And that thought terrifies me.
Enter Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman, a self-help-ish book about how to rework our relationship with time. If you’ve ever taken a peek at my to-do lists, you’re likely to see why such a book is necessary for me. I want to do it all, I feel like there’s never enough time, and I’m perpetually afraid of having wasted time that is irrecoverable.
But Oliver Burkeman is here to say, “Settle down, Proust, everything you want is impossible anyway!” (Hooray?). Burkeman’s central claim in the text is that we hold on to unhealthy—and even cruel—beliefs about time that are working against our actual lives. No matter what we aim to accomplish, it will never be finished. One task done, another pops up, and the idea of somehow gaining mastery over time is actually a disabling belief that prevents us from doing what is actually important.
In contrast to many books in the self-help genre, Burkeman is not giving you a list of rules to follow in order to make better use of your time (“how to stop procrastinating”, and all that type jazz). In fact, the sense of productivity culture that underlies those types of books is something Burkeman is challenging. In one passage he writes the following:
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.
Thus, in a sense, even if we could be more productive: would it even be sensible to follow-through? For whom are we expending our time? The passage continues with a reference to Edward T. Hall’s suggestion that “Time moves like an unstoppable conveyor belt, bringing us new tasks as fast as we can dispatch the old ones, and becoming more productive just seems to cause the belt to speed up, or eventually to break down.” A lot of people, I would suggest, are in “break down” mode precisely because there is no keeping up with the endless tasks we are required to accomplish. In Burkeman’s words, “It’s now common to encounter reports, especially from younger adults of an all-encompassing, bone-deep burnout, characterized by an inability to complete basic daily chores, the paralyzing exhaustion of a generation of finely honed tools, crafted from embryos to be lean, mean, production machines.” I feel that.
In fact, a lot of what Burkeman discusses is deeply relatable and he continues to focus on the psychological, physical, and existential impacts of measured time. I almost felt a faint hint of Mark Fisher’s comments with respect to capitalism and time. This is particularly true in the following quotation that Burkeman presents:
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. And this feeling of wrongness is only exacerbated by our attempts to become more productive, which seemed to have the effect of pushing the genuinely important stuff ever-further over the horizon. Our days are spent trying to get through tasks in order to get them out of the way, with the result that we live mentally in the future, waiting for when we’ll finally get around to what really matters—and worrying in the meantime that we don’t measure up, that we might lack the drive or stamina to keep pace with the speed at which life now seems to move. The spirit of the times is one of joyless urgency.
Just impeccable. I feel like our relationship to time, productivity, and capitalism are all linked in this passage. The idea of contrasting what life is supposed to be with what it has become as a result of constant productivity and capital is, in my view, very well articulated—especially because so much of it is ubiquitous in our systems. The line about having to raise our hands to pee is something that is so common in schools and reinforces the idea that we must live according to others’ expectations and timelines. From a personal standpoint, I see myself in the characterization that “this feeling of wrongness is only exacerbated by our attempts to become more productive, which seemed to have the effect of pushing the genuinely important stuff ever-further over the horizon.” The idea of trying to deal with all of the meaningless things in order to work towards the actual things is too real; it’s a deeply engrained mentality that the important things require full attention, and how can they have my full attention if I have to worry about all of the little things that don’t matter at all? I am trying to cope with my “joyless urgency.”
Burkeman notes that our relationship to time has changed because we are in a situation of “task-oriented living” versus whatever we have now. In task-oriented living, Burkeman argues, “the rhythms of life are governed by tasks rather than abstract timelines”. He makes reference to a medieval farmer who would wake with the sun, sleep with the dusk, and allow the length of day to vary based on the season. Just as an aside, I think that the example could have been about Indigenous people in Canada as much as about medieval farmers, but I digress. The key part here is that “there was no need to think of time as abstract and separate from life.” An example that really resonated with me is that, Burkeman says, “You milked the cows when they needed milking and harvested the crops when it was harvest time and anybody who tried to impose an external schedule on any of that, for example doing a month’s milking in a single day to get it out of the way, or by trying to make the harvest come sooner, would rightly have been considered a lunatic.” Here I am: a lunatic. Despite reading this book and gaining a lot from it, I still am trying to work weeks ahead in my daily planner to somehow clear my schedule of all responsibilities. Yet, responsibilities can’t be handled like this. In the separation of task-oriented living towards more abstract-time based living, we have gained a great deal of anxiety. For the medieval farmer, “There was no anxious pressure to get everything done, either, because a farmer’s work is infinite. There will always be another milking and another harvest forever. There is no sense in racing toward some hypothetical moment of completion.” I’m struck by this characterization in its truth and also in the despair that it causes me. There will always be more to mark, there will always be more classes to plan, there will always be more book reviews to write, more video games to finish and clear off my mental load. Even entertainment-based activities are reframed as tasks.
Just to expand a little further, Burkeman refers to “those days before clocks.” In those times, he says, “when you when you did need to explain how long something might take, your only option was to compare it with some other concrete activity. Medieval people might talk of a task lasting a miserere while, the time it took to recite psalm 50, known as the miserere from the Bible, or alternatively, a pissing while, which should require no explanation.” I feel like there is some resonance here. We have the trace of those comparative measurements lingering in our language, but overall we try to quantify in abstract terms. It’s ten minutes up the street, it’s going to be a fifteen hour project, and so on. Even as I am about to begin an additional qualifications course, I’m told how many hours I’m expected to spend, not what tasks I’m expected to complete. In a comparative-task measurement, Burkeman says,
one can imagine that experience would have felt expansive and fluid, suffused with something it might not be an exaggeration to call a kind of magic. Notwithstanding the many real privations of his existence, our peasant farmer might have sensed a luminous, awe-inspiring dimension to the world around him, untroubled by the notion of time ticking away, he might have experienced a heightened awareness of the vividness of things, the feeling of timelessness [...] living in deep-time.
It is a kind of magic in those moments when we are free of time, liberated from it. Instead, he suggests, we do everything we can to “avoid the painful constraints of reality” and focus instead on being productive, of ignoring those bright moments of tranquility.
There’s an addictive quality into task-completion. The people that used to refer to themselves as “workaholics” in job interviews as a cheeky ‘worst quality’ may have been more truthful than they thought. Especially if alcoholism is a means of escaping reality and trying to regain a sense of control of your life, productivity addiction runs parallel. Burkeman notes how common it is for “well-paid, high status, overachievers” to be “accustomed to a life of constant motion.” He sees their “pulsing sense of urgency [as] a form of self-medication, something they were doing as a way to not feel something else.” He then gives the example a woman who feels anxiety whenever she slows to rest and immediately looks for active distraction as a form of “emotional avoidance.” He then continues on to note that these traits are similar to alcoholics.
Let’s focus for a moment on the idea of avoidance. Burkeman argues that “Most of our strategies for becoming more productive make things worse because they’re really just ways of furthering the avoidance. After all, it’s painful to confront how limited your time is, because it means that tough choices are inevitable and that you won’t have time for all you once dreamed you might do.” It is indeed a bleak thought. I once did the calculation of how many books I read in a year and how many years I expect to live and when I calculate the number of books I’ll likely finish by my death is barely a drop in the bucket of all the incredible writing in the world. So we replace finitude with measurable progress towards some ambiguous dream. Not only do we not have enough time, “It’s also painful to accept your limited control over the time you do get. Maybe you simply lack the stamina or talent or other resources to perform well in all the roles that you feel you should. So rather than face our limitations, we engage in avoidance strategies in an effort to carry on feeling limitless.” Those lines strike me to the core. I can never simply be. I get depressed for a few weeks following the constant pressures of teaching because if I rest I do not feel I have “accomplished” anything. Trying to gain control this way, though, is outright unhealthy: “We push ourselves harder, chasing fantasies of the perfect work-life balance. Or we implement time management systems that promise to make time for everything so that tough choices won’t be required. Or we procrastinate, which is another means of maintaining the feeling of omnipotence control over life, because you needn’t risk the upsetting experience of failing at an intimidating project.” It’s hard not to see myself reflected in this: unable to make decisions, so drowning in tasks that require low stakes. I also think back, though, to my literary theory professor who made the comment that if something said “no experience necessary” it really meant “no experience gained.” Same thing here with choices. We avoid important choices so we never really have to live.
Burkeman links to other sociologists, theorists, and philosophers to help make the case. In this section, he refers to Nietzsche to explain how we “fill our minds with business and distraction to numb ourselves emotionally.” In Nietzsche’s words, “We labour at our daily work more ardently and thoughtlessly than is necessary to sustain our life [...] because to us it is even more necessary to not have leisure to stop and think. Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself.” This can take many forms, whether it be distraction of meaningless nonsense (cf. any meme on Facebook), or, Burkeman states, “we plan compulsively, because the alternative is to confront how little control over the future we really have.”
There are some political implications here, which I think takes Burkeman’s work a step beyond the general self-help tone. Burkeman notes how “most of us seek a specifically individualistic mastery over time” and that “our culture’s ideal is that you alone should control your schedule, doing whatever you prefer, whatever you want.” It becomes clear why capitalism and individualism and time have all bound together in this unhealthy spiral. What is clear to Burkeman, though, is that we do this “because it’s scary to confront the truth that almost everything worth doing from marriage and parenting to business or politics depends on cooperating with others, and therefore exposing yourself to the emotional uncertainties of relationships.” I would go one step further to suggest that this is precisely why the system gets maintained as it is. If, for instance, a company does not want its workers to unionize, what better way than to promote an individualistic sense of time—I am what matters to me, and who has the time to organize and work together? Again—we are distracted from the important work.
In another section, Burkeman addresses the blight of social media. I think it’s commonplace to recognize that our devices distract us from things that are more important. But Burkeman takes that one step further. He says that it’s not simply that devices distract us from things that are more important, but that “they change how we’re defining important matters in the first place. [...] They sabotage our capacity to want what we want to want.” He elaborates on the idea of social media and discusses our instances of heightened judgment of others that occur as a result of seeing a narrow window into them, rather than the full picture. But also, time eats away at us after such moments. For instance, when I see something politically egregious online and I’m out in the world later I think about how I might respond. Burkeman makes that case and says we even retrain our brains to think about how we will share moments afterward—while we’re still in them. Again, connecting politically, Burkeman notes his “unpaid role as a creator of content for Twitter” and how the entire format has been crafted by teams of psychologists. One of the reasons I find Burkeman’s text so rich is that it connects to so many discourses. I feel like these observations serve as a launch pad for so many rich epistemological, political, and existential questions.
Returning to the personal level for now, Burkeman offers the true, if depressing, observation that we will never do all of what we actually want to do. Since there is so much to do in the world, “At any given moment, you’ll be procrastinating on almost everything and by the end of your life, you’ll have gotten around doing virtually nothing of the things you theoretically could have done.” This sounds pretty bleak. Thank goodness Burkeman follows it up by reframing the discussion around choices: “the point isn’t to eradicate procrastination, but to choose more wisely what you’re going to procrastinate on in order to focus on what matters most. The real measure of time management technique is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things.” As a phrase, “neglecting the right things” would have served as a good subtitle for the book and as a good piece of advice in general.
At the end of the day, Burkeman focuses on the ways that these relationships to time are unhealthy and harmful for us. As we chase more and more accomplishment and productivity, he writes, “There is a sort of cruelty [...] in holding yourself to standards nobody could ever reach and many of us would never dream of demanding of other people. The more humane approach is to drop such efforts as completely as you can. Let your impossible standards crash to the ground. Then, pick a few meaningful tasks from the rubble, and get started on them today.” It’s about as practical as advice in the book gets. As I mentioned, it’s more of a theoretical explanation than a simple enhance-your-productivity checklist. He asks a critical question that I think hits at the heart of our relationships with time and productivity: “In what ways have you yet to accept the fact that you’re who you are and not the person you think you ought to be?” I think so much of our pain surrounding time is related to that disconnect of what we expert of ourselves and what is actually realistic. I struggle with that myself. Burkeman says, though, that we cannot treat the present day as part of a journey towards some version of ourselves we think we ought to be. There’s a sadness in that mentality that is implicit in the trouble of all overachievers, I think: “Once you’ve earned your right to exist, you tell yourself, life will stop feeling so uncertain and out of control.” But we already have and it never does, anyway. We do not have to prove ourselves, and even if we did, the measure would be, quite frankly, impossible anyway.
Before the review ends, I want to thank you for taking the time to read it (and all of my reviews for 2024). The fact that you have finite time and that you have chosen to spend some of it with me reading, thinking about, and responding to books means the world. I hope you have a year of restfulness, a year of accomplishment, and a year of neglecting the right things.
Happy reading; happy new year.
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