Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman
“The trouble with attempting to master your time, it turns out, is that time ends up mastering you.”
CONTENTS:
📌 The Brief Summary of the Books (3 sentences)
🧠Why you should read this book?
✏️ My favourite quotes
📚Great books this book refers to.
📌 The Brief Summary of the Book (3 sentences)
The average lifespan (in the best case scenario) consists of only four thousand weeks, but do we use it correctly?
In his recent book Oliver Burkeman addresses how the modern cult of ‘being productive’ makes our life less bearable, our to-do lists increase exponentially and force us to live in the hope for future results which might never arrive.
He explores how we refuse to address our finitude - the fact that we were granted limited amount of time in this world and we won’t get to experience everything however efficient or productive we wish we could be.
🧠Why you should read this book?
This book changed my perception of productivity and how I should treat my time.
I’ve noticed how ideas of efficiency and productivity reduce the quality of my experiences in my own life. In a rush to squeeze as much as I can from every single day, so it wouldn’t be ‘wasted’, I reduce my level of engagement and of joy for what I do.
The reason for this, as Burkeman showed me, is that I refuse to acknowledge my own limits and the fact that I cannot squeeze everything into my life. Instead, I should focus on a single task and forget about the amount of time it takes. He says that the reason we focus so much on to-do lists and our productivity is because we are afraid that we won’t get to do everything in our life.
The sad truth is that we won’t be able to do everything, but we can focus and do something that we truly enjoy, instead of chasing false dreams of so-called ‘full life’.
This made me calmer about my life-goals and I believe you might find it helpful too.
✏️ My favourite quotes
‘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.’
‘What you pay attention to will define, for you, what reality is.’
‘The trouble with attempting to master your time, it turns out, is that time ends up mastering you.’
‘We fill our minds with busyness and distraction to numb ourselves emotionally.’
‘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.’
Arguably time management is all life is.
It’s hard to imagine a crueller arrangement: not only are our four thousand weeks constantly running out, but the fewer of them we have left, the faster we seem to lose them.
Quoting Nietzsche: ‘One thinks with watch in one’s hand even as one eats one’s midday meal while reading the latest news of the stock market’.
‘Worry is the repetitious experience of a mind attempting to generate feeling of security about the future, failing, then trying again and again and again.’
Quoting Tao Te Ching: ‘Do not rule over imaginary kingdoms of endlessly proliferation possibilities.’
Quoting Alexander Herzen: ‘Because children grow up, we think a child’s purpose is to grow up, but a child’s purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn’t disdain what only lives for a day. It pours the while of itself into each moment… Life’s bounty is in its flow. Later is too late.’
Quoting John Maynard Keynes: ‘Productive man is always trying to secure a spurious and delusive immortality for his actions by pushing his interests in them forward into time.’
Quoting John Gray: “Nothing is more alien to the present age than idleness. How can there be play in a time when nothing has meaning unless it leads to something else?”
📚Great Books It Refers to:
On the Shortness of Life by Seneca
Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren by John Maynard Keynes
Technics and Civilisation by Mumford
Teach Yourself to Live by Charles Garfield Lott Du Cann
More work for Mother by Ruth Schwartz
Social Acceleration by Harmut Rosa
At the Existentialist Café by Sarah Bakewell
This Life by Martin Hägglund
Time and Free Will by Henri Bergson
On Settling by Robert Goodin
Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
All Said and Done by Simone de Beauvoir
Back to Sanity by Steve Taylor
Zen and Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig
The Art of Living by Thich Nhat Hahn
Radically Condensed Instructions for Being Just as You Are by Jennifer Matthews.
The Decline of Pleasure by Walter Kerr
Sabbath as Resistance by Walter Brueggemann
The World as Will and Idea by Arthur Schopenhauer
The Road Less Travelled by M.Scott Peck
Facts/ Notes
Pomodoro technique of arranging your tasks
The original Latin word for ‘decide’, decidere, means ‘to cut off’, as in slicing away alternatives, it’s a close cousin of words like ‘homicide’ and ‘suicide’.
Mechanical clocks were invented by medieval monks, who had to begin their morning prayers while it was still dark, and needed some way of ensuring that the whole monastery woke up at the required point.
The central theme of this book revolves around the idea that we sacrifice the present for the sake of future results. In the end those results do not arrive and we keep living in the fantasy world until our time is over.
He quote Henri Begson who wrote:
‘The idea of the future, pregnant with an infinity of possibilities, is this more fruitful than the future itself. ‘
‘All the feuds and fake news and public shaming on social media, therefore aren’t a flaw, from the perspective of platform owner; they’re integral part of the business model.’ - we all knows this, but I loved that Burkeman emphasised this in his book.
There is a story of a student from the U.S. who wanted to join Japanese branch of Buddhism called Shingon. He had to do simple chores such as cleaning the floors and washing the dishes. Then he had to pour on himself gallons of freezing water. What this student discovered after some time is that to control pain we need to focus and experience it instead of avoiding it. By doing menial tasks such as sweeping the floors he had to focus on the finitude of his life. Get in terms with it. Burkeman points out that most of our distractions come when we try to get away from whatever causes us pain, instead of addressing and dealing with it.
‘One way of understanding capitalism, in fact, is as a giant machine for instrumentalising everything it encounters - the earth’s resources, your time and abilities (or ‘human resources’) - in the service of future profit.
The fact that we no longer can create for the sake of just artistic purposes and instead every our creation must be ‘monetised’ otherwise it provides ‘no value’ is also true
A paragraph that I loved a lot:
‘Aristotle argued that true leisure - by which he meant self-reflection and philosophical contemplation - was among the very highest of virtues because it was worth choosing for its own sake, whereas other virtues, like courage in war, or noble behaviour in government, were virtuous only because they led to something else.
The Latin word for business, negotium, translates literally as ‘not-leisure’, reflecting the view that work was a deviation from the highest human calling .
Burkeman also emphasises the fact that the idea of having ‘a hobby' for hobby sake’ is also disappearing. Even our hobbies now need to lead to some results and outcomes in the future.
Our addiction to productivity comes from our fear to confront our finitude. We try to gain control over our life in fear of it running out. Burkeman cites one of the philosophies of Alcoholic Anonymous ‘which asserts that alcoholism is fundamentally a result of attempting to exert a level of control over your emotions that you can’t ever attain.’
Perhaps one of the most important facts that I discovered from this book is how Josef Stalin’s chief economist Yuri Larin tried to integrate the ideas of Frederick Winslow Taylor (so-called efficiency expert) into how factories worked in the USSR.
The idea was that many workers should be divided into five groups - yellow, green, orange, purple and red - each of them would have 4 day workweek and one day weekend. In this way the work at the factories would never stop. They justified this not only in terms of efficiency, one of the arguments was that this will allow more frequent days off and less overcrowding of public spaces.
But of course what it led to (maybe intentionally) was the destruction of social life. If your partner, your friends, your neighbours worked on different days then the likeliness that you would socialise with them in the same rhythm would be unlikely.
