Book Info
Oliver Burkeman: Four Thousand Weeks - Time Management for Mortals
Key essence of this book:
It is dangerous to pursue infinity with our finitude . The whole idea evolves from the famous Zhuangzi’s saying: 吾生也有涯，而知也无涯。以有涯隨无涯，殆已；已而為知者，殆而已矣。
Some principles mentioned in the book:
- Life’s unpredictable.
- With this unpredictability, we cannot control our future.
- We, humans, are mortals, the time we can use is finite.
- Things, happening around us, are infinite.
- The modern default thought of life is to fully utilize our time - work to earn more money to ameliorate our life.
- We then use our time for different purposes, to solve problems we counter in life.
- To fully utilize the time, we then squeeze more items to our to-do lists, aiming at tackling the problems we would face.
- But as mentioned above, we will face infinite number of things happening around us.
- As we’ve done more, problems still take place, we then seek to do more.
- As we have the thought of doing more means more problems can be solved.
- A vicious cycle then formed. With endless to-do lists, we fall deeper into frustration and burnout.
Life is full of uncertainty, no matter how we do, we can never find a state of permanent calm
For almost the whole of history, the entire point of being rich was not having to work so much.
Human life is like walking on a balance beam, it will never get fully balanced. We are making a continuous balancing effort, which is tiring, but like Buddhist teaching says, life is impermanent.
Nobody in the history of humanity has ever achieved “work-life balance,” whatever that might be, and you certainly won’t get there by copying the “six things successful people do before 7:00 a.m.”
What we are being taught is to make a good balance, which is not possible. For that is what makes us often feel tiring and frustrated. We always hoped to find a balanced time, but eventually, it is simply not possible.
The real problem isn’t our limited time. The real problem—or so I hope to convince you—is that we’ve unwittingly inherited, and feel pressured to live by, a troublesome set of ideas about how to use our limited time, all of which are pretty much guaranteed to make things worse.
The trouble with attempting to master your time, it turns out, is that time ends up mastering you.
The education system focuses on teaching somthing that are certain - if you do A and you will get B. Yet it is not how the world functions. Uncertainty makes us anxious. The illusion of being productive is to have a lot of works to do, and that illusion numb our guilt of not knowing what to do.
Most of us invest a lot of energy, one way or another, in trying to avoid fully experiencing the reality in which we find ourselves.
We fill our minds with busyness and distraction to numb ourselves emotionally.
But it can’t ever bring the sense that you’re doing enough—that you are enough—because it defines “enough” as a kind of limitless control that no human can attain.
Endless struggle leads to more anxiety and a less fulfilling life.
The more compulsively you plan for the future, the more anxious you feel about any remaining uncertainties, of which there will always be plenty.
Insight that meaningful productivity often comes not from hurrying things up but from letting them take the time they take. ( 揠苗助長 or 無爲自然 )
Getting as many things done as possible is a recent thought. It does not exist in premodern times, at least in the life of peasants.
Hartmut Rosa explains, premodern people weren’t much troubled by such thoughts, partly because they believed in an afterlife: there was no particular pressure to “get the most out of” their limited time, because as far as they were concerned, it wasn’t limited, and in any case, earthly life was but a relatively insignificant prelude to the most important part.
In the end, because they increase the size of the “everything” of which we’re trying to get on top.
By definition, you can’t do more than you can do. You always have infinite number of to-dos, but the number of can-dos are always finite. If you mind of peace relies on getting all the demands done, then you will never attain that state of mind. 不要爲明天憂慮， 因為明天自有明天的憂慮； 一天的難處一天當就夠了。
It can’t be the case that you must do more than you can do.
you’re no longer making your peace of mind dependent on dealing with all the demands.
”Efficiency trap. Rendering yourself more efficient—either by implementing various productivity techniques or by driving yourself harder—won’t generally result in the feeling of having “enough time,”
If the level of performance you’re demanding of yourself is genuinely impossible, then it’s impossible, even if catastrophe looms—and facing this reality can only help.
We are so small, there’s no need for us to carry such a heavy burden.
To remember how little you matter, on a cosmic timescale, can feel like putting down a heavy burden that most of us didn’t realize we were carrying in the first place.
It’s the feeling of realizing that you’d been holding yourself, all this time, to standards you couldn’t reasonably be expected to meet. And this realization isn’t merely calming but liberating, because once you’re no longer burdened by such an unrealistic definition of a “life well spent,” you’re freed to consider the possibility that a far wider variety of things might qualify as meaningful ways to use your finite time.
Because your quantity of time is so limited, you’ll never reach the commanding position of being able to handle every demand that might be thrown at you or pursue every ambition that feels important; you’ll be obliged to make tough choices instead.
Limitations of religion and consumerism:
Religion no longer provides the universal ready-made sense of purpose it once did, while consumerism misleads us into seeking meaning where it can’t be found.
We misuse time as something instrumental aiming for a state of permanent peace, and we end up with misery, especially in this generation.
Usefulness of pleasure, resonates to teachings in Ecclesiastes:
Walter Kerr noticed back in 1962, in his book The Decline of Pleasure: “We are all of us compelled,” Kerr wrote, “to read for profit, party for contacts…gamble for charity, go out in the evening for the greater glory of the municipality, and stay home for the weekend to rebuild the house.”
Another important insight: when leisure becomes another item of our to-do list. ‘We should do something to maximize the utility of our leisure time.‘
Defenders of modern capitalism enjoy pointing out that despite how things might feel, we actually have more leisure time than we did in previous decades—an average of about five hours per day for men, and only slightly less for women. But perhaps one reason we don’t experience life that way is that leisure no longer feels very leisurely. Instead, it too often feels like another item on the to-do list.
In the past, people were forced to leisure, leisure was part of their life, as of the same nature of work. Now, leisure is contrary to work, we leisure for the purpose of better work.
People faced strong social pressure not to work all the time: you observed religious holidays because the church required it; and in a close-knit village, it wouldn’t have been easy to shirk the other festivities, either. Another result was that a sense of leisureliness seeped into the crevices of the days people did spend at work.
In one narrow sense, this new situation left working people freer than before, since their leisure was more truly their own than when church and community had dictated almost everything they did with it. But at the same time, a new hierarchy had been established. Work, now, demanded to be seen as the real point of existence; leisure was merely an opportunity for recovery and replenishment, for the purposes of further work.
We utilize the time aiming at future or postponed satisfaction. Then time itself becomes instrumental and it loses its meaning.
In other words, he was suffering from the very problem we’ve been exploring: when your relationship with time is almost entirely instrumental, the present moment starts to lose its meaning. And it makes sense that this feeling might strike in the form of a midlife crisis, because midlife is when many of us first become consciously aware that mortality is approaching—and mortality makes it impossible to ignore the absurdity of living solely for the future. Where’s the logic in constantly postponing fulfillment until some later point in time when soon enough you won’t have any “later” left?
We push ourselves harder to get rid of anxiety, but the result is actually more anxiety, because the faster we go, the clearer it becomes that we’ll never succeed in getting ourselves or the rest of the world to move as fast as we feel is necessary.
We will never be able to manage our time well. And accept this truth.
Why accepting the concept that we will never manage our time well can sooth us?
After all, once you become convinced that something you’ve been attempting is impossible, it’s a lot harder to keep on berating yourself for failing.
After accepting the truth, prioritize wisely. Be settled.
So what should we do? We should not squeeze as many things as possible into our life, but to cross out most of the ‘not that important things’ in life.
The harder you struggle to fit everything in, the more of your time you’ll find yourself spending on the least meaningful things.
In reality your time is finite, doing anything requires sacrifice—the sacrifice of all the other things you could have been doing with that stretch of time.
Once you truly understand that you’re guaranteed to miss out on almost every experience the world has to offer, the fact that there are so many you still haven’t experienced stops feeling like a problem.
Having too much things to do is the reason of our miserable life. The book suggests we have no more than three items on our to-do lists.
Perhaps the most appealing way to resist the truth about your finite time is to initiate a large number of projects at once; that way, you get to feel as though you’re keeping plenty of irons in the fire and making progress on all fronts.
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.
Warren Buffett suggests us to make two to-do lists, one very urgent and one not that urgent. For the not that urgent to-do list, he tells us to avoid doing them at all costs.
Buffett allegedly explains, aren’t the second-tier priorities to which he should turn when he gets the chance. Far from it. In fact, they’re the ones he should actively avoid at all costs—because they’re the ambitions insufficiently important to him to form the core of his life yet seductive enough to distract him from the ones that matter most.
”You need to learn how to start saying no to things you do want to do, with the recognition that you have only one life.”
Another good insight is that, being settled can grant us a better freedom, in the sense that we no longer have to deal with those unsettled things.
Or to be more precise, you don’t have a choice. You will settle—and this fact ought to please you.
“You must settle, in a relatively enduring way, upon something that will be the object of your striving, in order for that striving to count as striving,” he writes: you can’t become an ultrasuccessful lawyer or artist or politician without first “settling” on law, or art, or politics, and therefore deciding to forgo the potential rewards of other careers.
The qualities that make someone a dependable source of excitement are generally the opposite of those that make him or her a dependable source of stability.
After you get settled, you can focus on several important things that are really important. The book then talks about the mechanism of paying attention. It talks about the reasons why we are being distracted is not on the attractiveness of those distractions but on our impatience on the things that are more important. It mentions a method of dealing with our distractions: attend to our discomfort towards the things we are doing.
Attention, on the other hand, just is life: your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention.
When you aim for this degree of control over your attention, you’re making the mistake of addressing one truth about human limitation—your limited time, and the consequent need to use it well—by denying another truth about human limitation, which is that achieving total sovereignty over your attention is almost certainly impossible.
The more intensely he could hold his attention on the experience of whatever he was doing, the clearer it became to him that the real problem had been not the activity itself but his internal resistance to experiencing it. When he stopped trying to block out those sensations and attended to them instead, the discomfort would evaporate.
It’s not usually that you’re sitting there, concentrating rapturously, when your attention is dragged away against your will. In truth, you’re eager for the slightest excuse to turn away from what you’re doing, in order to escape how disagreeable it feels to be doing it; you slide away to the Twitter pile-on or the celebrity gossip site with a feeling not of reluctance but of relief.
Problems like being distracted and procrastination are due to the misunderstanding towards time and work. It can be solved is we accept the truth.
Having too much things to do would be the reason for procrastination. The book offered the following insight:
Procrastination is a strategy of emotional avoidance—a way of trying not to feel the psychological distress that comes with acknowledging that he’s a finite human being.
if you’re procrastinating on something because you’re worried you won’t do a good enough job, you can relax—because judged by the flawless standards of your imagination, you definitely won’t do a good enough job.
Since every real-world choice about how to live entails the loss of countless alternative ways of living, there’s no reason to procrastinate, or to resist making commitments, in the anxious hope that you might somehow be able to avoid those losses. Loss is a given. That ship has sailed—and what a relief.
So why are we that distracted? Distraction is the excuse of not doing the things you are currently doing.
Why, exactly, are we rendered so uncomfortable by concentrating on things that matter—the things we thought we wanted to do with our lives—that we’d rather flee into distractions, which, by definition, are what we don’t want to be doing with our lives?
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.
training yourself to “do nothing” really means training yourself to resist the urge to manipulate your experience or the people
To solve this problem, one insight is to accept the lack of solution. 無辦法啦.
Yet there’s a sense in which accepting this lack of any solution is the solution.
Any task you’re planning to tackle will always take longer than you expect, “even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.”
The unpredictability of future is why we are encouraged to focus in the present. We are encouraged to do a lot to secure our future - which cannot be done, that’s why we would end up in anxiety and misery.
These truths about the uncontrollability of the past and the unknowability of the future explain why so many spiritual traditions seem to converge on the same advice: that we should aspire to confine our attentions to the only portion of time that really is any of our business—this one, here in the present.
The kernel of truth in the cliché that people in less economically successful countries are better at enjoying life—which is another way of saying that they’re less fixated on instrumentalizing it for future profit, and are thus more able to participate in the pleasures of the present.
”We ought to do something to secure ourselves” is very capitalist.
Hour not sold is automatically an hour wasted.
The Catholic legal scholar Cathleen Kaveny has argued that the reason so many of them are so unhappy—despite being generally very well paid—is the convention of the “billable hour,” which obliges them to treat their time, and thus really themselves, as a commodity to be sold off in sixty-minute chunks to clients. An hour not sold is automatically an hour wasted.
How to drive our attention back to the present?
Living more fully in the present may be simply a matter of finally realizing that you never had any other option but to be here now.
And it infected me, too, during the years I spent attending meditation classes and retreats with the barely conscious goal that I might one day reach a condition of permanent calm.
So, what’s next? Be patient and tolerant.
Patience is a strong power of this generation. How to be patience? It is a trainable skill.
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 fulfillment to the future.
That the most productive and successful among them generally made writing a smaller part of their daily routine than the others, so that it was much more feasible to keep going with it day after day.
They cultivated the patience to tolerate the fact that they probably wouldn’t be producing very much on any individual day, with the result that they produced much more over the long term. They wrote in brief daily sessions—sometimes as short as ten minutes, and never longer than four hours—and they religiously took weekends off.
To be willing to stop when your daily time is up, even when you’re bursting with energy and feel as though you could get much more done.
Helps strengthen the muscle of patience that will permit you to return to the project again and again, and thus to sustain your productivity over an entire career.
Embrace the inconvenience of life.
A life without problems is not a life worth living. Life itself is a process of engaging problem after problem.
Yet the state of having no problems is obviously never going to arrive. And more to the point, you wouldn’t want it to, because a life devoid of all problems would contain nothing worth doing, and would therefore be meaningless. Because what is a “problem,” really? The most generic definition is simply that it’s something that demands that you address yourself to it—and if life contained no such demands, there’d be no point in anything. Once you give up on the unattainable goal of eradicating all your problems, it becomes possible to develop an appreciation for the fact that life just is a process of engaging with problem after problem, giving each one the time it requires—that the presence of problems in your life, in other words, isn’t an impediment to a meaningful existence but the very substance of one.
Sometimes, inconvenience in life can be some sorts of blessings. It grants the human nature. 質感生活
Identify a “pain point”—one of the small annoyances resulting from (more jargon) the “friction” of daily life—and
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.
“Don’t even realize something is broken until someone else shows us a better way.”
The inconvenience involved, which might look like brokenness from the outside, in fact embodies something essentially human.
Sacrifice other less important things, find happiness within the life you are having right now.
”Bonheur” means happiness in French, its literal meaning is ‘good hour’. Some good example of ‘frictioned life’ is the source of happiness in life, as long as you have sacrificed every not important things.
She moved with her husband and children to a farm in the vast swath of the Canadian interior known as the Land Between, where each winter day begins by lighting the fire that will warm the farmhouse and provide heat for cooking:
Convenience culture seduces us into imagining that we might find room for everything important by eliminating only life’s tedious tasks. But it’s a lie. You have to choose a few things, sacrifice everything else, and deal with the inevitable sense of loss that results.
As I make hundreds of small choices throughout the day, I’m building a life—but at one and the same time, I’m closing off the possibility of countless others, forever.
Rhythms of life:
“A person with a flexible schedule and average resources will be happier than a rich person who has everything except a flexible schedule,“
That finding echoed other research, which has demonstrated that people in long-term unemployment get a happiness boost when the weekend arrives, just like employed people relaxing after a busy workweek, though they don’t have a workweek in the first place. The reason is that part of what makes weekends fun is getting to spend time with others who are also off work—plus, for the unemployed, the weekend offers respite from feelings of shame that they ought to be working when they aren’t.
Conclusion
You get to actually be here. You get to have some real purchase on life. You get to spend your finite time focused on a few things that matter to you, in themselves, right now, in this moment.
Some questions to reflect on:
- In what ways have you yet to accept the fact that you are who you are, not the person you think you ought to be?
- In which areas of life are you still holding back until you feel like you know what you’re doing?
- How would you spend your days differently if you didn’t care so much about seeing your actions reach fruition?
“I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber,” Blaise Pascal wrote. When it comes to the challenge of using your four thousand weeks well, the capacity to do nothing is indispensable, because if you can’t bear the discomfort of not acting, you’re far more likely to make poor choices with your time, simply to feel as if you’re acting—choices such as stressfully trying to hurry activities that won’t be rushed (chapter 10) or feeling you ought to spend every moment being productive in the service of future goals, thereby postponing fulfillment to a time that never arrives (chapter 8).