Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, by Oliver Burkeman (2023).
Four thousand weeks – Burkeman reminds us – is about all we get in life, if we live to be eighty. In the big picture of the universe, this is an “absurdly, insultingly brief” span. Clearly, it is not enough to do everything we want, even if we maximized our productivity with every trick ever invented.
That is the backdrop of this book, which offers guidance on constructing a meaningful life by acknowledging our limits.
I’ve enjoyed reading it, but am having difficulties passing on its advice. I feel a similar ambivalence toward its wisdom as towards the wisdom we sometimes hear from survivors of near-death experiences. Seemingly only having acquired this insight after almost dying, the survivors tell us that life is short and can end even sooner than we think, and therefore we should appreciate it even more. For example, why not marvel at the wonders of a sweet-smelling rose, instead of picking a petty fight with your spouse? It’s not that I disagree. On the contrary. It’s that those insights seem – well – not new, exactly.
That said, probably no great wisdom is truly new. (This itself would not be a new insight by any stretch.) Passing on old words of advice, even just as reminders, might be a good idea anyway. Most likely, people have been doing just that with memento mori art and related concepts, which seem to appear throughout human history and throughout different cultures.
So here are some of Oliver Burke’s points I found worth reflecting on.
My top three selection of time management tips for mortals
- Neglect the right things. Sadly, some of the things you’ll need to neglect will be important things. Make peace with those losses. It’s not your fault that you can’t do everything that would be important. Two particular lines of thought might help you decide what to let go of:
- Limit your works in progress.
- Resist the allure of middling priorities.
- Get real not only about how little time you have, but also about the fact that most things take longer than you expect – even when you take into account that most things take longer than you expect. Plan for enough buffers and breaks, slack and transition time. Since you can’t do everything anyway, you might as well cut out one more thing and instead show up early enough and be present for what you do choose to do.
- And my favorite – cosmic insignificance therapy: Remember how little you matter, on a cosmic timescale. Even the most impactful people in human history don’t make a dent in the universe. Truly recognizing this fact may feel like setting down a burden we didn’t realize we were carrying in the first place. Seen with this perspective, appreciating how little time we have in this life doesn’t mean resolving to “do something remarkable” with it. On the contrary, letting go of an over-demanding standard of remarkableness may help us appreciate the impact we do have on the people close to us, and to not discount the significance of this.
Lastly, this song goes out to (only, I’m afraid) my loyal Swiss-German readers, who might enjoy it as a collectively treasured memento mori:
Picture Credit:
[1] Jendex, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
by Ursina Teuscher (PhD), at Teuscher Decision Coaching, Portland OR