Nobody needs telling there isn’t enough time. We’re obsessed with our lengthening to-do lists, our overfilled inboxes, work-life balance, and the ceaseless battle against distraction; and we’re deluged with advice on becoming more productive and efficient, and “life hacks” to optimize our days. But such techniques often end up making things worse. The sense of anxious hurry grows more intense, and still the most meaningful parts of life seem to lie just beyond the horizon. Still, we rarely make the connection between our daily struggles with time and the ultimate time management problem: the challenge of how best to use our four thousand weeks.
MY THOUGHTS:
My Dad passed away aged 84, at the start of 2017. Along with the grief of losing him I experienced an acceleration of the time crisis I've had simmering for several years. His death really brought home to me how lightning fast is the passage of years. I remembered events which took place when he was my age, which seemed scarily recent. Those sorts of memories persist to this day, and as the gap lessens the sense of urgency increases. Dad had time to retire and tick off many things he aimed to do, yet time still seems to have moved like wild fire. The title of this book by Oliver Burkeman made me wince. 4000 weeks is approximately 76 years; a rough life palette in which to get done the things we want to do. Knowing how fast one week passes, the thought of only having something between 4000 or 4500 to play around with is intended as a wake-up call. It certainly worked for me.
The book is about changing our relationship with time and how we think about it, rather than offering 'time management hints' as such. I'll outline some of the parts that impressed me most.
Why do we procrastinate good things we really want to do?
Frittering away our time by ticking small, pressing tasks off our list each day seems an easy default. I'll sweep floors, fold washing, or head off to the shop rather than sit for an extended time writing at my computer. Burkeman believes we must claim time for the great plans our hearts really wish to prioritise, or else they'll remain untouched by the end of the day. (I used to be quite good at what he's talking about. Taking an hour or two to work on my novels when my kids were small was part of my routine, even if there were dishes in the sink and emails awaiting replies. I knew the housekeeping stuff needed to be relegated to second place, where it belonged.)
Another serious time sucker is outlined in a chapter called The Watermelon Problem, and specifically addresses using social media to procrastinate. The chapter's name alludes to viewers who once watched several large rubber bands being applied around a watermelon. They were hanging out to see at what stage the whole thing would burst in a spectacular shower of red watermelon flesh. The suspense was so prolonged that people started commenting, 'I really should be getting more important things done than sitting here waiting, but I'm hooked.' Eventually, the big smash was an anti-climax, as everyone knew in their hearts it would be. The great spectacle of green rind and red flesh flying everywhere released them to return to other, more important activities they were still, for some reason, strangely reluctant to do.
Why are we seduced by checking social media and deferring our cool passion projects even when there is a block of time at our disposal? An obvious answer is that we're addicted to the affirming likes, hearts and comments that flow our way, but Burkeman suggests a deeper, more primitive reason that gels with me. It's all to do with an unconscious dread of falling short of our own romantic and passionate expectations! When we make a start on our passion projects, we may even, heaven forbid, find the time spent is mildly boring. It's all because whenever we're free to pursue the great things we want to do, we come painfully face to face with our own limitations. What we produce in reality seldom lives up to the brilliant execution of our imaginations, especially at first. So our impulses to defer the let-down by sitting on social media or carrying out jobs with lower stakes are nothing more than pitiful efforts to shield our fragile egos.
Whoa, understanding this doesn't solve the problem itself, but does empower us to press on with our passion projects regardless. Oliver Burkeman simply says that we need to stop expecting the discomfort to be otherwise and get on with it. I guess this initial resistance is as true a fact of life as the state of flow we long for. (For my part, I earnestly want to take up fiction writing again, specifically some fan fiction inspired by great books I love. But I fear my nooby efforts to create something accurate and worth reading, let alone fathom fan fiction platforms and make a good go of it may fall short. So my challenge is to still plow on regardless, even knowing this. Knowledge is power.)
Limit Rods in the Fire
Burkeman suggests having no more than three passion projects on the go at any one time. (I guess keeping this blog must be one of mine because occasional attempts to cut back or quit have been fruitless. But I enjoy curating my thoughts about books, so that alone is reason enough to continue. And it's another point of his. Sometimes even leisure feels like a chore to tick off, so purposely choosing a pastime or two with no personal gain whatsoever is vital.)
Burkeman suggests that vaguely interesting, second-tier projects ought to be swept aside, because they're insufficiently important enough to form the core of our lives, yet seductive enough to suck our attention away from the things that really are. If we figure out what they are, we can sweep them aside with the finality they deserve.
And he counsels us to Stay on the Bus, even when something else looks better. When we've decided some activity is a good use of our time, we should resist the urge to veer off toward something seemingly new or novel, which is actually a strong cultural pressure. For when we do that, we leave nothing but a few short, fruitless tracks. (This puts me in mind of Toad in The Wind in the Willows. Oliver Burkeman would surely tell us not to be as unstable and emotion driven Toad of Toad Hall, who always dumped one passion in favour of the next big thing.)
Cosmic Insignificance Therapy
Burkeman has advice for those moments when we doubt the point of whatever we're doing with our lives. Sometimes it's easy to assume our lives, over the long term, don't amount to anything much. We've surely all been there, but he suggests that we've set the bar too high. We become victims of widespread grandiosity, when in actual fact, our life choices don't matter that much, for our couple of thousand weeks on this planet aren't the lynch pin of history. When we decide our lives are meaningless, we've possibly adopted a towering standard of meaningfulness to which few can measure up (or indeed ever have). We surely don't disapprove of a chair for being unable to brew a cup of tea, after all. What a nice reminder for the end of the book.
Finally, he reminds us that whatever compelled our attention from day to day and moment to moment is what our lives will have been composed of. So when we pay attention to something we don't especially value, we're paying with our lives.
I borrowed this book from the library and got so much out of it that I went and bought a copy of my own, so I can keep coming back and mulling over these points. I think it deserve full marks for this reason alone.
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