I recently read 4000 Weeks by Oliver Burkemann, which was a unique view on time management for a fulfilled life. As mere mortals, we know about the futility of our existence and deal with it by being ignorant to have an unencumbered life. As such, we assume we have a lot of time and therefore procrastinate hard important decisions and rather pursue swiping through feeds.
I don’t believe any of this is particularly revelatory but the book, while probably too long and repetitive, puts things into perspective nicely. I will summarise and quote some of its best bits below to either save you from reading it or entice you to pick it up.
LIFE IS SHORT
Life is short so time management is important to live a meaningful life.
We’ve been granted the mental capacities to make almost infinitely ambitious plans, yet practically no time at all to put them into action. ‘This space that has been granted to us rushes by so speedily and so swiftly that all save a very few find life at an end just when they are getting ready to live,’ lamented Seneca, the Roman philosopher, in a letter known today under the title On the Shortness of Life.
It follows from this that time management, broadly defined, should be everyone’s chief concern. Arguably, time management is all life is. Yet the modern discipline known as time management – like its hipper cousin, productivity – is a depressingly narrow-minded affair, focused on how to crank through as many work tasks as possible,
We labour at our daily work more ardently and thoughtlessly than is necessary to sustain our life,’ wrote Nietzsche, ‘because to us it is even more necessary not to have leisure to stop and think. Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself.’
TIME MANAGEMENT SUCKS
The current discipline of time management sucks because it creates the wrong impression that we can get everything on our to-do list done if we were better organised and more productive.
The more you try to manage your time with the goal of achieving a feeling of total control, and freedom from the inevitable constraints of being human, the more stressful, empty and frustrating life gets. But the more you confront the facts of finitude instead – and work with them, rather than against them – the more productive, meaningful and joyful life becomes.
Every decision to use a portion of time on anything represents the sacrifice of all the other ways in which you could have spent that time, but didn’t – and to willingly make that sacrifice is to take a stand, without reservation, on what matters most to you.
The reason for this effect is straightforward: the more firmly you believe it ought to be possible to find time for everything, the less pressure you’ll feel to ask whether any given activity is the best use for a portion of your time. Whenever you encounter some potential new item for your to-do list or your social calendar, you’ll be strongly biased in favour of accepting it, because you’ll assume you needn’t sacrifice any other tasks or opportunities in order to make space for it.
ACCEPT MORTALITY
Accepting the finitude of life and owning up to the fact that you cannot pursue endless possibilities, will allow you to live a more fulfilled and authentic life.
Once you truly understand that you’re guaranteed to miss out on almost every experience the world has to offer, the fact that there are so many you still haven’t experienced stops feeling like a problem.
Any finite life – even the best one you could possibly imagine – is therefore a matter of ceaselessly waving goodbye to possibility. The only real question about all this finitude is whether we’re willing to confront it or not. And this, for Heidegger, is the central challenge of human existence: since finitude defines our lives, he argues that living a truly authentic life – becoming fully human – means facing up to that fact.
We must live out our lives, to whatever extent we can, in clear-eyed acknowledgement of our limitations, in the undeluded mode of existence that Heidegger calls Being-towards-death’, aware that this is it, that life is not a dress rehearsal, that every choice requires myriad sacrifices, and that time is always already running out – indeed, that it may run out today, tomorrow, or next month.
It is by consciously confronting the certainty of death, and what follows from the certainty of death, that we finally become truly present for our lives.
The exhilaration that sometimes arises when you grasp this truth about finitude has been called the ‘joy of missing out’, by way of a deliberate contrast with the idea of the ‘fear of missing out’
STOP PROCRASTINATING
Avoiding this truth leads to wasted time and procrastination. Infinite possibilities are more appealing than making hard choices. Avoiding those choices will lead to a life full of regrets. Never settling is wrong advice, because you will have to settle at some point and better to do so while it’s not too late.
‘The idea of the future, pregnant with an infinity of possibilities, is thus more fruitful than the future itself,’ Bergson wrote, ‘and this is why we find more charm in hope than in possession, in dreams than in reality.’
The received wisdom, articulated in a thousand magazine articles and inspirational Instagram memes, is that it’s always a crime to settle. But the received wisdom is wrong. You should definitely settle. Or to be more precise, you don’t have a choice. You will settle – and this fact ought to please you.
Your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention. At the end of your life, looking back, whatever compelled your attention from moment to moment is simply what your life will have been. So when you pay attention to something you don’t especially value, it’s not an exaggeration to say that you’re paying with your life.
Our tech makes this conceit of infinite possibilities worse. When 1.000s of possible perfect matches are just a swipe away, then why settle? Numerous productivity apps allow us to organise the most unwieldy amounts of to-dos endlessly. Various reading lists pile up, while we never actually end up reading any of those 10.000 word Atlantic articles. Accepting finitude therefore leads to better prioritisation.
No wonder we seek out distractions online, where it feels as though no limits apply – where you can update yourself instantaneously on events taking place a continent away, present yourself however you like, and keep scrolling forever through infinite newsfeeds, drifting through ‘a realm in which space doesn’t matter and time spreads out into an endless present’, to quote the critic James Duesterberg.
The technologies we use to try to ‘get on top of everything’ always fail us, in the end, because they increase the size of the ‘everything’ of which we’re trying to get on top.
ALL YOU HAVE IS THE PRESENT
Another issue that follows from not accepting finitude is that you always live for the idea of a more perfect future in which you have time to do all the things you ought to do. Making plans for the future rather than acting in the now is a soothing comfort blanket of a perfect life around the corner. The problem is that it devalues the present and robs us of a real shot to realise our true potential in the here and now.
What we forget, or can’t bear to confront, is that, in the words of the American meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein, ‘a plan is just a thought’. We treat our plans as though they are a lasso, thrown from the present around the future, in order to bring it under our command. But all a plan is – all it could ever possibly be – is a present-moment statement of intent. It’s an expression of your current thoughts about how you’d ideally like to deploy your modest influence over the future. The future, of course, is under no obligation to comply.
We treat everything we’re doing – life itself, in other words – as valuable only insofar as it lays the groundwork for something else.
As long as you believe that the real meaning of life lies somewhere off in the future – that one day all your efforts will pay off in a golden era of happiness, free of all problems – you get to avoid facing the unpalatable reality that your life isn’t leading towards some moment of truth that hasn’t yet arrived. Our obsession with extracting the greatest future value out of our time blinds us to the reality that, in fact, the moment of truth is always now – that life is nothing but a succession of present moments, culminating in death, and that you’ll probably never get to a point where you feel you have things in perfect working order. And that therefore you had better stop postponing the ‘real meaning’ of your existence into the future, and throw yourself into life now.
DONT STRESS ABOUT LEGACY
We all have the desire to matter in some impactful way. We want to leave a legacy for future generations and be remembered. The truth is all of us will be forgotten, given the mind-boggling timescales with which this cosmos operates. Yes, I still quote Marcus Aurelius two thousand years later but will people do so in a million years - a timescale that is merely a blip in the history of our 13.7 billion year old universe? Accepting this futility shouldn’t be discouraging but should free us to strive for what we really want and what is truly possible rather than being crushed by an unattainable ideal set by someone else.
And we chase the ultimate fantasy of time mastery – the desire, by the time we die, to have truly mattered in the cosmic scheme of things, as opposed to being instantly trampled underfoot by the advancing aeons.
‘Entering space and time completely’ – or even partially, which may be as far as any of us ever get – means admitting defeat. It means letting your illusions die. 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.
The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short. But that isn’t a reason for unremitting despair, or for living in an anxiety-fuelled panic about making the most of your limited time. It’s a cause for relief. You get to give up on something that was always impossible – the quest to become the optimised, infinitely capable, emotionally invincible, fully independent person you’re officially supposed to be. Then you get to roll up your sleeves and start work on what’s gloriously possible instead.