Four Thousand Weeks

You won’t leave a legacy. Embrace ordinary.

Let problems linger, don’t rush to resolution.

Be present now, this moment won’t happen again

To be more present, you must embrace the inevitability of discomfort. Instead of resisting boredom by staying busy, focus your attention on it. Stay bored, see where it leads you.

Stop focusing on getting sh*t done, to achieve a future goal. Stop being productive.

One can waste years this way, systematically postponing precisely the things one cares about the most.

So getting better at processing your email is like getting faster and faster at climbing up an infinitely tall ladder: you’ll feel more rushed, but no matter how quickly you go, you’ll never reach the top.

The trouble with attempting to master your time, it turns out, is that time ends up mastering you.

You get to spend your finite time focused on a few things that matter to you, in themselves, right now, in this moment. Find the very few critical things that bring the most meaning to your life. Say no to everything else. Then invest your whole self into every moment doing the things that matter.

The real problem isn’t our limited time. The real problem is that we’ve inherited, and feel pressured to live by, a troublesome set of ideas about how to use our limited time. We assume this will help optimize our short time on earth. Instead, the opposite happens. These time management ideals are pretty much guaranteed to make things worse.

The world is bursting with wonder, and yet it’s the rare productivity guru who seems to have considered the possibility that the ultimate point of all our frenetic doing might be to experience more of that wonder.

Once time is a resource to be used, you start to feel pressure, whether from external forces or from yourself , to use it well, and to berate yourself when you feel you’ve wasted it.

The fundamental problem is that this attitude towards time sets up a rigged game in which it’s impossible ever to feel as though you’re doing well enough.

The problem with trying to make time for everything that feels important – or just for enough of what feels important – is that you definitely never will.

If you never stop to ask yourself if the sacrifice is worth it, your days will automatically begin to fill not just with more things, but with more trivial or tedious things, because they’ve never had to clear the hurdle of being judged more important than something else.

What’s needed instead in such situations, I gradually came to understand, is a kind of anti-skill: not the counterproductive strategy of trying to make yourself more efficient, but rather a willingness to resist such urges – to learn to stay with the anxiety of feeling overwhelmed, of not being on top of everything, without automatically responding by trying to fit more in.

It’s only by facing our finitude that we can step into a truly authentic relationship with life.

It is as if a new physical law has been described for us bespoke: absolute as all the others are, yet terrifyingly casual. It is a law of perception. It says, You will lose everything that catches your eye. - Marion Coutts

If you can adopt the outlook we’re exploring here even just a little – if you can hold your attention, however briefly or occasionally, on the sheer astonishingness of being, and on what a small amount of that being you get – you may experience a palpable shift in how it feels to be here, right now, alive in the flow of time.

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.

The finest meal at a Michelin-starred restaurant might as well be a plate of instant noodles if your mind is elsewhere; and a friendship to which you never actually give a moment’s thought is a friendship in name only.

The way to find peaceful absorption in a difficult project, or a boring Sunday afternoon, isn’t to chase feelings of peace or absorption, but to acknowledge the inevitability of discomfort, and to turn more of your attention to the reality of your situation than to railing against it.

The cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter is famous, among other reasons, for coining ‘Hofstadter’s law’, which 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’.

The obsessive planner, essentially, is demanding certain reassurances from the future – but the future isn’t the sort of thing that can ever provide the reassurance he craves, for the obvious reason that it’s still in the future.

The struggle for control over the future is a stark example of our refusal to acknowledge our built-in limitations when it comes to time, because it’s a fight the worrier obviously won’t win. You can never be truly certain about the future. And so your reach will always exceed your grasp.

Later , I would learn that there’s virtually no credible scientific evidence favouring either of these camps.

John Maynard K eynes saw the truth at the bottom of all this, which is that our fixation on what he called ‘purposiveness’ – on using time well for future purposes, or on ‘personal productivity’, he might have said, had he been writing today – is ultimately motivated by the desire not to die.

Enjoying leisure for its own sake – which you might have assumed was the whole point of leisure – comes to feel as though it’s somehow not quite enough. It begins to feel as though you’re failing at life, in some indistinct way, if you’re not treating your time off as an investment in your future.

The regrettable consequence of justifying leisure only in terms of its usefulness for other things is that it begins to feel vaguely like a chore – in other words, like work in the worst sense of that word.

The truth, then, is that spending at least some of your leisure time ‘wastefully’, focused solely on the pleasure of the experience, is the only way not to waste it – to be truly at leisure, rather than covertly engaged in future-focused self-improvement.

Taking a walk in the countryside, like listening to a favourite song or meeting friends for an evening of conversation, is thus a good example of what the philosopher Kieran Setiya calls an ‘atelic activity’, meaning that its value isn’t derived from its telos, or ultimate aim. - Kieran Setiya

In an age of instrumentalisation, the hobbyist is a subversive: he insists that some things are worth doing for themselves alone, despite offering no pay-offs in terms of productivity or profit.

The reason that technological progress exacerbates our feelings of impatience is that each new advance seems to bring us closer to the point of transcending our limits; it seems to promise that this time, finally, we might be able to make things go fast enough for us to feel completely in control of our unfolding time.

The futility of this situation – in which the addict’s efforts to regain control send him spiralling further out of control – is the basis of the paradoxical-sounding insight for which Alcoholics Anonymous has become famous: that you can’t truly hope to beat alcohol until you give up all hope of beating alcohol.

When you finally face the truth that you can’t dictate how fast things go, you stop trying to outrun your anxiety, and your anxiety is transformed.

In more and more contexts, patience becomes a form of power. In a world geared for hurry, the capacity to resist the urge to hurry – to allow things to take the time they take – is a way to gain purchase on the world, to do the work that counts, and to derive satisfaction from the doing itself, instead of deferring all your fulfilment to the future.

The truth is that time is also a ‘network good’, one that derives its value from how many other people have access to it, too, and how well their portion is coordinated with yours.

It’s that they come with an unavoidable flip side: every gain in personal temporal freedom entails a corresponding loss in how easy it is to coordinate your time with other people’s.

It’s in the interests of an autocrat that the only real bond among his supporters should be their support for him. - Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism.

To realise midway through a business trip that you hate your life is already to have taken the first step into one you don’t hate – because it means you’ve grasped the fact that these are the weeks that are going to have to be spent doing something worthwhile, if your finite life is to mean anything at all.

The hazard in any such discussion of ‘what matters most’ in life, though, is that it tends to give rise to a kind of paralysing grandiosity.

Entering space and time completely’ – or even partially, which may be as far as any of us ever get – means admitting defeat. It means letting your illusions die. You have to accept that there will always be too much to do; that you can’t avoid tough choices or make the world run at your preferred speed; that no experience, least of all close relationships with other human beings, can ever be guaranteed in advance to turn out painlessly and well – and that from a cosmic viewpoint, when it’s all over, it won’t have counted for very much anyway.

Choose uncomfortable enlargement over comfortable diminishment whenever you can.

Once you no longer need to convince yourself that the world isn’t filled with uncertainty and tragedy, you’re free to focus on doing what you can to help.

It’s better to begin from the assumption that tough choices are inevitable and to focus on making them consciously and well.

Research shows that this feeling arises on every rung of the economic ladder: On the ways ‘time poverty’ and economic poverty interact. - Andrew S. Harvey and Arun K. Mukhopadhyay

Work expands so as to fill the time available. - C. Northcote Parkinson

Totalitarian movements are mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals’: Hannah Arendt, The Origins of T otalitarianism (New Y ork: Harvest, 1973), 323.

Then I considered all that my hands had done’: Ecclesiastes 2:11, the Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway , 2005), 471.

We do not disapprove of a chair because it cannot be used to boil water’: Landau, Finding Meaning in an Imperfect W orld, 39.

The real measure of any time management technique is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things.

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 writer Adam Gopnik calls the trap into which I had fallen the ‘causal catastrophe’, which he defines as the belief ‘that the proof of the rightness or wrongness of some way of bringing up children is the kind of adults it produces’.

The question is, What kind of freedom do we really want when it comes to time? On the one hand, there’s the culturally celebrated goal of individual time sovereignty – the freedom to set your own schedule, to make your own choices, to be free from other people’s intrusions into your precious four thousand weeks. On the other hand, there’s the profound sense of meaning that comes from being willing to fall in with the rhythms of the rest of the world.

And what’s true of the state of civilisation is equally true of your life: it was always already the case that you would never experience a life of perfect accomplishment or security.

The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short.

The more you try to manage your time with the goal of achieving total control, the more stressful, empty, and frustrating life gets.

Productivity is a trap. Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster.

The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control.

The trouble with attempting to master your time is that time ends up mastering you.

Missing out on something isn’t a problem; it’s what makes our choices meaningful in the first place.

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.

When you render the process more convenient, you drain it of its meaning.

Each of us made it through to this point in our lives – so it might at least be worth entertaining the possibility that when the uncontrollable future arrives, we’ll have what it takes to weather that as well.

The moment of truth is always now – that life is nothing but a succession of present moments, culminating in death.

We treat everything we’re doing – life itself, in other words – as valuable only insofar as it lays the groundwork for something else.

To try to live in the moment implies that you’re somehow separate from ‘the moment,’ and thus in a position to either succeed or fail at living in it.

The truth, then, is that spending at least some of your leisure time ‘wastefully,’ focused solely on the pleasure of the experience, is the only way not to waste it.

Your reward for surrendering the fantasy of controlling the pace of reality is to achieve, at last, a real sense of purchase on that reality.

The presence of problems in your life isn’t an impediment to a meaningful existence but the very substance of one.

Stay on the bus.

We live less and less of our lives in the same temporal grooves as one another.

To realise midway through a business trip that you hate your life is already to have taken the first step into one you don’t hate.

We’ll never get the upper hand in our relationship with the moments of our lives because we are nothing but those moments.

Being unable to escape from the problems of finitude is not, in itself, a problem.