Four Thousand Weeks Time Management for Mortals

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

This book takes all the productivity and self-help books and asks if we should take a step back and not be captives of our ambitions. This book is for those who try too hard to be 10X'ers and feel demotivated by their lack of results.

🎨 Impressions

I found it provocatively captivating. It takes my mom's advice of not freaking out about lost time or broken habits and gives a lot of context around them. Sometimes things just take time and we don't have all the time in the world.

How I Discovered It

Hacker news

Who Should Read It?

All who work or study, and are trapped in the productivity trap.

☘️ How the Book Changed Me

I think I got a more profound understanding of my own limitations and why they are what they are. Learning to relax a bit more about things. Reducing the number of goals to a manageable few. Having just a couple of things in the working-on phase. Everything else is just distractions.

✍️ My Top Quotes

Assuming you live to be eighty, you’ll have had about four thousand weeks.
“Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” the economist John Maynard Keynes made a famous prediction: Within a century, thanks to the growth of wealth and the advance of technology, no one would have to work more than about fifteen hours a week.
St. Anthony’s fire, a form of food poisoning caused by moldy grain, which left the delirious sufferer feeling as though his skin were burning or as if he were being bitten by unseen teeth.
“I have by sundry people been horribly cheated,” fumed the iron magnate Ambrose Crowley, from County Durham in England, in a memo from the 1790s, announcing his new policy of deducting pay for time spent “smoking, singing, reading of news history, contention, disputes, anything foreign to my business or in any way loitering.” The way Crowley saw it, his lackadaisical employees were thieves, illegitimately helping themselves to containers from the conveyor belt of time.
It leads to the insight that meaningful productivity often comes not from hurrying things up but from letting them take the time they take, surrendering to what in German has been called Eigenzeit, or the time inherent to a process itself.
Helen Petersen writes in a widely shared essay on millennial burnout, you can’t fix such problems “with vacation, or an adult coloring book, or ‘anxiety baking,’ or the Pomodoro Technique, or overnight fucking oats.”
in her book More Work for Mother, the historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan shows 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; now that you could return each of your husband’s shirts to a spotless condition after a single wearing, it began to feel like you should, to show how much you loved him.
“Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion,” the English humorist and historian C. Northcote Parkinson wrote in 1955, coining what became known as Parkinson’s law.
The reason it’s so hard for my wife and me to find an hour in the week for a serious conversation, or for me and my three closest friends to meet for a beer, isn’t usually that we “don’t have the time,” in the strict sense of that phrase, though that’s what we may tell ourselves. It’s that we do have the time—but that there’s almost no likelihood of it being the same portion of time for everyone involved. Free to pursue our own entirely personal schedules, yet still yoked to our jobs, we’ve constructed lives that can’t be made to mesh.
OkCupid is an efficient way of finding people to date, but also of being constantly reminded about all the other, potentially more alluring people you might be dating instead.
But smoothness, it turns out, is a dubious virtue, since it’s often the unsmoothed textures of life that make it livable, helping nurture the relationships that are crucial for mental and physical health, and for the resilience of our communities.
“When you can skip the line and buy concert tickets on your phone,” Wu points out, “waiting in line to vote in an election is irritating.”
“It gave me a vital bit of perspective: I happen to be alive, and there’s no cosmic law entitling me to that status. Being alive is just happenstance, and not one more day of it is guaranteed.”
Principle number one is to pay yourself first when it comes to time. I’m borrowing this phrasing from the graphic novelist and creativity coach Jessica Abel, who borrowed it in turn from the world of personal finance, where it’s long been an article of faith because it works.
In their book Personal Kanban, which explores this strategy in detail, the management experts Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry suggest no more than three items. Once you’ve selected those tasks, all other incoming demands on your time must wait until one of the three items has been completed, thereby freeing up a slot. (It’s also permissible to free up a slot by abandoning a project altogether if it isn’t working out. The point isn’t to force yourself to finish absolutely everything you start, but rather to banish the bad habit of keeping an ever-proliferating number of half-finished projects on the back burner.)
*The government of New South Wales, being acutely conscious that big construction projects tend to overrun, allowed a seemingly ample four years for the building of the Sydney Opera House—but it ended up taking fourteen, at a cost of more than 1,400 percent of the original budget.
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.
Long after I’d closed the app, I’d be panting on the treadmill at the gym, or chopping carrots for dinner, only to find myself mentally prosecuting a devastating argument against some idiotic holder of Wrong Opinions I’d had the misfortune to encounter online earlier that day. (It wasn’t misfortune really, of course; the algorithm showed me those posts deliberately, having learned what would wind me up.)
Even if you quit Facebook, or ban yourself from social media during the workday, or exile yourself to a cabin in the mountains, you’ll probably still find it unpleasantly constraining to focus on what matters, so you’ll find some way to relieve the pain by distracting yourself: by daydreaming, taking an unnecessary nap, or—the preferred option of the productivity geek—redesigning your to-do list and reorganizing your desk.
On the contrary, “surreptitiously checking your phone beneath the dinner table” is what you do because it’s hard to focus on the conversation—because listening takes effort and patience and a spirit of surrender, and because what you hear might upset you, so checking your phone is naturally more pleasant.
“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.”
My paternal grandmother, who was Jewish, was nine years old and living in Berlin when Hitler came to power in 1933, and she was fifteen by the time her stepfather, surveying the wreckage of Kristallnacht, finally made plans to get his family to Hamburg and thence on board the SS Manhattan, bound for Southampton in England. (The passengers, I was once told, popped champagne corks on deck, but only after they were certain the ship had left German waters.)
“Do not rule over imaginary kingdoms of endlessly proliferating possibilities.”
“Because children grow up, we think a child’s purpose is to grow up,” Herzen says. “But a child’s purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn’t disdain what only lives for a day. It pours the whole of itself into each moment…Life’s bounty is in its flow. Later is too late.”
One way of understanding capitalism, in fact, is as a giant machine for instrumentalizing everything it encounters—the earth’s resources, your time and abilities (or “human resources”)—in the service of future profit.
“Lawyers imbued with the ethos of the billable hour have difficulty grasping a non-commodified understanding of the meaning of time that would allow them to appreciate the true value of such participation.”
“If the satisfaction of an old man drinking a glass of wine counts for nothing,” wrote Simone de Beauvoir, “then production and wealth are only hollow myths; they have meaning only if they are capable of being retrieved in individual and living joy.”
“Protestant work ethic,” the German sociologist Max Weber argued that it was one of the core ingredients of the modern soul.
Friends of mine live in an apartment building on the historically Jewish Lower East Side of New York that’s equipped with a “Shabbat elevator”: step inside it between Friday evening and Saturday night, and you’ll find yourself stopping at every floor, even if nobody wants to get on or off there, because it’s been programmed to spare Jewish residents and visitors from having to violate the rule against operating electrical switches on the sabbath. (In fact, the actual prohibition, laid down in ancient Jewish law, is against lighting fires, but modern authorities interpret that to include completing electrical circuits. The other thirty-eight categories of banned activities have been interpreted as outlawing everything from inflating water wings at the swimming pool to tearing sheets of toilet paper from a roll.)
As the Cat in the Hat says, “It is fun to have fun but you have to know how.”
“Nothing is more alien to the present age than idleness,” writes the philosopher John Gray. He adds: “How can there be play in a time when nothing has meaning unless it leads to something else?”
Philosopher Kieran Setiya calls an “atelic activity,” meaning that its value isn’t derived from its telos, or ultimate aim.
It has been calculated that if Amazon’s front page loaded one second more slowly, the company would lose $1.6 billion in annual sales.
People complain that they no longer have “time to read,” but the reality, as the novelist Tim Parks has pointed out, is rarely that they literally can’t locate an empty half hour in the course of the day.
Peck explains, he considered himself a “mechanical idiot,” almost entirely inept when it came to fixing household appliances, cars, bicycles, and suchlike. Then one day he came upon a neighbor who was midway through fixing his lawn mower, and paid him a self-deprecating compliment: “Boy, I sure admire you. I’ve never been able to fix those kinds of things!” “That’s because you don’t take the time,” the neighbor replied—
I try to remember the cautionary tale of Mario Salcedo, a Cuban American financial consultant who almost certainly holds the record for the number of nights spent aboard cruise ships. There’s little question that Super Mario—as he’s known to the staff of Royal Caribbean Cruises, the firm to which he’s been loyal for most of his two decades, as a resident of the oceans, with the 2020 coronavirus pandemic the only major interruption—is in full control of his time.
They derived psychological benefits not merely from vacation time, but from having the same vacation time as other people. When many were on vacation at once, it was as if an intangible, supernatural cloud of relaxation had settled over the nation as a whole.
“Totalitarian movements are mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals,” wrote Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism.
It’s in the interests of an autocrat that the only real bond among his supporters should be their support for him.
“Time is the substance I am made of,”
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.
“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.”
“Spring is here, even in London N1, and they can’t stop you enjoying it.”
Perhaps the simplest is to keep two to-do lists, one “open” and one “closed.” The open list is for everything that’s on your plate and will doubtless be nightmarishly long.
Meanwhile, as far as possible, choose devices with only one purpose, such as the Kindle ereader, on which it’s tedious and awkward to do anything but read.
To give money, check in on a friend, send an email praising someone’s work—act on the impulse right away, rather than putting it off until later. When we fail to act on such urges, it’s rarely out of mean-spiritedness, or because we have second thoughts about whether the prospective recipient deserves it.