Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

by Oliver Burkeman

the core challenge of managing our limited time isn’t about how to get everything done—that’s never going to happen—but how to decide most wisely what not to do, and how to feel at peace about not doing it.

the point isn’t to eradicate procrastination, but to choose more wisely what you’re going to procrastinate on, in order to focus on what matters most.

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.

So if a certain activity really matters to you—a creative project, say, though it could just as easily be nurturing a relationship, or activism in the service of some cause—the only way to be sure it will happen is to do some of it today, no matter how little, and no matter how many other genuinely big rocks may be begging for your attention.

“If you don’t save a bit of your time for you, now, out of every week,” as she puts it, “there is no moment in the future when you’ll magically be done with everything and have loads of free time.”

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.

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

the management experts Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry suggest 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.

The point isn’t to force yourself to finish absolutely everything you start, but rather to banish the bad habit of keeping an ever-proliferating number of half-finished projects on the back burner.)

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

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.”

Something—our limited talents, our limited time, our limited control over events, and over the actions of other people—will always render our creation less than perfect.

We invariably prefer indecision over committing ourselves to a single path,

“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.”

In other words, it’s easy for me to fantasize about, say, a life spent achieving stellar professional success, while also excelling as a parent and partner, while also dedicating myself to training for marathons or lengthy meditation retreats or volunteering in my community—because so long as I’m only fa...

Since every real-world choice about how to live entails the loss of countless alternative ways of living, there’s no reason to procrastinate, or to resist making commitments, in the anxious hope that you might somehow be able to avoid those losses. Loss is a given. That ship has sailed—and what a relief.

“settling”—the ubiquitous modern fear that you might find yourself committing to a romantic partner who falls short of your ideal, or who’s unworthy of your excellent personality.

But the received wisdom is wrong. You should definitely settle.

living life to the fullest. But this is a mistake, too, and not just because settling is unavoidable but also because living life to the fullest requires settling. “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,”

there’s no possibility of a romantic relationship being truly fulfilling unless you’re willing, at least for a while, to settle for that specific relationship, with all its imperfections—which means spurning the seductive lure of an infinite number of superior imaginary alternatives.

the cause of your difficulties isn’t that your partner is especially flawed, or that the two of you are especially incompatible, but that you’re finally noticing all the ways in which your partner is (inevitably) finite, and thus deeply disappointing by comparison with the world of your fantasy, where the limiting rules of reality don’t apply.

The reality is that the demands are contradictory. The qualities that make someone a dependable source of excitement are generally the opposite of those that make him or her a dependable source of stability. Seeking both in one real human isn’t much less absurd than dreaming of a partner who’s both six and five feet tall.

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

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.

Philosophers have been worrying about distraction at least since the time of the ancient Greeks, who saw it less as a matter of external interruptions and more as a question of character—a systematic inner failure to use one’s time on what one claimed to value the most.

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.

So 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 crucial point isn’t that it’s wrong to choose to spend your time relaxing, whether at the beach or on BuzzFeed. It’s that 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.

we’re often told today, is to render ourselves indistractible in the face of interruptions: to learn the secrets of “relentless focus”—usually involving meditation, web-blocking apps, expensive noise-canceling headphones, and more meditation—so as to win the attentional struggle once and for all. But this is a trap.

achieving total sovereignty over your attention is almost certainly impossible.

“Attention is the beginning of devotion,”

you can’t truly love a partner or a child, dedicate yourself to a career or to a cause—or just savor the pleasure of a stroll in the park—except to the extent that you can hold your attention on the object of your devotion to begin with.

we’re the fuel: logs thrown on Silicon Valley’s fire, impersonal repositories of attention to be exploited without mercy, until we’re all used up.

it’s not simply that our devices distract us from more important matters. It’s that they change how we’re defining “important matters” in the first place.

“want what we want to want.”

unscrupulous

“attention wandered, the suffering became unbearable.”

But the more common issue is one of boredom, which often arises without explanation. Suddenly, the thing you’d resolved to do, because it mattered to you to do it, feels so staggeringly tedious that you can’t bear to focus on it for one moment more.

you’ll have had to allow yourself to risk feeling “claustrophobic, imprisoned, powerless, and constrained by reality.”

This is why boredom can feel so surprisingly, aggressively unpleasant: we tend to think of it merely as a matter of not being particularly interested in whatever it is we’re doing, but in fact it’s an intense reaction to the deeply uncomfortable experience of confronting your limited control.

You’re obliged to deal with how your experience is unfolding in this moment, to resign yourself to the reality that this is it.

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.

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.

“Hofstadter’s law,” which states that any task you’re planning to tackle will always take longer than you expect,

even if you know that a given project is likely to overrun, and you adjust your schedule accordingly, it’ll just overrun your new estimated finishing time, too.