I first heard about the book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals on The Greg McKeown podcast interview with the author Oliver Burkeman and the concepts got me interested.
Let’s now see more about the book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals.
This post is part of the series Learnings from books where my goal is to share what I learned from the book that I read. It is a mixture of review and summary with a bit of my opinion and point of view. But, as reviews, these learnings can say more about me than the book itself, so I trust that you the smart reader will take it with a grain of salt.
Learnings from the book Four Thousand Weeks
The name of the book comes from the approximate life span of a human. If you live to be eighty years old, you’ll have had about four thousand weeks of life. This is a surprisingly short period.
The book tries to help us face the fact that our time is very limited and we will not be able to do everything that we want to do in this life, so we have to prioritize, not do some things, live in the moment, or just enjoy the things by what they are not what is the value in the future.
The book is full of learnings, but to not be a too-long post, I will share the 5 most important learnings from the book.
You’ll never have time for everything
Probably you were already aware of this, (In a way I was), but just being aware and really thinking about it is a different thing. So, the real benefit of this time-conscious perspective is organizing your days with the recognition that there will inevitably be tasks you won’t have time to accomplish. So it is a goal that is doomed to fail from the start, so at the very least, you can stop beating yourself up for failing at this impossible task.
As we don’t have time for everything, we have to make the hard choices of choosing what to prioritize and what is not going to be done. The real difference is that you will now be consciously making the choices of what won’t be done and what will.
Being efficient is a trap
We think that by being more efficient we will be able to do everything we want and need to do, but that is a trap. Increasing your efficiency, whether through the adoption of productivity strategies or pushing yourself harder, typically won’t lead to a sense of having “enough time.” This is because, under similar circumstances, the demands placed on you tend to increase and offset any benefits. Instead of accomplishing more, you’ll find yourself generating new tasks to complete and feeling that you still don’t have time for everything.
The value of your time is not measured by the results
We usually tend to measure the value of time with the result that we produce. So if you spend some time and have an output, you tend to feel accomplished. But we shouldn’t measure the worth of our time solely by the results. And results are always in the future.
So by just striving to live in the moment as means to an end (a result in the future), you are missing the present moment, which is the only one that you truly have. Embracing the present moment more wholly might be as simple as recognizing that you’ve always been left with no alternative but to exist in the here and now.
We use leisure as a means to an end
The same is true for leisure. We are instructed to rest, but only to rest if it benefits our future productivity. We were taught that if we want to spend our time “wisely”, any activity that doesn’t contribute to some form of future value is inherently considered mere idleness. While relaxation is tolerated, it’s only sanctioned if it serves as a means of recuperation for work or, perhaps, as a form of self-enhancement. Enjoying a moment of leisure for its own sake, without any concern for potential future gains, becomes challenging because rest devoid of instrumental value appears wasteful.
As the author points out: “To rest for the sake of rest – to enjoy a lazy hour for its own sake – entails first accepting the fact that this is it: that your days aren’t progressing toward a future state of perfectly invulnerable happiness, and that to approach them with such an assumption is systematically to drain our four thousand weeks of their value.”
Time alone is not worth
We like to be the “owner” of time, we strive to have flexibility and control our schedule. This is good, but if everyone has this control, everyone can have “free time” at different times than their friends and family.
Having an abundance of time is valuable, however, having endless time at your disposal isn’t particularly beneficial if you’re compelled to go through it in isolation. To accomplish numerous significant tasks with your time – such as socializing, dating, parenting, starting businesses, etc – it must be harmonized with the schedules of others. So time, just by itself, isn’t worth it.
Because of that, sometimes we must relinquish some of our personal time and flexibility to create more opportunities for meaningful moments with our loved ones.
Favorite quotes
These are my 5 favorite quotes from the book.
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“This is the maddening truth about time, which most advice on managing it seems to miss. It’s like an obstreperous toddler: the more you struggle to control it, to make it conform to your agenda, the further it slips from your control.”
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“The trouble with attempting to master your time, it turns out, is that time ends up mastering you.”
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“The technologies we use to try to “get on top of everything” always fail us, in the end, because they increase the size of the “everything” of which we’re trying to get on top.”
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“Results aren’t everything. Indeed, they’d better not be, because results always come later - and later is always too late.”
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“So it’s not simply that our devices distract us from more important matters. It’s that they change how we’re defining “important matters” in the first place.”
Other resources
This section is extra and here I compliment the post with content from other sources that resonate with the book.
These are my learnings from the book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals written by Oliver Burkeman. A special thanks to Vancouver Public Library (VPL) for allowing access to the book for free.
Happy reading!