Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

by Oliver Burkeman

This is the maddening truth about time, which most advice on managing it seems to miss. It’s like an obstreperous toddler: the more you struggle to control it, to make it conform to your agenda, the further it slips from your control.

In 1930, in a speech titled “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” the economist John Maynard Keynes made a famous prediction: Within a century, thanks to the growth of wealth and the advance of technology, no one would have to work more than about fifteen hours a week. The challenge would be how to fill all our newfound leisure time without going crazy. “For the first time since his creation,” Keynes told his audience, “man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem—how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares.” But Keynes was wrong. It turns out that when people make enough money to meet their needs, they just find new things to need and new lifestyles to aspire to; they never quite manage to keep up with the Joneses, because whenever they’re in danger of getting close, they nominate new

and better Joneses with whom to try to keep up.

As a result, they work harder and harder, and soon busyness becomes a...

yet we systematically spend our days doing other things instead.

There is an alternative: the unfashionable but powerful notion of letting time use you, approaching life not as an opportunity to implement your predetermined plans for success but as a matter of responding to the needs of your place and your moment in history.

however privileged or unfortunate your specific situation, fully facing the reality of it can only help.

is a kind of anti-skill: not the counterproductive strategy of trying to make yourself more efficient, but rather a willingness to resist such urges—to learn to stay with the anxiety of feeling overwhelmed, of not being on top of everything, without automatically responding by trying to fit more in. To

it’s often the unsmoothed textures of life that make it livable, helping nurture the relationships that are crucial for mental and physical health, and for the resilience of our communities.

That discomfort isn’t a sign that you shouldn’t be doing it, though. It’s a sign that you definitely should.

“atelic activity,”

freedom to suck without caring is revelatory.”

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

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.

“the social regulation of time”:

fika, the daily moment when everyone in a given workplace gets up from their desks to gather for coffee and cake.

how much of 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.

It starts to feel as though you, your spouse, and your closest friends have all been assigned to different color-coded Soviet work groups.

What would it mean to spend the only time you ever get in a way that truly feels as though you are making it count?

Which is why it’s useful to begin this last stage of our journey with a blunt but unexpectedly liberating truth: that what you do with your life doesn’t matter all that much—and when it comes to how you’re using your finite time, the universe absolutely could not care less.

“Abandoning hope is an affirmation, the beginning of the beginning,”

And once you no longer need to convince yourself that you’ll do everything that needs doing, you’re free to focus on doing a few things that count.

strategic underachievement—