Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

by Oliver Burkeman

time feels like an unstoppable conveyor belt, bringing us new tasks as fast as we can dispatch the old ones;

life accelerates, and everyone grows more impatient.

tasks, in order to get them “out of the way,” with the result that we live mentally in the future, waiting for when we’ll finally get around to what really matters

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.

When there are too many activities to fit comfortably into the containers, we feel unpleasantly busy; when there are too few, we feel bored. If we keep pace with the passing containers, we congratulate ourselves for “staying on top of things”

“task orientation,” because the rhythms of life emerge organically from the tasks themselves, rather than from being lined up against an abstract timeline,

(“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. Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself.”)

the more you try to manage your time with the goal of achieving a feeling of total control, and freedom from the inevitable constraints of being human, the more stressful, empty, and frustrating life gets.

however privileged or unfortunate your specific situation, fully facing the reality of it can only help.

“Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion,”

Rendering yourself more efficient—either by implementing various productivity techniques or by driving yourself harder—won’t generally result in the feeling of having “enough time,” because, all else being equal, the demands will increase to offset any benefits.

“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.

such tasks needed my full focus, which meant waiting until I had a good chunk of free time and fewer small-but-urgent tasks tugging at my attention.

Any finite life—even the best one you could possibly imagine—is therefore a matter of ceaselessly waving goodbye to possibility.

I can’t entirely depend upon a single moment of the future.

it’s only the guarantee that he definitely won’t have an infinity of them that makes them worth valuing.

I happen to be alive, and there’s no cosmic law entitling me to that status. Being alive is just happenstance, and not one more day of it is guaranteed.”

each moment of decision becomes an opportunity to select from an enticing menu of possibilities, when you might easily never have been presented with the menu to begin with.

The real measure of any time management technique is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things.

Principle number one is to pay yourself first

“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.”

second principle is to limit your work in progress.

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

the bad procrastinator finds himself paralyzed precisely because he can’t bear the thought of confronting his limitations.

reality, unlike fantasy, is a realm in which we don’t have limitless control, and can’t possibly hope to meet our perfectionist standards.

because so long as I’m only fantasizing, 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

“joy of missing out”: the recognition that the renunciation of alternatives is what makes their choice a meaningful one in the first place.

your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention.

what’s going on when we succumb to distraction, which is that we’re motivated by the desire to try to flee something painful about our experience of the present.

Suddenly, the thing you’d resolved to do, because it mattered to you to do it, feels so staggeringly tedious that you can’t bear to focus on it for one moment more.

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 overarching point is that what we think of as “distractions” aren’t the ultimate cause of our being distracted.

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.

There is a very down-to-earth kind of liberation in grasping that there are certain truths about being a limited human from which you’ll never be liberated. You don’t get to dictate the course of events. And the paradoxical reward for accepting reality’s constraints is that they no longer feel so constraining.

planning for the future, though, is that while it may occasionally prevent a catastrophe, the rest of the time it tends to exacerbate the very anxiety it was supposed to allay.

Or rather you can be certain—but only once you’ve arrived and you’re cooling your heels in the terminal, at which point there’s no solace to be gained from the fact that everything turned out fine, because that’s all in the past now, and there’s the next chunk of the future to feel anxious about instead.

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.

We try to [give the present the support of] the future, and think of arranging matters which are not in our power, for a time which we have no certainty of reaching.”

“Take no thought for the morrow, for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself,”

Rather, a life spent “not minding what happens” is one lived without the inner demand to know that the future will conform to your desires for it—and thus without having to be constantly on edge as you wait to discover whether or not things will unfold as expected.

all a plan is—all it could ever possibly be—is a present-moment statement of intent.

We treat everything we’re doing—life itself, in other words—as valuable only insofar as it lays the groundwork for something else.

“Because children grow up, we think a child’s purpose is to grow up,” Herzen says. “But a child’s purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn’t disdain what only lives for a day. It pours the whole of itself into each moment … Life’s bounty is in its flow. Later is too late.”

we should therefore try to treat every such experience with the reverence we’d show if it were the final instance of it.

the moment of truth is always now

By trying too hard to make the most of his time, he misses his life.

The more you try to be here now, to point at what’s happening in this moment and really see it, the more it seems like you aren’t here now

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 spend some of our time, that is, on activities in which the only thing we’re trying to get from them is the doing itself.

The derision we heap upon the avid stamp collector or train spotter might really be a kind of defense mechanism, to spare us from confronting the possibility that they’re truly happy in a way that the rest of us—pursuing our telic lives, ceaselessly in search of future fulfillment—are not.