Four Thousand Weeks

Notes on the book “Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals” by Oliver Burkeman. I enjoyed the book. I think it’s worth reading. It’s not your typical time management book (such as Getting Things Done). It’s not focused on making you more efficient at getting through your day. It wants the reader to think about what it is that they actually want to accomplish in the limited lifetime that each of us is gifted.

Highlights

I’ll take notes when I’m reading. If its a Kindle (or the like) then I can highlight as I go. If its a library book then I’ll usually write a couple notes after I finish a large enough portion of a book. I’ll do this with books I buy too. I don’t generally highlight physical books.

I don’t like “keeping” books. When I was younger I built up a fairly large collection of books. As it turns out, books are heavy. It’s a pain to move them. So I began giving away my books - either to friends, charity organizations or our local library. There’s a wonderful service called Free Little Library. We have a couple of them in our surrounding neighborhoods and one was done by a woman that is in a bookclub I belong to.

The list below is extracted from my book highlights. They may not be direct quotes. Any errors that you find are almost certainly my fault and not the author’s.

The real problem isn’t our limited time. The real problem - or so I hope to convince you - is that we’ve unwittingly inherited, and feel pressured to live by, a troublesome set of ideas about how to use our limited time, all of which are pretty much guaranteed to make things worse.
Traditional time management has long held out the implicit promise of “getting on top of everything”, of becoming the master of one’s time. The yearning for this feeling of control over the unfolding hours and days is an old one: back in 1908, in a short book entitled “How to Live on 24 Hours a Day” (should be availabe on Project Gutenberg), the English journalist and novelist Arnold Bennett offered scheduling tips to “that innumerable band of souls who are haunted, more or less painfully, by the feeling that the years slip by, and slip by, and slip by, and they have not yet been able to get their lives into proper working order.”
Historians call this way of living (in the Middle Ages) “task orientation,” because the rhythms of life emerge organically from the tasks themselves, rather than being lined up against an abstract timeline, the approach that has become second nature to us today.
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 a precondition for all the uniquely modern ways in which we struggle with time today.
(time) stops being the water in which you swim and turns into something you feel you need to dominate or control
“One of my teachers told me, “If I think a thought five times, and I’m not learning anything new from it, I don’t think it anymore.”
Mumford wrote “Eternity ceased gradually to serve as the measure and focus of human actions.” In its place came the dictatorship of the clock, the schedule, and the Google calendar alert.
instead of clearing the decks, declining to clear the decks, focusing instead on what’s truly of greatest consequence while tolerating the discomfort of knowing that, as you do so, the decks will be filling up further, with emails and errands and other to-dos, many of which you may never get around to at all.
smoothness, as it turns out, is a dubious virtue, since it’s often the unsmoothed textures of life that make it liveable, helping nurture the relationships that are crucial for mental and physical health, and for reslience of our communities.
when you render the process more convenient, you drain it of its meaning
the original Latin word for decide, decidere, means “to cut off”, as in slicing away alternatives; it’s a close cousin of words like “homicide” and “suicide”
Become a Better Procrastinator
By the end of your life, you’ll have gotten around to doing virtually none of the things you theoretically could have done
The real measure of any time management technique is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things
pay yourself first when it comes to time. Creative Career Building for Artists & Writers - Jessica Abel
the only way to be sure (anything) will happen is to do some of it today, no matter how little, and no matter how many other things may be begging for your attention.
limit your work in progress
resist the allure of middling priorities - make a list of the top 25 things you want out of life and order them from most important to least. Then organize your time around the top 5. Actively avoid every other item on the list.
“you need to learn how to say no to things you do want to do, with the recognition that you have only one life” – Elizabeth Gilbert
“We invariably prefer indecision over committing ourselves to a single path” - Henri Bergson
psychologist Timothy Wilson “we’re capable of consciously attending to about 0.0004 percent of the information bombarding our brains at any given moment”. In 11 studies, we found that participants typically did not enjoy spending 6 to 15 minutes in a room by themselves with nothing to do but think, that they enjoyed doing mundane external activities much more, and that many preferred to administer electric shocks to themselves instead of being left alone with their thoughts.
“Attention is the beginning of devotion” - poet Mary Oliver
“We are distracted from distraction by distraction” - T S Eliot

Recommendations From Book

These were books or web articles referenced in the book. I found all of them interesting.

Meditation for fidgety skeptics : a 10% happier how-to book
The Path of Least Resistance - Robert Fritz]
The Miracle of Morning Pages - Julia Cameron]
Death: The End of Self-Improvement - Joan Tollifson]
Marilynne Robinson’s “joyless urgency” (The Givenness of Things)
Personal Kanban by Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry

Highlights

Recommendations From Book

Links

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