Matt Hart

“Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals” by Oliver Burkeman

Hardcover, 288 pages
Published in 2021 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
EAN/UPC: 9780374159122
Date Finished: Dec 18, 2021
How strongly I recommend it: 8/10
Find it at Amazon and BookShop.org

This is likely the most thoughtful and honest book you will ever read on the topic of productivity. A great antidote for the general thrust of the time-management book industry. Time is finite. You are finite. This means that you cannot get everything done. In any life, to accomplish important things, the less important things will have to be left undone and we all need to get comfortable with this fact. This book will help you with that.

My Notes:

Assuming you live to be eighty, you’ll have had about four thousand weeks.

Expressing the matter in such startling terms makes it easy to see why philosophers from ancient Greece to the present day have taken the brevity of life to be the defining problem of human existence: we’ve been granted the mental capacities to make almost infinitely ambitious plans, yet practically no time at all to put them into action.

Recently, as the gig economy has grown, busyness has been rebranded as “hustle”—relentless work not as a burden to be endured but as an exhilarating lifestyle choice, worth boasting about on social media.

even those of us who were bookworms as children now struggle to make it through a paragraph without experiencing the urge to reach for our phones. What makes this so troubling, in the end, is that it represents a failure to make the best use of a small supply of time. (You’d feel less self-loathing about wasting a morning on Facebook if the supply of mornings were inexhaustible.)

Then there are all those timeless human dilemmas like whom to marry, whether to have children, and what kind of work to pursue. If we had thousands of years in which to live, all those would be far less agonizing, too, since there’d be sufficient time to spend decades trying out each kind of possible existence.

that alarming phenomenon,

whereby time seems to speed up as you age—steadily

And the chief selling point of a thousand other products and services, from kitchen appliances to online banking, is that they’ll help you achieve the widely championed goal of squeezing the most from your time. The problem isn’t exactly that these techniques and products don’t work. It’s that they do work—in the sense that you’ll get more done, race to more meetings, ferry your kids to more after-school activities, generate more profit for your employer—and yet, paradoxically, you only feel busier, more anxious, and somehow emptier as a result.

As a result, they work harder and harder, and soon busyness becomes an emblem of prestige. Which is clearly completely absurd: for almost the whole of history, the entire point of being rich was not having to work so much. Moreover, the busyness of the better-off is contagious, because one extremely effective way to make more money, for those at the top of the tree, is to cut costs and make efficiency improvements in their companies and industries. That means greater insecurity for those lower down, who are then obliged to work harder just to get by. On Getting the Wrong Things Done But now here we get to the heart of things, to a feeling that goes deeper, and that’s harder to put into words: the sense that despite all this activity, even the relatively privileged among us rarely get around to doing the right things.

the sense that despite all this activity, even the relatively privileged among us rarely get around to doing the right things.

The environmentalist and spiritual writer Charles Eisenstein recalls first sensing this basic “wrongness” in our use of time as a child, growing up amid material comfort in 1970s America: Life, I knew, was supposed to be more joyful than this, more real, more meaningful, and the world was supposed to be more beautiful. We were not supposed to hate Mondays and live for the weekends and holidays. We were not supposed to have to raise our hands to be allowed to pee. We were not supposed to be kept indoors on a beautiful day, day after day.

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

It was because, so far as we can tell, they generally didn’t experience time as an abstract entity—as a thing—at all. If that sounds confusing, it’s because our modern way of thinking about time is so deeply entrenched that we forget it even is a way of thinking; we’re like the proverbial fish who have no idea what water is, because it surrounds them completely.

your only option was to compare it with some other concrete activity. Medieval people might speak of a task lasting a “Miserere whyle”—the approximate time it took to recite Psalm 50, known as the Miserere, from the Bible—or alternatively a “pissing whyle,” which should require no explanation.

“The clock does not stop, of course,” Eberle writes, “but we do not hear it ticking.” This happens for some people in prayer, or in meditation, or in magnificent landscapes;

From thinking about time in the abstract, it’s natural to start treating it as a resource, something to be bought and sold and used as efficiently as possible, like coal or iron or any other raw material.

The Industrial Revolution is usually attributed to the invention of the steam engine; but as Mumford shows in his 1934 magnum opus, Technics and Civilization, it also probably couldn’t have happened without the clock.

The title of a book that arrived on my desk the other day sums things up nicely: Master Your Time, Master Your Life. The fundamental problem is that this attitude toward time sets up a rigged game in which it’s impossible ever to feel as though you’re doing well enough. Instead of simply living our lives as they unfold in time—instead of just being time, you might say—it becomes difficult not to value each moment primarily according to its usefulness for some future goal, or for some future oasis of relaxation you hope to reach once your tasks are finally “out of the way.”

Superficially, this seems like a sensible way to live, especially in a hypercompetitive economic climate, in which it feels as though you must constantly make the most judicious use of your time if you want to stay afloat. (It also reflects the manner in which most of us were raised: to prioritize future benefits over current enjoyments.)

But ultimately it backfires. It wrenches us out of the present, leading to a life spent leaning into the future, worrying about whether things will work out, experiencing everything in terms of some later, hoped-for benefit, so that peace of mind never quite arrives.

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

The rest of this book is an exploration of a saner way of relating to time and a toolbox of practical ideas for doing so, drawn from the work of philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual teachers who all rejected the struggle to dominate or master it.

My adventures with Inbox Zero were only the tip of the iceberg. I’ve squandered countless hours—and a fair amount of money, spent mainly on fancy notebooks and felt-tip pens—in service to the belief that if I could only find the right time management system, build the right habits, and apply sufficient self-discipline, I might actually be able to win the struggle with time, once and for all.

I remember sitting on a park bench near my home in Brooklyn one winter morning in 2014, feeling even more anxious than usual about the volume of undone tasks, and suddenly realizing that none of this was ever going to work. I would never succeed in marshaling enough efficiency, self-discipline, and effort to force my way through to the feeling that I was on top of everything, that I was fulfilling all my obligations and had no need to worry about the future.

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.

Nietzsche,

Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself.”)

The more you hurry, the more frustrating it is to encounter tasks (or toddlers) that won’t be hurried; the more compulsively you plan for the future, the more anxious you feel about any remaining uncertainties, of which there will always be plenty. And the more individual sovereignty you achieve over your time, the lonelier you get.

In practical terms, a limit-embracing attitude to time means organizing your days with the understanding that you definitely won’t have time for everything you want to do, or that other people want you to do—and so, at the very least, you can stop beating yourself up for failing.

And it means standing firm in the face of FOMO, the “fear of missing out,” because you come to realize that missing out on something—indeed, on almost everything—is basically guaranteed. Which isn’t actually a problem anyway, it turns out, because “missing out” is what makes our choices meaningful in the first place.

surrendering to what in German has been called Eigenzeit, or the time inherent to a process itself.

None of us can single-handedly overthrow a society dedicated to limitless productivity, distraction, and speed. But right here, right now, you can stop buying into the delusion that any of that is ever going to bring satisfaction. You can face the facts. You can turn on the shower, brace yourself for some invigoratingly icy water, and step…

As the law professor Daniel Markovits has shown, even the winners in our achievement-obsessed culture—the ones who make it to the elite universities, then reap the highest salaries—find that their reward is the unending pressure to work with “crushing intensity” in order to maintain the income and status that have come to seem like prerequisites for the lives they want to lead.

That notion doesn’t make any sense: if you truly don’t have time for everything you want to do, or feel you ought to do, or that others are badgering you to do, then, well, you don’t have time—no matter how grave the consequences of failing to do it all might prove to be

Fit a bit more activity into each day’s container, he suggests, and you’ll reach the serene and commanding status of finally having “enough time.” But that wasn’t true in 1908, and it’s even less true today.

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

there’s no reason to believe you’ll ever feel “on top of things,” or make time for everything that matters, simply by getting more done.

Figure out how to spend enough time with your kids and at the office, so you don’t feel guilty about either, and you’ll suddenly feel some new social pressure: to spend more time exercising or to join the parent-teacher association—oh, and isn’t it finally time you learned to meditate?

“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.

It applies to everything that needs doing.

In ancient Greek myth, the gods punish King Sisyphus for his arrogance by sentencing him to push an enormous boulder up a hill, only to see it roll back down again, an action he is condemned to repeat for all eternity. In the contemporary version, Sisyphus would empty his inbox, lean back, and take a deep breath, before hearing a familiar ping: “You have new messages…”

there’s a good chance of provoking a reply to that email, which itself may require another reply, and so on and so on, until the heat death of the universe.

So it’s not simply that you never get through your email; it’s that the process of “getting through your email” actually generates more email. The general principle in operation is one you might call the “efficiency trap.”

Once you stop believing that it might somehow be possible to avoid hard choices about time, it gets easier to make better ones. You begin to grasp that when there’s too much to do, and there always will be, the only route to psychological freedom is to let go of the limit-denying fantasy of getting it all done and instead to focus on doing a few things that count.

But there’s a deeper sense in which merely to be alive on the planet today is to be haunted by the feeling of having “too much to do,”

the modern world provides an inexhaustible supply of things that seem worth doing, and so there arises an inevitable and unbridgeable gap between what you’d ideally like to do and what you actually can do.

But secular modernity changes all that. When people stop believing in an afterlife, everything depends on making the most of this life.

Perhaps it goes without saying that the internet makes this all much more agonizing, because it promises to help you make better use of your time, while simultaneously exposing you to vastly more potential uses for your time—so that the very tool you’re using to get the most out of life makes you feel as though you’re missing out on even more of it.

it grew painfully clear that the things I got done most diligently were the unimportant ones, while the important ones got postponed—either forever or until an imminent deadline forced me to complete them, to a mediocre standard and in a stressful rush.

I told myself that such tasks needed my full focus, which meant waiting until I had a good chunk of free time and fewer small-but-urgent tasks tugging at my attention. And so, instead, like the dutiful and efficient worker I was, I’d put my energy into clearing the decks, cranking through the smaller stuff to get it out of the way—only to discover that doing so took the whole day, that the decks filled up again overnight anyway,

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

instead of clearing the decks, declining to clear the decks, focusing instead on what’s truly of greatest consequence while tolerating the discomfort of knowing that, as you do so, the decks will be filling up further, with emails and errands and other to-dos, many of which you may never get around to at all.

what’s required is the will to resist the urge to consume more and more experiences, since that strategy can only lead to the feeling of having even more experiences left to consume.

“I prefer to brew my coffee,” the law professor Tim Wu writes in an essay on the pitfalls of convenience culture, “but Starbucks instant is so convenient I hardly ever do what I ‘prefer.’”

As convenience colonizes everyday life, activities gradually sort themselves into two types: the kind that are now far more convenient, but that feel empty or out of sync with our true preferences; and the kind that now seem intensely annoying, because of how inconvenient they remain.

the undodgeable reality of a finite human life is that you are going to have to choose.

starting in 1933, he was a card-carrying member of the Nazi Party. (The question of what this means for his philosophy is a fraught and fascinating one, but it would get us off track here. So you’re going to have to decide for yourself whether this exceptionally poor life choice invalidates his thoughts about how we make life choices in general.)

Martin Heidegger.

Most philosophers and scientists spend their careers pondering the way things are: what sorts of things exist, where they come from, how they relate to each other, and so on. But we’ve forgotten to be amazed that things are in the first place—that “a world is worlding all around us,” as Heidegger puts it.

We tend to speak about our having a limited amount of time. But it might make more sense, from Heidegger’s strange perspective, to say that we are a limited amount of time. That’s how completely our limited time defines us, as humans, before we start coping with anything at all.

a decision to do any given thing will automatically mean sacrificing an infinite number of potential alternative paths.

(The original Latin word for “decide,” decidere, means “to cut off,” as in slicing away alternatives;

Rather than taking ownership of our lives, we seek out distractions, or lose ourselves in busyness and the daily grind, so as to try to forget our real predicament.

In his 2019 book, This Life, the Swedish philosopher Martin Hägglund makes this all a bit clearer and less mystical by juxtaposing the idea of facing our finitude with the religious belief in an eternal life.

It is by consciously confronting the certainty of death, and what follows from the certainty of death, that we finally become truly present for our lives.

What I can confirm, though, is that 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.

But if it’s amazing to have been granted any being at all—if “your whole life is borrowed time,” as Cain realized,

shootings—then wouldn’t it make more sense to speak not of having to make such choices, but of getting to make them?

wouldn’t it make more sense to speak not of having to make such choices, but of getting to make them?

The exhilaration that sometimes arises when you grasp this truth about finitude has been called the “joy of missing out,” by way of a deliberate contrast with the idea of the “fear of missing out.”

the core challenge of managing our limited time isn’t about how to get everything done—that’s never going to happen—but how to decide most wisely what not to do, and how to feel at peace about not doing it.

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

The critical question isn’t how to differentiate between activities that matter and those that don’t, but what to do when far too many things feel at least somewhat important, and therefore arguably qualify as big rocks.

The same logic, Abel points out, applies to time. If you try to find time for your most valued activities by first dealing with all the other important demands on your time, in the hope that there’ll be some left over at the end, you’ll be disappointed.

do some of it today, no matter how little, and no matter how many other genuinely big rocks may be begging for your attention.

“If you don’t save a bit of your time for you, now, out of every week,” as she puts it, “there is no moment in the future when you’ll magically be done with everything and have loads of free time.”

you get to feel as though you’re keeping plenty of irons in the fire and making progress on all fronts. Instead, what usually ends up happening is that you make progress on no fronts—because each time a project starts to feel difficult, or frightening, or boring, you can bounce off to a different one instead.

The second principle is to limit your work in progress.

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.

Making this rather modest change to my working practices produced a startlingly large effect.

way—to see that I was always neglecting most tasks, in order to work on anything at all, and that working on everything at once simply wasn’t an option—the result was a powerful sense of undistracted calm, and a lot more productivity than in my days as a productivity obsessive.

The third principle is to resist the allure of middling priorities.

The top five, Buffett says, should be those around which he organizes his time. But contrary to what the pilot might have been expecting to hear, the remaining twenty, 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.

Bradatan argues that when we find ourselves procrastinating on something important to us, we’re usually in some version of this same mindset. We fail to see, or refuse to accept, that any attempt to bring our ideas into concrete reality must inevitably fall short of our dreams, no matter how brilliantly we succeed in carrying things off—because reality, unlike fantasy, is a realm in which we don’t have limitless control, and can’t possibly hope to meet our perfectionist standards.

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. So you might as well make a start.

he yearned to live more than one life: to be a respectable citizen, which was why he kept his day job as an insurance claims investigator; to relate intimately to another person in marriage, which would mean marrying Bauer; and yet also to dedicate himself without compromise to his writing. On more than one occasion, in letters to Bauer, he characterized this struggle as a matter of “two selves” wrestling with each other inside him—one in love with her but the other so consumed by literature that “the death of his dearest friend would seem to be no more than a hindrance” to his work.

Kafka

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.

But the received wisdom is wrong. You should definitely settle.

because living life to the fullest requires settling. “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.

That problem is distraction. After all, it hardly matters how committed you are to making the best use of your limited time if, day after day, your attention gets wrenched away by things on which you never wanted to focus.

The watermelon tale is a reminder, moreover, that these days distraction has become all but synonymous with digital distraction: it’s what happens when the internet gets in the way of our attempts to concentrate.

distraction has become all but synonymous with digital distraction: it’s what happens when the internet gets in the way of our attempts to concentrate. But this is misleading. 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.

Most other resources on which we rely as individuals—such as food, money, and electricity—are things that facilitate life, and in some cases it’s possible to live without them, at least for a while. 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.

This was why Seneca, in On the Shortness of Life, came down so hard on his fellow Romans for pursuing political careers they didn’t really care about, holding elaborate banquets they didn’t especially enjoy, or just “baking their bodies in the sun”: they didn’t seem to realize that in succumbing to such diversions, they were squandering the very stuff of existence.

But the crucial point isn’t that it’s wrong to choose to spend your time relaxing, whether at the beach or on BuzzFeed. It’s that the distracted person isn’t really choosing at all. Their attention has been commandeered by forces that don’t have their highest interests at heart.

The Paleolithic hunter-gatherer whose attention was alerted by a rustling in the bushes, whether he liked it or not, would have been far more likely to flourish than one who heard such rustlings only after first making the conscious decision to listen out for them. Neuroscientists call this “bottom-up” or involuntary attention, and we’d struggle to stay alive without it. Yet the capacity to exert some influence over the other part of your attention—the “top-down” or voluntary kind—can make the whole difference between a well-lived life and a hellish one.

Austrian psychotherapist Viktor Frankl, author of Man’s Search for Meaning, who was able to fend off despair as a prisoner in Auschwitz because he retained the ability to direct a portion of his attention toward the only domain the camp guards couldn’t violate: his inner life, which he was then able to conduct with a measure of autonomy, resisting the outer pressures that threatened to reduce him to the status of an animal.

“Attention is the beginning of devotion,” writes the poet Mary Oliver, pointing to the fact that distraction and care are incompatible with each other: you can’t truly love a partner or a child, dedicate yourself to a career or to a cause—or just savor the pleasure of a stroll in the park—except to the extent that you can hold your attention on the object of your devotion to begin with

A Machine for Misusing Your Life

it’s essentially a giant machine for persuading you to make the wrong choices about what to do with your attention, and therefore with your finite life, by getting you to care about things you didn’t want to care about.

We know that the “free” social media platforms we use aren’t really free, because, as the saying goes, you’re not the customer but the product being sold: in other words, the technology companies’ profits come from seizing our attention, then selling it to advertisers.

All the feuds and fake news and public shamings on social media, therefore, aren’t a flaw, from the perspective of the platform owners; they’re an integral part of the business model.

useful—it systematically distorts the picture of the world we carry in our heads at all times. It influences our sense of what matters, what kinds of threats we face, how venal our political opponents are, and thousands of other things—and all these distorted judgments then influence how we allocate our offline time as well.

Yet Twitter’s dominion over my attention extended a great deal further than that. 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.

starting to approach the rest of life as if they were the norm, which meant being constantly braced for confrontation or disaster, or harboring a nebulous sense of foreboding. Unsurprisingly, this rarely proved to be the basis for a fulfilling day.

As the technology critic Tristan Harris likes to say, each time you open a social media app, there are “a thousand people on the other side of the screen” paid to keep you there—and so it’s unrealistic to expect users to resist the assault on their time and attention by means of willpower alone.

Something in us wants to be distracted, whether by our digital devices or anything else—to not spend our lives on what we thought we cared about the most.

Consider the archetypal case of being lured from your work by social media: 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;

author Gregg Krech, describing his own experience of the same urge, “is that, more often than not, I do not feel like doing most of the things that need doing. I’m not just speaking about cleaning the toilet bowl or doing my tax returns. I’m referring to those things I genuinely desire to accomplish.”

It’s worth pausing to notice how exceptionally strange this is. 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?

“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.”

Heidegger’s idea that we are time—that there’s no meaningful way to think of a person’s existence except as a sequence of moments of time—begins

on—and if you peer back even further in time, to before your own birth, it’s an even more dizzying matter of coincidence piled upon coincidence.

And it is chance, a chance quite unpredictable in the present state of science, that caused me to be born a woman. From that point on, it seems to me that a thousand different futures might have stemmed from every single movement of my past: I might have fallen ill and broken off my studies; I might not have met Sartre; anything at all might have happened.

I don’t think Krishnamurti means to say that we shouldn’t feel sorrow, compassion, or anger when bad things happen to ourselves or others, nor that we should give up on our efforts to prevent bad things from happening in the future. Rather, a life spent “not minding what happens” is one lived without the inner demand to know that the future will conform to your desires for it—and

“a plan is just a thought.” We treat our plans as though they are a lasso, thrown from the present around the future, in order to bring it under our command. But all a plan is—all it could ever possibly be—is a present-moment statement of intent. It’s an expression of your current thoughts about how you’d ideally like to deploy your modest influence over the future. The future, of course, is under no obligation to comply.

philosopher Alan Watts explained with characteristic vigor: Take education. What a hoax. As a child, you are sent to nursery school. In nursery school, they say you are getting ready to go on to kindergarten. And then first grade is coming up and second grade and third grade … In high school, they tell you you’re getting ready for college. And in college you’re getting ready to go out into the business world … [People are] like donkeys running after carrots that are hanging in front of their faces from sticks attached to their own collars. They are never here. They never get there. They are never alive.

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.”

Maybe it really is a “bad habit,” as the Baby Trainers insist, for your one-year-old to grow accustomed to falling asleep on your chest. But it’s also a delightful experience in the present moment, and that has to be weighed in the balance; it can’t be the case that concerns for the future must always automatically take precedence.

“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.”

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.

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. So when an outwardly successful, hard-charging attorney fails to show up for a family dinner, or his child’s school play, it’s not necessarily because he’s “too busy,” in the straightforward sense of having too much to do.

The truth is that we collaborate with this state of affairs. We choose to treat time in this self-defeatingly instrumental way, and we do so because it helps us maintain the feeling of being in omnipotent control of our lives.

the moment of truth is always now—that life is nothing but a succession of present moments, culminating in death, and that you’ll probably never get to a point where you feel you have things in perfect working order.

we start to experience pressure to use our leisure time productively, too. 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.

your friend who always seems to be training for a 10K, yet who’s apparently incapable of just going for a run: she has convinced herself that running is a meaningful thing to do only insofar as it might lead toward a future accomplishment.

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. And like many of our time troubles, research suggests that this problem grows worse the wealthier you get.

To the philosophers of the ancient world, leisure wasn’t the means to some other end; on the contrary, it was the end to which everything else worth doing was a means. 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 behavior 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.

Factories and mills required the coordinated labor of hundreds of people, paid by the hour, and the result was that leisure became sharply delineated from work.

In this view of time, anything that doesn’t create some form of value for the future is, by definition, mere idleness.

In order to most fully inhabit the only life you ever get, you have to refrain from using every spare hour for personal growth.

Early capitalism got much of its energy, Weber argued, from Calvinist merchants and tradesmen who felt that relentless hard work was one of the best ways to prove—to others, but also to themselves—that they belonged to the former category rather than the latter.

We flatter ourselves that we’ve outgrown such superstitions today. And yet there remains, in our discomfort with anything that feels too much like wasting time, a yearning for something not all that dissimilar from eternal salvation. As long as you’re filling every hour of the day with some form of striving, you get to carry on believing that all this striving is leading you somewhere—to an imagined future state of perfection, a heavenly realm in which everything runs smoothly, your limited time causes you no pain, and you’re free of the guilty sense that there’s more you need to be doing in order to justify your existence.

(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. What they mean is that when they do find a morsel of time, and use it to try to read, they find they’re too impatient to give themselves over to the task. “It is not simply that one is interrupted,” writes Parks. “It is that one is actually inclined to interruption.”

It’s not so much that we’re too busy, or too distractible, but that we’re unwilling to accept the truth that reading is the sort of activity that largely operates according to its own schedule. You can’t hurry it very much before the experience begins to lose its meaning; it refuses to consent, you might say, to our desire to exert control over how our time unfolds.

reading something properly just takes the time it takes.

“the feeling of anxiety wells up inside, and I look for something to take it away.” Reaching for the smartphone, diving back into the to-do list, pounding away on the elliptical machine at the gym—all these forms of high-speed living were serving as some kind of emotional avoidance.

The high achievers of Silicon Valley reminded Brown of herself in her days as an alcoholic. To understand the significance of this point, it helps to know that Brown, like many former drinkers, holds in high esteem the twelve-step philosophy of Alcoholics 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. The future alcoholic first turns to drink in an effort to escape some painful aspect of experience:

At first this strategy seems to work, because drinking does temporarily numb unpleasant emotions. In the longer run, though, it backfires disastrously. Despite all your efforts to escape your experience, the truth is that you’re still where you are—stuck in your dysfunctional family or your abusive relationship, suffering from depression, or not confronting the aftermath of childhood trauma—and so the feelings soon return, requiring stronger drinks in order to numb them.

You know you must stop, but you also can’t stop, because the very thing that’s hurting you—alcohol—has come to feel like the only means of controlling the negative emotions that, in fact, your drinking is helping to cause.

But her point isn’t that compulsive hurry is as physically destructive as an excess of alcohol. It’s that the basic mechanism is the same. As the world gets faster and faster, we come to believe that our happiness, or our financial survival, depends on our being able to work and move and make things happen at superhuman speed.

there’s an intoxicating thrill to living at warp speed. (As the science writer James Gleick points out, it’s no coincidence that another meaning of the word “rush” is “a feeling of exhilaration.”)

speed addiction tends to be socially celebrated. Your friends are more likely to praise you for being “driven.”

the least fashionable but perhaps most consequential of superpowers: patience.

In practical terms, three rules of thumb are especially useful for harnessing the power of patience as a creative force in daily life. The first is to develop a taste for having problems. Behind our urge to race through every obstacle or challenge, in an effort to get it “dealt with,” there’s usually the unspoken fantasy that you might one day finally reach the state of having no problems whatsoever.

we seem to believe, if only subconsciously, that we shouldn’t have problems at all.

a life devoid of all problems would contain nothing worth doing, and would therefore be meaningless.

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.

It was precisely the students’ impatient desire to hasten their work beyond its appropriate pace, to race on to the point of completion, that was impeding their progress.

Stopping 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.

The final principle is that, more often than not, originality lies on the far side of unoriginality.

guilty of the same basic mistake—of treating our time as something to hoard, when it’s better approached as something to share, even if that means surrendering some of your power to decide exactly what you do with it and when.

But “digital nomad” is a misnomer—and an instructive one. Traditional nomads aren’t solitary wanderers who just happen to lack laptops; they’re intensely group-focused people who, if anything, have less personal freedom than members of settled tribes, since their survival depends on their working together successfully. And in their more candid moments, digital nomads will admit that the chief problem with their lifestyle is the acute loneliness.

A fellow wanderer, Manson learned, “burst into tears in a small suburb in Japan watching families ride their bikes together in a park,” as it dawned on him that his supposed freedom—his theoretical ability to do whatever he wanted, whenever he chose—had put such ordinary pleasures beyond reach.

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. The digital nomad’s lifestyle lacks the shared rhythms required for deep relationships to take root.

Words are inadequate to describe the emotion aroused by the prolonged movement in unison that drilling involved. A sense of pervasive well-being is what I recall; more specifically, a strange sense of personal enlargement; a sort of swelling out, becoming bigger than life, thanks to participation in collective ritual …

The modern world is especially lacking in good responses to such feelings: 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.

What would it mean to spend the only time you ever get in a way that truly feels as though you are making it count?

It starts to feel as though it’s your duty to find something truly consequential to do with your time—to quit your office job to become an aid worker or start a space flight company—or else, if you’re in no position to make such a grand gesture, to conclude that a deeply meaningful life isn’t an option for you.

To contemplate “the massive indifference of the universe,” writes Richard Holloway, the former bishop of Edinburgh, can feel “as disorienting as being lost in a dense wood, or as frightening as falling overboard into the sea with no-one to know we have gone.”

“cosmic insignificance therapy”: When things all seem too much, what better solace than a reminder that they are, provided you’re willing to zoom out a bit, indistinguishable from nothing at all? The anxieties that clutter the average life—relationship troubles, status rivalries, money worries—shrink instantly down to irrelevance.

This is the mindset of the Silicon Valley tycoon determined to “put a dent in the universe,” or the politician fixated on leaving a legacy, or the novelist who secretly thinks her work will count for nothing unless it reaches the heights, and the public acclaim, of Leo Tolstoy’s.

But what actually happens is that this overvaluing of your existence gives rise to an unrealistic definition of what it would mean to use your finite time well.

Landau points out: a chair just isn’t the kind of thing that ought to have the capacity to boil water, so it isn’t a problem that it doesn’t. And it is likewise “implausible, for almost all people, to demand of themselves that they be a Michelangelo, a Mozart, or an Einstein … There have only been a few dozen such people in the entire history of humanity.” In other words, you almost certainly won’t put a dent in the universe.

Perhaps the iPhone will be remembered for more generations than anything you or I will ever accomplish; but from a truly cosmic view, it will soon be forgotten, like everything else.

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. You’re freed, too, to consider the possibility that many of the things you’re already doing with it are more meaningful than you’d supposed—and that until now, you’d subconsciously been devaluing them, on the grounds that they weren’t “significant” enough. From this new perspective, it becomes possible to see that preparing nutritious meals for your children might matter as much as anything could ever matter, even if you won’t be winning any cooking awards; or that your novel’s worth writing if it moves or entertains a handful of your contemporaries, even though you know you’re no Tolstoy. Or that virtually any career might be a worthwhile way to spend a working life, if it makes things slightly better for those it serves.

Cosmic insignificance therapy is an invitation to face the truth about your irrelevance in the grand scheme of things.

Truly doing justice to the astonishing gift of a few thousand weeks isn’t a matter of resolving to “do something remarkable” with them. In fact, it entails precisely the opposite: refusing to hold them to an abstract and overdemanding standard of remarkableness,

Other people hold off entirely from starting on important projects or embarking on intimate relationships in the first place because they can’t bear the anxiety of having committed themselves to something that might or might not work out happily in practice.

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.

“Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.” There’s no scrambling up to the safety of the riverbank when the river is you. And so insecurity and vulnerability are the default state—because in each of the moments that you inescapably are, anything could happen, from an urgent email that scuppers your plans for the morning to a bereavement that shakes your world to its foundations.

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.

Pursuing the life projects that matter to you the most will almost always entail not feeling fully in control of your time, immune to the painful assaults of reality, or confident about the future. It means embarking on ventures that might fail, perhaps because you’ll find you lacked sufficient talent; it means risking embarrassment, holding difficult conversations, disappointing others, and getting so deep into relationships that additional suffering—when bad things happen to those you care about—is all but guaranteed.

Choose uncomfortable enlargement over comfortable diminishment whenever you can.

This quest to justify your existence in the eyes of some outside authority can continue long into adulthood. But “at a certain age,” writes the psychotherapist Stephen Cope, “it finally dawns on us that, shockingly, no one really cares what we’re doing with our life.

Peace of mind, and an exhilarating sense of freedom, comes not from achieving the validation but from yielding to the reality that it wouldn’t bring security if you got it.

But I sometimes think of my journey through adulthood to date as one of incrementally discovering the truth that there is no institution, no walk of life, in which everyone isn’t just winging it, all the time.

It’s alarming to face the prospect that you might never truly feel as though you know what you’re doing, in work, marriage, parenting, or anything else. But it’s liberating, too, because it removes a central reason for feeling self-conscious or inhibited about your performance in those domains in the present moment: if the feeling of total authority is never going to arrive, you might as well not wait any longer to give such activities your all—to put bold plans into practice, to stop erring on the side of caution.

We’re all in the position of medieval stonemasons, adding a few more bricks to a cathedral whose completion we know we’ll never see. The cathedral’s still worth building, all the same.

But if you do with conviction the next and most necessary thing, you are always doing something meaningful and intended by fate.”

It is true, as more upbeat commentators like to remind us, that people have always believed they were living in the end times, and that much of the news these days is really rather good: infant mortality, absolute poverty, and global inequality are all falling rapidly, while literacy is rising, and you’re less likely than ever to get killed in a war.

“Abandoning hope is an affirmation, the beginning of the beginning,” Chödrön says. You realize that you never really needed the feeling of complete security you’d previously felt so desperate to attain. This is a liberation.

And once you no longer need to convince yourself that you’ll do everything that needs doing, you’re free to focus on doing a few things that count.

It kills the fear-driven, control-chasing, ego-dominated version of you—the one who cares intensely about what others think of you, about not disappointing anyone or stepping too far out of line, in case the people in charge find some way to punish you for it later.

You get to appreciate life in the droll spirit of George Orwell, on a stroll through a war-dazed London in early 1946, watching kestrels darting above the grim shadows of the gasworks, and tadpoles dancing in roadside streams, and later writing of the experience: “Spring is here, even in London N1, and they can’t stop you enjoying it.”

You get to give up on something that was always impossible—the quest to become the optimized, infinitely capable, emotionally invincible, fully independent person you’re officially supposed to be. Then you get to roll up your sleeves and start work on what’s gloriously possible instead.

ten further techniques for implementing this limit-embracing philosophy in daily life.

1. Adopt a “fixed volume” approach to productivity.

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. Fortunately, it’s not your job to tackle it: instead, feed tasks from the open list to the closed one—that is, a list with a fixed number of entries, ten at most.

establish predetermined time boundaries for your daily work.

2. Serialize, serialize, serialize. Following the same logic, focus on one big project at a time (or at most, one work project and one nonwork project) and see it to completion before moving on to what’s next.

instead, train yourself to get incrementally better at tolerating that anxiety, by consciously postponing everything you possibly can, except for one thing. Soon, the satisfaction of completing important projects will make the anxiety seem worthwhile—and since you’ll be finishing more and more of them, you’ll have less to feel anxious about anyway.

3. Decide in advance what to fail at.

But the great benefit of strategic underachievement—that is, nominating in advance whole areas of life in which you won’t expect excellence of yourself—is that you focus that time and energy more effectively.

when you “decide in advance what things you’re going to bomb … you remove the sting of shame.”

fail on a cyclical basis: to aim to do the bare minimum at work for the next two months, for example, while you focus on your children, or let your fitness goals temporarily lapse while you apply yourself to election canvassing. Then switch your energies to whatever you were neglecting.

you can’t feel good about yourself until it’s

it’s easy to grow despondent and self-reproachful: you can’t feel good about yourself until it’s all finished—but it’s never finished, so you never get to feel good about yourself.

As a counterstrategy, keep a “done list,” which starts empty first thing in the morning, and which you then gradually fill with whatever you accomplish through the day.

5. Consolidate your caring. Social media is a giant machine for getting you to spend your time caring about the wrong things (here), but for the same reason, it’s also a machine for getting you to care about too many things, even if they’re each indisputably worthwhile.

—not because fires in the Amazon or the fate of refugees don’t matter, but because you understand that to make a difference, you must focus your finite capacity for care.

6. Embrace boring and single-purpose technology.

You can combat this problem by making your devices as boring as possible—first by removing social media apps, even email if you dare, and then by switching the screen from color to grayscale.

choose devices with only one purpose, such as the Kindle ereader, on which it’s tedious and awkward to do anything but read.

7. Seek out novelty in the mundane.

seems to speed up as we age, so that the fewer weeks we have left, the faster we seem to lose them (here). The

the dispiriting manner in which time seems to speed up as we age, so that the fewer weeks we have left, the faster we seem to lose them (here). The likeliest explanation for this phenomenon is that our brains encode the passage of years on the basis of how much information we process in any given interval. Childhood involves plentiful novel experiences, so we remember it as having lasted forever; but as we get older, life gets routinized—we stick to the same few places of residence, the same few relationships and jobs—and the novelty tapers off.

An alternative, Shinzen Young explains, is to pay more attention to every moment, however mundane:

when presented with a challenging or boring moment, try deliberately adopting an attitude of curiosity,

whenever a generous impulse arises in your mind—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.

10. Practice doing nothing. “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.

“Do Nothing” meditation, for which the instructions are to simply set a timer, probably only for five or ten minutes at first; sit down in a chair; and then stop trying to do anything. Every time you notice you’re doing something—including thinking, or focusing on your breathing, or anything else—stop doing it. (If you notice you’re criticizing yourself inwardly for doing things, well, that’s a thought, too, so stop doing that.)

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