PRESENT Score: 91%

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman is a profound and thought-provoking examination of our relationship with time. The title refers to the average human lifespan of approximately 4000 weeks, highlighting the brevity of life and the importance of how we choose to spend our time. Burkeman challenges traditional notions of productivity and efficiency, offering a philosophical perspective on time management that emphasizes meaning and fulfillment over mere accomplishment.

Burkeman combines insights from philosophy, psychology, and personal experience to address the paradoxes and limitations of time. He encourages readers to embrace their finitude and make conscious choices about what truly matters, rather than striving to do more in less time.

Key Points

• The Paradox of Efficiency: Burkeman critiques the modern obsession with efficiency and productivity, arguing that attempts to optimize every moment can lead to stress and a sense of inadequacy. Instead, he suggests accepting the limitations of time and focusing on what truly matters.

• Embracing Finitude: Recognizing that we have limited time forces us to make meaningful choices. Burkeman encourages readers to prioritize activities and relationships that bring genuine satisfaction and purpose, rather than succumbing to societal pressures.

• The Myth of Work-Life Balance: The book challenges the concept of achieving a perfect balance between work and personal life. Burkeman posits that life is inherently unbalanced and that seeking balance can be a distraction from engaging fully with the present moment.

• Accepting Imperfection: Burkeman emphasizes the importance of accepting that we cannot do everything or please everyone. By acknowledging our limitations, we can focus on a few significant endeavors and derive more satisfaction from them.

• Living in the Present: The book advocates for mindfulness and being present in the moment. Burkeman suggests that instead of constantly planning for the future, we should immerse ourselves in the present experiences and relationships.

• Philosophical and Practical Insights: Drawing on a range of philosophical traditions and practical advice, Burkeman offers strategies for rethinking our approach to time. These include setting boundaries, letting go of perfectionism, and embracing a slower, more deliberate pace of life.

Passages I highlighted in my book:

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. (Location 577)

‘Depressing? Not a bit of it. No more depressing than a cold [shower] is depressing … You are no longer befogged and bewildered by a false and misleading illusion about your life – like most people.’ This is an excellent spirit in which to confront the challenge of using time well. None of us can single-handedly overthrow a society dedicated to limitless productivity, distraction and speed. But right here, right now, you can stop buying into the delusion that any of that is ever going to bring satisfaction. You can face the facts. You can turn on the shower, brace yourself for some invigoratingly icy water, and step in. (Location 604)

But the choice you can make is to 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. Once you stop believing that it might somehow be possible to avoid hard choices about time, it gets easier to make better ones. You begin to grasp that when there’s too much to do, and there always will be, 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. (Location 704)

What’s needed instead in such situations, I gradually came to understand, is a kind of anti-skill: not the counterproductive strategy of trying to make yourself more efficient, but rather a willingness to resist such urges – to learn to stay with the anxiety of feeling overwhelmed, of not being on top of everything, without automatically responding by trying to fit more in. (Location 778)

To approach your days in this fashion means, instead of clearing the decks, declining to clear the decks, focusing instead on what’s truly of greatest consequence while tolerating the discomfort of knowing that, as you do so, the decks will be filling up further, with emails and errands and other to-dos, many of which you may never get round to at all. (Location 780)

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. (Location 848)

The most fundamental thing we fail to appreciate about the world, Heidegger asserts in his magnum opus, Being and Time, is how bafflingly astonishing it is that it’s there at all – the fact that there is anything rather than nothing. (Location 870)

It’s only by facing our finitude that we can step into a truly authentic relationship with life. (Location 918)

It is by consciously confronting the certainty of death, and what follows from the certainty of death, that we finally become truly present for our lives. (Location 941)

What I can confirm, though, is that if you can adopt the outlook we’re exploring here even just a little – if you can hold your attention, however briefly or occasionally, on the sheer astonishingness of being, and on what a small amount of that being you get – you may experience a palpable shift in how it feels to be here, right now, alive in the flow of time. (Or as the flow of time, a Heideggerian might say.) (Location 967)

The second principle is to limit your work in progress. Perhaps the most appealing way to resist the truth about your finite time is to initiate a large number of projects at once; that way, you get to feel as though you’re keeping plenty of irons in the fire and making progress on all fronts. Instead, what usually ends up happening is that you make progress on no fronts – because each time a project starts to feel difficult, or frightening, or boring, you can bounce off to a different one instead. You get to preserve your sense of being in control of things, but at the cost of never finishing anything important. (Location 1077)

The alternative approach is to fix a hard upper limit on the number of things that you allow yourself to work on at any given time. In their book Personal Kanban, which explores this strategy in detail, the management experts Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry suggest no more than three items.4 Once you’ve selected those tasks, all other incoming demands on your time must wait until one of the three items has been completed, thereby freeing up a slot. (It’s also permissible to free up a slot by abandoning a project altogether if it isn’t working out. The point isn’t to force yourself to finish absolutely everything you start, but rather to banish the bad habit of keeping an ever-proliferating number of half-finished projects on the back burner.) (Location 1081)

You needn’t embrace the specific practice of listing out your goals (I don’t, personally) to appreciate the underlying point, which is that in a world of too many big rocks, it’s the moderately appealing ones – the fairly interesting job opportunity, the semi-enjoyable friendship – on which a finite life can come to grief. (Location 1107)

You need to learn how to start saying no to things you do want to do, with the recognition that you have only one life.’ (Location 1113)

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 exchange on a house. 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. (Location 1244)

We mustn’t let Silicon Valley off the hook, but we should be honest: much of the time, we give in to distraction willingly. 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. (Location 1385)

Slowly it dawned on him that this was the whole point of the ceremony. As he put it – though traditional Buddhist monks certainly would not have done so – it was a ‘giant biofeedback device’, designed to train him to concentrate by rewarding him (with a reduction in suffering) for as long as he could remain undistracted, and punishing him (with an increase in suffering) whenever he failed. (Location 1413)

The more intensely he could hold his attention on the experience of whatever he was doing, the clearer it became to him that the real problem had been not the activity itself but his internal resistance to experiencing it. (Location 1419)

‘One of the puzzling lessons I have learned,’ observes the American author Gregg Krech, describing his own experience of the same urge, ‘is that, more often than not, I do not feel like doing most of the things that need doing.4 I’m not just speaking about cleaning the toilet bowl or doing my tax returns. I’m referring to those things I genuinely desire to accomplish.’ (Location 1434)

It’s worth pausing to notice how exceptionally strange this is. Why, exactly, are we rendered so uncomfortable by concentrating on things that matter – the things we thought we wanted to do with our lives – that we’d rather flee into distractions, which, by definition, are what we don’t want to be doing with our lives? (Location 1438)

When you try to focus on something you deem important, you’re forced to face your limits, an experience that feels especially uncomfortable precisely because the task at hand is one you value so much. (Location 1447)

The overarching point is that what we think of as ‘distractions’ aren’t the ultimate cause of our being distracted. They’re just the places we go to seek relief from the discomfort of confronting limitation. (Location 1472)

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. (Location 1482)

Some Zen Buddhists hold that the entirety of human suffering can be boiled down to this effort to resist paying full attention to the way things are going, because we wish they were going differently (‘This shouldn’t be happening!’7), or because we wish we felt more in control of the process. There is a very down-to-earth kind of liberation in grasping that there are certain truths about being a limited human from which you’ll never be liberated. You don’t get to dictate the course of events. And the paradoxical reward for accepting reality’s constraints is that they no longer feel so constraining. (Location 1490)

Instead, you just find yourself in each moment as it comes, already thrown into this time and place, with all the limitations that entails, and unable to feel certain about what might happen next. Reflect on this a little, and Heidegger’s idea that we are time – that there’s no meaningful way to think of a person’s existence except as a sequence of moments of time – begins to make more sense. (Location 1562)

In her autobiography All Said and Done, Simone de Beauvoir marvels at the mind-boggling number of things, all utterly beyond her control, that had to happen in order to make her her: If I go to sleep after lunch in the room where I work, sometimes I wake up with a feeling of childish amazement – why am I myself?5 What astonishes me, just as it astonishes a child when he becomes aware of his own identity, is the fact of finding myself here, and at this moment, deep in this life and not in any other. What stroke of chance has brought this about? (Location 1587)

These truths about the uncontrollability of the past and the unknowability of the future explain why so many spiritual traditions seem to converge on the same advice: that we should aspire to confine our attentions to the only portion of time that really is any of our business – this one, here in the present. (Location 1602)

Rather, a life spent ‘not minding what happens’ is one lived without the inner demand to know that the future will conform to your desires for it – and thus without having to be constantly on edge as you wait to discover whether or not things will unfold as expected. (Location 1622)

But to the extent that we can stop demanding certainty that things will go our way later on, we’ll be liberated from anxiety in the only moment it ever actually is, which is this one. (Location 1626)

in the words of the American meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein, ‘a plan is just a thought’. (Location 1633)

Of course, grumbling about younger people’s smartphone habits is a favourite pastime of middle-aged curmudgeons like Taylor and me. (Location 1652)

In order to most fully inhabit the only life you ever get, you have to refrain from using every spare hour for personal growth. (Location 1930)

From this perspective, idleness isn’t merely forgivable; it’s practically an obligation. ‘If the satisfaction of an old man drinking a glass of wine counts for nothing,’ wrote Simone de Beauvoir, ‘then production and wealth are only hollow myths; they have meaning only if they are capable of being retrieved in individual and living joy.’ (Location 1930)

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. (Location 1967)

‘We are the sum of all the moments of our lives,’ writes Thomas Wolfe, ‘all that is ours is in them: we cannot escape it or conceal it.’14 If we’re going to show up for, and thus find some enjoyment in, our brief time on the planet, we had better show up for it now. (Location 1975)

if you’re willing to endure the discomfort of not knowing, a solution will often present itself (Location 2313)

Robert Boice spent his career studying the writing habits of his fellow academics, reaching the conclusion that the most productive and successful among them generally made writing a smaller part of their daily routine than the others, so that it was much more feasible to keep going with it day after day. (Location 2336)

They cultivated the patience to tolerate the fact that they probably wouldn’t be producing very much on any individual day, with the result that they produced much more over the long term. They wrote in brief daily sessions – sometimes as short as ten minutes, and never longer than four hours – and they religiously took weekends off. (Location 2338)

‘Entering space and time completely’ – or even partially, which may be as far as any of us ever get – means admitting defeat. It means letting your illusions die. You have to accept that there will always be too much to do; that you can’t avoid tough choices or make the world run at your preferred speed; that no experience, least of all close relationships with other human beings, can ever be guaranteed in advance to turn out painlessly and well – and that from a cosmic viewpoint, when it’s all over, it won’t have counted for very much anyway. (Location 2766)

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 Hobson puts it, ‘to figure out who this human being is that we’re with’.7 (Location 3059)

Not knowing what’s coming next – which is the situation you’re always in, with regard to the future – presents an ideal opportunity for choosing curiosity (wondering what might happen next) over worry (hoping that a certain specific thing will happen next, and fearing it might not) whenever you can. (Location 3066)

When people stop believing in an afterlife, everything depends on making the most of this life. (Location 744)

Who is the Author?

Oliver Burkeman is a British journalist and author known for his work on psychology and self-help. He wrote a popular column for The Guardian called “This Column Will Change Your Life,” which explored various aspects of personal development and well-being. Burkeman’s writing is characterized by its blend of wit, insight, and practicality, offering readers a fresh perspective on managing life’s challenges.

Oliver was also a contributor in both PRESENT Issue 2 and Issue 3