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Without overthinking it. If you were to live till 80, how many weeks do you think that is? Pause this video for a second and think of a number. If you’re really brave, comment that number. Ok pause now.The answer is 4,000.This book has confronted me in ways I didn’t know I needed to be confronted.You know when you read a book and you’re just like mhmm, uh-huh, yep, that’s me, that’s what I do, great, thank you, alright you can stop now, I get it, you’re calling me out!”.I love it. It’s exactly what I want to feel when I read a book. I want to feel called out. I want to see someone putting in words the things that I think, do, feel.
This book did that for me. Four thousand weeks - Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman.It’s a book on time management. On productivity, really. But it takes
a different approach. A more philosophical one, poetic almost, which isn’t very typical for books in this genre. Lots of references to Nietchze and Mary Oliver, to give you an idea.And honestly, this type of book is exactly what I needed at this moment in my life. So let’s talk about it.But before diving into the book, I’d like to share with you one tool that helps me be productive and organized, especially as a creator. And that is BioSites, who is so kindly our sponsor today which I’m so excited about
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The overlapping theme of the book is that no matter how much you try, and no matter how much you think you do, you’ll never be able to have perfect control over your time.Yet, many of us become obsessed with TIME: How we use it, and the guilt we feel when we fail to use it the way we think we should; and the anxiety we feel as we hope and want and wish that life will unfold the way we want it to.But we still often end up feeling like we’re not doing enough.
Instead of valuing life for what it is in the now simply letting it unfold, we value it according to its usefulness for some future goal, or for some hope about a time in the future where we’ll finally be able to relax and enjoy ourselves.
You know, it’s the classic, “I’ll stress about this now so that I can get the benefits from it later and then I’ll be able to relax.”And so, what many of us do is we live in the future. For the future. A future that isn’t promised to us at all. We give up current enjoyments for these potential future benefits that may or may not come.As he writes, “The trouble with attempting to master your time, it turns out, is that time ends up mastering you.”
Now, while it’s quite disheartening to really consider the fact that our time is so very limited, it’s also what gives everything we do meaning. It’s also what forces us to make tough decisions. I mean, if you had forever, why would you care to make a career choice, or to date the right person, or to make weekend plans, or do anything, really?And speaking of choices, I liked how he described FOMO, the fear of missing out, as a good thing. See, not only are we inevitably going to miss out on almost everything in life since our time is so limited in contrast to all the opportunities and possibilities there are in life, but FOMO is what actually makes our choices meaningful in the first place, because we’re deliberately choosing one thing over another.
The efficiency trap
You simply can’t get everything that you want done, done. For that reason, you’ll have to make hard choices about time–you simply can’t avoid it. There will always be “too much to do”, and so, instead of trying to get everything done (because you can’t) focus on doing a few things that count.The thing is, the more we do and have, generally speaking, we tend to want to do and have more. Like the more wonderful experiences you have, the more additional wonderful experiences you start to feel you could have, or ought to have.
And so we get overwhelmed,wondering if we’re spending our time wisely and how we may optimize it.But as Burkman writes, “Once you truly understand that you’re guaranteed to miss out on almost every opportunity 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 - and the freer you are to choose, in each moment, what counts the most.”
Procrastination - how to become a better procrastinator
Since we can’t do everything all the time, procrastination is inevitable. But we can learn to choose more wisely what we decide to spend our time on, and therefore,
what we are going to procrastinate on, in order to focus on what matters most.
It’s about learning to neglect the gith things, and Burkman presents three principles for this:
Principle 1: Pay yourself first when it comes to time.
Basically, do the important things first, even if you only do a little bit each day,
as this will generate the most sustainable results over time, even if it’s just 10 minutes. Schedule
this time for yourself and for your most important projects, and don’t let anything else intrude.
Principle 2: Limit your work in progress
Don’t have too many projects at once, because you’re less likely to make any real progress. See,
when you have multiple projects, each time one of them starts to feel difficult or boring,
you’ll just bounde off to a different one instead, and this gives you a sense of control. But what ends up happening is you don’t finish anything important. So limit your number of projects to 3.
Principle 3: Resist the allure of middling priorities
Everyone could list a long list of tasks that are important to us,
but they’re not all equally important, and we need to decide which ones are the most important ones
and focus on those. The famous Warren Buffet way is to list 25 things that you want out of life,
arrange them in order, and only focus on organizing your time around the top 5.
The intimate interrupter
While there are so many distractions today, and it’s all so very easily accessible to us,
it’s interesting to dig deeper into why we seek out these distractions. The answer, oftentimes,
is that we’re trying to flee something painful about our existence in the present.
Mary Oliver calls this inner urge toward distraction “The Intimate Interrupter”.
What’s quite bizarre is that, we even experience this urge to distract ourselves when we’re doing
things we genuinely enjoy, or working towards goals we genuinely desire to accomplish.
“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.”
Doing things that matter to us come with a level of discomfort,
lack of control and fear: that we might fail,
that we might not be skilled enough… and that can be scary, and so we may distract ourselves.
Part 2: Beyond control
We try to gain control by planning for the future as much as we can. We get emotionally invested,
hoping this will provide some reassurance from the future,
but the future isn’t the sort of thing that can ever provide the reassurance we crave.
“Worry, at its core, is the repetition experience of a mind attempting to generate a feeling of
security about the future, failing, then trying again and again and again - as if
the very effort of worrying might somehow help forestall disaster. The fuel behind worry,
in other words, is the internal demand to know, in advance, that things will turn out fine.”
Now this is not to say that we shouldn’t plan for anything and that we should just go with
the flow of life. The problem isn’t planning. The problem, and the source of all the anxiety,
is this need we feel to be able to know that all the effort we put into things,
and the time we spend, will be worth it in the end.
Your partner could still leave you,
you could still miss your flight, you may still not get that job.
But this lack of control shouldn’t merely be viewed in a negative light. After all,
much of the things we value most in life were given to us when we didn’t have much,
if any control, at all. Many of the things we appreciate and love
in life were given to us thanks to circumstances we never chose.
You are here
I’m very much guilty of stressing over how I spend my time. What could I be doing differently? Is
this the best use of it? Am I wasting my time now? Should I use this hour to do something productive?
Am I serving my future self, and future life, the best way I possibly can? Am I being a lazy bum?
Here’s what Burkman wrote about that, “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.”
It’s the whole “when I finish x, then I’ll finally be able to x”,
“when I get to x, then I can finally x”.
What we’re doing is treating the present solely as a path to some superior future
state, and so the present moment won’t ever feel satisfying in itself. So even if we reach a goal,
big or small, we’ll just find some other reason to postpone our fulfillment until later on.
I’d like to end with this quote from the book that I really liked. As you guys know I’m
an absolute sucker for quotes:
“What you pay attention to will define, for you, what reality is.”
