* Tags:: #📚Books, #✒️SummarizedBooks, [[Productivity]], [[⛵ Life vision, mission, and values]] * Author:: [[Oliver Burkeman]] * Liked:: #5/5 * Link:: [Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman (goodreads.com)](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/54785515-four-thousand-weeks) * Read date:: [[2021-09-17]] * Source date:: [[2021-08-10]] - Cover:: ![[cover_four_thousand_weeks.png|100]] The most radical and interesting productivity book I have read so far. It has been a wonderful experience and has changed me in unexpected and very liberating ways. I will try hard to keep its ideas alive in my mind, since there is a difference between knowing them and applying them correctly the moment you are supposed to do so. It has been hard to summarize because it is packed with anecdotes to illustrate its ideas, but the stories are actually interesting, meaningful, and not repetitive. Difficulty in summarizing is a sign of being with a good book: there is not much to leave out. The book leads by example and unfolds at its own speed: making a summary of it, apart from being against its own message, will not do it justice. And yet, the book message is very simple: is all about **embracing your finitude** and staying with the discomfort that brings, and hence the title, the amount of time you really have, 4000 weeks. With this book, you will realize that feeling overwhelmed is a universal feeling, that you will miss a ton of things and it is precisely committing only to some things what gives life meaning. I loved the anecdote about Danielle Steel and, on the practical side, the idea of "radical incrementalism" was :chef kiss. You may not really find incredible new ideas --old philosophers already nailed these questions-- but still, it makes up for a wonderful and illustrative read. ## Introduction: In the Long Run, We're All Dead ### Life on the Conveyor Belt There is always more work to do: >I bought [[📖 Getting Things Done]], by the time management guru [[David Allen]], lured by his promise that it is “possible for a person to have an overwhelming number of things to do and still function productively with a clear head” and “what the martial artists call a ‘mind like water.’” But I failed to appreciate Allen’s deeper implication— that there’ll always be too much to do—and instead set about attempting to get an impossible amount done. In fact, I did get better at racing through my to-do list, only to find that greater volumes of work magically started to appear (Actually, it’s not magic; it’s simple psychology, plus capitalism) (p. 11) >the historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan shows that when housewives first got access to “labor-saving” devices like washing machines and vacuum cleaners, no time was saved at all, because society’s standards of cleanliness simply rose to offset the benefits. (p. 30) as opposed to what [[Keynes]] forecasts, that people would end up working only 15 hours a week. ### On Getting the Wrong Things Done. >even the relatively privileged among us rarely get around to doing the right things. We sense that there are important and fulfilling ways we could be spending our time, even if we can’t say exactly what they are (p. 12) # Part I. Choosing to Choose [[Life is about choosing]]. ## 1. The Limit-Embracing Life ### The End of Eternity According to American cultural critic Lewis Mumford in "Technics and Civilization" (1934), time started to be seen as a resource with the [[Industrial Revolution]]: people started being paid by the hour. With increasing demands, people thought the answer was to become more efficient, instead of questioning such demands. And then.. >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. (p. 20) ### Confessions of a Productivity Geek This resonates with me very well, a very short period of feeling of control, followed by frustation: >Using these techniques often made me feel as if I were on the verge of ushering in a golden era of calm, undistracted productivity and meaningful activity. But it never arrived. Instead, I just got more stressed and unhappy (p. 21) and a way to hide, **[[neurosis]]**: >If I could get enough work done, my subconscious had apparently concluded, I wouldn’t need to ask if it was all that healthy to be deriving so much of my sense of self-worth from work in the first place (…) in the words of the psychotherapist Bruce Tift, “we don’t have to consciously participate in what it’s like to feel claustrophobic, imprisoned, powerless, and constrained by reality.” ### An Icy Blast of Reality >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 (…) understanding that you definitely won’t have time for everything you want to do (p. 24) >freedom, sometimes, is to be found not in achieving greater sovereignty over your own schedule but in allowing yourself to be constrained by the rhythms of community (…) letting them take the time they take, surrendering to what in German has been called **[[Eigenzeit]]**. He talks about the notion of "letting time use you (…) responding to the needs of your place and your moment in history", a sentence here remind me of [[Viktor Frankl]] - [[Man's Search for Meaning]], where Viktor talks about "responding to what life wants". ## 2. The Efficiency Trap Everybody feels the same: >Research shows that this feeling [overwhelmed] arises **on every rung of the economic ladder** (p. 27). >The more we can accelerate our ability to [do stuff], the less incongruence there is between the possibilities of experience we can realize in our own lifetimes and the total array of possibilities available to human beings now and in the future—that is, the closer we come to having a truly “fulfilled” life, in the literal sense of one that is as filled full of experiences as it can possibly be (…) So the retiree ticking exotic destinations off a bucket list and **the hedonist stuffing her weekends full of fun are arguably just as overwhelmed as the exhausted social worker** or corporate lawyer. The premodern person did not have this problem: they believed in an infinite afterlife and history was seen as cyclical instead of evolutionary. ### Why You Should Stop Clearing the Decks Not only that, but you end up doing shit: >The more efficient you get, the more you become “a limitless reservoir for other people’s expectations,” in the words of the management expert Jim Benson (…) it grew painfully clear that the things I got done most diligently were the unimportant ones, while the important ones got postponed—either forever or until an imminent deadline **forced me to complete them, to a mediocre standard and in a stressful rush.** (p. 34) So, stop 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. ### The Pitfalls of Convenience This reminds me of the hacks you can do to your habits from [[Atomic Habits]], making those things you want to do as more convenient: >the effect of convenience isn’t just that a given activity starts to feel less valuable, but that we stop engaging in certain valuable activities altogether (…) “I prefer to brew my coffee,” the law professor Tim Wu writes in an essay on the pitfalls of convenience culture, “but Starbucks instant is so convenient I hardly ever do what I ‘prefer.’” Meanwhile, those aspects of life that resist being made to run more smoothly start to seem repellent. (p. 37) ## 3. Facing Finitude The "joy of missing out": if your whole life is borrowed time, every of your commits to something is a selection from a menu, and precisely choosing is what gives meaning to the choice. >it’s precisely the fact that getting married forecloses the possibility of meeting someone else—someone who might genuinely have been a better marriage partner; who could ever say? —that makes marriage meaningful (p. 46) A similar argument presented in [[El matrimonio anarquista]] and in [[📖 No siento nada]]. ## 4. Becoming a Better Procrastinator Everything is important: ![[first_things_first_jar.png|300]] ^bd8e1b >Perhaps you’re familiar with **the extraordinarily irritating parable of the rocks in the jar**, which was first inflicted upon the world in Stephen Covey’s 1994 book, First Things First (…) The real problem of time management today, though, isn’t that we’re bad at prioritizing the big rocks. It’s that there are too many rocks—and most of them are never making it anywhere near that jar (p. 49). ^56856e ### The Art of Creative Neglect With time, as with savings, pay yourself first: do your most valued activities first. From [[Personal Kanban]] book, limit your work in progress. It forces you to face your finitude and also, to break down your tasks since you don't want to be stuck with a huge task for months: >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. Instead, what usually ends up happening is that you make progress on no fronts (p. 50) Resist the allure of not-so-much priorities. The things that are not the top of your list are the most dangerous ones: they are not that important but they are seductive enough to distract you. But it goes further than the cliché of saying no: >as the writer Elizabeth Gilbert points out, it’s all too easy to assume that this merely entails finding the courage to decline various tedious things you never wanted to do in the first place. In fact, she explains, “it’s much harder than that. You need to learn how to start saying no to things you do want to do, with the recognition that you have only one life.” (p. 52) ### Perfection and Paralysis You will never make a good job: >if you’re procrastinating on something because you’re worried you won’t do a good enough job, you can relax—because judged by the flawless standards of your imagination, you definitely won’t do a good enough job. So you might as well make a start (p. 53). Kafka was like you: >On more than one occasion, in letters to Bauer, he characterized this struggle as a matter of “two selves” wrestling with each other inside him—one in love with her but the other so consumed by literature that “the death of his dearest friend would seem to be no more than a hindrance” to his work (p. 54) ### The Inevitability of Settling This wonderfully explained by [[Esther Perel]] in [[📖 Mating in Captivity]] as well as [[📖 The State of Affairs. Rethinking Infidelity]], but makes total sense to appear also in this context of choosing: >It’s common, for example, to enter a relationship unconsciously hoping that your partner will provide both an unlimited sense of stability and an unlimited sense of excitement (…). The reality is that the demands are contradictory (…) when people finally do choose, in a relatively irreversible way, they're usually much happier as a result (p. 58) ## 5. The Watermelon Problem Committing to something without attention makes little sense. Sometimes, it is all you have: >[[Viktor Frankl]], author of [[Man's Search for Meaning]], who was able to fend off despair as a prisoner in Auschwitz because he retained the ability to direct a portion of his attention toward the only domain the camp guards couldn’t violate: his inner life, which he was then able to conduct with a measure of autonomy, resisting the outer pressures that threatened to reduce him to the status of an animal (p. 62) but your control over attention is also limited and it's hard to realize that: >it's extremely difficult for it to monitor itself (p. 65) As told in [[Indistractable]] from [[Nir Eyal]]: >We mustn’t let Silicon Valley off the hook, but we should be honest: much of the time, we give in to distraction willingly. **Something in us wants to be distracted** (p. 65) > ## 6. The Intimate Interrupter >When you try to focus on something you deem important, you’re forced to face your limits, an experience that feels especially uncomfortable precisely because the task at hand is one you value so much (p. 69) And there are no ways to get rid of the discomfort and thus, from the distraction. Just acceptance, kind of in a Buddhist sense: >the truth is that I don’t think there is one [solution]. The most effective way to sap distraction of its power is just to stop expecting things to be otherwise—to accept that this unpleasantness is simply what it feels like for finite humans to commit ourselves to the kinds of demanding and valuable tasks that force us to confront our limited control over how our lives unfold (p. 70). >And the paradoxical reward for accepting reality’s constraints is that they no longer feel so constraining (p. 71) # Part II. Beyond Control ## 7. We Never Really Have Time This is *más viejo que la Tana*, addressed by many ancient religions: * In Taoism (in Tao Te Ching texts): >Trying to control the future is like trying to take the master carpenter’s place. * Christianism (in Jesus' Sermon on the Mount): >Take no thought for the morrow, for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself (...) sufficient to the day is the evil thereof. ## 8. You Are Here Capitalism is just exploiting something that was already there: >And yet we’d be fooling ourselves to put all the blame on capitalism for the way in which modern life so often feels like a slog, to be “gotten through” en route to some better time in the future. The truth is that we collaborate with this state of affairs. We choose to treat time in this self-defeatingly instrumental way, and we do so because it helps us maintain the feeling of being in omnipotent control of our lives (p. 86). [[Keynes]] *been knew*: >our fixation on what he called “purposiveness”—on using time well for future purposes, or on “personal productivity,” he might have said, had he been writing today—is ultimately motivated by the desire not to die. “The ‘purposive’ man,” Keynes wrote, “is always trying to secure a spurious and delusive immortality for his actions by pushing his interests in them forward into time (p. 87). But you can also use mindfulness very badly! >The problem is that the effort to be present in the moment, though it seems like the exact opposite of the instrumentalist, future-focused mindset I’ve been criticizing in this chapter, is in fact just a slightly different version of it. You’re so fixated on trying to make the best use of your time—in this case not for some later outcome, but for an enriching experience of life right now—that it obscures the experience itself (p. 88). The thing is... we have no other options than being here: >As the author Jay Jennifer Matthews puts it in her excellently titled short book Radically Condensed Instructions for Being Just as You Are, “We cannot get anything out of life. There is no outside where we could take this thing to. There is no little pocket, situated outside of life, [to which we could] steal life’s provisions and squirrel them away. The life of this moment has no outside.” ## 9. Rediscovering Rest ### The Decline of Pleasure We can also use rest badly, not for the purpose of pleasure itself ([[Atelic activities]]), referencing [[How philosophy can solve your midlife crisis]]: >Defenders of modern capitalism enjoy pointing out that despite how things might feel, we actually have more leisure time than we did in previous decades (...) But perhaps one reason we don’t experience life that way is that leisure no longer feels very leisurely. Instead, it too often feels like another item on the to-do list. (p. 92) And amazingly, there is no place to arrive at: >research suggests that this problem grows worse the wealthier you get. Rich people are frequently busy working, but they also have more options for how to use any given hour of free time (p. 92) !!! >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. **The Latin word for business, negotium, translates literally as “not-leisure,” reflecting the view that work was a deviation from the highest human calling** (p. 92). ### Pathological Productivity This anecdote was super fun for me. My mother, from which I inherited my pathological productivity obsession, is a huge fan of Danielle Steel. She probably didn't know about this, but maybe one can sense when other human being is similar to you? >An extreme example is the case of the novelist Danielle Steel, who in a 2019 interview with Glamour magazine revealed the secret of how she’d managed to write 179 books by the time she turned seventy-two, releasing them at the rate of almost seven per year: by working almost literally all the time, in twenty-hour days, with a handful of twenty-four-hour writing periods per month, a single week’s holiday each year, and practically no sleep. (“I don’t get to bed until I’m so tired I could sleep on the floor,” she was quoted as saying. “If I have four hours, it’s a really good night for me.”) (...) In fact, Steel herself seems to concede that she uses productivity as a way to avoid confronting difficult emotions. Her personal ordeals have included the loss of an adult son to a drug overdose and no fewer than five divorces—and work, she told the magazine, is “where I take refuge. Even when bad things have happened in my personal life, it’s a constant. It’s something solid I can escape into.” [[Max Weber]] blames the "Protestant work ethic" of Calvinist Christians in northern Europe as the origin of capitalism. They believed in destiny: from birth, it is already chosen whether you go to heaven or hell. Calvinists worked very hard to prove they were going to go to heaven, and lived frugally since they believed in a fulfilling afterlife -> capital accumulation. If you don't believe in afterlife... >“We are the sum of all the moments of our lives,” writes Thomas Wolfe (...) your days aren’t progressing toward a future state of perfectly invulnerable happiness (...) ” If we’re going to show up for, and thus find some enjoyment in, our brief time on the planet, we had better show up for it now (p. 96) ### Rules for Rest But religion forced a communal rest! Sabbath. >As the writer Judith Shulevitz explains: (...) The rules did not exist to torture the faithful. They were meant to communicate the insight that interrupting the ceaseless round of striving requires a surprisingly strenuous act of will, one that has to be bolstered by habit as well as social sanction (p. 97) And carry on anyway: >The other important thing we can do as individuals, in order to enter the experience of genuine rest, is simply to stop expecting it to feel good, at least in the first instance (p. 98) ### Hiking as an End in Itself And it turns out that the midlife crisis is about this finitude: you are confronted clearly with your mortality and you are dissatisfied, because you either don't achieved your goals, or you already did and you have nothing to pursue. >As [[Schopenhauer]] puts it in his masterwork, The World as Will and Idea, it’s therefore inherently painful for humans to have “objects of willing” (p. 100) ### Rod Stewart, Radical You may enjoy your hobbies more if you are mediocre at them (as opposed to current trends of monetizing everything): >to pursue an activity in which you have no hope of becoming exceptional is to put aside, for a while, the anxious need to “use time well (p. 102). ## 10. The Impatience Spiral Even if you manage to be happy with your finitude, you will need to withstand society: >Nor will it make much difference, unfortunately, if you personally manage to muster the inner serenity to avoid this kind of reaction, because you’ll still end up suffering from **societal impatience**—that is, from the wider culture’s rising expectations about how quickly things ought to happen (p. 105). And acceleration, of course, doesn't come for free: >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. **(Meanwhile, we suffer the other effects of moving too fast: poor work output, a worse diet, damaged relationships.)** ## 11. Staying on the Bus And then, amazingly, patience becomes power. It reminds me of some thread I read on Twitter, about how great founders have "patience for enduring sustaining long periods of impatience": >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 There is an amazing anecdote in this chapter, about how the first assignment in a Harvard art class is to choose a painting in a museum and look at it for 3 hours straight: how you end up noticing a lot of subtleties once you go past discomfort. ### Watching and Waiting Sometimes things simply take time. I can easily connect this with people [[✍️ Refusing to stand on the shoulders of giants]]. >if you’re willing to endure the discomfort of not knowing, a solution will often present itself (...) We’re made so uneasy by the experience of allowing reality to unfold at its own speed that when we’re faced with a problem, it feels better to race toward a resolution—any resolution, really, so long as we can tell ourselves we’re “dealing with” the situation. ### Three Principles of Patience >the presence of problems in your life (...) isn't an impediment to a meaningful existence but the very substance of one (p. 114) >The second principle is to embrace radical incrementalism (...) 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 (...) Because as [Robert Boice, psychology professor] explained, the urge to push onward beyond that point “includes a big component of impatience about not being finished, about not being productive enough, about never again finding such an ideal time” for work. Stopping helps strengthen the muscle of patience that will permit you to return to the project again and again, and thus to sustain your productivity over an entire career (p. 115). ^c4db83 Again, a reminder of [[✍️ Refusing to stand on the shoulders of giants]]: >**Originality lies on the far side of unoriginality (...)** In many areas of life, there’s strong cultural pressure to strike out in a unique direction— to spurn the conventional options of getting married, or having kids, or remaining in your hometown, or taking an office job, in favor of something apparently more exciting and original. Yet if you always pursue the unconventional in this way, you deny yourself the possibility of experiencing those other, richer forms of uniqueness that are reserved for those with the patience to travel the well-trodden path first (...) To experience the profound mutual understanding of the long-married couple, you have to stay married to one person; to know what it’s like to be deeply rooted in a particular community and place, you have to stop moving around (p. 116) ## 12. The Loneliness of the Digital Nomad Time is better approached as something to share, even if that means surrendering its control: >**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 (p. 119). >In 2013, a researcher from Uppsala in Sweden named Terry Hartig, along with several colleagues, elegantly proved the connection between synchronization and life satisfaction (...) **antidepressant use fell by a greater degree, Hartig demonstrated, in proportion to how much of the population of Sweden was on vacation at any given time**. Or to put things slightly differently, the more Swedes who were off work simultaneously, the happier people got. And, surprise, this "individual freedom" that gets so often touted by our political leaders, is at the root of Totalitarianism: >All this comes with political implications, too, because grassroots politics— the world of meetings, rallies, protests, and get-out-the-vote operations—are among the most important coordinated activities that a desynchronized population finds it difficult to get around to doing. The result is a vacuum of collective action, which gets filled by autocratic leaders, who thrive on the mass support of people who are otherwise disconnected—alienated from one another, stuck at home on the couch, a captive audience for televised propaganda. “Totalitarian movements are mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals,” wrote [[Hannah Arendt]] in The Origins of [[Totalitarianism]] (p. 127) ## 13. [[Cosmic Insignificance Therapy]] The simple life. Been there, done that: >The hazard in any such discussion of “what matters most” in life, though, is that it tends to give rise to a kind of **paralyzing grandiosity** (...) what you do with your life doesn’t matter all that much—and when it comes to how you’re using your finite time, **the universe absolutely could not care less** (p. 132). As my PhD advisor told me once, which I found liberating, "if there is a need to develop 1000 for 1 to succeed, then we will very likely be the ones that develop the 1000 failed ones". >implausible, for almost all people, to demand of themselves that they be a Michelangelo, a Mozart, or an Einstein … There have only been a few dozen such people in the entire history of humanity.” In other words, you almost certainly won’t put a dent in the universe. Indeed, depending on the stringency of your criteria, **even [[Steve Jobs]], who coined that phrase, failed to leave such a dent.** Perhaps the iPhone will be remembered for more generations than anything you or I will ever accomplish; but from a truly cosmic view, it will soon be forgotten, like everything else (p. 134). ^fd23d1 Cosmic insignificance therapy is again... acceptance: >Truly doing justice to the astonishing gift of a few thousand weeks isn’t a matter of resolving to “do something remarkable” with them. In fact, it entails precisely the opposite: refusing to hold them to an abstract and overdemanding standard of remarkableness, against which they can only ever be found wanting, and taking them instead on their own terms, dropping back down from godlike fantasies of cosmic significance into the experience of life as it concretely, finitely—and often enough, marvelously—really is (p. 135). ## 14. The Human Disease ### The Provisional Life So, insecurity and vulnerability is the default. Life is like that, couldn't be anything else. You will never be in control, because to be in control of life would mean to be out of it: >“Time is the substance I am made of,” writes [[Jorge Luis Borges]]. “Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.” There’s no scrambling up to the safety of the riverbank when the river is you. (p. 137) ### Five Questions >It doesn’t matter if answers aren’t immediately forthcoming; the point, in Rainer Maria [[Rilke]]’s famous phrase, is to “live the questions.” (p. 139) 1. Where in your life or your work are you currently pursuing comfort, when what’s called for is a little discomfort? Without compulsive worrying, which is another trick to think you have control. >But you usually know, intuitively, whether remaining in a relationship or job would present the kind of challenges that will help you grow as a person (enlargement) or the kind that will cause your soul to shrivel with every passing week (diminishment). Choose [[Uncomfortable enlargement over comfortable diminishment ]] whenever you can (p. 139) 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? >Perhaps your particular contribution to a world facing multiple crises isn’t primarily to spend your time pursuing activism but on caring for an elderly relative, or making music(...) The Buddhist teacher Susan Piver points out that it can be surprisingly radical and discomfiting, for many of us, to ask how we’d enjoy spending our time. But at the very least, you shouldn’t rule out the possibility that the answer to that question is an indication of how you might use your time best (p. 141) 4. In which areas of life are you still holding back until you feel like you know what you’re doing? > I sometimes think of my journey through adulthood to date as one of incrementally discovering the truth that there is no institution, no walk of life, in which everyone isn’t just winging it, all the time (...) if the feeling of total authority is never going to arrive, you might as well not wait any longer to give such activities your all (p. 142). 5. How would you spend your days differently if you didn’t care so much about seeing your actions reach fruition? >We’re all in the position of medieval stonemasons, adding a few more bricks to a cathedral whose completion we know we’ll never see (p. 143) # Appendix: Ten Tools for Embracing Your Finitude 1. Fixed volume productivity. 2. [[Focus on one big project at a time and see it to completion]]. Don't parallelize. 3. Decide in advance what to fail at. 4. Focus on what you've already completed, not just on what's left to complete. 5. Pick your battles 6. Embracing boring and single-purpose technology. 7. Seek out novelty in the mundane. Which is also an antidote to the feeling of years passing by quickly. 8. Wondering and curiosity over worrying. 9. Whenever a generous impulse arises, act on it right away (or you will never do it). 10. Practice doing nothing. >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.