This is a book summary of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman (Amazon):
Here’s a video intro to Four Thousand Weeks and Oliver Burkeman:
Quick Housekeeping:
- All content in quotation marks is from the original author unless otherwise stated.
- All content is grouped into my own themes (not necessarily the author’s chapters).
- I’ve added emphasis in bold for readability/skimmability.
Book Summary Contents: Click a link here to jump to a section below
- About the Book
- Limits & Finitude
- Efficiency Trap
- Time & Attention as Resources
- Time as Leisure
- Truth about Time
- 3 Procrastination Principles
- 3 Rules of Patience
- 5 Key Questions
- 10 Tools for Embracing Your Finitude
- 15+ Noteworthy Concepts
Time Management for Mortals: Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman (Book Summary)
About the Book Four Thousand Weeks
“This book is an attempt to help redress the balance—to see if we can’t discover, or recover, some ways of thinking about time that do justice to our real situation: to the outrageous brevity and shimmering possibilities of our four thousand weeks.”
- “Assuming you live to be eighty, you’ll have had about four thousand weeks.”
- “You might have assumed there’d be a handful of productivity books that take seriously the stark facts about the shortness of life, instead of pretending that we can just ignore the subject. But you’d be wrong.”
- “Four Thousand Weeks is yet another book about making the best use of time. But it is written in the belief that time management as we know it has failed miserably, and that we need to stop pretending otherwise.”
- “This book is an exploration of a saner way of relating to time and a toolbox of practical ideas for doing so, drawn from the work of philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual teachers who all rejected the struggle to dominate or master it. I believe it sketches a kind of life that’s vastly more peaceful and meaningful—while also, it turns out, being better for sustained productivity over the long haul.”
- “You could think of this book as an extended argument for the empowering potential of giving up hope. Embracing your limits means giving up hope that with the right techniques, and a bit more effort, you’d be able to meet other people’s limitless demands, realize your every ambition, excel in every role, or give every good cause or humanitarian crisis the attention it seems like it deserves. It means giving up hope of ever feeling totally in control, or certain that acutely painful experiences aren’t coming your way. And it means giving up, as far as possible, the master hope that lurks beneath all this, the hope that somehow this isn’t really it—that this is just a dress rehearsal, and that one day you’ll feel truly confident that you have what it takes.”
Limits & Finitude
Limit-Embracing Attitude: “Organizing your days with the understanding that you definitely won’t have time for everything you want to do, or that other people want you to do—and so, at the very least, you can stop beating yourself up for failing.”
- “The real problem isn’t our limited time. The real problem—or so I hope to convince you—is that we’ve unwittingly inherited, and feel pressured to live by, a troublesome set of ideas about how to use our limited time, all of which are pretty much guaranteed to make things worse.”
- “The fundamental problem is that this attitude toward time sets up a rigged game in which it’s impossible ever to feel as though you’re doing well enough. Instead of simply living our lives as they unfold in time—instead of just being time, you might say—it becomes difficult not to value each moment primarily according to its usefulness for some future goal.”
- “Denying reality never works. It may provide some immediate relief, because it allows you to go on thinking that at some point in the future you might, at last, feel totally in control. But it can’t ever bring the sense that you’re doing enough—that you are enough—because it defines ‘enough’ as a kind of limitless control that no human can attain.”
- “There is an alternative: the unfashionable but powerful notion of letting time use you, approaching life not as an opportunity to implement your predetermined plans for success but as a matter of responding to the needs of your place and your moment in history.”
- “Our troubled relationship with time arises largely from this same effort to avoid the painful constraints of reality. And most of our strategies for becoming more productive make things worse, because they’re really just ways of furthering the avoidance. After all, it’s painful to confront how limited your time is, because it means that tough choices are inevitable and that you won’t have time for all you once dreamed you might do. It’s also painful to accept your limited control over the time you do get.”
- “We tend to speak about our having a limited amount of time. But it might make more sense, from Heidegger’s strange perspective, to say that we are a limited amount of time. That’s how completely our limited time defines us.”
- “Any decision I make, to do anything at all with my time, is already radically limited. For one thing, it’s limited in a retrospective sense, because I’m already who I am and where I am, which determines what possibilities are open to me. But it’s also radically limited in a forward-looking sense, too, not least because a decision to do any given thing will automatically mean sacrificing an infinite number of potential alternative paths.”
The Efficiency Trap
Efficiency Trap: “Rendering yourself more efficient—either by implementing various productivity techniques or by driving yourself harder—won’t generally result in the feeling of having ‘enough time,’ because, all else being equal, the demands will increase to offset any benefits.”
- “The worst aspect of the trap is that it’s also a matter of quality. The harder you struggle to fit everything in, the more of your time you’ll find yourself spending on the least meaningful things.”
- “The more firmly you believe it ought to be possible to find time for everything, the less pressure you’ll feel to ask whether any given activity is the best use for a portion of your time.”
- “What’s needed … 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. 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 around to at all.”
Time & Attention as Resources
“Once ‘time’ and ‘life’ had been separated in most people’s minds, time became a thing that you used—and it’s this shift that serves as the precondition for all the uniquely modern ways in which we struggle with time today.”
- “From thinking about time in the abstract, it’s natural to start treating it as a resource, something to be bought and sold and used as efficiently as possible, like coal or iron or any other raw material.”
- “Once time is a resource to be used, you start to feel pressure, whether from external forces or from yourself, to use it well, and to berate yourself when you feel you’ve wasted it.”
- “To describe attention as a ‘resource’ is to subtly misconstrue its centrality in our lives. Most other resources on which we rely as individuals—such as food, money, and electricity—are things that facilitate life, and in some cases it’s possible to live without them, at least for a while. Attention, on the other hand, just is life: your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention. At the end of your life, looking back, whatever compelled your attention from moment to moment is simply what your life will have been.”
- “The truth is that time is also a ‘network good,’ one that derives its value from how many other people have access to it, too, and how well their portion is coordinated with yours.”
Time as Leisure
“We probably can’t hope to grasp how utterly alien this attitude toward leisure would have seemed to anyone living at any point before the Industrial Revolution.”
- “To the philosophers of the ancient world, leisure wasn’t the means to some other end; on the contrary, it was the end to which everything else worth doing was a means. Aristotle argued that true leisure—by which he meant self-reflection and philosophical contemplation—was among the very highest of virtues because it was worth choosing for its own sake, whereas other virtues, like courage in war, or noble behavior in government, were virtuous only because they led to something else.”
- “Work, now, demanded to be seen as the real point of existence; leisure was merely an opportunity for recovery and replenishment, for the purposes of further work.”
- “We have inherited from all this a deeply bizarre idea of what it means to spend your time off ‘well’—and, conversely, what counts as wasting it. In this view of time, anything that doesn’t create some form of value for the future is, by definition, mere idleness. Rest is permissible, but only for the purposes of recuperation for work, or perhaps for some other form of self-improvement.”
The Truth about Time
“Nobody ever really gets four thousand weeks in which to live—not only because you might end up with fewer than that, but because in reality you never even get a single week, in the sense of being able to guarantee that it will arrive, or that you’ll be in a position to use it precisely as you wish. 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.”
- “This is the maddening truth about time, which most advice on managing it seems to miss … the more you struggle to control it, to make it conform to your agenda, the further it slips from your control.”
- “The universal truth … is that most of us invest a lot of energy, one way or another, in trying to avoid fully experiencing the reality in which we find ourselves.”
- “The core challenge of managing our limited time isn’t about how to get everything done—that’s never going to happen—but how to decide most wisely what not to do, and how to feel at peace about not doing it.”
- “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.”
- “You have to choose a few things, sacrifice everything else, and deal with the inevitable sense of loss that results.”
- “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.”
- “Skillful time management is best understood as a matter of learning to procrastinate well, by facing the truth about your finitude and making your choices accordingly.”
- “The trouble with attempting to master your time is that time ends up mastering you.”
- “‘Missing out’ is what makes our choices meaningful in the first place. 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.”
- “We must live out our lives, to whatever extent we can, in clear-eyed acknowledgment of our limitations, in the undeluded mode of existence that Heidegger calls ‘Being-towards-death,’ aware that this is it, that life is not a dress rehearsal, that every choice requires myriad sacrifices, and that time is always already running out—indeed, that it may run out today, tomorrow, or next month.”
- “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.”
- “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.”
- “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!’), 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.”
- “The Tao Te Ching is full of images of suppleness and yielding: the wise man (the reader is constantly being informed) is like a tree that bends instead of breaking in the wind, or water that flows around obstacles in its path. Things just are the way they are, such metaphors suggest, no matter how vigorously you might wish they weren’t—and your only hope of exercising any real influence over the world is to work with that fact, instead of against it.”
- “This is also the kernel of truth in the cliché that people in less economically successful countries are better at enjoying life—which is another way of saying that they’re less fixated on instrumentalizing it for future profit, and are thus more able to participate in the pleasures of the present. Mexico, for example, has often outranked the United States in global indices of happiness. Hence the old parable about a vacationing New York businessman who gets talking to a Mexican fisherman, who tells him that he works only a few hours per day and spends most of his time drinking wine in the sun and playing music with his friends.”
- “The truth, then, is that spending at least 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 most fully inhabit the only life you ever get, you have to refrain from using every spare hour for personal growth.”
- “The deeper truth behind all this is to be found in Heidegger’s mysterious suggestion that we don’t get or have time at all—that instead we are time. We’ll never get the upper hand in our relationship with the moments of our lives because we are nothing but those moments. To ‘master’ them would first entail getting outside of them, splitting off from them.”
3 Procrastination Principles
“The point isn’t to eradicate procrastination, but to choose more wisely what you’re going to procrastinate on, in order to focus on what matters most. The real measure of any time management technique is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things.”
1. Pay yourself first when it comes to time:
- “If you try to find time for your most valued activities by first dealing with all the other important demands on your time, in the hope that there’ll be some left over at the end, you’ll be disappointed. So if a certain activity really matters to you—a creative project, say, though it could just as easily be nurturing a relationship, or activism in the service of some cause—the only way to be sure it will happen is to do some of it today, no matter how little, and no matter how many other genuinely big rocks may be begging for your attention.”
2. 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.”
3. Resist the allure of middling priorities
3 Rules of Patience
“In more and more contexts, patience becomes a form of power. In a world geared for hurry, the capacity to resist the urge to hurry—to allow things to take the time they take—is a way to gain purchase on the world, to do the work that counts, and to derive satisfaction from the doing itself, instead of deferring all your fulfillment to the future … In practical terms, three rules of thumb are especially useful for harnessing the power of patience as a creative force in daily life.”
1. Develop a taste for having problems:
- “Behind our urge to race through every obstacle or challenge, in an effort to get it ‘dealt with,’ there’s usually the unspoken fantasy that you might one day finally reach the state of having no problems whatsoever. As a result, most of us treat the problems we encounter as doubly problematic: first because of whatever specific problem we’re facing; and second because we seem to believe, if only subconsciously, that we shouldn’t have problems at all. Yet the state of having no problems is obviously never going to arrive. And more to the point, you wouldn’t want it to, because a life devoid of all problems would contain nothing worth doing, and would therefore be meaningless.”
2. Embrace radical incrementalism:
- “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.”
3. Originality lies on the far side of unoriginality
5 Key Questions
“The most fundamental question of time management: What would it mean to spend the only time you ever get in a way that truly feels as though you are making it count?”
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?
10 Tools for Embracing Your Finitude
“In this book, I’ve made the case for embracing the truth about your limited time and limited control over that time—not simply because it’s the truth, so you might as well face it, but because it’s actively empowering to do so. By stepping more fully into reality as it actually is, you get to accomplish more of what matters, and feel more fulfilled about it.”
1. Adopt a “fixed volume” approach to productivity:
- “Keep two to-do lists, one ‘open’ and one ‘closed.’ The open list is for everything that’s on your plate and will doubtless be nightmarishly long … Feed tasks from the open list to the closed one—that is, a list with a fixed number of entries, ten at most. The rule is that you can’t add a new task until one’s completed … A complementary strategy is to establish predetermined time boundaries for your daily work.”
2. Serialize, serialize, serialize:
- “Focus on one big project at a time (or at most, one work project and one non-work project) and see it to completion before moving on to what’s next.”
3. Decide in advance what to fail at:
- “The great benefit of strategic underachievement—that is, nominating in advance whole areas of life in which you won’t expect excellence of yourself—is that you focus that time and energy more effectively … Fail on a cyclical basis: to aim to do the bare minimum at work for the next two months, for example, while you focus on your children, or let your fitness goals temporarily lapse while you apply yourself to election canvassing. Then switch your energies to whatever you were neglecting.”
4. Focus on what you’ve already completed, not just on what’s left to complete:
- “Keep a ‘done list,’ which starts empty first thing in the morning, and which you then gradually fill with whatever you accomplish through the day.”
5. Consolidate your caring:
- “Consciously pick your battles in charity, activism, and politics: to decide that your spare time, for the next couple of years, will be spent lobbying for prison reform and helping at a local food pantry—not because fires in the Amazon or the fate of refugees don’t matter, but because you understand that to make a difference, you must focus your finite capacity for care.”
6. Embrace boring and single-purpose technology:
- “You can combat this problem by making your devices as boring as possible—first by removing social media apps, even email if you dare, and then by switching the screen from color to grayscale … Choose devices with only one purpose, such as the Kindle ereader, on which it’s tedious and awkward to do anything but read.”
7. Seek out novelty in the mundane:
- “Pay more attention to every moment, however mundane: to find novelty not by doing radically different things but by plunging more deeply into the life you already have.”
8. Be a “researcher” in relationships:
- “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.'”
9. Cultivate instantaneous generosity:
- “Whenever a generous impulse arises in your mind—to give money, check in on a friend, send an email praising someone’s work—act on the impulse right away, rather than putting it off until later.”
10. Practice doing nothing:
- “When it comes to the challenge of using your four thousand weeks well, the capacity to do nothing is indispensable, because 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—choices such as stressfully trying to hurry activities that won’t be rushed or feeling you ought to spend every moment being productive in the service of future goals, thereby postponing fulfillment to a time that never arrives … ‘Do Nothing’ meditation, for which the instructions are to simply set a timer, probably only for five or ten minutes at first; sit down 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, or anything else—stop doing it.”
15+ Noteworthy Concepts
Below is a list of concepts that I found insightful:
1. Paradox of Limitation:
- “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. But the more you confront the facts of finitude instead—and work with them, rather than against them—the more productive, meaningful, and joyful life becomes.”
2. Eigenzeit (German):
- “The time inherent to a process itself.”
3. Parkinson’s Law:
- (from English humorist and historian C. Northcote Parkinson in 1955): “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”
4. Hofstadter’s Law:
- (from cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter): “Any task you’re planning to tackle will always take longer than you expect, ‘even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.'”
5. Existential Overwhelm:
- “The modern world provides an inexhaustible supply of things that seem worth doing, and so there arises an inevitable and unbridgeable gap between what you’d ideally like to do and what you actually can do.”
6. Joy of Missing Out (JOMO):
- “The thrilling recognition that you wouldn’t even really want to be able to do everything, since if you didn’t have to decide what to miss out on, your choices couldn’t truly mean anything.”
7. Persuasive Design:
- “An umbrella term for an armory of psychological techniques borrowed directly from the designers of casino slot machines, for the express purpose of encouraging compulsive behavior.”
8. Variable Rewards:
- “When you can’t predict whether or not refreshing the screen will bring new posts to read, the uncertainty makes you more likely to keep trying, again and again and again, just as you would on a slot machine.”
9. ‘When-I-Finally’ Mind:
- “When I finally get my workload under control/get my candidate elected/find the right romantic partner/sort out my psychological issues, then I can relax, and the life I was always meant to be living can begin.”
10. Idleness Aversion:
- “Inability to rest.”
11. Atelic Activity:
- “Value isn’t derived from its telos, or ultimate aim.”
12. Second-Order Change:
- “It’s not an incremental improvement but a change in perspective that reframes everything. 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.”
13. Social Regulation of Time:
- “Greater outside pressure to use their time in particular ways. That means more willingness to fall in with the rhythms of community.”
14. Fika (Sweden):
- “The daily moment when everyone in a given workplace gets up from their desks to gather for coffee and cake.”
15. Possibility Shock:
- “The startling understanding that things could be different, on a grand scale, if only we collectively wanted that enough.”
16. Cosmic Insignificance Therapy:
- “When things all seem 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?”
17. Task Orientation:
- “The rhythms of life emerge organically from the tasks themselves, rather than from being lined up against an abstract timeline, the approach that has become second nature for us today.”
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Kyle – I’m not quite done with the book, but I appreciate your summary as I pick a choose a few bits for leadership training I facilitate. I’m trying not to read 4000 Weeks with a highlighter which makes it feel too much like homework. This feels like the kind of book I should absorb and wrestle with, not slice, dice, and analyze. 😉
So with no highlighter or notes, your summary is perfect for me.