Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

by Oliver Burkeman

“a generation of finely honed tools,

“pissing whyle,”

babies are the ultimate “task-oriented” beings, which, along with sleep deprivation, may explain the otherworldliness of those first few months with a newborn: you’re dragged from clock time into deep time, whether you like it or not.)

Making time standardized and visible in this fashion inevitably encourages people to think of it as an abstract thing with an independent existence, distinct from the specific activities on which one might spend it;

From thinking about time in the abstract, it’s natural to start treating it as a resource, something to be bought and sold

if I could meet every editor’s every demand, while launching various side projects of my own, maybe one day I’d finally feel secure in my career and my finances.

It had been more comforting to imagine that I might eventually “optimize” myself into the kind of person who could confront such decisions without fear, feeling totally in charge of the process.

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.

the more individual sovereignty you achieve over your time, the lonelier you get.

paradox of limitation,

Since hard choices are unavoidable, what matters is learning to make them consciously,

resisting the seductive temptation to “keep your options open”

Charles Garfield Lott Du Cann wrote a short book, Teach Yourself to Live,

Research shows that this feeling arises on every rung of the economic ladder.

How to Live on 24 Hours a Day.

you never stop to ask yourself if the sacrifice is worth it, your days will automatically begin to fill not just with more things, but with more trivial or tedious things, because they’ve never had to clear the hurdle of being judged more important than something else.

The same goes for existential overwhelm: what’s required is the will to resist the urge to consume more and more experiences,

it’s often the unsmoothed textures of life that make it livable, helping nurture the relationships that are crucial for mental and physical health, and for the resilience of our communities.

you might like to be sitting down for this next one—“anxiety ‘in the face of’ that potentiality-for-Being which is one’s ownmost.”

(The original Latin word for “decide,” decidere, means “to cut off,” as in slicing away alternatives;

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

if a certain activity really matters to you—a creative project, say, though it could just as easily be nurturing a relationship, or activism in the service of some cause—the only way to be sure it will happen is to do some of it today, no matter how little, and no matter how many other genuinely big rocks may be begging for your attention.

I get to imagine all of them unfolding simultaneously and flawlessly. As soon as I start trying to live any of those lives, though, I’ll be forced to make trade-offs

ideally, you should settle in a way that makes it harder to back out,

A better analogy, McNamee suggests, is that we’re the fuel: logs thrown on Silicon Valley’s fire, impersonal repositories of attention to be exploited without mercy, until we’re all used up.

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.

“a realm in which space doesn’t matter and time spreads out into an endless present,” to quote the critic James Duesterberg. It’s true that killing time on the internet often doesn’t feel especially fun, these days. But it doesn’t need to feel fun. In order to dull the pain of finitude, it just needs to make you feel unconstrained.

Even if you place your phone out of reach, therefore, you shouldn’t be surprised to find yourself seeking some other way to avoid paying attention. In the case of conversation, this generally takes the form of mentally rehearsing what you’re going to say next, as soon as the other person has finished making sounds with their mouth.

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.

“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.”

“The ‘purposive’ man,” Keynes wrote, “is always trying to secure a spurious and delusive immortality for his actions by pushing his interests in them forward into time. He does not love his cat, but his cat’s kittens; nor in truth the kittens, but only the kittens’ kittens, and so on forward forever to the end of cat-dom. For him, jam is not jam unless it is a case of jam tomorrow and never jam today.

Personal or household rules, such as the increasingly popular idea of a self-imposed “digital sabbath,” can fill the vacuum to some extent. But they lack the social reinforcement that comes when everyone else is following the rule too, so they’re inevitably harder to abide by—and because they’re reliant on willpower, they’re prone to all the hazards involved in trying to force yourself to be more “present in the moment,” as explored in the previous chapter.

“in the process of trying to attain a few moments of bliss,” Rinaldi explains, “I experience something else: patience and humility, definitely, but also freedom. Freedom to pursue the futile. And the freedom to suck without caring is revelatory.”

The first is to develop a taste for having problems.

The second principle is to embrace radical incrementalism

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