Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

“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 capacity to make almost infinitely ambitious plans, yet practically no time at all to put them into action.”

Dividing the average human lifespan into the week rather than years creates a sense of urgency because a week is a short unit of time. Oliver Burkeman employs the contrast between the potential infinity of our plans and the finiteness of our life on the planet to express the sad, problematic nature of the contradiction. In evoking ancient Greece and the start of Western philosophy, he draws attention to the fact that our finitude is not a contemporary concern but one that has plagued civilizations for millennia.

“Arguably, time management is all life is. Yet the modern discipline known as time management – like its hipper cousin, productivity – is a depressingly narrow-minded affair, focused on how to crank through as many work tasks as possible, or on devising the perfect morning routine, or on cooking all your dinners for the week in one big batch on Sundays. These things matter to some extent, no doubt. But they’re hardly all that matters.”

While Burkeman agrees that time management is a fundamental component of any human life, he is critical of how modern self-help literature handles the topic. The anthropomorphized notion of a “hipper cousin” called productivity conveys how superficial and mundane he thinks the concerns of modern time-management gurus are. The run of duties including an ability to perform more work tasks or to save time by batch-cooking meals seem joyless and little to do with what life is all about.

“Once ‘time’ and ‘life’ had been separated in most people’s minds, time became a thing that you used – and it’s this shift that serves as the precondition for all the uniquely modern ways in which we struggle with time today. Once time is a resource to be used, you start to feel pressure, whether from external forces or from yourself, to use it well, and to berate yourself when you feel you’ve wasted it.”

Burkeman shows that the separation of time from life was the initiator of the modern anxiety about using time well. Whereas in a primarily agrarian labor force tasks took the time they needed organically, when people felt that they were up against the clock, the idea of external assessment came in, along with the negative feelings around things not being efficient enough.