Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

by Oliver Burkeman

Our efforts to influence the future aren’t the problem. The problem—the source of all the anxiety—is the need that we feel, from our vantage point here in the present moment, to be able to know that those efforts will prove successful.

a surprisingly effective antidote to anxiety can be to simply realize that this demand for reassurance from the future is one that will definitely never be satisfied—no matter how much you plan or fret,

Whatever you value most about your life can always be traced back to some jumble of chance occurrences you couldn’t possibly have planned for, and that you certainly can’t alter retrospectively now.

you shouldn’t necessarily even want such control, given how much of what you value in life only ever came to pass thanks to circumstances you never chose.

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. It’s an expression of your current thoughts about how you’d ideally like to deploy your modest influence over the future. The future, of course, is under no obligation to comply.

the more you focus on using time well, the more each day begins to feel like something you have to get through, en route to some calmer, better, more fulfilling point in the future, which never actually arrives.

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

Even if she does get her workload under control, or meet her soulmate, she’ll just find some other reason to postpone her fulfillment until later on.

“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.

our lives, thanks to their finitude, are inevitably full of activities that we’re doing for the very last time. Just as there will be a final occasion on which I pick up my son

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

One way of understanding capitalism, in fact, is as a giant machine for instrumentalizing everything it encounters—the earth’s resources, your time and abilities (or “human resources”)—in the service of future profit.

“Lawyers imbued with the ethos of the billable hour have difficulty grasping a non-commodified understanding of the meaning of time that would allow them to appreciate the true value of such participation.” When an activity can’t be added to the running tally of billable hours, it begins to feel like an indulgence one can’t afford.

Our obsession with extracting the greatest future value out of our time blinds us to the reality that, in fact, the moment of truth is always now—that life is nothing but a succession of present moments, culminating in death, and that you’ll probably never get to a point where you feel you have things in perfect working order.

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

the attempt to be here now feels not so much relaxing as rather strenuous—and it turns out that trying to have the most intense possible present-moment experience is a surefire way to fail.

you are, in fact, always already living in the moment anyway, whether you like it or not.

To try to live in the moment implies that you’re somehow separate from “the moment,” and thus in a position to either succeed or fail at living in it.

the attempt to be here now is therefore still another instrumentalist attempt to use the present moment purely as a means to an end,

Enjoying leisure for its own sake—which you might have assumed was the whole point of leisure—comes to feel as though it’s somehow not quite enough.

The regrettable consequence of justifying leisure only in terms of its usefulness for other things is that it begins to feel vaguely like a chore

To the philosophers of the ancient world, leisure wasn’t the means to some other end; on the contrary, it was the end to which everything else worth doing was a means.

Implicitly, workers were offered a deal: you could do whatever you liked with your time off, so long as it didn’t damage—and preferably enhanced—your usefulness on the job.

We have inherited from all this a deeply bizarre idea of what it means to spend your time off “well”—and, conversely, what counts as wasting it. In this view of time, anything that doesn’t create some form of value for the future is, by definition, mere idleness.

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 be truly at leisure,

when people spend their days generating vast amounts of wealth through hard work but also feel obliged not to fritter it away on luxuries, the inevitable result is large accumulations of capital.

As long as you’re filling every hour of the day with some form of striving, you get to carry on believing that all this striving is leading you somewhere—to an imagined future state of perfection,

your days aren’t progressing toward a future state of perfectly invulnerable happiness, and that to approach them with such an assumption is systematically to drain our four thousand weeks of their value.

Most people mistakenly believe that all you have to do to stop working is not work.

interrupting the ceaseless round of striving requires a surprisingly strenuous act of will, one that has to be bolstered by habit as well as social sanction.

while capitalism gets its energy from the permanent anxiety of striving for more, the sabbath embodies the thought that whatever work you’ve completed by the time that Friday (or Saturday) night rolls around might be enough

it’s virtually guaranteed that truly stopping to rest—as opposed to training for a 10K, or heading off on a meditation retreat with the goal of attaining spiritual enlightenment—is initially going to provoke some serious feelings of discomfort, rather than of delight.

Kieran Setiya calls an “atelic activity,” meaning that its value isn’t derived from its telos, or ultimate aim.

You shouldn’t be aiming to get a walk “done”; nor are you likely to reach a point in life when you’ve accomplished all the walking you were aiming to do.

Where’s the logic in constantly postponing fulfillment until some later point in time when soon enough you won’t have any “later” left?

In an age of instrumentalization, the hobbyist is a subversive: he insists that some things are worth doing for themselves alone, despite offering no payoffs in terms of productivity or profit.

it’s far less embarrassing (indeed, positively fashionable) to have a “side hustle,” a hobbylike activity explicitly pursued with profit in mind.

the freedom to suck without caring is revelatory.” Results aren’t everything.

results always come later—and later is always too late.

Things just are the way they are, such metaphors suggest, no matter how vigorously you might wish they weren’t—and your only hope of exercising any real influence over the world is to work with that fact, instead of against it.

Working too hastily means you’ll make more errors, which you’ll then be obliged to go back to correct;

Once you can heat your dinner in the microwave in sixty seconds, it begins to seem genuinely realistic that you might be able to do so instantaneously, in zero seconds—and thus all the more maddeningly frustrating that you still have to wait an entire minute instead.

Once most people believe that one ought to be able to answer forty emails in the space of an hour, your continued employment may become dependent on being able to do so, regardless of your feelings on the matter.

“It is not simply that one is interrupted,” writes Parks. “It is that one is actually inclined to interruption.” It’s not so much that we’re too busy, or too distractible, but that we’re unwilling to accept the truth that reading is the sort of activity that largely operates according to its own schedule. You can’t hurry it very much before the experience begins to lose its meaning; it refuses to consent, you might say, to our desire to exert control over how our time unfolds.

the twelve-step philosophy of Alcoholics Anonymous, which asserts that alcoholism is fundamentally a result of attempting to exert a level of control over your emotions that you can’t ever attain.

the alcoholic has additional problems: as well as struggling to control her emotions through drink, she must also try to control her drinking, lest it cost her her relationship, her job, or even her life.

You know you must stop, but you also can’t stop, because the very thing that’s hurting you—alcohol—has come to feel like the only means of controlling the negative emotions that, in fact, your drinking is helping to cause.

We push ourselves harder to get rid of anxiety, but the result is actually more anxiety, because the faster we go, the clearer it becomes that we’ll never succeed in getting ourselves or the rest of the world to move as fast as we feel is necessary.

speed addiction tends to be socially celebrated. Your friends are more likely to praise you for being “driven.”