Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

by Oliver Burkeman

You have to accept that there will always be too much to do; that you can’t avoid tough choices or make the world run at your preferred speed; that no experience, least of all close relationships with other human beings, can ever be guaranteed in advance to turn out painlessly and well—and that from a cosmic viewpoint, when it’s all over, it won’t have counted for very much anyway. And in exchange for accepting all that? You get to actually be here.

none of this is an argument against long-term endeavors like marriage or parenting, building organizations or reforming political systems, and certainly not against tackling the climate crisis; these are among the things that matter most. But it’s an argument that even those things can only ever matter now, in each moment of the work involved, whether or not they’ve yet reached what the rest of the world defines as fruition. Because now is all you ever get.

The peace of mind on offer here is of a higher order: it lies in the recognition that being unable to escape from the problems of finitude is not, in itself, a problem.

1. Where in your life or your work are you currently pursuing comfort, when what’s called for is a little discomfort?

James Hollis recommends asking of every significant decision in life: “Does this choice diminish me, or enlarge me?”

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.

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

3. In what ways have you yet to accept the fact that you are who you are, not the person you think you ought to be?

Peace of mind, and an exhilarating sense of freedom, comes not from achieving the validation but from yielding to the reality that it wouldn’t bring security if you got it.

4. In which areas of life are you still holding back until you feel like you know what you’re doing?

if the feeling of total authority is never going to arrive, you might as well not wait any longer to give such activities your all—to put bold plans into practice, to stop erring on the side of caution.

5. How would you spend your days differently if you didn’t care so much about seeing your actions reach fruition?

His sole advice for walking such a path was to “quietly do the next and most necessary thing. So long as you think you don’t yet know what that is, you still have too much money to spend in useless speculation.