Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

by Oliver Burkeman

Once you truly understand that you’re guaranteed to miss out on almost every experience the world has to offer, the fact that there are so many you still haven’t experienced stops feeling like a problem. Instead, you get to focus on fully enjoying the tiny slice of experiences you actually do have time for—and the freer you are to choose, in each moment, what counts the most.

Geoff Lye, a British environmental consultant, once told me that after the sudden and premature death of his friend and colleague David Watson, he would find himself stuck in traffic, not clenching his fists in agitation, as per usual, but wondering: “What would David have given to be caught in this traffic jam?” It was the same for queues in supermarkets and customer service lines that kept him on hold too long. Lye’s focus was no longer exclusively on what he was doing in such moments or what he’d rather be doing instead; now, he noticed also that he was doing it, with an upwelling of gratitude that took him by surprise.

Many of the philosophers who’ve pondered the subject of human finitude have been reluctant to translate their observations into practical advice, because that smacks of self-help.

The limitations we’re trying to avoid when we engage in this self-defeating sort of procrastination frequently don’t have anything to do with how much we’ll be able to get done in the time available; usually, it’s a matter of worrying that we won’t have the talent to produce work of sufficient quality, or that others won’t respond to it as we’d like them to, or that in some other way things won’t turn out as we want.

We invariably prefer indecision over committing ourselves to a single path, Bergson wrote, because “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.

Whereas staying focused on the present had made the agonies of the ice-water ritual more tolerable, it made less unpleasant undertakings—daily chores that might previously have been a source not of agony but of boredom or annoyance—positively engrossing. The more intensely he could hold his attention on the experience of whatever he was doing, the clearer it became to him that the real problem had been not the activity itself but his internal resistance to experiencing it.

Then Krishnamurti “said in a soft, almost shy voice, ‘You see, I don’t mind what happens.’”