Humans face a unique predicament. We’re given “the mental capacities to make almost infinitely ambitious plans, yet practically no time at all to put them into action”. Such is the inspiration for the title of Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks, in which he delves into the limitations surrounding human life and their consequences on happiness and fulfillment.

Sound a bit existential? Four Thousand Weeks was actually billed as a productivity book on some LinkedIn list I found, but veers in a completely different direction than your typical Pomodoro method or Eisenhower matrix bible. If anything, it’s anti-productivity—but pro-humanity.

Burkeman’s main thesis is simply that our time is finite. What we can accomplish in that time is finite. Any productivity system, or mindset, that ignores that (looking at you, “rocks, pebbles, and sand” analogy) is deceptive at best, actively harmful at worst.

Recognizing that we’ll never accomplish everything is a necessary step to focusing on the most important things. Because time is limited, every moment requires a choice, a sacrifice. But that’s easier said than done. Rather than admit this fundamental truth, we trick ourselves in several sneaky ways:

• We work many projects in parallel. It sounds innocuous, but by not restraining the number of different tasks we take on, we end up spending time on vapid bullshit because we never first decided which activities were highest priority.
• We attempt to “keep our options open” by making noncommittal choices or by not making them at all. This applies in all spheres across the human experience from careers, to plans with friends, to dating. As Burkeman explains,

We invariably prefer indecision over committing ourselves to a single path, Bergson wrote, because “the future, which we dispose of to our liking, appears to us at the same time under a multitude of forms, equally attractive and equally possible.”

• We experience FOMO: what if we had done this instead of that? How can we maximize the number of experiences we can have?

Though I’m guilty of all of these, the last point resonates with me the most. I’m one of those spreadsheet travelers who tries to cram as much as possible into an itinerary. Having only a limited time in an exotic place, and having spent all this money to get there, I want to make the most of what could be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

But this desire is futile. Irreversible past decisions and circumstances have led us up to a certain, singular present moment—one out of infinity. Already, the spread of choices before us is severely limited. And by making one of those choices, we ensure that an infinite number of other choices close off forever.

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. Instead, you get to focus on fully enjoying the tiny slice of experiences you actually do have time for—and the freer you are to choose, in each moment, what counts the most.

We think a lot about those black lines, forgetting that it’s all still in our hands. pic.twitter.com/RSZ1d3W642

— Tim Urban (@waitbutwhy) March 5, 2021

By acknowledging this reality, we infuse more meaning into everything we do because it means we have chosen to sacrifice countless other options to do whatever it is we’re doing now. On a longer timescale, Burkeman highlights marriage, whose meaningfulness comes from the fact that committing to your partner closes off your ability to meet other, potentially even better-suited partners in the future.

Acknowledging the limited nature of our lifespans and making conscious, targeted choices is perhaps the best productivity tool available to us. It may not make us accomplish more tasks on a given day, but it will ensure those we do complete are the most important and fulfilling.

Other tidbits

Distraction: limitation’s savior

Burkeman presents an alternate view on social media addiction. We all know social networks are finely engineered to be as attractive as possible, but there is a part of us that actually seeks out distraction. We welcome it when we feel discomfort at the limitations of daily life: things take much longer than we think they should, whether due to their inherent nature (a notable example being reading) or our limited abilities, and so we look for easy, limitless activities instead—such as an infinitely-scroling Instagram feed.

Some Zen Buddhists hold that the entirety of human suffering can be boiled down to this effort to resist paying full attention to the way things are going, because we wish they were going differently (“This shouldn’t be happening!”), or because we wish we felt more in control of the process.

Instead, by recognizing and accepting this reality, we can make progress away from distraction and towards meaningful work.

Living for the future

The rise of capitalism brought about an instrumentalization of every resource on the planet (including our time) to service some future profit. Since we live and work in a capitalistic society, it’s easy for this mindset to bleed into personal lives. It often takes some form of “living for the future”—a peculiar example mentioned in the book, and also my lived experience, being taking pictures of museum panels to read after the trip. Or, not being able to run simply for exercise, but needing to run for the purpose of training for a 10K. Instrumentalizing leisure makes it feel like work, which defeats its point.

An indifferent universe

We experience each and every day solely through our own unique lens, which lends us an egocentric bias. Coupled with the realization that our time is finite, we may feel pressure to achieve the loftiest ambitions.

We chase the ultimate fantasy of time mastery—the desire, by the time we die, to have truly mattered in the cosmic scheme of things, as opposed to being instantly trampled underfoot by the advancing eons.

The cure, again, is simply accepting that nothing we can do in our lifetimes will survive indefinitely. Even the most famous people alive today, the Bezoses and Musks who we deem to have made an indelible mark on society, will be forgotten in a few hundred years, and if not, in a few thousand. Such is the nature of civilization, which itself will be forgotten in due course in the cosmos. Accepting our cosmic insignificance liberates us to consider a wider range of activities that may end up conferring more meaning than we thought, rather than single-mindedly chasing “maximum impact” like so many of my peers in the tech world.

Practical tips

Some actionable tips I’ve taken away from Four Thousand Weeks include:

• Focus on one big project at a time. See it to completion—or drop it—before moving on to the next one. For smaller to-do’s, have a hard limit on the total number of active tasks.

  • For books, I’m personally restricting myself to 2 nonfiction (one for actively learning and note-taking, one for more casual reading) and 1 fiction.

• Pick up atelic hobbies: ones that are done for their own sake, not for some achievement or approval. Atelic activities don’t have a clearly defined endpoint.

  • I personally enjoy Lego building and birdwatching—which somewhat skirt this definition, but still draw me to the present moment instead of towards some future goal.

• Practice strategic underachievement: decide in advance what you’re going to be bad at, and do it without shame or regret.

  • I found this idea incredibly novel. I tend towards perfectionism, which is useful for things like detailed technical work but useless for, say, writing inconsequential emails. Approaching chores with a ruthless premeditated neglect frees me to make more active, meaningful choices.
  • This directed neglect can also be done on a cyclical basis: when I want to push for a promotion at work, I can neglect housekeeping; when I want to spend more time with family or friends, I can underachieve at work.