4,000 weeks
May 14, 2023
Life is short. Assuming you live to be 80, you have around 4000 weeks.
Today I finished reading Four Thousand Weeks where Oliver Burkeman reflects on the idea of time management given our limited time here on Earth.
The efficiency trap
The more you try to manage your time with the goal of achieving total control, the more empty, frustrating, and empty life gets. Indeed, the problem with trying to find time for everything that feels important is that you definitely never will.
The efficiency trap is vicious. You have too much to do, so you try to fit more in, but you end up with more to do and spending your time doing the least meaningful things.
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 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 most.
Choosing what not to do
By making hundreds of decisions every day, we build a life, but at the same time, we close off the possibilities of countless others, forever.
The core challenge about managing our limited time isn’t about how to get everything done, but how to wisely chose what not to do and be at peace. Hence, the real measure of any time management technique is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things.
So aim to:
Pay yourself first when it comes to time.
Limit your work in progress.
Resist the allure of middling priorities.
In world of too many big rocks, it’s the moderately appealing ones that are the most dangerous. Learn to say no to some things you want to do, with the recognition that you only have one life.
Reframe time
It doesn’t matter how committed you are to making the best use of your limited time if, day after day, your attention gets wrenched away by things on which you never wanted to focus.
Attention is life. What you pay attention to defines your reality.
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.
The assumption that time is something that we can possess and control is the premise of almost all our thinking about the future, our planning and goal-setting and worrying.
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.
“Because children grow up, we think a child’s purpose is to grow up, but a child’s purpose is to be a child.” — Alexander Herzen
Spending some of your leisure time “wastefully”, focused solely on the pleasure of the experience , is the only way not to waste it—to be truly at leisure, rather than covertly engaged in future-focused self-improvement. In order to fully inhabit the only life you ever get, you have to refrain from using every spare hour for personal growth. From this perspective, idleness isn’t merely forgivable, it’s practically an obligation.
What you do with your life doesn’t matter all that much—the universe absolutely couldn’t care less.
When things get all too much, what better solace than a reminder that they are, provided you’re willing to zoom out a bit, indistinguishable from nothing at all?
"The next and most necessary thing is all any of us can ever aspire to do in any moment. Fortunately, precisely because that’s all you can do, it’s also all that you ever have to do." — Oliver Burkeman
If you can face the truth about time in this way-if you can step more fully into the condition of being a limited human—you will reach the greatest heights of productivity, accomplishment, service and fulfillment that were ever in the cards for you to begin with. And the life you will see incrementally taking shape, in the rear-view mirror, will be one that meets the only definitive measure of what it means to have used your weeks well: not how many people you helped, or how much you got done; but that working within the limits of your moment in history, and your finite time and talents, you actually got around to doing—and made life more luminous for the rest of us by doing—whatever magnificent task or weird little thing it was that you came here for.