate in what it’s like to feel claustrophobic, imprisoned, powerless, and constrained by reality’.12

We labour at our daily work more ardently and thoughtlessly than is necessary to sustain our life,’ wrote Nietzsche, ‘because to us it is even more necessary not to have leisure to stop and think.13

Or we plan compulsively, because the alternative is to confront how little control over the future we really have.

All of this illustrates what might be termed the paradox of limitation,