Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

by Oliver Burkeman

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

We’re all in the position of medieval stonemasons, adding a few more bricks to a cathedral whose completion we know we’ll never see.

the “next and most necessary thing” is all that any of us can ever aspire to do in any moment. And we must do it despite not having any objective way to be sure what the right course of action even is.

“Many people say they hope the dominant culture stops destroying the world,” as Jensen puts it, but by saying that, “they’ve assumed the destruction will continue, at least in the short term, and they’ve stepped away from their own ability to participate in stopping it.”

To give up hope, by contrast, is to reinhabit the power that you actually have.

The world is already broken. And what’s true of the state of civilization is equally true of your life: it was always already the case that you would never experience a life of perfect accomplishment or security.

Once you no longer need to convince yourself that the world isn’t filled with uncertainty and tragedy, you’re free to focus on doing what you can to help.

You get to give up on something that was always impossible—the quest to become the optimized, infinitely capable, emotionally invincible, fully independent person you’re officially supposed to be. Then you get to roll up your sleeves and start work on what’s gloriously possible instead.

1. Adopt a “fixed volume” approach to productivity.

keep two to-do lists, one “open” and one “closed.” The open list is for everything that’s on your plate and will doubtless be nightmarishly long.

establish predetermined time boundaries for your daily work.

2. Serialize, serialize, serialize. Following the same logic, focus on one big project at a time

3. Decide in advance what to fail at.

strategic underachievement—that is, nominating in advance whole areas of life in which you won’t expect excellence of yourself—is that you focus that time and energy more effectively.

even in these essential domains, there’s scope to fail on a cyclical basis: to aim to do the bare minimum at work for the next two months, for example, while you focus on your children,

4. Focus on what you’ve already completed, not just on what’s left to complete.

keep a “done list,” which starts empty first thing in the morning, and which you then gradually fill with whatever you accomplish through the day. Each entry is another cheering reminder that you could, after all, have spent the day doing nothing remotely constructive

5. Consolidate your caring.

consciously pick your battles in charity, activism, and politics:

6. Embrace boring and single-purpose technology.

making your devices as boring as possible—first by removing social media apps, even email if you dare, and then by switching the screen from color to grayscale.

7. Seek out novelty in the mundane.

our brains encode the passage of years on the basis of how much information we process in any given interval.

pay more attention to every moment, however mundane: to find novelty not by doing radically different things but by plunging more deeply into the life you already have.

8. Be a “researcher” in relationships.

deliberately adopting an attitude of curiosity, in which your goal isn’t to achieve any particular outcome, or successfully explain your position, but, as Hobson puts it, “to figure out who this human being is that we’re with.”

9. Cultivate instantaneous generosity.

to give money, check in on a friend, send an email praising someone’s work—act on the impulse right away,

10. Practice doing nothing.

the capacity to do nothing is indispensable, because if you can’t bear the discomfort of not acting, you’re far more likely to make poor choices with your time, simply to feel as if you’re acting

But to get better at it is to begin to regain your autonomy—to stop being motivated by the attempt to evade how reality feels here and now, to calm down, and to make better choices with your brief allotment of life.