Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

People in medieval European agricultural societies had a task-orientated view of time, as workers got up at dawn and went to bed at dusk, their work taking place in between. Task orientation meant that the pace of life was dictated by chores themselves rather than by the clock. During this period, time and life were not separate, meaning that tasks such as milking cows or harvesting crops took place when they could and needed to, without anyone imposing a schedule on them. Living according to this kind of chronology enabled people to experience deep time, where they could be fully present in the moment.

The limitations of the medieval experience of time are evident when it comes to wanting to accomplish complex tasks that involve the coordination of several people. This would require an established, reliable method of measuring time. Medieval monks invented mechanical clocks to organize worship in their monasteries, thereby creating a notion of time whereby one thinks of it “as an abstract thing with an independent existence, distinct from the specific activities on which one might spend it” (23). However, it was not until the Industrial Revolution and the invention of factories that the six-day week and notion of fixed working hours began to dominate people’s experience. Now time was a resource that was as much part of the capitalist system as coal or iron or any of the other things produced. This meant that people began to experience anxiety about using time well and not wasting it. Each moment becomes an opportunity that can be applied efficiently or wasted. While making productive use of our time might be essential given today’s competitive economy, it engenders unsatisfying, future-oriented lives that neglect the enjoyment of the present moment.

Burkeman himself spent years trying to achieve mastery over his time and even wrote a newspaper column in which he tried every new timesaving fad. While he hoped to encounter techniques that would make him feel calm and in control, he became increasingly stressed. One day in 2014, on a park-bench in Brooklyn, he realized that he would never have enough time to fulfil all his goals and obligations. Ironically, accepting this limitation gave him the peace of mind that had thus far eluded him. He realized that while he kept himself relentlessly busy, he could avoid answering the scarier question of what life was all about and surrendering to the unknown. Ultimately, the wish to control time is the wish to keep open the myth that we are limitless and endlessly capable. Burkeman argues that while “the details differ from person to person […] we recoil from the notion that this is it – that this life, with all its flaws and inescapable vulnerabilities, its extreme brevity, and our limited influence over how it unfolds, is the only one we’ll get a shot at” (29). Often busyness and spreading ourselves thin are ways to numb the pain of knowing that our time is limited. Nevertheless, denying reality does not work, as we run into the “paradox of limitation,” which dictates that the more we try to fit everything in with the goal of time-mastery, the more our lives become unfulfilling (31).

We can only become liberated from this by accepting that we will not have time to do everything we want and that we will have to make hard choices about how to spend our time. Indeed, missing out on other options is what makes the path we have chosen so meaningful. Moreover, rather than seeking to put everything on our schedule, we might find more meaning in participating in aspects of social and community life where we accept that tasks take as long as they need to. This is because our culture’s obsession with individual schedules ignores how some of the most valuable aspects of life are in relationship with others, which involves negotiation and uncertainty.

Busyness is a modern affliction that affects everyone across socioeconomic classes. Everyone feels stretched to do more than they can in the time they have. While we rationally know that we have too little time for all that we want to do, we resist accepting this because this would mean confronting painful limitations, such as the impossibility of spending enough time at work to excel and being there for our children’s every need. Instead, we comfort ourselves by spinning the myth that we will just have to find more time for these things.

One of the first time-management books was the English writer Arnold Bennet’s 1908 How to Live on 24 Hours a Day. Bennet reprimanded his reader that they were not making the most of their 24-hour daily quota because they complained that they were tired after work or did not get up early enough before to do the projects that fulfilled them. However, Burkeman finds Bennet’s contention that all people need to do is find strategies to fit a bit more activity into every day is false. This is because “the problem with trying to make time for everything that feels important – or just for enough of what feels important – is that you definitely never will” (41). He further adds that doing more with your time begets more tasks and a sense that there are further obligations to fill.

The only way to be free is to accept that we must make hard choices about how to spend our time; to do the few things that count and sacrifice the rest. People in pre-modern societies who believed in an afterlife did not feel the same existential pressure to get the most out of this one, hence the present-day need to cram in as much as possible. Moreover, pre-modern people tended to have a cyclical view of human history with the sense that they were playing a role that people like them had played for centuries. Modern technologies such as the Internet may promise to help us get on top of our tasks, but they also expand the number of the tasks we have to complete because they increase our sense of the possibilities on which we are missing out.

Many of us have the mistaken belief that we should clear the decks of urgent tasks before we can find the golden time to perform the ones that mean the most to us. This is a complete fallacy, as the meaningful tasks never get done, even if we have checked off all the unimportant items from our to-do lists. The underlying cause of this is the myth that we have infinite amounts of time, which in turn means that we neglect to scrutinize whether a task is worth our while in the first place. For this reason, Burkeman believes people need to take a counterintuitive approach and approach the meaningful tasks first.

Convenience devices promise to save us time and money, so that we can spend more time doing meaningful things and less time doing meaningless tasks. These might include the efficiency of Uber or sending an e-birthday card instead of taking the trouble to choose, handwrite and deliver one. However, these conveniences have costs, such as increased isolation, the dismantlement of local businesses and community and a sense that our lives are devoid of texture and spontaneity. As Burkeman summarizes, “convenience […] makes things easy, but without regard to whether easiness is truly what’s most valuable in any given context” (52). Convenience culture also sees us substituting the easier, less meaningful option, for example, staying in and watching Netflix, for the more inconvenient but fulfilling one—going out with friends.