Time Management for Mortals
4000 Weeks
Time Management for mortals
By Oliver Burkeman
Excellent and insightful book about being grateful for having happened and making the most of it.
Opening quote from the book says it all:
“It’s the very last thing, isn’t it, we feel grateful for: having happened. You know, you needn’t have happened. You needn’t have happened. But you did happen.”
Notes from the book
Make sure to read (/skip) to the end, and ask yourself Oliver Burkeman’s 5 questions of your own life.
Part 1. Choosing to Choose
1. The Limit-Embracing Life
Embracing that we do have limits. That we will never ever be able to do even a fraction of what is available to us in our life time. Choices need to be made.
Imagine that! Not knowing time. Living as they did before ‘time’ was ‘a thing’. When there was no clock, but just a day and a night. I feel like that is an experience worth having. No screens, no watches, nothing but being awake and asleep, tending to chores/meditation.
2. The Efficiency Trap
Sisyphus’s inbox, bottomless to-do lists and also the pitfalls (/cost) of convenience
3. Facing Finitude
Martin Heidegger on time. How amazing it is that we are even here in the first place.
To decide means to cut off, i.e cutting away other options from life tree
4. Becoming a Better Procrastinator
Neglect the right things.
pay yourself first (spend time on what is truly important every day)
Limit your work in progress (max. 3 ongoing projects to keep progressing and closing)
Resist the allure of mid priorities (focus only on most important things, avoid the moderately appealing ones).
Accept that it will never be as good as it could be (in imagination). Don’t fall victim to paralysis by perfection.
5. The Watermelon Problem
Problem of distraction, digital and otherwise.
Attention is not just a resource. “Attention is life”.
Beware of distractions.
Bottom-up / involuntary attention is hard-coded for survival, but top-down / voluntary attention is what needs to be harnessed. Victor Frankl, case in point. Perspective and attention is everything.
6. The Intimate Interrupter
Stephen Young’s monastic journey; daily ice water baths. Resist temptation to distract yourself; instead focus on the experience, the sensations.
Suffering increases with distraction (fleeing reality) and diminishes with attention (observing and accepting reality).
The discomfort of what matters is at first glance strange, but can be explained by that meaningful task making our own finitude/limitations clear (which we want to flee from; dull the pain of finitude; distraction / procrastination).
All boils down to accepting that ‘this is it’. It will always feel unpleasant, so do it anyways.
Part 2 Beyond Control
7. We Never Really Have Time
Hofstadter’s Law and the uncertainty of the future. Plan, but know that it is just a plan.
You don’t ‘have’ time. Even though we expect it. It’s not in our possession and we do not control it. We cannot control the future.
Reduce anxiety by accepting that we can never be certain of what the future will bring.
All religions/traditions say the same thing; that we should try to confine our attention to the only portion of time that is any of our business, the present.
Jiddu Krishnamurti: “I don’t mind what happens”.
Joseph Goldstein: “a plan is just a thought”.
8. You Are Here
The present moment is a gift.
Don’t instrumentalize everything
You are only what you are now. Life is now.
9. Rediscovering Rest
Rest can be uncomfortable
Hiking as an end in itself
Schopenhauer: life as pursuit of accomplishments and challenge herein. Solution may be activities we do for their own sake.
10. The Impatience Spiral
We are getting more and more impatient and eager to bend reality to our liking. Bad taoists.
11. Staying on the Bus
Patience is a form of power.
Jennifer Roberts HarvardU: look at painting for three hours straight, w/o distractions.
Watching and waiting
Three principles of patience:
Develop a taste for having problems
Embrace radical incrementalism
Originality lies on the far side of unoriginality
12. The Loneliness of the Digital Nomad
The value of relations is larger than the cost.
Having all the time in the world isn’t worth much if you have no one to share it with.
In and out of sync - on a societal basis (Soviet experiment)
Keeping together in time - marching to the same beat.
Removing flexibility in exchange for rewards of community. Prioritize physical activities over digital ones. Sometimes allow rhythm of family and business life (collective action) to take precedence over perfect morning routine and weekly schedule.
13. Cosmic Insignificance Therapy
Invitation to face the truth about your irrelevance in the grand scheme of things.
Don’t hold your 4000 weeks to some abstract and over demanding standard of remarkableness. Take life instead on it’s own terms as it concretely, finitely, and often enough, marvelously, really is.
14. The human disease
We are time. We are the moments. Time (past/future) cannot be mastered/controlled.
Accept that there will always be too much to do, and in exchange be here now.
Recognize that being unable to escape problem of finitude is not in itself a problem. It is a (human) condition of life.
5 questions to make matters more concrete:
Oliver Burkeman ends the book with the following questions to make it all a bit more concrete. As he says; “it doesn’t matter if answers aren’t immediately forthcoming; the point in Rainer Maria Rilke’s famous phrase is to “live the questions”. Even to ask them with any sincerity is already to have begun to come to grips with the reality of your siutation and to start to make the most of your finite time.”
Where in your life or your work are you currently pursuing comfort, when what’s called for is a little discomfort?
Are you holding yourself to, and judging yourself by, standards of productivity or performance that are impossible to meet?
In what ways have you yet to accept the fact that you are who you are, not the person you think you ought to be?
In which areas of life are you still holding back until you feel like you know what you’re doing?
How would you spend your days differently if you didn’t care so much about seeing your actions reach fruition?
In the book, Oliver Burkeman writes a few pages helping you to assess the criticality of these questions and how to think about them. It really is a wonderful book.
He closes the book with excerpts from a letter by Carl Jung to a Frau V. asking how to live. His answer is that there is no right way to live. One lives as one can. In a modified and shortened version this has since become a slogan favored among members of Alcoholics Anonymous, but really it is what any of us can ever aspire to do in any moment:
Do the next right thing
Afterword: Beyond Hope
Give up what was always impossible; to become the optimized, infinitely capable, emotionally invincible, fully independent person you’re “officially” supposed to be.
Then roll up your sleeves and work on what is possible.
