These are my top 3 takeaways from the book Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman
- From thinking about time in the abstract, separating ‘time’ and ‘life’, it’s natural to start treating it as a resource, something to be bought and sold, and used as efficiently as possible, like coal or iron or any other raw material
In focusing so hard on instrumentalizing their ‘time’, they end up treating their lives in the present moment as nothing but a vehicle in which to travel towards a future state of happiness, even though life is nothing but a succession of present moments. And so their days are sapped of meaning, even as their bank balances increase.
Since every real world choice about how to live entails the loss of countless alternative ways of living, there is no reason to procrastinate or resist making commitments in the anxious hope that you might somehow be able to avoid those losses. Loss is a given, That ship has sailed – what a relief.
Below are the quotes that didn’t make it to my top 3.
- The unfashionable but powerful notion of letting time use you, approaching life not as an opportunity to implement your predetermined plans for success but as a matter of responding to the needs of your place and your moment in history
- We only have four thousand weeks. Even the oldest woman who lived 122 years had only 6400
- BUSYNESS has been rebranded as ‘hustle’: worth boasting about on social media
- Consider all technology intended to help us gain the upper hand over time, time ought to feel more expansive and abundant thanks to all the hours freed up, but instead, life accelerates, and everyone grows more impatient
- Productivity is a trap, becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed
- 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
- The ones who make to the elite universities, find that their reward is the unending pressure to work with crushing intensity in order to maintain the income and status that have come to seem like prerequisites for the live they want to lead
- The problem with trying to make time for everything that feels important is that you definitely never will. There is no reason to believe you’ll ever feel ‘on top of things’ or make time for everything that matters, simply by getting more done.
- The real problem of time management today , though, is not that we’re bad at prioritizing the big rocks, it is that there are too many rocks to fit in the jar in the first place
- The cause of your difficulties isn’t that your partner is especially flawed or that the two of you are especially incompatible, but that you’re finally noticing all the ways in which your partner is finite and thus deeply disappointing by comparison with the world of your fantasy where the limiting rules of reality don’t apply.
- The more intensely he could hold his attention on the experience of whatever he was doing, the clearer it became to him that the real problem had been not the activity itself but his internal resistance to experiencing it
- The overarching point is that what we think of as ‘distractions’ aren’t the ultimate cause of our being distracted. They’re just the places we go to seek relief from the discomfort of confronting limitation.
- It has been calculated that if AMAZONS front page loaded one second more slowly, the company would lose 1.62 billion dollars in annual sales
- Go to a museum then go and look at it for three hours straight
- If you’ve decided to work on a given project for 50 minutes, then once that have elapsed, get up and walk away from it
- Stopping helps strengthen the muscle of patience that will permit you to return to the project again and again
- Stay on the bus, Stay on the fucking bus
- Once you no longer feel the stifling pressure to become a particular kind of person, you can confront the personality and follow where they lead
- Choose uncomfortable enlargement over comfortable diminishment whenever you can
