NOTES: Four Thousand Weeks (2021)

In other words – Four Thousand Weeks’s message to stop trying to do everything was exactly what I needed to hear.

I wrote about Burkeman’s book in a newsletter I was working on at that time, and that one issue got the most feedback (from the most diverse range of people) I had ever gotten in that newsletter’s entire two year run. It resonated with a LOT of people. I’m not surprised in retrospect. I think Burkeman’s book was published at just the right time. After all, the entire world had just stopped completely. And many of us finally began to question what all the hustling, grinding, and side-gigging in the pre-pandemic days really meant.

As I review various old journal entries, I could see that this was definitely a theme I was going through (See here, here, and here.)

For me, as well, I was also beginning to question all my hobbies. Especially since I wasn’t so much doing hobbies so much as shopping, ranking, and collecting things in my hobbies in-between and during client meetings. My hobbies were more of an escapist distraction to numb myself from my work life than the act of the hobby itself giving me actual satisfying fulfilment. (Mostly because I wasn’t actually doing them so much as circling around them).

I have continued to think about this book nonstop since. I am writing this in early 2024, but I’m retroactively dating this journal entry to August of 2022 as most of what I wrote below is a revision of the original newsletter issue I mentioned above.

You Are Going to Die One Day

Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks forces us to face two uncomfortable truths that becomes the basis of the entire book:

• One, if you live the average lifespan, you will have about 4,000 weeks on this planet. In other words, there is a finitude to your existence. You don’t know when it will end, but it will end.
• Two, given that your life is finite… you will NOT be able to do everything you want to do. At the end of your life, you will have not checked off everything on your list.

And yet…

We do almost everything in our power to avoid, deny, evade, and ignore those two truths. And as long as we keep doing that, we will never be fulfilled with our lives. We will always live in this limbo where we believe we can overcome these two fundamental truths, only to lead a disappointing, unfufilled life.

The Lie of Productivity Hacks

This message was especially hard for me to swallow despite immediately seeing the capital-T truth of it.

In my twenties and thirties, I fell into the typical “Ascension Plot Thread”. I grew up in a lower-class, immigrant blue collar family. We were poor, I didn’t want that, and climbing the ladder drove me.

Fortunately/unfortunately, I was/am too much of an anti-authoritarian individual/weirdo to climb the corporate ladder. But freelancing, business, and investing made sense to me. It was different, and because I was (and most likely still am) under the delusion that “I’m special/unique”, I decided that I should go do that instead. After all, why would I do what the rest of the 9-5 population did?

So from the early aughts onwards… I climbed. And blessed with nearly inexhaustible energy, resilient health, and unparalleled focus/drive… I kept climbing. As an entrepreneur, I was taught (and believed in) the maxims of “act first, and apologize later”, “say yes to everything”, and “sleep when you’re dead”. I read nothing but self-help, business, and investing books from 2001-2012 (minus Harry Potter and a few novels).

At that time, if I didn’t reach my goals “fast enough”, I truly believed it was because I didn’t “manage my time” well enough. That I wasn’t hacking my life to be the most efficient enough. That I simply wasn’t doing enough, that I just needed to focus better, block distractions, to “make time”, dissect my days, prioritize, get to inbox zero, use pomodoros, just get… things… done.

And I kept believing that if I was only better and more efficient, I’d be able to do everything and have it all.

Refusing to Face Our Limitations

And that brings us back to the crux of the book: That we are indeed mortal (4,000 weeks on average)… but “time management”, productivity hackers, and self-help gurus tell us we can live, experience, and do more than the time alloted to us. That we can “have it all” if we only do more.

From the book:

We recoil from the notion that this is it – that this life, with all its flaws and inescapable vulnerabilities, its extreme brevity, and our limited influence over how it unfolds, is the only one we’ll get a shot at.

After all, it’s painful to confront how limited your time is, because it means that tough choices are inevitable and that you won’t have time for all you once dreamed you might do. It’s also painful to accept your limited control over the time you do get.

And so, rather than face our limitations, we engage in avoidance strategies, in an effort to carry on feeling limitless. We push ourselves harder, chasing fantasies of the perfect work-life balance; or we implement time management systems that promise to make time for everything, so that tough choices won’t be required. Or we procrastinate, which is another means of maintaining the feeling of omnipotent control over life – because you needn’t risk the upsetting experience of failing at an intimidating project, obviously, if you never even start it. We fill our minds with busyness and distraction to numb ourselves emotionally.

There’s a lot to unpack here.

We use avoidance strategies to feel limitless. Avoidance strategies may include:

• Saying yes to everything and not cutting anything. That way, we believe we can have it all. We don’t have to say “no” to anything (or anyone). Short-term, we don’t have to make the tough choices of upsetting people.
• Procrastinating means we don’t actually do the thing we want to do… which prevents actual failure, getting stuck in the uncomfortable muck of struggling against resistance, and never facing the uncertainty/chaos of the actual activity.
• Distract ourselves with busyness. Shopping, ranking, collecting, reading about, going through reviews, and generally circling the project/craft/hobby… or organizing, cleaning, and rearranging furniture/books/stationary… but never actually pushing forward to do the thing we say we want to do. Busyness is easier to do, and easier to find time for.

In other words, it’s simply easier to do these short-term, low-risk activities: saying yes to everything, procrastinating, and distracting busyness. They give us a hit of joy, making us feel invincible or safe (we don’t upset anyone, we never face failure, and we get a fake sense of progress). Of course, the cost is never actually going after and acheiving the goals we want to pursue.

These are all avoidant strategies I’ve used in one way or another in business, new ventures, and projects I keep saying I want to do… but don’t do anything about.

Burkeman goes on to dismantle each of these strategies and why they’re each broken (and severely flawed) in their own ways.

The Efficiency Trap & Shifting Goal Posts

You can’t do it all. There is no circumstance where you’ll reach a state in your life where you’ve “done it all”. We all only have 24 hours a day and it’s scientifically impossible to “make time”. There are only trade-offs. You sacrifice one activity to do another. You sleep less and mess up your health. You neglect your loved ones to chase deadlines. You forgo exercise to “make time”, only to pay for it later.

What’s more – it doesn’t matter if you “stay on top of things” and accomplish all your goals. Because the truth is, once you’ve checked off your list, that list fills up again. Once you’ve accomplished your first set of goals, the goal posts shifts again and again, and you want more. Once you’ve reached the “next level”… you realize there’s another level.

Burkeman references More Work for Mother (1985) by Ruth Schwartz Cowan (with the lengthy subtitle The Ironies Of Household Technology From The Open Hearth To The Microwave). In that book, Cowan argues that:

When housewives first got access to ’labor-saving’ devices like washing machines and vacuum cleaners, no time was saved at all, because society’s standards of cleanliness simply rose to offset the benefits

And this applies to work, emails, etc. as well. If you “finish your work” quickly and efficiently, what happens? Your boss gives you more. If you’re self-employed or an entrepreneur, you believe you yourself can do more. So you pile on more work, creating more tasks.

What makes it worse in the modern world is… the Internet (and social media as well) is great at showing you what else you could be doing. What else you’re missing. What else you can do to optimize your life.

But ultimately, the point is, you’re never going to feel like you have enough if you keep chasing. From the book:

When people make enough money to meet their needs, they just find new things to need and new lifestyles to aspire to; they never quite manage to keep up with the Joneses, because when they’re in danger of getting close, they nominate new and better Joneses with whom to keep up. And so this conveyor belt of “to do lists” keeps going and going and going. And you carry the false belief that you can do “everything” if you put your mind to it.

It Fucks With Your Prioritization Skills

But it gets worse. From the book…

The worst aspect of the trap, though, is that it’s also a matter of quality. The harder you struggle to fit everything in, the more of your time you’ll find yourself spending on the least meaningful things.

The reason for this is straightforward: the more firmly you believe it ought to be possible to find time for everything, the less pressure you’ll feel to ask whether any given activity is the best use for a portion of your time. Whenever you encounter some potential new item for your to-do list or your social calendar, you’ll be strongly biased in favor of accepting it, because you’ll assume you needn’t sacrificed any other tasks or opportunities in order to make space for it.

But… you can’t. Remember. Your life is finite. By definition, you cannot do everything. When you put everything of equal value, when you say “yes” to everything, then nothing is of higher value. Nothing gets prioritized. Everything just ends up being another task on your to-do list that you have to apologize for later because you couldn’t get around to it… while also creating this culture around you that you can’t keep promises, or you’re unreliable.

Saying “no” is not just about respecting your own time, it’s also respecting others by short-term, disappointing them with a refusal, but long-term, letting them know what your boundaries are.

Facing Our Mortality Upfront

Burkeman goes on to argue that the main reason we keep ourselves busy, get distracted, or fill our lives with meaningless tasks… is because we don’t want to confront the finitude of our existence.

I mean, I get it. Who does? If you took out a calculator right now and multiplied your age by 52, you’d see that’s how many weeks you’ve used up already out of your 4000 weeks. This is barring accidental death, disease, or disaster killing you off earlier than the average lifespan.

But Burkeman asks the reader to flip this script upside down. He refers to and draws from Martin Heidegger’s philosophy. What if, instead of thinking that those 4000 weeks are “short”… we are grateful for receiving any span of life at all? That we exist. That we’ve been blessed with life. That – no matter what your religion is – realizing how incomprehensibly miraculous it is that you are here, right now, right here.

And further more, instead of FOMO (fear of missing out)… when we intently choose the things we want to do, and commit to “one thing”, and accept all the rough friction that comes with that “one thing”… we feel JOMO instead? (joy of missing out). That we know we’re cutting all possibilties out of our life. So that our decisions are sure, satisfying, or even just simply satisficing.

3 Ways to Better Time Management

So to summarize:

1. Our existence is finite. We only have 4000 weeks.
2. We cannot (and will not) be able to do everything.
3. We use avoidant activites to numb ourselves
   • Say yes to everything and work ourselves to death and/or fail to deliver and feel guilty for not doing well enough
   • Procrastinate or “circle around” what we actually want to do, because if we never start, we can’t ever fail.
   • Distract ourselves with busyness. Organize, clean, collect, rank, shop… but never actually doing the thing.

What are three “time management” strategies that Burkeman actually recommends?

1. Pay Yourself First

Recognize, that unless you’re ultra-wealthy (the top 0.01%)… you will always have an endless list of to-dos. It could be your work, your business, your personal social obligations, your household, and/or just daily life stuff.

ACCEPT that it will never end, and in order to do the stuff you REALLY want to do… you just have to pay the price of letting a few of those to-dos drop off and/or be comfortable with the consequences. In other words, you need to say “no” and set boundaries, vanish, and go do your thing. It will upset people and you have to accept that.

Set aside an hour a day, or more or whatever, to do what you really want to do.

2. Limit Your Work in Progress

When you start too many projects, you are living under the delusion that you’re making a little progress on each one and you’re moving them all forward. That’s just a lie you tell yourself.

Truth is, nothing gets done. Not really. So instead of “doing everything”… choose three projects you will complete and until you’ve finished one (or quit it), you can’t let another one in. You have “three slots”. That’s it.

3. Resist the Allure of Middling Priorities

This one is simple. A lot of what we do in life are “middling”. They’re not high priorities, or low ones even. They just are. The “fairly interesting opportunity” and the “semi-enjoyable friendship”.

We don’t drop them because they’re not “bad” per se… but they’re not great either. Drop them. Seriously, just starve them of your attention so they’ll go away.

Watch Out for Procrastination & Perfectionism

OK, let’s say we’ve blocked out time to do the stuff we really want (a cause, time with family, a creative pursuit, a big meaningful project, a side hustle)… what happens?

We procrastinate. But why? Perfectionism. We’re actually chasing our dream now. But here’s the problem: dreams are perfect. Nobody’s arguing with it. Nobody’s pointing out the flaws. Nobody’s resisting your perfect plan in your head.

When you fantasize, everything is possible and perfect. Burkeman quotes French philosopher Henri Bergson here:

The idea of the future, pregnant with an infinity of possibilites, is thus more fruitful than the future itself and this is why we find more charm in hope than in possession, in dreams than in reality.

In other words - fantasy is easy. You have 100% control. Reality is hard. You don’t have control.

You don’t have control over how your “perfect plan” will be met when it hits reality.

• Maybe your plan requires collaboration with people (uncertainty).
• Maybe your plan requires the value judgment and reactions of people (uncertainty).
• Maybe your project is stifled by your lack of resources, talent, energy, finance, whatever… (more uncertainty!)

Point is - when you do actually do the thing you want to do (project/craft/side-gig)… it’s not going to be as perfect as what’s in your head. Reality will never match your dream and how you’ve imagined it. But it’s so easy to fall back on daydreaming where everything is perfect. HOWEVER – that is exactly what we must avoid. From the book:

When you try to focus on something you deem important, you’re forced to face your limits, an experience that feels especially uncomfortable precisely because the task at hand is one you value so much… you’re obliged to give up your godlike fantasies and to experience your lack of power over things you care about.

And suddenly, the thing you’d resolved to do, because it mattered to you to do it, feels staggeringly tedious that you can’t bare to focus on it for one moment.

This is our attempt to flee a painful encounter with our finitude… and we look for ways to relieve the pain by distracting ourselves: by daydreaming, taking an unnecessary nap, or redesigning your to-do list and reorganizing your desk.

So what can you do? Is there a magical way to stop this pain so we can get on with the work we believe matters so much to us? The short answer is “no”. From the book:

Accept that this unpleasantness is simply what it feels like for finite humans to commit ourselves to the kinds of demanding and valuable tasks that force us to confront our limited control over how our lives unfold.

Conclusion

To summarize Burke’s strategies:

1. Block out time at the cost of upsetting/disappointing people and/or letting a few tasks drop. Those are simply the trade-offs.
2. Only work on three things at any time. Do not add any project until a slot frees up (either through completion or you’ve given up on it).
3. Say no to middling obligations. Say no to unclear requests. Say no to small favors.
4. Watch out for distractions, procrastination, and busyness. Busyness isn’t just organizing, cleaning, and rearranging furniture. It can also be more education (books and courses), reading reviews, shopping, creating lists, and ranking things related to your hobby/craft/goal/project. You will justify these activities as “in-order-to” steps to your doing the actual thing. You will say to yourself that you must do this X first before you get to Y. And it may even sound very reasonable and well thought-out. But it’s really a very clever form of procrastination.
5. Accept that your dream will never match reality when you do it. You are walking into uncertainty and chaos. You will face your limits.
6. Train yourself to get incrementally better at tolerating the anxiety that comes with uncertainty and chaos. That is the cost of projects/crafts/goals worth pursuing.

I wrote about Four Thousand Weeks again in March of 2023 here