Four Thousand Weeks

Time Management for Mortals

Rating

3/5

Date Started

11/16/2023

Date Completed

11/24/2023

Five Powerful Quotes from the Book

Quote 1

“All of this illustrates what might be termed ‘The Paradox of Limitation’ which runs through everything that follows. 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, and work with them rather than against them, the more productive, meaningful, and joyful life becomes. I don’t think the feeling of anxiety ever completely goes away. We’re even limited, apparently, in our capacity to embrace our limitations. But I’m aware of no other time management technique that’s half as effective as just facing the way things truly are.”

Quote 2

“Here the story ends, but it’s a lie. The smug teacher is being dishonest. He has rigged his demonstration by bringing only a few big rocks into the classroom, knowing they’ll all fit into the jar. The real problem of time management today, though, isn’t that we’re bad at prioritizing the big rocks, it’s that there are too many rocks and most of them are never making it anywhere near that jar. The critical question isn’t how to differentiate between activities that matter and those that don’t, but what to do when far too many things feel at least somewhat important and therefore arguably qualify as big rocks.

“Fortunately, a handful of wiser minds have addressed exactly this dilemma, and their counsel coalesces around three main principles.

“Principle number one is to pay yourself first when it comes to time… If you try to find time for your most valued activities by first dealing with all the other important demands on your time in the hope that there will be some leftover at the end, you’ll be disappointed. So if a certain activity really matters to you… 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…

“The second principle is to limit your work in progress… Fix a hard upper limit on the number of things you allow yourself to work on at any given time…

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

Quote 3

“People complain that they no longer have time to read, but the reality, as the novelist Tim Parks has pointed out, is rarely that they literally can’t locate an empty half hour in the course of the day. What they mean is that when they do find a morsel of time and use it to try to read, they find they’re too impatient to give themselves over to the task. ‘It is not simply that one is interrupted,’ writes Parks, ‘it is that one is actually inclined to interruption. It’s not so much that we’re too busy or too distractible, but that we’re unwilling to accept the truth that reading is the sort of activity that largely operates according to its own schedule. You can’t hurry it very much before the experience begins to lose its meaning. It refuses to consent, you might say, to our desire to exert control over how our time unfolds. In other words, and in common with far more aspects of reality that we’re comfortable acknowledging, reading something properly just takes the time it takes.'”

Quote 4

“Patience becomes a form of power. 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…

“Three principles of patience. In practical terms, three rules of thumb are especially useful for harnessing the power of patience as a creative force in daily life. The first is to develop a taste for having problems. Behind our urge to race through every obstacle or challenge in an effort to get it dealt with, there’s usually the unspoken fantasy that you might one day finally reach the state of having no problems whatsoever. As a result, most of us treat the problems we encounter as doubly problematic. First because of whatever specific problem we’re facing, and second because we seem to believe, if only subconsciously, that we shouldn’t have problems at all. Yet the state of having no problems is obviously never going to arise. And more to the point, you wouldn’t want it to. Because a life devoid of all problems would contain nothing worth doing and would therefore be meaningless…

“The second principle is to embrace radical incrementalism… One critical aspect of the radical incrementalist approach, which runs counter to much mainstream advice on productivity, is thus to 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 50 minutes, then once 50 minutes have elapsed, get up and walk away from it…

“The final principle, that more often than not, originality lies on the far side of unoriginality… In many areas of life, there’s strong cultural pressure to strike out in a unique direction… in favor of something more exciting and original. Yet if you always pursue the unconventional in this way, you deny yourself the possibility of experiencing those other, richer forms of uniqueness that are reserved for those with the patience to travel the well-trodden path first… This begins with the willingness to stop and be where you are, to engage with that part of the journey too instead of always badgering reality to hurry up. To experience the profound mutual understanding of the long-married couple, you have to stay married to one person. To know what it’s like to be deeply rooted in a particular community and place, you have to stop moving around. Those are the kinds of meaningful and singular accomplishments that just take the time they take.”

Quote 5

“Ten further techniques for implementing this limit-embracing philosophy in daily life:

“Number one, adopt a fixed volume approach to productivity…

“Number two, serialize, serialize, serialize. Following the same logic, focus on one big project at a time, or at most one work project and one non-work project, and see it to completion before moving on to what’s next…

“Number three, decide in advance what to fail at. You’ll inevitably end up underachieving at something, simply because your time and energy are finite. But the great benefit of 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…

“Number four, focus on what you’ve already completed, not just on what’s left to complete…

“Number five, 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, even if they’re each indisputably worthwhile…

“Number six, embrace boring and single-purpose technology…

“Number seven, seek out novelty in the mundane…

“Number eight, 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 as [Tom] Hobson puts it, ‘To figure out who this human being is that we’re with.’ …

“Number nine, cultivate instantaneous generosity…

“Number ten, practice doing nothing.”

About the Book

Original Date Published

8/10/2021

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals – Audiobook | Ebook | Hardcover – “The average human lifespan is absurdly, insultingly brief. Assuming you live to be eighty, you have just over four thousand weeks.

“Nobody needs telling there isn’t enough time. We’re obsessed with our lengthening to-do lists, our overfilled inboxes, work-life balance, and the ceaseless battle against distraction; and we’re deluged with advice on becoming more productive and efficient, and ‘life hacks’ to optimize our days. But such techniques often end up making things worse. The sense of anxious hurry grows more intense, and still the most meaningful parts of life seem to lie just beyond the horizon. Still, we rarely make the connection between our daily struggles with time and the ultimate time management problem: the challenge of how best to use our four thousand weeks.

“Drawing on the insights of both ancient and contemporary philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual teachers, Oliver Burkeman delivers an entertaining, humorous, practical, and ultimately profound guide to time and time management. Rejecting the futile modern fixation on ‘getting everything done,’ Four Thousand Weeks introduces listeners to tools for constructing a meaningful life by embracing finitude, showing how many of the unhelpful ways we’ve come to think about time aren’t inescapable, unchanging truths, but choices we’ve made as individuals and as a society – and that we could do things differently.”

About the Author

Oliver Burkeman – “Author of The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking (2012) and Help! How to Become Slightly Happier and Get a Bit More Done (2011), a collection of [his] columns for the Guardian newspaper.

”[His] new book, Four Thousand Weeks, is about making the most of our radically finite lives in a world of impossible demands, relentless distraction and political insanity (and ‘productivity techniques’ that mainly just make everyone feel busier).”