Book Notes - Four Thousand Weeks, by Oliver Burkeman

Posted on:October 10, 2023

The book explores a better way to handle time and shares ideas from wise thinkers who emphasized understanding time instead of controlling it.

Table of Content

Personal opinion: Best and worst of the book

1. Fast Society

Since the beginning of the modern era of acceleration, people have been responding not with satisfaction at all the time saved but with increasing agitation that they can’t make things move faster still.

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 superhuman 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 this only generates an addictive spiral. We push ourselves harder to get rid of anxiety, but the result is actually more anxiety, because the faster we go, the clearer it becomes that we’ll never succeed in getting ourselves or the rest of the world to move as fast as we feel is necessary.

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

The modern world provides an inexhaustible supply of things that seem worth doing, and so there arises an inevitable and unbridgeable gap between what you’d ideally like to do and what you actually can do.

Busyness has been rebranded as “hustle” or relentless work not as a burden to be endured but as an exhilarating lifestyle choice, worth boasting about on social media.

Time feels like an unstoppable conveyor belt, bringing us new tasks as fast as we can dispatch the old ones; and becoming “more productive” just seems to cause the belt to speed up.

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 an emblem of prestige. Which is clearly completely absurd: for almost the whole of history, the entire point of being rich was not having to work so much.

Our days are spent trying to “get through” tasks, in order to get them “out of the way,” with the result that we live mentally in the future, waiting for when we’ll finally get around to what really matters.

Even the winners in our achievement-obsessed culture, the ones who make it to the elite universities, then reap the highest salaries find that their reward is the unending pressure to work with “crushing intensity” in order to maintain the income and status that have come to seem like prerequisites for the lives they want to lead.

2. Facing the reality of time

It’s hard to imagine a crueler arrangement: not only are our four thousand weeks constantly running out, but the fewer of them we have left, the faster we seem to lose them.

We are forced to acknowledge that there are hard choices to be made: which balls to let drop, which people to disappoint, which cherished ambitions to abandon, which roles to fail at.

Maybe you can’t keep your current job while also seeing enough of your children; 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.

Instead, in an attempt to avoid these unpleasant truths, we deploy the strategy that dominates most conventional advice on how to deal with busyness: we tell ourselves we’ll just have to find a way to do more—to try to address our busyness, you could say, by making ourselves busier still.

It’s painful to confront how limited your time is, because it means that tough choices are inevitable and that you won’t have time for all you once dreamed you might do.

No other time management technique that’s half as effective as just facing the way things truly are. 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 tried to align my daily actions with my goals, and my goals with my core values. Using these techniques often made me feel as if I were on the verge of ushering in a golden era of calm, undistracted productivity and meaningful activity. But it never arrived. Instead, I just got more stressed and unhappy.

We don’t want to feel the anxiety that might arise if we were to ask ourselves whether we’re on the right path, or what ideas about ourselves it could be time to give up. We don’t want to risk getting hurt in relationships or failing professionally; we don’t want to accept that we might never succeed in pleasing our parents or in changing certain things we don’t like about ourselves—and we certainly don’t want to get sick and die.

The more you believe you might succeed in “fitting everything in,” the more commitments you naturally take on, and the less you feel the need to ask whether each new commitment is truly worth a portion of your time—and so your days inevitably fill with more activities you don’t especially value.

Most of us do, most of the time, instead of confronting our finitude, which is to indulge in avoidance and denial, or what Heidegger calls “falling.” Rather than taking ownership of our lives, we seek out distractions, or lose ourselves in busyness and the daily grind, so as to try to forget our real predicament.

3. Distractions

What you pay attention to will define, for you, what reality is.

The elephant-in-the-room problem with everything I’ve been arguing so far about time and time management. That problem is distraction. After all, it hardly matters how committed you are to making the best use of your limited time if, day after day, your attention gets wrenched away by things on which you never wanted to focus.

Achieving total sovereignty over your attention is almost certainly impossible.

As you surface from an hour inadvertently frittered away on Facebook, you’d be forgiven for assuming that the damage, in terms of wasted time, was limited to that single misspent hour. But you’d be wrong. Because the attention economy is designed to prioritize whatever’s most compelling—instead of whatever’s most true, or most useful—it systematically distorts the picture of the world we carry in our heads at all times. It influences our sense of what matters, what kinds of threats we face, how venal our political opponents are, and thousands of other things—and all these distorted judgments then influence how we allocate our offline time as well.

4. Short life

Convenience culture seduces us into imagining that we might find room for everything important by eliminating only life’s tedious tasks. But it’s a lie. You have to choose a few things, sacrifice everything else, and deal with the inevitable sense of loss that results.

The original Latin word for “decide,” decidere, means “to cut off,” as in slicing away alternatives; it’s a close cousin of words like “homicide” and “suicide.”

Every decision to use a portion of time on anything represents the sacrifice of all the other ways in which you could have spent that time, but didn’t and to willingly make that sacrifice is to take a stand, without reservation, on what matters most to you.

This dream of somehow one day getting the upper hand in our relationship with time is the most forgivable of human delusions because the alternative is so unsettling. But unfortunately, it’s the alternative that’s true: the struggle is doomed to fail. 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. And because you can’t dictate, or even accurately predict, so much of what happens with the finite portion of time you do get, you’ll never feel that you’re securely in charge of events, immune from suffering.

You’ll do what you can, you won’t do what you can’t, and the tyrannical inner voice insisting that you must do everything is simply mistaken.

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. The reason isn’t that you haven’t yet discovered the right time management tricks or applied sufficient effort, or that you need to start getting up earlier, or that you’re generally useless.

The only route to psychological freedom is to let go of the limit-denying fantasy of getting it all done and instead to focus on doing a few things that count.. 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.

5. Instrumentalization of time

Inevitably, we become obsessed with “using time well,” whereupon we discover an unfortunate truth: 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. The problem is one of instrumentalization.

When your relationship with time is almost entirely instrumental, the present moment starts to lose its meaning.

Focus exclusively on where you’re headed, at the expense of focusing on where you are with the result that you find yourself living mentally in the future, locating the “real” value of your life at some time that you haven’t yet reached.

A more fruitful approach to the challenge of living more fully in the moment starts from noticing that you are, in fact, always already living in the moment anyway, whether you like it or not.

This is also why it can be so unexpectedly calming to take actions you’d been fearing or delaying—to finally hand in your notice at work, become a parent, address a festering family issue, or close on a house purchase. 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.

6. Leisure

We actually have more leisure time than we did in previous decades, an average of about five hours per day for men, and only slightly less for women. But perhaps one reason we don’t experience life that way is that leisure no longer feels very leisurely. Instead, it too often feels like another item on the to-do list.

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.

Rest is permissible, but only for the purposes of recuperation for work, or perhaps for some other form of self-improvement. It becomes difficult to enjoy a moment of rest for itself alone, without regard for any potential future benefits, because rest that has no instrumental value feels wasteful.

As long as you’re filling every hour of the day with some form of striving, you get to carry on believing that all this striving is leading you somewhere, to an imagined future state of perfection, a heavenly realm in which everything runs smoothly, your limited time causes you no pain, and you’re free of the guilty sense that there’s more you need to be doing in order to justify your existence.

Leisure, unlike almost everything else I do with my life, it’s not relevant to ask whether I’m any good at it: it doesn’t have a purpose, in the sense of an outcome you’re trying to achieve or somewhere you’re trying to get.

7. Cosmic insignificance

It’s fundamental to being human the understandable tendency to judge everything from the perspective you occupy, so that the few thousand weeks for which you happen to be around inevitably come to feel like the linchpin of history, to which all prior time was always leading up.

This overvaluing of your existence gives rise to an unrealistic definition of what it would mean to use your finite time well.

From a truly cosmic view, it will soon be forgotten, like everything else.

This realization isn’t merely calming but liberating, because once you’re no longer burdened by such an unrealistic definition of a “life well spent,” you’re freed to consider the possibility that a far wider variety of things might qualify as meaningful ways to use your finite time.

Cosmic insignificance therapy is an invitation to face the truth about your irrelevance in the grand scheme of things.

8. Random productivity tips.

This is a very random section and totally dispensable section at the end of the book.

It seems that the publisher realised that the book offers no tools or practical advice more than “acknowledge that you are going to die”, and forced the author to add a sections in which he repeats the same productivity tips already exhausted in self-help books.

  1. Pay yourself first when it comes to time - a.k.a prioritise what makes you happy.

  2. Limit your work in progress and resist the allure of middling priorities - a.k.a focus in a few tasks each time.

  3. Give the task the time it needs.