Time management for mortals
👋🏻 Welcome to another book club post. I had fun writing this one - hope it adds some degree of value to your day. Adding value is my whole goal here. Get in contact and let me know if it has. Or if it hasn’t. Here we go.
📘 Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman
This is one of the few books about productivity that genuinely reshaped my perspective about life. I don’t say that lightly - I’ve read more nonfiction than any person should. The overarching theme of this book is a philosophy regarding human mortality and the finitude of life on earth. This dovetails nicely into a common-sense (minimalist) approach to productivity and time management. I should say that this is more of a philosophical book than a practical one. If you are looking for a perspective-altering book, this is the right one for you; if you are looking for more practical time management tools, this might not be right.
🩳 Short Form Summary
The author takes the perspective that our time on earth is very short. It follows, then, that time management should be one of our chief concerns while we are here. Though we are inundated with advice on the topic, productivity systems only (often) serve to make us busier. As a solution, the author recommends that we face our own finitude, in every sense of the word, as human beings. And we should do our best to minimize, pare down, and prioritize tasks in our lives based on our most sacred and deeply-rooted desires.
🔑 Key Takeaways
🌎 Our time on earth is very short; on average, human beings only live for about four thousand weeks.
⌚ Time management should be our chief concern. Most productivity systems don’t help us manage our limited time - they only help us become more busy performing passionless tasks.
💻 Underlying an addiction to speed, productivity, and entertainment is a troublesome relationship with our own mortality - we seek distraction from our own finitude.
✅ The goal of any productivity system worth its salt should be to teach you how to pare down and prioritize tasks.
🔮 We are conditioned to assign value to every moment in our life based on its ability to lay the groundwork for future success. Every moment has its own inherent value.
🕺🏻 FOMO is a symptom of failing to face your own finitude. There are literally infinite things to do with your life, you will never do 99.9% of them. That’s OK.
😎 Approach your choice of how to spend your time as an affirmation of what you have chosen your life to be, as opposed to lamenting the moments you may have missed.
👖 What I Learned
Our time on earth - any way you slice it - is shockingly short. On average, we only spend about four thousand weeks on earth. That’s… Four Thousand Mondays; Four Thousand “Hump Day” joke opportunities; Four Thousand “Thank God It’s Friday” eye rolls; Four Thousand Weekends. It’s pretty startling when you put life into these finite terms. Our opportunities are limited. And we don’t have endless time to reach our goals.
It follows, then, that managing our limited time should be our chief concern. And, for many, it is.
We are deluged with advice. Book after book, system after system, about how to manage our time appropriately. The vast majority of these systems only succeed insofar as they allow us to become more busy. We clear our to-do lists faster, only to have them fill more quickly still. And thus our days fill with passionless tasks. We aren’t machines and we shouldn’t act like it.
The goal of any productivity system worth its salt should be its ability to pare down tasks - to make you prioritize, based on your most sacred goals in life. The author advocates for this minimalist mindset to time management which is intuitive in the best sense of the word.
At the core of many of our modern insecurities is a troubled relationship with time and our own finitude as human beings.
Part-and-parcel with our troubled with relationship with time is our inability to appropriately assign value to certain aspects of life. We are conditioned, by our productivity- and distraction-obsessed culture, to interpret the value of every moment in the context for the value it has in setting the groundwork for the future. This makes it impossible to to focus on the present and sets our minds perpetually in the future. The reality is that every moment has its own inherent value; none more than others.
Fear of missing out (FOMO) is a concept we are all familiar with. FOMO is rampant, especially in this social media age. I can’t mindlessly scroll social media without seeing an idyllic influencer trip to Bali. Can we collectively decide to stop pretending our life is perfect on social media? The author contends that FOMO is an illusion created by our inability to respect our finitude. The hard reality is that there are (literally) infinite things that you might do with your life. Infinite paths you might take. And you will never take 99.9% of them. And that’s OK.
As a cure for FOMO in the social media age, the author recommends that, instead of constantly seeing (and lamenting) the potential alternative decisions you might have made, you should try to reinterpret how you spend every moment as an affirmation of the specific path that you have chosen. I think this is a nice note to end on this week - every moment is an affirmation.
👋🏻 Thank you for reading. Feel free to contact me with any feedback or questions that you may have regarding this post. As I said, I had a lot of fun reading the book and writing the post. I hope it has added some degree of value to your day.
