Four Thousand Weeks : Time Management for Mortals (9780374715243)

by Burkeman, Oliver

  Five Questions

  To make this all a little more concrete, it may be useful to ask the following questions of your own life. It doesn’t matter if answers aren’t immediately forthcoming; the point, in Rainer Maria Rilke’s famous phrase, is to “live the questions.” Even to ask them with any sincerity is already to have begun to come to grips with the reality of your situation and to start to make the most of your finite time.

  1. Where in your life or your work are you currently pursuing comfort, when what’s called for is a little discomfort?

  Pursuing the life projects that matter to you the most will almost always entail not feeling fully in control of your time, immune to the painful assaults of reality, or confident about the future. It means embarking on ventures that might fail, perhaps because you’ll find you lacked sufficient talent; it means risking embarrassment, holding difficult conversations, disappointing others, and getting so deep into relationships that additional suffering—when bad things happen to those you care about—is all but guaranteed. And so we naturally tend to make decisions about our daily use of time that prioritize anxiety-avoidance instead. Procrastination, distraction, commitment-phobia, clearing the decks, and taking on too many projects at once are all ways of trying to maintain the illusion that you’re in charge of things. In a subtler way, so too is compulsive worrying, which offers its own gloomy but comforting sense that you’re doing something constructive to try to stay in control.

  James Hollis recommends asking of every significant decision in life: “Does this choice diminish me, or enlarge me?” The question circumvents the urge to make decisions in the service of alleviating anxiety and instead helps you make contact with your deeper intentions for your time. If you’re trying to decide whether to leave a given job or relationship, say, or to redouble your commitment to it, asking what would make you happiest is likely to lure you toward the most comfortable option, or else leave you paralyzed by indecision. But you usually know, intuitively, whether remaining in a relationship or job would present the kind of challenges that will help you grow as a person (enlargement) or the kind that will cause your soul to shrivel with every passing week (diminishment). Choose uncomfortable enlargement over comfortable diminishment whenever you can.

  2. Are you holding yourself to, and judging yourself by, standards of productivity or performance that are impossible to meet?

  One common symptom of the fantasy of someday achieving total mastery over time is that we set ourselves inherently impossible targets for our use of it—targets that must always be postponed into the future, since they can never be met in the present. The truth is that it’s impossible to become so efficient and organized that you could respond to a limitless number of incoming demands. It’s usually equally impossible to spend what feels like “enough time” on your work and with your children, and on socializing, traveling, or engaging in political activism. But there’s a deceptive feeling of comfort in believing that you’re in the process of constructing such a life, which is due to come into being any day now.

  What would you do differently with your time, today, if you knew in your bones that salvation was never coming—that your standards had been unreachable all along, and that you’ll therefore never manage to make time for all you hoped you might? Perhaps you’re tempted to object that yours is a special case, that in your particular situation you do need to pull off the impossible, timewise, in order to avert catastrophe. For example, maybe you’re afraid you’ll be fired and lose your income if you don’t stay on top of your impossible workload. But this is a misunderstanding. If the level of performance you’re demanding of yourself is genuinely impossible, then it’s impossible, even if catastrophe looms—and facing this reality can only help.

  There is a sort of cruelty, Iddo Landau points out, in holding yourself to standards nobody could ever reach (and which many of us would never dream of demanding of other people). The more humane approach is to drop such efforts as completely as you can. Let your impossible standards crash to the ground. Then pick a few meaningful tasks from the rubble and get started on them today.

  3. In what ways have you yet to accept the fact that you are who you are, not the person you think you ought to be?

  A closely related way to postpone the confrontation with finitude—with the anxiety-inducing truth that this is it—is to treat your present-day life as part of a journey toward becoming the kind of person you believe you ought to become, in the eyes of society, a religion, or your parents, whether or not they’re still alive. Once you’ve earned your right to exist, you tell yourself, life will stop feeling so uncertain and out of control. In times of political and environmental crisis, this mindset often takes the form of the belief that nothing is truly worth doing with your time except addressing such emergencies head-on, around the clock—and that you’re entirely correct to think of yourself as guilty and selfish for spending it on anything else.

  This quest to justify your existence in the eyes of some outside authority can continue long into adulthood. But “at a certain age,” writes the psychotherapist Stephen Cope, “it finally dawns on us that, shockingly, no one really cares what we’re doing with our life. This is a most unsettling discovery to those of us who have lived someone else’s life and eschewed our own: no one really cares except us.” The attempt to attain security by justifying your existence, it turns out, was both futile and unnecessary all along. Futile because life will always feel uncertain and out of your control. And unnecessary because, in consequence, there’s no point in waiting to live until you’ve achieved validation from someone or something else. Peace of mind, and an exhilarating sense of freedom, comes not from achieving the validation but from yielding to the reality that it wouldn’t bring security if you got it.

  I’m convinced, in any case, that it is from this position of not feeling as though you need to earn your weeks on the planet that you can do the most genuine good with them. Once you no longer feel the stifling pressure to become a particular kind of person, you can confront the personality, the strengths and weaknesses, the talents and enthusiasms you find yourself with, here and now, and follow where they lead. Perhaps your particular contribution to a world facing multiple crises isn’t primarily to spend your time pursuing activism, or seeking electoral office, but on caring for an elderly relative, or making music, or working as a pastry chef, like my brother-in-law, a strapping South African you might mistake for a rugby player but whose work involves concocting intricate structures of spun sugar and butter frosting that detonate small explosions of joy in their recipients. The Buddhist teacher Susan Piver points out that it can be surprisingly radical and discomfiting, for many of us, to ask how we’d enjoy spending our time. But at the very least, you shouldn’t rule out the possibility that the answer to that question is an indication of how you might use your time best.

  4. In which areas of life are you still holding back until you feel like you know what you’re doing?

  It’s easy to spend years treating your life as a dress rehearsal on the rationale that what you’re doing, for the time being, is acquiring the skills and experience that will permit you to assume authoritative control of things later on. But I sometimes think of my journey through adulthood to date as one of incrementally discovering the truth that there is no institution, no walk of life, in which everyone isn’t just winging it, all the time. Growing up, I assumed that the newspaper on the breakfast table must be assembled by people who truly knew what they were doing; then I got a job at a newspaper. Unconsciously, I transferred my assumptions of competence elsewhere, including to people who worked in government. But then I got to know a few people who did—and who would admit, after a couple of drinks, that their jobs involved staggering from crisis to crisis, inventing plausible-sounding policies in the backs of cars en route to the press conferences at which those policies had to be announced. Even then, I found myself assuming that this might all be explained as a manifestation of the perverse pride that Briti
sh people sometimes take in being shamblingly mediocre. Then I moved to America—where, it turns out, everyone is winging it, too. Political developments in the years since have only made it clearer that the people “in charge” have no more command over world events than the rest of us do.

  It’s alarming to face the prospect that you might never truly feel as though you know what you’re doing, in work, marriage, parenting, or anything else. But it’s liberating, too, because it removes a central reason for feeling self-conscious or inhibited about your performance in those domains in the present moment: if the feeling of total authority is never going to arrive, you might as well not wait any longer to give such activities your all—to put bold plans into practice, to stop erring on the side of caution. It is even more liberating to reflect that everyone else is in the same boat, whether they’re aware of it or not.

  5. How would you spend your days differently if you didn’t care so much about seeing your actions reach fruition?

  A final common manifestation of the desire for time mastery arises from the unspoken assumption described in chapter 8 as the causal catastrophe: the idea that the true value of how we spend our time is always and only to be judged by the results. It follows naturally enough from this outlook that you should focus your time on those activities for which you expect to be around to see the results. But in his documentary A Life’s Work, the director David Licata profiles people who took another path, dedicating their lives to projects that almost certainly won’t be completed within their lifetimes—like the father-and-son team attempting to catalog every tree in the world’s remaining ancient forests, and the astronomer scouring radio waves for signs of extraterrestrial life from her desk at the SETI Institute in California. All have the shining eyes of people who know they’re doing things that matter, and who relish their work precisely because they don’t need to try to convince themselves that their own contributions will prove decisive or reach fruition while they’re still alive.

  Yet there is a sense in which all work—including the work of parenting, community-building, and everything else—has this quality of not being completable within our own lifetimes. All such activities always belong to a far bigger temporal context, with an ultimate value that will only be measurable long after we’re gone (or perhaps never, since time stretches on indefinitely). And so it’s worth asking: What actions—what acts of generosity or care for the world, what ambitious schemes or investments in the distant future—might it be meaningful to undertake today, if you could come to terms with never seeing the results? We’re all in the position of medieval stonemasons, adding a few more bricks to a cathedral whose completion we know we’ll never see. The cathedral’s still worth building, all the same.

  The Next Most Necessary Thing

  On December 15, 1933, Carl Jung wrote a reply to a correspondent, Frau V., responding to several questions on the proper conduct of life, and his answer is a good one with which to end this book. “Dear Frau V.,” Jung began, “Your questions are unanswerable, because you want to know how to live. One lives as one can. There is no single, definite way … If that’s what you want, you had best join the Catholic Church, where they tell you what’s what.” By contrast, the individual path “is the way you make for yourself, which is never prescribed, which you do not know in advance, and which simply comes into being itself when you put one foot in front of the other.” His sole advice for walking such a path was to “quietly do the next and most necessary thing. So long as you think you don’t yet know what that is, you still have too much money to spend in useless speculation. But if you do with conviction the next and most necessary thing, you are always doing something meaningful and intended by fate.” A modified version of this insight, “Do the next right thing,” has since become a slogan favored among members of Alcoholics Anonymous, as a way to proceed sanely through moments of acute crisis. But really, the “next and most necessary thing” is all that any of us can ever aspire to do in any moment. And we must do it despite not having any objective way to be sure what the right course of action even is.

  Fortunately, precisely because that’s all you can do, it’s also all that you ever have to do. If you can face the truth about time in this way—if you can step more fully into the condition of being a limited human—you will reach the greatest heights of productivity, accomplishment, service, and fulfillment that were ever in the cards for you to begin with. And the life you will see incrementally taking shape, in the rearview mirror, will be one that meets the only definitive measure of what it means to have used your weeks well: not how many people you helped, or how much you got done; but that working within the limits of your moment in history, and your finite time and talents, you actually got around to doing—and made life more luminous for the rest of us by doing—whatever magnificent task or weird little thing it was that you came here for.

  Afterword: Beyond Hope

  Except there’s a problem: everything is screwed. Perhaps you’ve noticed.

  A time traveler from an ancient Hindu civilization would have no difficulty recognizing our era as part of the Kali Yuga, that phase in the cycle of history when, according to Hindu mythology, everything starts to unravel: governments crumble, the environment collapses and strange weather events proliferate, refugees pour across borders, and diseases and dubious ideologies spread across the world. (Much of that comes almost verbatim from the Mahabharata, the two-thousand-year-old Sanskrit epic, so its resemblance to my Twitter timeline is either coincidental or extremely sinister.) It is true, as more upbeat commentators like to remind us, that people have always believed they were living in the end times, and that much of the news these days is really rather good: infant mortality, absolute poverty, and global inequality are all falling rapidly, while literacy is rising, and you’re less likely than ever to get killed in a war. Still, those ninety-four-degree days in the Arctic are real, too, as is the coronavirus pandemic, the epic wildfires, the dinghies overloaded with desperate migrants. To put things as mildly as possible, it’s hard to remain entirely confident that everything will turn out fine.

  Why focus on time management in an era like this? It might seem like the height of irrelevance. But as I’ve sought to make clear, I think that’s mainly just a consequence of the blinkered focus of most conventional time management advice. Broaden your perspective a bit, and it’s obvious that in periods of anxiety and darkness, questions of time use take on fresh urgency: our success or failure in responding to the challenges we face will turn entirely on how we use the hours available in the day. The phrase “time management” might seem to render the whole thing rather mundane. But then a mundane life—in the sense of the one that’s unfolding here now, in this very moment—is all that we have to work with.

  People sometimes ask Derrick Jensen, the environmentalist who cofounded the radical group Deep Green Resistance, how he manages to stay hopeful when everything seems so grim. But he tells them he doesn’t—and that he thinks that’s a good thing. Hope is supposed to be “our beacon in the dark,” Jensen notes. But in reality, it’s a curse. To hope for a given outcome is to place your faith in something outside yourself, and outside the current moment—the government, for example, or God, or the next generation of activists, or just “the future”—to make things all right in the end. As the American Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön says, it means relating to life as if “there’s always going to be a babysitter available when we need one.” And sometimes that attitude can be justified: if I go to the hospital for surgery, for instance, I do simply have to hope that the surgeon knows what he’s doing, because no contribution I can make is likely to make much difference. But the rest of the time, it means disavowing your own capacity to change things—which in the context of Jensen’s field, environmental activism, means surrendering your power to the very forces you were supposed to be fighting.

  “Many people say they hope the dominant culture stops destroying the world,” as Jensen puts it, but by saying that, “they�
�ve assumed the destruction will continue, at least in the short term, and they’ve stepped away from their own ability to participate in stopping it.” To give up hope, by contrast, is to reinhabit the power that you actually have. At that point, Jensen goes on, “we no longer have to ‘hope’ at all. We simply do the work. We make sure salmon survive. We make sure prairie dogs survive. We make sure grizzlies survive … When we stop hoping that the awful situation we’re in will somehow resolve itself, when we stop hoping the situation will somehow not get worse, then we are finally free—truly free—to honestly start working to resolve it.”

  You could think of this book as an extended argument for the empowering potential of giving up hope. Embracing your limits means giving up hope that with the right techniques, and a bit more effort, you’d be able to meet other people’s limitless demands, realize your every ambition, excel in every role, or give every good cause or humanitarian crisis the attention it seems like it deserves. It means giving up hope of ever feeling totally in control, or certain that acutely painful experiences aren’t coming your way. And it means giving up, as far as possible, the master hope that lurks beneath all this, the hope that somehow this isn’t really it—that this is just a dress rehearsal, and that one day you’ll feel truly confident that you have what it takes.