Four Thousand Weeks

Oliver Burkeman serves up a great big dish of finitude in his New York Times bestseller Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. He argues that time management should be everyone’s concern and offers some practical advice for making the most of it.

Make hard choices. There’s not enough time to do everything that feels worthwhile or interesting. There’s no peace and contentment trying to cram ever more things into each day. The more we fall into the trap of believing we can do it all, the more likely we’ll invest precious time in activities that aren’t truly meaningful for us. When we discipline ourselves to make hard choices, we make better ones.

Face finitude. We are each granted a limited time on this earth with no guarantees on how long that might be. Confronting that reality can make us truly present for the moments we’ve been given. As he says: “Where’s the logic in constantly postponing fulfillment until some later point in time when soon enough you won’t have any later left?”

Get comfortable with procrastination. Do the right things and let the other stuff slide. Burkeman’s principles include: (i) focusing on personal priorities first to make sure they get done; (ii) setting limits on how many projects you’ll tackle at a time (i.e., top 5, not a top 25!); and, (iii) resisting the allure of middling priorities even if they’ll take consume very little time and resources. That approach may leave some items on the “someday list” for quite a while. If they prove compelling, they’ll work their way up. If not, they’ll fall off.

Avoid external distraction. Digital media excels at hijacking attention. Our devices provide alerts to new content and provide effortless ways to tap them. We lose momentum on the tasks at hand and often get drawn in to browsing their curated content. Beyond their disruptive influence, they exert a substantive impact on our attitudes and thoughts. It’s time to reset notification parameters and limit the parties who are granted instant access.

Avoid internal distraction. When facing difficult or uncomfortable tasks – even things we want to do – our minds can start scanning for ways to pull us off course. Turn on the TV. Check social media. Do busy work. Go to the refrigerator. Boredom accounts for a number of these interrupts. (Daily workouts, meditation, and music practice fall into this category for me… until I get going on them.) Fear accounts for others. (“What if I’m not good enough to get this job done well?”) Internally-motivated distraction chews up a lot of brain cycles while stalling forward progress. Rather than getting caught up in this spin cycle, acknowledge (name) the discomfort, deal with it, and then move on.

Rediscover rest. We needn’t justify our lives in terms of productivity or treat leisure time as recovery for work or yet another opportunity to achieve mastery. It’s OK to pursue hobbies at which we’re mediocre. It’s OK to go on hikes, runs, or bike rides without challenging ourselves to better our prior efforts. In fact, it’s OK to flat out “waste time” and do nothing at all. We’re allowed to just be and put the kibosh on the constant striving.

Practice patience. We’ve become speed addicts, always in a hurry. If traffic jams up, we get frustrated and start honking our horns. When in slow moving lines at the grocers, we get annoyed with the chatty check-out clerks or the folks who take too long with payment. When projects take longer to complete than we anticipated (as they usually do!), we stop enjoying the process and grumble about the unanticipated drag on our schedules. Why opt for anxiety-laden frustration when it won’t change the outcome? Breathe and opt for peace and calm instead.

Cultivate staying power. Life doesn’t always come with easy answers to the problems it presents. Stay in the mix long enough to discern the way forward. If challenged by a gnarly task, chip away at it a little at a time without succumbing to the pressure to race to the finish line. Embrace trial and error; fumble along while learning new skills or accumulating experience. It creates a more satisfying experience while delivering better outcomes.

Connect with people who matter. The cosmos will take little note of our lives on earth. All but a very few of us will make our marks in history. But our lives will be enriched immeasurably by aligning our temporal grooves with the family, friends, and communities about which we most care.