Four Thousand Weeks
By Oliver Burkeman
đź“šThe Book in 3 Bullets
The more productive we become at a certain task, the more work we will have as a result. Thinking that there will be time to relax is a false narrative, you need to make time for yourself.
There are too many seemingly important things for any human to spend their time on. There are trade-offs with every decision, just make sure that you’re making them consciously.
We have little control over how we spend our time. Sometimes accepting inevitable interruptions or changes to your schedule can be much more beneficial than scrambling to stick to your original plan.
🌎 How the Book Changed Me
This book has changed my thoughts on being productive at all times. Too often, I judge myself on how much I’ve gotten done in a certain period of time. This is futile because there will always be more things to get done regardless of how productive I am. I want to make sure that I am also enjoying the journey of being alive, and not only focusing on how many things I can accomplish.
✍️ My Top Quotes
The first modern humans appeared on the plains of Africa at least 200,000 years ago, and scientists estimate that life, in some form, will persist for another 1.5 billion years or more. But you? Assuming you live to be eighty, you’ll have had about four thousand weeks.
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.
Productivity is a trap. Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster.
The trouble with attempting to master your time is that time ends up mastering you.
Where’s the logic in constantly postponing fulfillment until some later point in time when soon enough you won’t have any “later” left?
đź“– Summary & Notes
The Limit-Embracing Life
The invention of the clock is solely to blame for all our time-related troubles today.
Once time is a resource to be used, you start to feel pressure to use it well, and to berate yourself when you feel you’ve wasted it. When you’re faced with too many demands, it’s easy to assume that the only answer must be to make better use of time, by becoming more efficient, driving yourself harder, or working for longer instead of asking whether the demands themselves might be unreasonable.
The paradox of limitation: The more you try to manage your time with the goal of achieving a feeling of total control, and freedom from the inevitable constraints of being human, the more stressful, empty, and frustrating life gets. But the more you confront the facts of finitude instead, the more productive, meaningful, and joyful life becomes.
A limit-embracing attitude to time means organizing your days with the understanding that you definitely won’t have time for everything you want to do, or that other people want you to do—and so, at the very least, you can stop beating yourself up for failing. Since hard choices are unavoidable, what matters is learning to make them consciously, deciding what to focus on and what to neglect, rather than letting them get made by default.
The Efficiency Trap
Maybe making sufficient time in the week for your creative calling means you’ll never have an especially tidy home, or get quite as much exercise as you should, and so on.
The problem with trying to make time for everything that feels important—or just for enough of what feels important—is that you definitely never will.
There’s no reason to believe you’ll ever feel “on top of things, or make time for everything that matters, simply by getting more done.
If you succeed in fitting more in, you’ll find the goalposts start to shift: more things will begin to seem important, meaningful, or obligatory. Acquire a reputation for doing your work at amazing speed, and you’ll be given more of it.
Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
Negligent emailers frequently find that forgetting to reply ends up saving them time: people find alternative solutions to the problems they were nagging you to solve, or the looming crisis they were emailing about never materializes. So it’s not simply that you never get through your email; it’s that the process of “getting through your email” actually generates more emails.
Stop believing you’ll ever solve the challenge of busyness by cramming more in because that just makes matters worse. And once you stop investing in the idea that you might one day achieve peace of mind that way, it becomes easier to find peace of mind in the present, in the midst of overwhelming demands, because you’re no longer making your peace of mind dependent on dealing with all the demands.
The harder you struggle to fit everything in, the more of your time you’ll find yourself spending on the least meaningful things.
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.
Facing Finitude
It’s only by facing our finitude that we can step into a truly authentic relationship with life.
If you really thought life would never end, then nothing could ever genuinely matter, because you’d never be faced with having to decide whether or not to use a portion of your precious life on something.
Why treat four thousand weeks as a very small number, because it’s so tiny compared with infinity, rather than treating it as a huge number because it’s so many more weeks than if you had never been born?
The exhilaration that sometimes arises when you grasp this truth about finitude has been called the “joy of missing out,” by way of a deliberate contrast with the idea of the “fear of missing out.”
It is a thrilling recognition that you wouldn’t even really want to be able to do everything, since if you didn’t have to decide on what to miss out on, your choices couldn’t truly mean anything.
Becoming a Better Procrastinator
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 problem of time management today isn’t that we’re bad at prioritizing the important things. It’s that there are too many important things—most of which we do not have time for.
Pay yourself first when it comes to time.
If you don’t save a bit of time for yourself, now, out of every week, there is no moment in the future when you’ll magically be done with everything and have loads of free time.
Limit your work in progress.
The good procrastinator accepts the fact that she can’t get everything done, and then decides as wisely as possible what tasks to focus on and what to neglect. By contrast, the bad procrastinator finds himself paralyzed precisely because he can’t bear the thought of confronting his limitations. For him, procrastination is a strategy of emotional avoidance.
If you’re procrastinating on something because you’re worried you won’t do a good enough job, you can relax—because judged by the flawless standards of your imagination, you definitely won’t do a good enough job. So you might as well make a start.
When people finally do choose, in a relatively irreversible way, they’re usually much happier as a result.
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.
The Watermelon Problem
Attention is life: your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention. At the end of your life, looking back, whatever compelled your attention from moment to moment is simply what your life will have been.
Something in us wants to be distracted, whether by our digital devices or anything else—to not spend our lives on what we thought we cared about the most.
The Intimate Interrupter
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.
We Never Really Have Time
When we claim that we have time, what we really mean is that we expect it.
You only ever get to feel certain about the future once it’s already turned into the past.
All a plan is is a present-moment statement of intent. It’s an expression of your current thoughts about how you’d ideally like to deploy your modest influence over the future. The future, of course, is under no obligation to comply.
You Are Here
The more you focus on using time well, the more each day begins to feel like something you have to get through, en route to some calmer, better, more fulfilling point in the future, which never actually arrives.
We treat everything we’re doing—life itself, in other words—as valuable only insofar as it lays the groundwork for something else.
There will be a last time that you visit your childhood home, or swim in the ocean, or make love, or have a deep conversation with a certain close friend. We should therefore try to treat every such experience with the reverence we’d show if it were the final instance of it.
Our obsession with extracting the greatest future value out of our time blinds us to the reality that the moment of truth is always now—that life is nothing but a succession of present moments, culminating in death, and that you’ll probably never get to a point where you feel you have things in perfect working order.
Rediscovering Rest
Enjoying leisure for its own sake—which you might have assumed was the whole point of leisure—comes to feel as though it’s somehow not quite enough. It begins to feel as though you’re failing at life, in some indistinct way, if you’re not treating your time off as an investment in your future.
Leisure no longer feels very leisurely. Instead, it too often feels like another item on the to-do list.
To the philosophers of the ancient world, leisure wasn’t the means to some other end; on the contrary, it was the end to which everything else worth doing was a means.
The truth is that spending at least some of your leisure time “wastefully,” focused solely on the pleasure of the experience, is the only way not to waste it—to be truly at leisure, rather than covertly engaged in future-focused self-improvement. In order to most fully inhabit the only life you ever get, you have to refrain from using every spare hour for personal growth. From this perspective, idleness isn’t merely forgivable; it’s practically an obligation.
While capitalism gets its energy from the permanent anxiety of striving for more, the sabbath embodies the thought that whatever work you’ve completed by the time that Friday night rolls around might be enough—that there might be no sense, for now, in trying to get any more done.
Nothing is more alien to the present age than idleness.
In such an era, it’s virtually guaranteed that truly stopping to rest—as opposed to training for a 10K, or heading off on a meditation retreat with the goal of attaining spiritual enlightenment—is initially going to provoke some serious feelings of discomfort, rather than of delight. That discomfort isn’t a sign that you shouldn’t be doing it, though. It’s a sign that you definitely should.
We might seek to incorporate into our daily lives more things we do for their own sake alone—to spend some of our time on activities in which the only thing we’re trying to get from them is the doing itself.
The Impatience Spiral
As the world gets faster and faster, we come to believe that our happiness, or our financial survival, depends on our being able to work and move and make things happen at super-human speed. We grow anxious about not keeping up—so to quell the anxiety, to try to achieve the feeling that our lives are under control, we move faster. But his only generates an addictive spiral.
Speed addiction tends to be socially celebrated. Your friends are more likely to praise you for being “driven.”
We have to give up. You surrender to the reality that things just take the time they take and that 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.
Staying on the Bus
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, to do the work that counts, and to derive satisfaction from the doing itself, instead of deferring all your fulfillment to the future.
The state of having no problems is never going to arrive. You wouldn’t want it to, because a life devoid of all problems would contain nothing worth doing, and would therefore be meaningless.
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, giving each one the time it requires—that the presence of problems in your life, in other words, isn't an impediment to a meaningful existence but the very substance of one.
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. If you’ve decided to work on a given project for fifty minutes, then once fifty minutes have elapsed, get up and walk away from it.
The Loneliness of the Digital Nomad
The digital nomad’s lifestyle lacks the shared rhythms required for deep relationships to take root.
It’s much easier to nurture relationships with family and friends when they’re off work, too.
Part of what makes weekends fun is getting to spend time with others who are also off work.
We live less and less of our lives in the same temporal grooves as one another.
It’s harder than ever to find time for a leisurely family dinner, a spontaneous visit to friends, or any collective project that takes place in a setting other than the workplace.
You can make the kinds of commitments that remove flexibility from your schedule in exchange for the rewards of community, by joining amateur choirs or sports teams. You can prioritize activities in the physical world over those in the digital one, where even collaborative activity ends up feeling curiously isolating.
Sometimes, let the rhythms of family life and friendships and collective action take precedence over your perfect morning routing or your system for scheduling your week.
Cosmic Insignificance Therapy
Religion no longer provides the universal ready-made sense of purpose it once did, while consumerism misleads us into seeking meaning where it can’t be found.
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.
To contemplate the massive indifference of the universe can feel as disorienting as being lost in a dense wood, or as frightening as falling overboard into the sea with no one to know we have gone. But there’s another angle from which it’s oddly consoling. You might think of it as “cosmic insignificance therapy”: when things all seem too much, what better solace than a reminder that they are, provided you’re willing to zoom out a bit, indistinguishable from nothing at all? the anxieties that clutter the average life—relationship troubles, status rivalries, money worries—shrink instantly down to irrelevance.
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.
Virtually any career might be a worthwhile way to spend a working life, if it makes things slightly better for those it serves.
Cosmic insignificance therapy is an invitation to face the truth about your irrelevance in the grand scheme of things.
The Human Disease
We waste our lives railing against traffic jams and toddlers for having the temerity to take the time they take, because they’re blunt reminders of how little control we truly have over our schedules.
Because your quantity of time is so limited, you’ll never reach the commanding position of being able to handle every demand that might be thrown at you or pursue every ambition that feels important; you’ll be obliged to make tough choices instead.
Ask yourself if you’re holding yourself to, and judging yourself by, standards of productivity or performance that are impossible to meet.
Let your impossible standards crash to the ground. Then pick a few meaningful tasks from the rubble and get started on them today.
Once you no longer feel the stifling pressure to become a particular kind of person, you can confront the personality, the strengths and weaknesses, the talents and enthusiasms you find yourself with, here and now, and follow where they lead.
It’s alarming to face the fact 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, too, because it removes a central reason for feeling self-conscious or inhibited about your performance in those domains in the present moment. If the feeling of total authority is never going to arrive, you might as well not wait any longer to give such activities your all—to put bold plans into practice, to stop erring on the side of caution.
One lives as one can. There is no single, definite way. Just focus on doing the next right thing.
Ten Tools for Embracing Your Finitude
Adopt a “fixed volume” approach to productivity.
It’s better to begin from the assumption that tough choices are inevitable and to focus on making them consciously and well. Any strategy for limiting your work in progress will help.
Establish predetermined time boundaries for your daily work. Decide in advance how much time you’ll dedicate to work.
Serialize, serialize, serialize.
Focus on one big project at a time.
Decide in advance what to fail at.
You’ll inevitably end up underachieving at something, simply because your time and energy are finite. Focus on strategic underachievement.
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 gradually fill with whatever you accomplish through the day.
Consolidate your caring.
Social media is a giant machine for getting you to spend your time caring about the wrong things, but for the same reason, it’s also a machine for getting you to care about too many things.
Embrace boring and single-purpose technology.
Make 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.
Seek out novelty in the mundane.
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. Experience life with twice the usual intensity, and “your experience of life would be twice as full as it currently is.”
Meditation helps here. But so does going on unplanned walks to see where they lead you, using a different route to get to work, or journaling.
Be a “researcher” in relationships.
When presented with a challenging or boring moment, try deliberately adopting an attitude of curiosity, in which your goal isn’t to achieve any particular outcome, or successfully explain your position, but to figure out who this human being is that we’re with.
Cultivate instantaneous generosity.
Practice doing nothing.
When it comes to the challenge of using your four thousand weeks well, 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—choices such as stressfully trying to hurry activities that won’t be rushed or feeling you ought to spend every moment being productive in the service of future goals, thereby postponing fulfillment to a time that never arrives.
Try the “Do nothing” meditation. Set a timer for five to ten minutes, sit down in a chair, and then stop trying to do anything.