Title Four Thousand Weeks
Author Oliver Burkeman
Year Published 2021
Kind of Book Productivity/Philosophy
How strongly I recommend it 7/10
My Impressions This book is a wake up call for all who have bought into the myth that the world of productivity implicitly sells people—if you can only optimize your productivity then you can do everything you want to do in life and you won't have to make hard choices and sacrifices in how you spend you time. This book is devoted to debunking that myth. I liked the core idea, but felt it was a little repetitive and didn't need to be a whole 200 and some odd pages long. A Ted talk or podcast would have sufficed.
Date Read March 2023
Practical Takeaways
stop beating yourself up for failing to get everything you want to get done in one day
organize your days with the understanding that you definitely won’t have time for everything you want to do, or that other people want you
Make hard choices about how you use you time consciously
Resist the seductive temptation to “keep your options open”—which is really just
Decline to clear the decks, and instead focus 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, with emails and errands and other to-dos, many of which you may never get around to at all.
live your life in a clear-eye acknowledgement of your limitations
pay yourself first when it comes to time //sim to pay yourself 10% before paying anyone else
Work on your most important project for the first hour of each day,
protect your time by scheduling “meetings” with yourself, marking them in your calendar so that other commitments can’t intrude.
fix a hard upper limit on the number of projects that you allow yourself to work on at any given time. *no more than three items. Once you’ve selected those tasks, all other incoming demands on your time must wait until one of the three items has been completed, thereby freeing up a slot. (It’s also permissible to free up a slot by abandoning a project altogether if it isn’t working out. The point isn’t to force yourself to finish absolutely everything you start, but rather to banish the bad habit of keeping an ever-proliferating number of half-finished projects on the back burner.)
Warren Buffet Prioritizing
1)Make a list of the top twenty-five things you wants out of life
2)arrange them in order, from the most important to the least. The top five, should be those around which you organize your time.
3)the remaining twenty, aren’t the second-tier priorities to which he should turn when
he gets the chance. Far from it. In fact, they’re the ones you should actively avoid at all costs—(because they’re the ambitions insufficiently important to him to form the core of his life yet seductive enough to distract him from the ones that matter most.)
Start saying no to things you do want to do, with the recognition that you have only one life.
Your creation will never be as good as your imagination of it, so don't worry about if it will be
Settle for less than perfect
Live with the awareness that we are constantly doing things in life for the last time
Choose uncomfortable enlargement over comfortable diminishment whenever you can.
Be willing to bend your schedule/morning routine to fit the free time of people in your life who you care about
Give up hope of ever feeling totally in control of your life
Big Ideas
The more productive you become the busier and more anxious you feel
One would think that time saving devices like dishwashers and microwaves make people feel more relaxed and expansive, but this is not the case
The faster you are at answering emails, the more emails you receive
Because
People are more likely to send you more emails when they have seen you respond to emails quickly and promptly
And
Every time you reply to an email you are putting the ball back in that persons quart to then send you another email
When people's income increases they adjust their lifestyle and spending to match the new amount of income
Nobody in the history of humanity has ever achieved “work-life balance
Before the clock had been invented people did not think of time and life as two separate concepts.
After the clock had been invented people began thinking of time and life as two separate concepts
After people began thinking of time and life as two separate concepts they began thinking about 'time' as something that you used
Once 'time' began to be thought about as something you used, there began to be internal and external pressures to use time well ie. Not waste time
After the clock had been invented People began basing their Self-worth on how well they were using their time
No matter how productive we become we will never have enough time to do everything we want to do in life
Therefore
We must make sacrifices and hard decisions about how we use our time
Many people engage in efforts to try to be as productive as possible in order to avoid facing the reality that we can't do everything we want to do and therefore have to make hard choices
If you buy into the myth that you will have time to do everything you want to do in life then you will think less about how you use your time and what you commit yourself to and your days will become full of things you don' especially value
the more you try to manage your time with the goal of achieving a feeling of total control, and freedom from the inevitable constraints of being human, the more stressful, empty, and frustrating life gets.
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
If we had time to do everything than our choices would have not meaning
Therefore
Missing out of some things gives meaning to the things that we do decide to do with our time
You teach best what you most need to learn
The more successful you become at fitting more into you schedule the more things will begin to seem important, meaningful, or obligatory
Once you have dispelled yourself of the productivity myth it will be easier to find peace of mind in the present moment (in which you will be busy, overstretched etc.)
If your orientation towards doing fun things or checking things off your bucket-list is similar to how you view your work to-do list then it will leave you just as overwhelmed and exhausted
The world has an infinite number of experiences to offer
Therefore
No matter how many experiences you have had in life, you will never get closer to the sense that you have feasted on life's possibilities
When we feel we have too much to do we often try to do more (rather than sacrifice some things)
The more you try to fit everything you want to do into your life, the more time you will spend doing low-level less meaningful things that don't bring you as much value
The idea that you should get all of the small less important things out of the way first before starting on the big meaningful things is flawed
Because
There will always be more small less important things to do
And
If there aren't small less important things to do, your mind will create them in order to procrastinate doing the hard work
You WILL "miss out on" almost every experience the world has to offer
Therefore
It is not a problem that there are many things you still haven't experienced in life
It is uncomfortable to face the truth that our lives have limitations
But
When we live in acknowledgement of our limitations our lives become more authentic
People claim that a terminal illness was the best thing that happened to them generally because it helped clear away the façade that they had infinite time on Earth and helped them reorient to their actual predicament
Instead of seeing yourself as being cheated out of having an infinite amount of time, see yourself as being blessed to have been given ANY amount of time
A good time management system is one that helps you neglect the right things
The only way you will be able to works towards things that really matter to you is by ignoring all of the less important things vying for you attention
Reality will never live up to your fantasy of that thing
Because
Fantasy is beyond the realm of limitation and therefore plays by different unfair rules that reality can never match
Your creation will never be as good as your imagination of it
We all settle in our lives
Not settling and continuing to search for the perfect partner, is a form of settling
Because
When you spend your time searching for the perfect partner you are not using your time in a very enjoyable way
Settling in a relationship is better than living in a fantasy of having a perfect partner
We do everything we can to avoid having to close a door or burn a bridge
However
Closing doors and burning bridges is actually beneficial to our happiness
Any task you're planning will take longer than you expect EVEN if you adjust your schedule to account for the fact that it will take longer than you expect
Time is never something that we HAVE, but rather something that we expect to have
It is a fallacy to automatically assume the future benefit outweighs the present benefit
It is a fallacy to automatically assume that something that leads to a bad habit in adulthood is therefore bad, if it creates pleasure in the moment
We believe that a child's purpose is to grow up
But
A child's purpose is to be a child
We are constantly doing things in our life for the last time
However
Rarely when we do something for the last time in our life are we aware that it will be the last time
In order for actions towards a goal to have value the goal itself must have value
It is/was very difficult for people to be idle and not work
Sabbath is/was a way to force people to be idle for a day
Midlife crisis' results from living a future oriented life and realizing there will one day be no more future
Each person is always in one of two different states of suffering: Striving or boredom -Schopenhauer
Many digital nomads suffer from acute loneliness
Because
The digital nomad’s lifestyle lacks the shared rhythms required for deep relationships to take root
It is important to not only have time off work, but shared time off work with the people you love
The value in time off work is not just about quantity, but also about whether the people you care about also have the time off work
Surprising Facts
Assuming you live to be eighty, you’ll have had about four thousand weeks of life
The oldest person on record is Jeanne Calment, the Frenchwoman who was thought to be 122 when she died in 1997
we’re capable of consciously attending to about 0.0004 percent of the information bombarding our brains at any given moment.
Unknown Terms
The Productivity Myth: A myth explicitly or implicitly sold to people in the world or productivity/optimization that "if you can only optimize your productivity then you can do everything you want to do in life and you won't have to make hard choices and sacrifices in how you spend you time"
Hofstadter’s law: states that any task you’re planning to tackle will always take longer than you expect, “even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.” In other words, even if you know that a given project is likely to overrun, and you adjust your schedule accordingly, it’ll just overrun your new estimated finishing time, too. It follows from this that the standard advice about planning—to give yourself twice as long as you think you’ll need—could actually make matters worse."
idleness aversion: A term in social psychology meant to describe an affliction where a person is unable to be idle and feels a compulsion to always be striving for something more