Four Thousand Weeks : Time Management for Mortals (9780374715243)

by Burkeman, Oliver

  The limitations we’re trying to avoid when we engage in this self-defeating sort of procrastination frequently don’t have anything to do with how much we’ll be able to get done in the time available; usually, it’s a matter of worrying that we won’t have the talent to produce work of sufficient quality, or that others won’t respond to it as we’d like them to, or that in some other way things won’t turn out as we want. The philosopher Costica Bradatan illustrates the point by means of a fable about an architect from Shiraz in Persia who designed the world’s most beautiful mosque: a breathtaking structure, dazzlingly original yet classically well proportioned, awe-inspiring in its grandeur yet wholly unpretentious. All those who saw the architectural plans wanted to buy them, or steal them; famous builders begged him to let them take on the job. But the architect locked himself in his study and stared at the plans for three days and nights—then burned them all. He might have been a genius, but he was also a perfectionist: the mosque of his imagination was perfect, and it agonized him to contemplate the compromises that would be involved in making it real. Even the greatest of builders would inevitably fail to reproduce his plans absolutely faithfully; nor would he be able to protect his creation from the ravages of time—from the physical decay or marauding armies that would eventually reduce it to dust. Stepping into the world of finitude, by actually building the mosque, would mean confronting all that he couldn’t do. Better to cherish an ideal fantasy than to resign himself to reality, with all its limitations and unpredictability.

  Bradatan argues that when we find ourselves procrastinating on something important to us, we’re usually in some version of this same mindset. We fail to see, or refuse to accept, that any attempt to bring our ideas into concrete reality must inevitably fall short of our dreams, no matter how brilliantly we succeed in carrying things off—because reality, unlike fantasy, is a realm in which we don’t have limitless control, and can’t possibly hope to meet our perfectionist standards. Something—our limited talents, our limited time, our limited control over events, and over the actions of other people—will always render our creation less than perfect. Dispiriting as this might sound at first, it contains a liberating message: if you’re procrastinating on something because you’re worried you won’t do a good enough job, you can relax—because judged by the flawless standards of your imagination, you definitely won’t do a good enough job. So you might as well make a start.

  And this sort of finitude-avoiding procrastination certainly isn’t confined to the world of work. It’s a major issue in relationships, too, where a similar refusal to face the truth about finitude can keep people mired in a miserably tentative mode of existence for years on end. By way of a cautionary tale, consider the case of the worst boyfriend ever, Franz Kafka, whose most important romantic liaison began one summer evening in Prague in 1912, when he was twenty-nine. Dining that night at the home of his friend Max Brod, Kafka met his host’s cousin, Felice Bauer, who was visiting from Berlin. She was an independent-minded twenty-four-year-old, already enjoying professional success at a manufacturing company in Germany, and her down-to-earth vigor appealed to the neurotic, self-conscious Kafka. We know little of the strength of feeling in the other direction, since only Kafka’s account survives, but he was smitten, and soon a relationship began.

  Or it began, at least, in correspondence form: over the next five years, the couple exchanged hundreds of letters yet met only a handful of times, each meeting apparently a source of agony for Kafka. Seven months after their first encounter, he finally agreed to meet a second time, but sent a telegram on the morning in question to say he wasn’t coming; then he showed up anyway but acted morose. When the couple eventually got engaged, Bauer’s parents held a celebratory reception; but attending it, Kafka confided to his diary, made him feel “tied hand and foot like a criminal.” Shortly afterward, during a rendezvous at a Berlin hotel, Kafka called off the engagement, but the letters continued. (Though Kafka was indecisive about those too: “It is quite right that we should stop this business of so many letters,” he wrote to Bauer on one occasion, apparently in response to a suggestion of hers. “Yesterday I even started a letter on this subject, which I will send tomorrow.”) Two years later, the engagement was back on, but only for a while: in 1917, Kafka used the onset of tuberculosis as an excuse to cancel it a second and final time. It was presumably with some relief that Bauer married a banker, had two children, and moved to the United States, where she opened a successful knitwear firm—leaving behind her a liaison characterized by so many nightmarish and unpredictable reversals it’s impossible to resist describing it as Kafkaesque.

  It might be easy to file Kafka away under the heading of “tortured genius,” a remote figure with little relevance to our more ordinary lives. But the truth, as the critic Morris Dickstein writes, is that his “neuroses are no different from ours, no more freakish: only more intense, more pure … [and] driven by genius to an integrity of unhappiness that most of us never approach.” Like the rest of us, Kafka railed at reality’s constraints. He was indecisive in love, and in much else, because he yearned to live more than one life: to be a respectable citizen, which was why he kept his day job as an insurance claims investigator; to relate intimately to another person in marriage, which would mean marrying Bauer; and yet also to dedicate himself without compromise to his writing. On more than one occasion, in letters to Bauer, he characterized this struggle as a matter of “two selves” wrestling with each other inside him—one in love with her but the other so consumed by literature that “the death of his dearest friend would seem to be no more than a hindrance” to his work.

  The degree of agony here might be extreme, but the essential tension is the same one felt by anybody torn between work and family, between a day job and a creative calling, a hometown and the big city, or any other clash of possible lives. And Kafka responded like the rest of us, too, by trying not to confront the problem. Confining his relationship with Bauer to the realm of letters meant that he could cling to the possibility of a life of intimacy with her without allowing it to compete with his mania for work, as a real-life relationship necessarily would. This effort to dodge the implications of finitude doesn’t always manifest itself in commitment-phobia like Kafka’s: some people do commit outwardly to a relationship but hold back from full emotional commitment on the inside. Others find themselves years into threadbare marriages they actually should leave but don’t, because they want to keep open the possibility that their relationship might yet blossom into a long and contented one, and also the option of exercising their freedom to leave at some future date. It’s all the same essential evasion, though. At one point, a desperate-sounding Bauer advised her fiancé to try to “live more in the real world.” But that was precisely what Kafka was seeking to avoid.

  Six hundred miles away in Paris, and two decades before Franz met Felice, the French philosopher Henri Bergson tunneled to the heart of Kafka’s problem in his book Time and Free Will. We invariably prefer indecision over committing ourselves to a single path, Bergson wrote, because “the future, which we dispose of to our liking, appears to us at the same time under a multitude of forms, equally attractive and equally possible.” In other words, it’s easy for me to fantasize about, say, a life spent achieving stellar professional success, while also excelling as a parent and partner, while also dedicating myself to training for marathons or lengthy meditation retreats or volunteering in my community—because so long as I’m only fantasizing, I get to imagine all of them unfolding simultaneously and flawlessly. As soon as I start trying to live any of those lives, though, I’ll be forced to make trade-offs—to put less time than I’d like into one of those domains, so as to make space for another—and to accept that nothing I do will go perfectly anyway, with the result that my actual life will inevitably prove disappointing by comparison with the fantasy. “The idea of the future, pregnant with an infinity of possibilities, is thus more fruitful than the future itself,” Bergson wrote, “and
this is why we find more charm in hope than in possession, in dreams than in reality.” Once again, the seemingly dispiriting message here is actually a liberating one. Since every real-world choice about how to live entails the loss of countless alternative ways of living, there’s no reason to procrastinate, or to resist making commitments, in the anxious hope that you might somehow be able to avoid those losses. Loss is a given. That ship has sailed—and what a relief.

  The Inevitability of Settling

  Which brings me to one of the few pieces of dating advice I feel entirely confident in delivering, though in fact it’s relevant in every other sphere of life, too. It concerns “settling”—the ubiquitous modern fear that you might find yourself committing to a romantic partner who falls short of your ideal, or who’s unworthy of your excellent personality. (The career-related version of this worry entails “settling” for a job that pays the bills rather than going all-in on your passion.) The received wisdom, articulated in a thousand magazine articles and inspirational Instagram memes, is that it’s always a crime to settle. But the received wisdom is wrong. You should definitely settle.

  Or to be more precise, you don’t have a choice. You will settle—and this fact ought to please you. The American political theorist Robert Goodin wrote a whole treatise on this topic, On Settling, in which he demonstrates, to start with, that we’re inconsistent when it comes to what we define as “settling.” Everyone seems to agree that if you embark on a relationship when you secretly suspect you could find someone better, you’re guilty of settling, because you’re opting to use up a portion of your life with a less-than-ideal partner. But since time is finite, the decision to refuse to settle—to spend a decade restlessly scouring online dating networks for the perfect person—is also a case of settling, because you’re opting to use up a decade of your limited time in a different sort of less-than-ideal situation. Moreover, Goodin observes, we tend to contrast a life of settling with a life of what he labels “striving,” or living life to the fullest. But this is a mistake, too, and not just because settling is unavoidable but also because living life to the fullest requires settling. “You must settle, in a relatively enduring way, upon something that will be the object of your striving, in order for that striving to count as striving,” he writes: you can’t become an ultrasuccessful lawyer or artist or politician without first “settling” on law, or art, or politics, and therefore deciding to forgo the potential rewards of other careers. If you flit between them all, you’ll succeed in none of them. Likewise, there’s no possibility of a romantic relationship being truly fulfilling unless you’re willing, at least for a while, to settle for that specific relationship, with all its imperfections—which means spurning the seductive lure of an infinite number of superior imaginary alternatives.

  Of course, we rarely approach relationships with such wisdom. Instead, we spend years failing to fully commit to any one relationship—either by finding a reason to call things off as soon as a serious liaison starts to look likely or by only halfheartedly showing up for whatever relationship we’re in. Or, alternatively, in a pattern that every experienced psychotherapist has encountered a hundred times, we do commit—but then, after three or four years, start thinking about breaking things off, convinced that our partner’s psychological issues are making things impossible, or that we’re not as compatible as we’d believed. Either of these might conceivably be true in certain cases; people are sometimes guilty of spectacularly bad choices in love, and in other domains as well. But more often, the real problem is just that the other person is one other person. In other words, the cause of your difficulties isn’t that your partner is especially flawed, or that the two of you are especially incompatible, but that you’re finally noticing all the ways in which your partner is (inevitably) finite, and thus deeply disappointing by comparison with the world of your fantasy, where the limiting rules of reality don’t apply.

  The point that Bergson made about the future—that it’s more appealing than the present because you get to indulge in all your hopes for it, even if they contradict each other—is no less true of fantasy romantic partners, who can easily exhibit a range of characteristics that simply couldn’t coexist in one person in the real world. It’s common, for example, to enter a relationship unconsciously hoping that your partner will provide both an unlimited sense of stability and an unlimited sense of excitement—and then, when that’s not what transpires, to assume that the problem is your partner and that these qualities might coexist in someone else, whom you should therefore set off to find. The reality is that the demands are contradictory. The qualities that make someone a dependable source of excitement are generally the opposite of those that make him or her a dependable source of stability. Seeking both in one real human isn’t much less absurd than dreaming of a partner who’s both six and five feet tall.

  And not only should you settle; ideally, you should settle in a way that makes it harder to back out, such as moving in together, or getting married, or having a child. The great irony of all our efforts to avoid facing finitude—to carry on believing that it might be possible not to have to choose between mutually exclusive options—is that when people finally do choose, in a relatively irreversible way, they’re usually much happier as a result. We’ll do almost anything to avoid burning our bridges, to keep alive the fantasy of a future unconstrained by limitation, yet having burned them, we’re generally pleased that we did so. Once, in an experiment, the Harvard University social psychologist Daniel Gilbert and a colleague gave hundreds of people the opportunity to pick a free poster from a selection of art prints. Then he divided the participants into two groups. The first group was told that they had a month in which they could exchange their poster for any other one; the second group was told that the decision they’d already made had been final. In follow-up surveys, it was the latter group—those who were stuck with their decision, and who thus weren’t distracted by the thought that it might still be possible to make a better choice—who showed by far the greater appreciation for the work of art they’d selected.

  Not that we necessarily need psychologists to prove the point. Gilbert’s study reflects an insight that’s deeply embedded in numerous cultural traditions, most obviously that of marriage. When two spouses agree to stay together “for better or worse,” rather than bolting as soon as the going gets tough, they’re making an agreement that not only will help them weather the rough patches, but that also promises to make the good times more fulfilling, too—because having committed themselves to one finite course of action, they’ll be much less likely to spend that time pining after fantastical alternatives. In consciously making a commitment, they’re closing off their fantasies of infinite possibility in favor of what I described, in the previous chapter, as the “joy of missing out”: the recognition that the renunciation of alternatives is what makes their choice a meaningful one in the first place. This is also why it can be so unexpectedly calming to take actions you’d been fearing or delaying—to finally hand in your notice at work, become a parent, address a festering family issue, or close on a house purchase. When you can no longer turn back, anxiety falls away, because now there’s only one direction to travel: forward into the consequences of your choice.

  5.

  The Watermelon Problem

  One Friday in April 2016, as that year’s polarizing American presidential race intensified, and more than thirty armed conflicts raged around the globe, approximately three million people spent part of their day watching two reporters from BuzzFeed wrap rubber bands around a watermelon. Gradually, over the course of forty-three agonizing minutes, the pressure ramped up—both the psychological kind and the physical pressure on the watermelon—until, at minute forty-four, the 686th rubber band was applied. What happened next won’t amaze you: the watermelon exploded, messily. The reporters high-fived, wiped the splatters from their reflective goggles, then ate some watermelon. The broadcast ended. The earth continued its orbit around the sun.

>   I’m not raising this to imply that there’s anything especially shameful about spending forty-four minutes of your day staring at a watermelon on the internet. On the contrary, given what was to happen to life online in the years after 2016—as the trolls and neo-Nazis began to crowd out the pop quizzes and cat videos, and social media increasingly became a matter of “doomscrolling” in a depressive daze through bottomless feeds of bad news—the BuzzFeed watermelon escapade already feels like a tale from a happier time. But it’s worth mentioning because it illustrates an elephant-in-the-room problem with everything I’ve been arguing so far about time and time management. That problem is distraction. After all, it hardly matters how committed you are to making the best use of your limited time if, day after day, your attention gets wrenched away by things on which you never wanted to focus. It’s a safe bet that none of those three million people woke up that morning with the intention of using a portion of their lives to watch a watermelon burst; nor, when the moment arrived, did they necessarily feel as though they were freely choosing to do so. “I want to stop watching so bad but I’m already committed,” read one typically rueful comment on Facebook. “I’ve been watching you guys put rubber bands around a watermelon for 40 minutes,” wrote someone else. “What am I doing with my life?”

  The watermelon tale is a reminder, moreover, that these days distraction has become all but synonymous with digital distraction: it’s what happens when the internet gets in the way of our attempts to concentrate. But this is misleading. Philosophers have been worrying about distraction at least since the time of the ancient Greeks, who saw it less as a matter of external interruptions and more as a question of character—a systematic inner failure to use one’s time on what one claimed to value the most. Their reason for treating distraction so seriously was straightforward, and it’s the reason we ought to do so, too: what you pay attention to will define, for you, what reality is.