Oliver Burkeman has written a book, Four Thousand Weeks, which, in my opinion, is the best book ever written on the subject of time management. Burkeman’s major premise is reflected in these two paragraphs:
“You have to accept that there will always be too much to do; that you can’t avoid tough choices or make the world run at your preferred speed; that, no experience, least of all close relationships with other human beings, can ever be guaranteed in advance to turn out painlessly and well – and that from a cosmic viewpoint, when it’s all over, it won’t have counted for very much anyway.
And in exchange for accepting all that? You get to actually be here. You get to have some real purchase on life. You get to spend your finite time focused on a few things that matter to you, in themselves, right now, in this moment”.
To help you assess your own life with respect to how you manage your time, Burkeman poses five questions:
- Where in your life or your work are you currently pursuing comfort, when what’s called for is a little discomfort?
“We naturally tend to make decisions about our daily use of time that prioritize anxiety-avoidance instead. Procrastination, distraction, commitment-phobia, clearing the decks and taking on too many projects at once are all ways of trying to maintain the illusion that you’re in charge of things”. Psychotherapist James Hollis recommends asking of every significant decision in life: “Does this diminish me, or enlarge me”? Burkeman writes, “The question circumvents the urge to make decisions in the service of alleviating anxiety and instead helps you make contact with your deeper intentions for your time”.
2. Are you holding yourself to, and judging yourself by, standards of productivity or performance that are impossible to meet?
“One common symptom of the fantasy of someday achieving total mastery over time is that we set ourselves inherently impossible targets for our use of it – targets that must always be postponed into the future, since they can never be met in the present. The truth is that it’s impossible to become so efficient and organized that you can respond to a limitless number of incoming demands…Let your impossible standards crash to the ground. Then pick a few meaningful tasks from the rubble and get started on them today”.
3. In what ways have you yet to accept the fact that you are who you are, not the person you think you ought to be?
“A closely related way to postpone the confrontation with finitude – with the anxiety-inducing truth that this is it – is to treat your present-day life as part of a journey toward becoming the kind of person you believe you ought to become, in the eyes of a society, a religion, or your parents…The quest to justify your existence in the eyes of some outside authority can continue long into adulthood…There’s no point in waiting to live until you’ve achieved validation from someone or something else. Peace of mind, and an exhilarating sense of freedom, comes not from achieving the validation but from yielding to the reality that it wouldn’t bring security if you got it…Once you no longer feel the stifling pressure to become a particular kind of person, you can confront the personality, strengths and weaknesses, the talents and enthusiasms you find yourself with, here and now, and follow where they lead”.
4. In which areas of your life are you still holding back until you feel you know what you’re doing?
“It’s easy to spend years treating your life as a dress rehearsal on the rationale that, what you’re doing, for the time being, is acquiring the skills and experiences that will permit you to assume authoritative control of things later on…It’s alarming to face the prospect that you might never truly feel as though you know what you’re doing, in work, marriage, parenting or anything else. But it’s liberating, too, because it removes a central reason for feeling self-conscious or inhibited about your performance in those domains of the present moment: if the feeling of total authority is never going to arrive, you might as well not wait any longer to give such activities your all – to put bold plans into practice, to stop erring on the side of caution. It is even more liberating to reflect that everyone else is in the same boat, whether they’re aware of it or not”.
5. How would you spend your days differently if you didn’t care so much about seeing your actions reach fruition?
“A final manifestation of the desire for time mastery arises from the unspoken assumption as the casual catastrophe: the idea that the true value of how we spend our time is always and only to be judged by the results”. In reality, most of our work “will only be measurable long after we’re gone (or perhaps never, since time stretches on indefinitely). And so it’s worth asking: What actions – what acts of generosity or care for the world, what ambitious schemes or investments in the distant future – might it be meaningful to undertake today, if you could come to terms with never seeing the results”?
Burkeman concludes his book by reiterating that we’re only limited human beings and we need to step into this reality. If we do, “the life you will see incrementally taking shape, in the rearview mirror, will be one that meets the only definitive measure of what it means to have used your weeks well: not how many people you helped, or how much you got done; but that working within the limits of your moment in history, and your finite time and talents, you actually got around to doing – and made life more luminous for the rest of us by doing – whatever magnificent task or weird little thing it was that you came here for”.