Book Summary – 4000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

At the end of last year, I set a goal to revisit some of the most impactful books I’ve already read with the plan to summarize them. Despite all of this reading, I find I can rarely recall the main ideas. By writing, I’m hoping to reinforce some of the important messages for myself and others. 

The first book I am covering is 4000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. This book resonated with me as it covers many ideas that I struggle with regularly. The author, Oliver Burkeman, tells how the 4000 weeks we have to live on average is incredibly short while the list of things we can do with our time is nearly infinite. Despite all of our advances in productivity and efficiency, it’s unclear if we’re any happier than we were in the past. We live in a culture of life hacks, side hustles, and productivity tips but rarely question what we’re actually trying to achieve. We have tools like smart phones, computers, and washing machines to make our lives easier, yet we still work just as much as ever. 

John Maynard Keyes predicted 15 hour work weeks almost 100 years ago. However, rather than giving us our life back, efficiencies have gone towards profit, comfort, and convenience. Our lives are certainly easier than they were 100 years ago and our choices have increased, but we still hate Mondays and live for the weekend.

This book takes a philosophical yet practical approach to life as Oliver Burkeman gives advice on what it means to live a truly meaningful life. I’ve certainly fallen victim to the traps of our time and this book was a wake up call for me to question some of my most deeply held values. Below, I’ve summarized some of the points that I wanted to take away. 

Productivity and Efficiency are Traps

Our modern age has driven us to unquestioningly value productivity. Life must be better if we can have more experiences and get more done, right? We’re taught that a good life is one with more accomplishments, a bigger house, or a prestigious title. We are told that we can have it all if only we are more productive and worked harder. However, in productivity, it becomes easy to lose sight of what is really important. Do we really want to be better and do more, or do we just want our core needs like love and acceptance to be met?

Efficiency is similar. We can become better and faster at tasks, and it will work – we will get more done. Efficiency also gives us the illusion that we can get everything on our list done. However, we don’t question whether the stuff was worth doing in the first place. Do we really need to earn more, be on more committees, or have our children in more sports? Rather than giving us more time, efficiency causes our standards to increase. A faster phone, or a smarter home feels good for a while, but they soon become just a normal part of our lives. We still compare ourselves to our neighbors and find ourselves striving for more. This is the rate race. 

The solution? Embrace reality as it is and don’t try to deny it. We will never get everything done, find the perfect productivity system, or make everybody happy. Trying to do so will only lead to suffering, while embracing limitations allow us to be happy where we are. 

Stop Clearing the Decks

By prioritizing meaningful tasks and learning to say no to the trivial, we free ourselves from the burden of endless busyness. Burkeman compares menial and routine tasks with clearing the desk on a ship. No matter how hard we work at them, they always come back. These tasks are clear, easy, and we can see the results quickly. Bigger projects and goals on the other hand are often unclear, make us uncomfortable, and take time to see results. It’s easy to procrastinate on important tasks and trick ourselves into thinking we’re productive. I’ve found myself reflecting on months and years of my life feeling like I was always busy but questioned why it didn’t feel like I’d made meaningful progress. I found that the answer was that I often occupied myself with things that felt more urgent, but less important like organizing my finances (exciting… I know), planning every detail my next trip, or keeping my house clean. 

One way to avoid this is to learn to live with the discomfort of incomplete tasks. It’s okay if our lives are not in perfect order. I walked past a dish full of dishes and ignored a few unopened text messages to sit down and write this. Prioritize the few things that will really matter in a year and consciously choose what to neglect. We can’t do everything and it’s often the difficult yet important tasks that are the easiest to avoid.

To Decide is to ‘Cut Away’

To fully immerse ourselves in this life, we have to embrace hard decisions. The Latin root of the word decide literally means to ‘cut away’. Making a decision is to close off all other possibilities – whether temporarily or permanently. This can be very powerful if applied properly in our lives. 

What stops us most from living the lives we want is often not making mistakes, but being unwilling to make important choices. We avoid picking a partner to spend our lives with, quitting a job to pursue our passion, or one of the infinite other choices that scares the hell out of us. Apprehension is understandable as we are required to give up an ideal fantasy that isn’t likely to materialize. However, this can also be liberating as decisions are how we take ownership of our lives. 

Much of our suffering comes from decisions that haven’t been made. It’s tempting to pretend that we can have it all. I catch myself imagining the time where I have a steady job and travel the world with a family while volunteering and training for my next 50k. When I think about this, it’s clearly not realistic, but part of me believes it’s true. Making decisions are scary as they force us to pick a path and abandon others. Even more scary though is making no choice at all and allowing our life to pass us by. 

Christopher Hitchens has a good quote that pairs well with this: “You have to choose your future regrets”. Regret is a certainty in life. Make a decision, don’t make a decision, stay in a relationship, leave the relationship. All of these carry some form of regret. The fear of regret often stops us from making decisions. If we can change our perspective and see regret as an inevitability, we can embrace regret as part of being a limited human. 

Avoid a Moderately Appealing Life

“Midway upon the journey of our life,

I found myself within a forest dark,

For the straightforward pathway had been lost”

-Dante’s Inferno

It seems all too common to wake up in the middle of our lives and to have no idea how we got here. If you’re like most people, life is probably pretty mundane with aspirations of a truly great life feeling like an elusive ideal. We’re put in situations that are not bad enough to leave but are also not good enough to enjoy deeply. This is a place of mediocrity. These are the jobs we sort of put up with, the commute that is annoying but not miserable, semi-enjoyable friendships or relationships where neither partner is truly happy. 

To avoid a moderately appealing life, we need to find ways to change these situations, or be willing to put in effort to improve them. We should recognize that these will make our lives harder at first, but trust that this is only temporary. It takes active effort to recognize where we have become complacent and courage to do something about it, no matter how trivial it may seem to be. 

Limit Works in Progress

By focusing our energy on a few key priorities, we increase our chances of making meaningful progress. Warren Buffet created the 5/25 rule where he instructs people to list their 25 most important goals, gets them to pick their top 5, and instructs them to avoid the rest. He reasons that in order for us to make progress in the most important parts of our lives, we have to avoid distraction. The other 20 goals are where we are most likely to get distracted. 

Of course, This is easier said than done as the tasks on most important items will inevitably get hard, and it’s normal to seek distraction. It becomes tempting to juggle many works in progress and bounce between tasks. This allows us to feel productive and busy, but the cost is rarely finishing anything of importance. Limiting works in progress allows us to take control of our lives and make progress that is most meaningful to us. 

Embrace Imperfection

Perfectionism paralyzes us from taking action. We’re afraid of falling short of our ideals and being judged by others. Realistically, the ideals we hold in our head are probably too high and other people don’t think about us as much as we imagine. If we can embrace imperfection and accept that we will never be perfect, we join the ranks of every other human, and give ourselves freedom to make mistakes and fail. 

I was listening to a TED Talk by Brene Brown where she called TED the “failure conference”. People at TED are among the most successful, inspiring and influential among us. They are also more willing to iterate and learn through failure and imperfection. The paradox is that the path to greatness requires imperfection. Think of the last time you unleashed your creativity. It probably wasn’t when you were focused on what others would think. Most people stop before they every get started as they prefer an ideal fantasy to an imperfect reality. Embracing imperfections lets us keep moving towards our goals. 

Ditch Distraction, be Present

In today’s hyper-connected world, it’s easy to become overstimulated or distracted and to lose sight of what truly matters to us. A distraction is simply the failure to use our time where we say it’s most valuable. The alternative is presence. What we’re doing matters less than HOW we’re doing it. Are you scrolling on your phone from a place of distraction and escape? Or are you truly engaged with what you’re seeing, or is it mindless?

Presence is the act of being deeply engaged with the current moment and not worrying about the past or future.

We can’t control all of our attention, but we can control some of it. Meditation practices like mindfulness can help us improve our awareness of our attention. These techniques won’t stop us from getting distracted overnight, but they can help us recognize when we’re distracted more quickly to bring ourselves back to presence. 

Practice Patience and Embrace Discomfort

I was recently reminded that patience requires us to wait for something that we want – to use our time in waiting. If we see our time as a commodity, waiting for anything seems wasteful. In a time with same-day Amazon shipping and 60-second reels; waiting for anything feels painful. We are becoming accustomed to instant gratification. 

By contrast, patience asks us to savor the moments where we’re not getting what we want. It is an active process that requires the continued commitment to stay with the moment instead of trying to project into the future. There are aspects of life that can only be enjoyed by slowing down, like enjoying the beauty of nature, reading a book, or sitting with our own creative process.

Embracing patience is especially important when faced with challenges or uncertainty. Often, the answers won’t emerge through forcing, but take the time they take. We need to sit with the discomfort of not knowing for an answer to emerge. We’ve likely all experienced this when working on a challenging problem. When I try to fix something on my car for example, I feel like I have to break at least one tool  and watch five videos before I figure out what I need to do. 

We have never been in an era with more distractions than today. Distractions are an appealing way to avoid discomfort as they provide the illusion of timelessness. We easily become absorbed in infinite scrolling of endless content or binge-watching Netflix. They allow us to temporarily avoid our problems, but inevitably we have to confront reality. The solution is to accept that it is hard to stay focused on difficult things and that discomfort is inevitable. Rather than avoiding it, we can see it as a sign that we are on the right path. 

 Find Community

Despite being more connected than every before, we are facing increased isolation. The World Health Organization has declared loneliness a public health concern. Most people would agree that finding community is important, yet it feels harder and harder to find. People are more likely to live alone and work from home. We are less likely to know our neighbors, and fewer people are attending weekly spiritual gatherings like church. 

In an effort to express our individuality, we are creating a society of de-synchronized people. Everybody seems to have a unique work schedule that extend beyond the traditional 9-5. I think about how I often have to make plans with friends weeks ahead of time or how organizing a group event can feel impossible. It used to be that people had to live in close community to survive, but it’s not necessarily true today. 

There is a tension that exists between freedom and community. Community necessarily limits our freedom as we have to conform to the schedule and rules of the group. In return, we get people to share our lives with and often end up happier as a result. It’s been shown that community and social connection play a significant role in longevity¹. We thrive when we connect meaningfully with others. 

Welcome Insignificance

Perhaps one of the hardest truths I was confronted with in this book is that we are cosmically insignificant. Over the vast spans of time and space, the impact of our individual lives are really, really small. Whatever we accomplish isn’t likely to change the world. While this might sound depressing, it can also be a cause for celebration. We can drop any expectation of ourselves to do something big with our lives. Instead, we can look to make our own meaning.  

There are many places to find meaning in life that are not globally significant. Raising a family, pursuing passions, finding spiritual meaning, or contributing to the good of others are all ways to do this. The point is that these shouldn’t be done with the intent of changing the world, but to create fulfillment in our own lives. 

If we can untether our actions from an expected outcome, we can give ourselves permission to feel worthy as we are today. We don’t need to wait for an authority to bestow us with accolades, or to feel like we need to earn this life; the only person that can allow us to feel happy is ourselves. At the end of our life, we will have done essentially nothing compares to all there is to do. Our choice becomes whether we choose to accept this limitation and live happily nevertheless. 

Abandon Hope

The Merriam-Webster definition for hope is “to cherish a desire with anticipation: to want to happen or be true”. This definition implies that factors out of our control will get us what we want. 

It’s understandable to look at the world today and to wish things were different. Despite out advances, poverty and suffering are still commonplace, the list of existential threats continues to rise, and wars are still being fought. We find ourselves hoping things were different. However, hope implies that something outside of ourselves will save the day. It removes our sense of control. Rather than simply hoping for a better future, we are ought to confront reality as it is and do what we can within our ability to “be the change we want to see in the world” as Gandhi said. 

Accept Finitude

Out life is short. 4000 weeks goes by disturbingly quickly, and it’s thought that our perception of time accelerates as we age. The older we get, the more clear it seems to become that this ride we’re on will come to an end. 

Accepting finitude means accepting the death of ourselves and everybody we know. In the west in particular, this is a taboo subject to discuss. We rarely talk about death, and when we do, it is shrouded with euphemisms and rituals that conceal the death process. However, embracing our finitude allows us to fully enjoy our lives in a way that we couldn’t if we were immortal. If our lives went on forever, decisions wouldn’t matter as we could always start again. Any sense of urgency would fade as we could just start tomorrow. It is with limited existence that we can enjoy a sunset, celebrate the birth of a child, or cherish time with friends and family. 

Another perspective is to be grateful for some experience of life instead of nothing at all. This is an idea brought up by philosopher Martin Heidegger. From this perspective, our blip of experience between our birth and death is truly a miracle. It is the somethingness against the infinite backdrop of nothingness. This is admittedly hard to imagine as we don’t have a good concept of what ‘nothingness’ is, but perhaps that’s the point. 

Questions to find more meaning in life

Oliver Burkeman implores the reader the ask themselves five questions to help us find more meaning. If we are willing to confront the reality of our situation and be honest with ourselves, it can be possible to lead an increasingly fulfilling life.

 

1. 1. Where in life are you pursuing comfort when what’s called for is a bit of discomfort?

1. 1. Are you holding yourself to productivity or performance standards that are impossible?

1. 1. How are you not accepting yourself for who you are right now, thinking you will be different in the future?

1. 1. In which areas of life you do feel you’re still holding back until you know what you’re doing?

1. 1. How would you spend your time differently if you were detached from outcomes?

1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK298903/ ↩︎