Book Review: Oliver Burkeman's Four Thousand Weeks

do your decisions diminish you or enlarge you? (and a nod to Interstellar and Nietzsche)

This book unpacked a lot of my existential angst around Time, but I kept slipping into being a forgetful reader/student rather than the receiver of concrete practical pointers up until I put pen to paper and decided to treat the book for what it was— a critical analysis of time management, a no-frills, non-self-help-book kinda lesson-plan useful for someone sick of seeing online productivity hacks (centered on selfishly carving out ‘me, me, me’ time) and hearing about how people on social media go about their day as though they invented the hours on the clock.

Here are some of the book lessons that resonated with me, ones I want to be able to reference time and again, shared here with the hope that you, too, will find them useful in thinking about our limited time here.

Before reading the book (or its title), I didn’t really assign to my life a numerical constraint. I’m here, and somewhere there or there or there on a line I’d no longer be here. Of course, if asked to estimate a lifespan in quantifiable terms, it was easy to think in terms of years. And sure, converting those years to weeks was an easy enough calculation, but intuitively, who among us wouldn’t be stunned by the correct answer?

A mere 4,000 weeks, if that.

And here we are fussing about nailing our morning and evening routines.

Embrace the limit

It’s alluring to multitask, and to create endless to-do lists as a coping/defense mechanism to the stark fact that this is it, we have only one shot at this life. In thinking of time as a resource, these tools help us subconsciously fight against the reality of being constrained by time. They promise us a feeling of satisfaction with ourselves and a sense of control over our circumstances. But they can also give a false sense of limitlessness.

“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.” — Burkeman

Mastery over our time masks the reality that we really have near zero control over it. But time is not a resource. We might think of time as something to master, but in fact time masters us. It’s not that we have/don’t have time. We move about in relation to time. Thinking in terms of the former instead of the latter can backfire on us, makes us think of our lives in terms of what “pays off” and what doesn’t (utility versus joy), and leads us to think not in the present but always with one foot into the future. Everyone is in flight from themselves; and thus hastiness is universal. We don’t let things take the time they take, and instead seek hasty solutions; we don’t let time use us, we don’t surrender to it, and instead we erroneously seek opportunities to “implement [our] predetermined plans of success [rather than] responding to the needs of [our] place and moment in history,” according to Burkeman.

Everything worth doing involves others

We are quick to seek out time for ourselves, or ways to ensure that we get to do only whatever we want. And yet, life’s sweetest moments operate in tandem with cooperation from others. That which is worth doing involves others.

I’ll probably regret writing these words if/when I become a mother, but being alone in the emptiness of four walls surrounding you can be just as claustrophobic as being sardined in an elevator jammed with loads of people. To the detriment of my anxiety, I go back to a scene in Chris Nolan’s Interstellar, where Cooper is trapped behind a bookcase, sandwiched by books on all sides, alone, with only the hollow pleas from his own voice as company, his biggest fear being that he cannot communicate with his kin and fellow living beings. We do not live in a vacuum.