A tribute to
the book by
Oliver Burkeman, an exploration of time management in the
face of human finitude, and addressing the anxiety of “getting
everything done.”
To begin, enter when were you born
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We live our lives
week by week
Yet a week feels frustratingly limited
The pressure to be more productive and fit ever-increasing quantities of
activity into a stubbornly non-increasing quantity of time leads to
productivity anxiety, shriveled attention spans, and burn-out.
And there are alarmingly few of them
You would feel less anxious about wasting an evening doom-scrolling if
you had an infinite amount of them. Somehow either doing too much or too
little can create the sense of wasting time.
Despite all this activity we sense there are important and fulfilling
ways we could be spending our time, even if we can’t say exactly what
they are. Yet, we systematically spend our time doing other things to
get by instead.
The average human life is only four thousand weeks
Scientists estimate that life, in some form, will persist for another
1.5 billion years or more, until the intensifying heat of the sun
condemns the last organism to death.
But you? Assuming you live to be eighty, you’ll have had about four
thousand weeks. The rare few lucky enough to become a centenarian will
see only five thousand.
That’s absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short.
You have lived of them so far
Productivity is a trap
There are numerous techniques, products, and services to squeeze the
most productivity from your week. The problem isn’t that these don’t
work, it’s that they do work. And yet paradoxically you only
feel busier, more anxious, and somehow emptier as a result.
The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under
control—when the flood of emails has been contained; when your to-do
lists have stopped getting longer; when you’re meeting all your
obligations at work and in your home life; when nobody’s angry with you
for missing a deadline or dropping the ball; and when the fully
optimized person you’ve become can turn, at long last, to the things
life is really supposed to be about.
Let’s start by admitting defeat: none of this is ever going to happen.
Adopt a limit-embracing attitude
If you truly don’t have time for everything you want to do, or feel you
ought to do, or that others are badgering you to do, then, well, you
don’t have time—no matter how grave the consequences of failing to do it
all might prove to be. So, technically, it’s irrational to feel troubled
by an overwhelming to-do list. 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.
We rarely stop to consider things so rationally, though, because that
would mean confronting the painful truth of our limitations.
Surrender to the reality that things just take the time they take, and
that you can’t quiet your anxieties by working faster, because it isn’t
within your power to force reality’s pace as much as you feel you need
to, and because the faster you go, the faster you’ll feel you need to
go.
How you spend your time is a choice
We are forced to accept that there will always be too much to do; that
you can’t make the world run at your preferred speed and so there are
tough choices to be made: which balls to let drop, which people to
disappoint, which cherished ambitions to abandon, which roles to fail
at.
Once you truly understand that you’re guaranteed to miss out on almost
every experience the world has to offer, the fact that there are so many
you still haven’t experienced stops feeling like a problem. Instead, you
get to focus on fully enjoying the tiny slice of experiences you
actually do have time for. Digging in to a challenging project that
can’t be hurried becomes not a trigger for stressful emotions but a
bracing act of choice.
The importance of rest
A real risk of doing too much is finding your work time, in attempt to
be productive, encroaching on an evening’s rest. Rest as it turns
out—whether in the evening, over a weekend, or a long vacation—is
critical for productive creative work. Its absence can lead to stress,
burnout, and counterintuitively overall poor performance despite the
extra hours worked.
Though why should vacations or lazy mornings need defending in terms of
improved work performance? Enjoying leisure for its own sake—which is
the whole point of leisure—should not feel as though you’re failing at
life. Leisure is not merely an opportunity for recovery and
replenishment for the purposes of further work, but for its intrinsic
satisfactions.
The loneliness of temporal sovereignty
Other human beings are always impinging on your time in countless
frustrating ways. In an ideal world the only person making decisions
about your time is you. However this comes at a cost that’s not worth
paying.
It’s good to have plenty of time, but having all the time in the world
isn’t much use if you’re forced to experience it all on your own. To do
countless important things with time: to socialize, go on dates, raise
children, launch businesses, start movements; it has to be synchronized
with other people. In fact, having large amounts of time but no
opportunity to use it collaboratively can be actively unpleasant.
We treat our time as something to hoard, when it’s better approached as
something to share. Even if that means surrendering some of your power
to decide exactly what you do with it and when.
Ten tools for embracing finitude
1.
Adopt a fixed volume approach to productivity
Tough choices are inevitable; focus on making them consciously and well.
Keep two to-do lists: an “open” one for everything on your plate,
doubtlessly nightmarishly long, and “closed” with a fixed number of
entries, only moving tasks onto it when previous ones have been
completed.
You’ll never get through all the tasks on the open list, but you were
never going to in any case. The choice to leave them there is hard, but
time spent on them is time not spent on the things you chose to focus
on.
Establish pre-determined time boundaries on your work, and make
decisions in light of those limits. If your primary goal is to do what’s
required to be finished by 5:30 you’ll be aware of the constraints on
your time and motivated to use it wisely.
2.
Serialize,
serialize,
serialize
Focus on one big project at a time, and see it to completion before
moving onto the next.
It’s alluring to try to alleviate the anxiety of having too many
responsibilities or ambitions by getting started on them all at once,
but you’ll make little progress that way. Instead, train yourself to get
incrementally better at tolerating that anxiety by consciously
postponing everything you possibly can except for one thing.
Soon the satisfaction of completing important projects will make that
anxiety feel worthwhile, and as you complete them you’ll have less to be
anxious about anyway.
3.
Strategic underachievement
Simply because your time is finite, you’ll inevitably underachieve at
something. When you can’t do it all, you can feel ashamed and give up.
When you decide in advance what to fail at, you remove the sting of
shame.
Nominate in advance whole areas of life in which you won’t expect
excellence from yourself. Instead focus that time more effectively, and
you won’t be surprised when you fail at what you planned to fail at all
along.
4.
Celebrate wins
The to-do list will never be finished. Inbox zero will inevitably
refill. There’s an unhelpful assumption that you begin each morning with
a productivity debt that you must pay off with hard work to achieve a
zero-balance by evening.
Keep a “done” list which starts empty and fills up over the day. You
could have spent the day doing nothing remotely constructive, and look
what you did instead! Lower the bar for what gets to count as an
accomplishment; small wins accrue.
5.
Consolidate care
The attention economy demands urgency, bringing a litany of demands for
your care every day. Consciously choose your battles in industry,
charity, activism, and politics.
To make a real difference, you must focus your finite capacity for care.
6.
Embrace boring & single-purpose technology
Modern digital devices offer distraction to a place where painful human
limitations do not apply; you need never feel bored or constrained in
your freedom of action—which isn’t the case when it comes to work that
matters.
Combat this by making your devices boring. Remove apps that distract
(even consider Slack or Email). Switch your screen to grayscale. Use
time-limiting reminders.
Choose single-purpose devices like an e-reader where it’s tedious and
awkward to do anything but read. If distracting apps are only a swipe
away they’ll prove impossible to resist when the first twinge of boredom
or difficulty of focus arises.
7.
Seek novelty in the mundane
The fewer weeks we have left the faster we seem to lose them. The
likeliest explanation for this phenomenon is that our brains encode the
passing of time on the basis of how much information we process in any
given interval.
Cramming your life with novel experiences does work, but can also lead
to existential overwhelm and is also impractical, especially if you have
a job or children.
Alternatively pay more attention to every moment no matter how mundane.
Plunge into the life you already have with twice the intensity and your
life will feel twice as full and will be remembered as lasting twice as
long. Meditation, going on unplanned walks, photography, journaling,
anything that draws your attention more fully to the present.
8.
Be a researcher in relationships
When presented with a challenging or boring moment with another person,
deliberately adopt an attitude of curiosity in which your goal isn’t to
achieve any particular outcome or explain your position but to figure
out who this human being is who we’re with.
This curiosity is well suited to the unpredictability of life with
others because it can be satisfied by their behaving in ways you like or
dislike whereas the stance of demanding a certain result is frustrated
each time things fail to go your way.
9.
Cultivate instantaneous generosity
Whenever a generous impulse arises your mind: to give money, to check in
on a friend, send an email praising someone’s work, act on that impulse
right away. If you put it off for whatever reason, you’ll likely not get
back to it. The only acts of generosity that count are the ones you’re
actually making.
People are social creatures, and generous action reliably makes us feel
much happier.
10.
Practice doing nothing
When it comes to the challenge of using your four thousand weeks well,
the capacity to do nothing is indispensable. If you can’t bear the
discomfort of not acting you’re far more likely to make poor choices
with your time simply to feel as if you’re acting. Calm down, gain
autonomy over your choices, and make better ones.
Do nothing meditation
- Set a timer, even for only five minutes.
- Sit in a chair and then stop trying to do anything.
-
Every time you notice you’re doing something, including thinking or
focusing on your breathing, stop doing it. -
If you notice you’re criticizing yourself inwardly for doing things
well… that’s a thought too so stop doing that. - Keep on stopping until the timer goes off.
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