Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

by Oliver Burkeman

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. And it stops making sense to pity yourself for having been cheated of all the other options.

you wouldn’t even really want to be able to do everything, since if you didn’t have to decide what to miss out on, your choices couldn’t truly mean anything.

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 when it comes to time.

If you try to find time for your most valued activities by first dealing with all the other important demands on your time, in the hope that there’ll be some left over at the end, you’ll be disappointed.

venerable pieces of time management advice: to work on your most important project for the first hour of each day, and to protect your time by scheduling “meetings” with yourself, marking them in your calendar so that other commitments can’t intrude.

The second principle is to limit your work in progress.

what usually ends up happening is that you make progress on no fronts—because each time a project starts to feel difficult, or frightening, or boring, you can bounce off to a different one instead.

fix a hard upper limit on the number of things that you allow yourself to work on at any given time.

Personal Kanban,

Look into this book

no more than three items. Once you’ve selected those tasks, all other incoming demands on your time must wait until one of the three items has been completed, thereby freeing up a slot.

I’d be doing only a few things on any given day. The difference, this time, was that I actually did them.

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

in a world of too many big rocks, it’s the moderately appealing ones—the fairly interesting job opportunity, the semi-enjoyable friendship—on which a finite life can come to grief.

You need to learn how to start saying no to things you do want to do, with the recognition that you have only one life.”

We fail to see, or refuse to accept, that any attempt to bring our ideas into concrete reality must inevitably fall short of our dreams, no matter how brilliantly we succeed in carrying things off

We invariably prefer indecision over committing ourselves to a single path, Bergson wrote, because “the future, which we dispose of to our liking, appears to us at the same time under a multitude of forms, equally attractive and equally possible.”

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

“You must settle, in a relatively enduring way, upon something that will be the object of your striving, in order for that striving to count as striving,”

you can’t become an ultrasuccessful lawyer or artist or politician without first “settling” on law,

settle for that specific relationship, with all its imperfections—which means spurning the seductive lure of an infinite number of superior imaginary alternatives.

when people finally do choose, in a relatively irreversible way, they’re usually much happier as a result.

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

When you can no longer turn back, anxiety falls away, because now there’s only one direction to travel: forward into the consequences of your choice.

it hardly matters how committed you are to making the best use of your limited time if, day after day, your attention gets wrenched away by things on which you never wanted to focus.

what you pay attention to will define, for you, what reality is.

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

when you pay attention to something you don’t especially value, it’s not an exaggeration to say that you’re paying with your life.

the distracted person isn’t really choosing at all. Their attention has been commandeered by forces that don’t have their highest interests at heart.

to have any meaningful experience, you must be able to focus on it, at least a bit. Otherwise, are you really having it at all?

once the attention economy has rendered you sufficiently distracted, or annoyed, or on edge, it becomes easy to assume that this is just what life these days inevitably feels like.

we are “distracted from distraction by distraction.

By portraying our opponents as beyond persuasion, social media sorts us into ever more hostile tribes, then rewards us,

much of the time, we give in to distraction willingly. Something in us wants to be distracted, whether by our digital devices or anything else—to not spend our lives on what we thought we cared about the most.

when it’s so unpleasant to stay focused on present experience, common sense would seem to suggest that mentally absenting yourself from the situation would moderate the pain.

Whereas staying focused on the present had made the agonies of the ice-water ritual more tolerable, it made less unpleasant undertakings—daily chores that might previously have been a source not of agony but of boredom or annoyance—positively engrossing.

whenever we succumb to distraction, we’re attempting to flee a painful encounter with our finitude

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.

The overarching point is that what we think of as “distractions” aren’t the ultimate cause of our being distracted. They’re just the places we go to seek relief from the discomfort of confronting limitation.

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.

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 less attention he devoted to objecting to what was happening to him, the more attention he could give to what was actually happening.

Some Zen Buddhists hold that the entirety of human suffering can be boiled down to this effort to resist paying full attention to the way things are going, because we wish they were going differently

“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.”

to give yourself twice as long as you think you’ll need—could actually make matters worse.

The trouble with being so emotionally invested in 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.

The fuel behind worry, in other words, is the internal demand to know, in advance, that things will turn out fine: that your partner won’t leave you, that you will have sufficient money to retire, that a pandemic won’t claim the lives of anyone you love,

You can never be truly certain about the future. And so your reach will always exceed your grasp.

we never have time in the same sense that we have the cash in our wallets or the shoes on our feet.

You only ever get to feel certain about the future once it’s already turned into the past.