book info

  • Book Title: Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
  • Author: Oliver Burkeman
  • Goodreads Rating: 4.2/5
  • ISBN: 9780374159122
  • Release Date: August 10, 2021
  • Page Count: 288 pages

summary

A human lifespan is short—about four thousand weeks if you’re lucky. That’s why knowing what not to do matters just as much as knowing what to do.

This book isn’t your typical self-help guide. It’s not about chasing endless productivity hacks. Instead, it’s a philosophy on what truly matters in life, given our limited time as humans. It’s an antidote to the unhealthy productivity craze flooding social media, which pushes us to do more without asking why.

You could think of this book as an extended argument for the empowering potential of giving up hope.

The world is already broken. And what’s true of the state of civilization is equally true of your life: it was always already the case that you would never experience a life of perfect accomplishment or security. And your four thousand weeks have always been running out.

The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short. But that isn’t a reason for unremitting despair, or for living in an anxiety-fueled panic about making the most of your limited time. It’s a cause for relief. You get to give up on something that was always impossible—the quest to become the optimized, infinitely capable, emotionally invincible, fully independent person you’re officially supposed to be. Then you get to roll up your sleeves and start work on what’s gloriously possible instead.

facing our finitude

The book tackles this topic by pulling together ideas from philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual masters. It’s a bit unusual, honestly, but it works. Combining these perspectives helps explain the book’s main point—that our limited time demands focus on what matters—from different angles.

I think this excerpt is a good summary of the book:

…the more you try to manage your time with the goal of achieving a feeling of total control, and freedom from the inevitable constraints of being human, the more stressful, empty, and frustrating life gets.

Being human means you’re limited by what you can do. You’ll die someday, and we all get just 24 hours in a day. Subtract sleep, and you’re left with about 16 hours of being awake. There’s no way to do everything you want to do.

The harder you try to be efficient, the more work piles up. Common productivity tricks—like to-do lists, time blocking, waking up early, deep work, or keeping a gratitude journal—actually work. But because they work, you end up doing more work. And the more work you take on, the less time you spend on the things you really want to do, the things that matter to you.

It’s tough for most of us to face this reality. To really grasp what it means to die. Think about it: Why do we get so uncomfortable focusing on the things that matter—the things we said we wanted to do with our lives—that we’d rather escape into distractions? Distractions, by definition, are things we don’t actually want to be doing. The answer is that the moment we commit to something, we’re facing our limits.

When you’re cleaning your room, you’re not reading that book you’ve been meaning to get to. When you’re doing math homework, you’re not watching a Netflix series, playing video games, or scrolling through YouTube or Instagram.

We can only do one thing at a time. And the great things—the goals and dreams that would truly fulfill us—require real sacrifice. They take years of consistent effort.

That’s why it’s easier to rearrange your to-do list than to actually tackle it. Easier to make colorful highlights or set up an elaborate note-taking system than to sit down and do those math exercises.

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.

We can’t even handle boredom anymore. When was the last time you were truly bored? Most of us can’t wait in line without pulling out our phones. We think boredom is just feeling uninterested in what we’re doing, but it’s more than that. It’s a gut-level reaction to facing how little control we have over our time and choices.

This ties into how impatient we’ve become in the modern world. Instead of sitting with discomfort or focusing on what matters, we distract ourselves the second things get hard.

Virtually every new technology, from the steam engine to mobile broadband, has permitted us to get things done more quickly than before. Shouldn’t this therefore have reduced our impatience, by allowing us to live at something closer to the speed we’d prefer?

We push ourselves harder to get rid of anxiety, but the result is actually more anxiety, because the faster we go, the clearer it becomes that we’ll never succeed in getting ourselves or the rest of the world to move as fast as we feel is necessary.

the solution

We have to accept that we can’t do everything. Or perhaps we can, but not at once. Until we accept this, we can’t make progress.

When you finally face the truth that you can’t dictate how fast things go, you stop trying to outrun your anxiety, and your anxiety is transformed. Digging in to a challenging work project that can’t be hurried becomes not a trigger for stressful emotions but a bracing act of choice; giving a difficult novel the time it demands becomes a source of relish. “You cultivate an appreciation for endurance, hanging in, and putting the next foot forward,” Brown explains. You give up “demanding instant resolution, instant relief from discomfort and pain, and magical fixes.” You breathe a sigh of relief, and as you dive into life as it really is, in clear-eyed awareness of your limitations, you begin to acquire what has become the least fashionable but perhaps most consequential of superpowers: patience.

Three rules of thumb can help you harness patience as a creative force in daily life.

First, develop a taste for problems. You’ll always have problems—life is just a series of them waiting to be solved. Think about it: Do you really want to run out of problems? To have nothing to do? A life without problems would feel empty. The meaning in life comes from facing and tackling the problems you deal with every day.

Second, embrace radical incrementalism. Always have a problem you’re chipping away at, little by little, every day. If you’re working on a big project, break it down into small steps you can handle consistently. When you don’t do this, you’re fighting your human limitations instead of accepting them. That impatience leads to procrastination—like putting off your homework until the last minute and scrambling late at night before it’s due.

The psychology professor 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. 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.

…One critical aspect of the radical incrementalist approach, which runs counter to much mainstream advice on productivity, is thus to be willing to stop when your daily time is up, even when you’re bursting with energy and feel as though you could get much more done.

The final principle is that, more often than not, originality lies on the far side of unoriginality.

What’s the solution? “It’s simple,” Minkkinen says. “Stay on the bus. Stay on the fucking bus.” A little farther out on their journeys through the city, Helsinki’s bus routes diverge, plunging off to unique destinations as they head through the suburbs and into the countryside beyond. That’s where the distinctive work begins. But it begins at all only for those who can muster the patience to immerse themselves in the earlier stage—the trial-and-error phase of copying others, learning new skills, and accumulating experience.

The fantasy behind so many of our time-related troubles is the one encapsulated in the title of the book I alluded to in the first chapter: Master Your Time, Master Your Life, by the time management guru Brian Tracy. The reason time feels like such a struggle is that we’re constantly attempting to master it—to lever ourselves into a position of dominance and control over our unfolding lives so that we might finally feel safe and secure, and no longer so vulnerable to events.

This dream of somehow one day getting the upper hand in our relationship with time is the most forgivable of human delusions because the alternative is so unsettling. But unfortunately, it’s the alternative that’s true: the struggle is doomed to fail.

To make this all a little more concrete, it may be useful to ask the following questions of your own life:

  1. Where in your life or your work are you currently pursuing comfort, when what’s called for is a little discomfort?
  2. Are you holding yourself to, and judging yourself by, standards of productivity or performance that are impossible to meet?
  3. 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?
  4. In which areas of life are you still holding back until you feel like you know what you’re doing?
  5. How would you spend your days differently if you didn’t care so much about seeing your actions reach fruition?

Here, in addition to the suggestions throughout the text, are ten further techniques for implementing this limit-embracing philosophy in daily life:

  1. Use a “Fixed Volume” Productivity System
    Keep two to-do lists: an open list for everything that comes your way, and a closed list limited to 10 tasks max. You can only add something new to the closed list when you’ve finished an item. This forces you to prioritize and avoid constantly reacting to new tasks. Also, set fixed working hours (e.g., 8:30 to 5:30) and stick to them. When your time is limited, you’ll naturally work smarter and stop chasing the illusion of endless productivity.
  2. Work on One Big Project at a Time
    Avoid juggling multiple large projects. Instead, focus your energy on completing one major work-related task and maybe one personal project. This reduces stress and increases your chance of finishing things instead of bouncing between tasks without real progress.
  3. Intentionally Decide What to Let Slide
    You can’t excel in every area of life all the time. Choose in advance where you’ll underperform—whether that’s letting go of being perfectly organized at home, skipping a few workouts, or not replying to every email. By failing strategically, you free up time and energy for what matters more right now.
  4. Let Life Be Cyclical
    You don’t have to be balanced every day. You can focus on one part of life for a few months (e.g., family, career, or a personal goal), then shift focus later. Trying to do it all at once often leads to burnout and shallow results.
  5. Track What You’ve Done, Not Just What’s Left
    A simple “done list” helps you focus on accomplishments, not just unfinished tasks. Start with a blank list each morning and add everything you complete throughout the day. It’s a reminder that progress is happening, even when your to-do list still looks long.
  6. Be Selective With What You Care About
    You can’t care deeply about every issue. Choose a few causes to commit your time and energy to, even if others are also important. Spreading yourself too thin often leads to doing less for everyone.
  7. Simplify Your Devices
    Remove social media and other distracting apps. Set your phone to grayscale to make it less appealing. Use single-purpose tools when possible, like an e-reader instead of a full-feature tablet. The goal is to reduce distraction and make digital life less addictive.
  8. Look for Novelty in the Ordinary
    Time feels like it speeds up as we age because we stop paying attention. You can slow things down by being more present in your daily life. Focus more deeply on routine activities—walking, cooking, working, talking. Familiar experiences can become interesting again if you truly pay attention.
  9. Practice Curiosity in Relationships
    Instead of trying to control or fix situations during difficult interactions, approach them with curiosity. Try to understand the other person instead of focusing on winning the argument or reaching a specific outcome. When you’re uncertain, choose curiosity over anxiety.
  10. Act Immediately on Generosity—and Learn to Do Nothing
    If you feel an impulse to help, praise, or connect—act on it right away. Don’t wait. Also, take time to practice doing nothing. Sit quietly for 5–10 minutes without trying to meditate, think, or be productive. This helps build tolerance for stillness, which is essential in a world that constantly pushes action and efficiency.