Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

by Oliver Burkeman

you can’t quiet your anxieties by working faster, because it isn’t within your power to force reality’s pace as much as you feel you need to, and because the faster you go, the faster you’ll feel you need to go.

When you finally face the truth that you can’t dictate how fast things go, you stop trying to outrun your anxiety, and your anxiety is transformed.

patience becomes a form of power. In a world geared for hurry, the capacity to resist the urge to hurry—to allow things to take the time they take—is a way to gain purchase on the world,

Your reward for surrendering the fantasy of controlling the pace of reality is to achieve, at last, a real sense of purchase on that reality. Or, to use the Britishism, of really getting stuck in to life.

if you’re willing to endure the discomfort of not knowing, a solution will often present itself

we snap at our partners, rather than hearing them out, because waiting and listening would make us feel—correctly—as though we weren’t in control of the situation.

Three Principles of Patience

develop a taste for having problems.

Once you give up on the unattainable goal of eradicating all your problems, it becomes possible to develop an appreciation for the fact that life just is a process of engaging with problem after problem,

embrace radical incrementalism.

the most productive and successful among them generally made writing a smaller part of their daily routine than the others,

They cultivated the patience to tolerate the fact that they probably wouldn’t be producing very much on any individual day, with the result that they produced much more over the long term.

be willing to stop when your daily time is up, even when you’re bursting with energy and feel as though you could get much more done.

Stopping helps strengthen the muscle of patience that will permit you to return to the project again and again, and thus to sustain your productivity over an entire career.

originality lies on the far side of unoriginality

A little farther out on their journeys through the city, Helsinki’s bus routes diverge, plunging off to unique destinations as they head through the suburbs and into the countryside beyond.

if you always pursue the unconventional in this way, you deny yourself the possibility of experiencing those other, richer forms of uniqueness that are reserved for those with the patience to travel the well-trodden path first.

time is also a “network good,” one that derives its value from how many other people have access to it, too, and how well their portion is coordinated with yours.

every gain in personal temporal freedom entails a corresponding loss in how easy it is to coordinate your time with other people’s. The digital nomad’s lifestyle lacks the shared rhythms required for deep relationships to take root.

people in long-term unemployment get a happiness boost when the weekend arrives, just like employed people relaxing after a busy workweek,

what makes weekends fun is getting to spend time with others who are also off work

the value of time comes not from the sheer quantity you have, but from whether you’re in sync with the people you care about most.

Free to pursue our own entirely personal schedules, yet still yoked to our jobs, we’ve constructed lives that can’t be made to mesh.

it’s not unusual to hear protesters describe experiences that call to mind William McNeill’s “strange sense of personal enlargement”—a feeling of time thickening and intensifying, tinged with a kind of ecstasy.

you can make the kinds of commitments that remove flexibility from your schedule in exchange for the rewards of community,

sometimes let the rhythms of family life and friendships and collective action take precedence over your perfect morning routine or your system for scheduling your week.

your time can be too much your own.

It’s deeply unsettling to find yourself doubting the point of what you’re doing with your life. But it isn’t actually a bad thing, because it demonstrates that an inner shift has already occurred.

To realize midway through a business trip that you hate your life is already to have taken the first step into one you don’t hate

things could be different, on a grand scale, if only we collectively wanted that enough.

To remember how little you matter, on a cosmic timescale, can feel like putting down a heavy burden that most of us didn’t realize we were carrying in the first place.

this overvaluing of your existence gives rise to an unrealistic definition of what it would mean to use your finite time well. It sets the bar much too high.

“We do not disapprove of a chair because it cannot be used to boil water for a nice cup of tea,”

it becomes possible to see that preparing nutritious meals for your children might matter as much as anything could ever matter, even if you won’t be winning any cooking awards; or that your novel’s worth writing if it moves or entertains a handful of your contemporaries, even though you know you’re no Tolstoy.

we chase the ultimate fantasy of time mastery—the desire, by the time we die, to have truly mattered in the cosmic scheme of things, as opposed to being instantly trampled underfoot by the advancing eons.

we are time. We’ll never get the upper hand in our relationship with the moments of our lives because we are nothing but those moments.

A life spent focused on achieving security with respect to time, when in fact such security is unattainable, can only ever end up feeling provisional

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;

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.

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

The question circumvents the urge to make decisions in the service of alleviating anxiety and instead helps you make contact with your deeper intentions for your time.

asking what would make you happiest is likely to lure you toward the most comfortable option,

Choose uncomfortable enlargement over comfortable diminishment

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

If the level of performance you’re demanding of yourself is genuinely impossible, then it’s impossible, even if catastrophe looms

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?

shockingly, no one really cares what we’re doing with our life. This is a most unsettling discovery to those of us who have lived someone else’s

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

It’s alarming to face the prospect that you might never truly feel as though you know what you’re doing, in work, marriage, parenting, or anything else. But it’s liberating,

It is even more liberating to reflect that everyone else is in the same boat,