Week 1 - Four Thousand Weeks

Welcome to Week 1 of the Self Help Slow Read of Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management For Mortals. We will read through the book one chapter at a time, using excerpts, reflections, resources, and questions that stimulate conversation and actions, helping us along each of our paths, with an occasional dash of healthy skepticism.

This week - Introduction: In the Long Run, We’re All Dead.

If this is your first time here, visit the Four Thousand Weeks reading schedule for more details.

Originally, this week was to cover the Intro and Chapter 1, but I decided Chapter 1 needs its own spotlight next week.

What is Self Help Slow Reads?

If you were asked how many weeks the average lifespan is, what would you say? Before picking up this book, I’m sure my answer would have been off the mark. Burkeman posed this question to a few friends and received a wide range of answers, with one on the higher end of 300,000 weeks.

Of course the answer is the title of the book. As Burkeman says from the start, “The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short” (p. 3).

4000 weeks is about 76.9 years. But 4000 weeks somehow sounds much shorter than 76 years! And much shorter than the 28,068.5 days that make up those weeks. Oh, but it actually gets worse. Depending on when you come across this little perspective nugget, it certainly will be less than 4000 weeks, maybe even much less. So some of us might only have a couple thousand weeks while others even fewer. For myself, I’m certainly past the halfway mark.

As Burkeman puts it, “When I first made the four-thousand-weeks calculation, I felt queasy” (p. 4). After reading through the introduction, queasy feels like an understatement.

There are so many things I still want to do with my life—so many I haven’t even started yet. There are books I may never read, places I want to see, things I want to experience, and stories I haven’t told. Ugh!

Burkeman puts it eloquently,
“we’ve been granted the mental capacities to make almost infinitely ambitious plans, yet practically no time at all to put them all into action” (p. 4).

He also goes on to quote the Roman philosopher and Stoic YouTube personality, Seneca:

“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” (p. 4).

Have you ever felt this way? When I was younger, I didn’t notice it as much, but now I sometimes feel like I’m still waiting for life to begin and things are passing more quickly. I know I’ve accomplished things, but it’s not quite what I once imagined for myself.

Burkeman confesses his own obsession with the pursuit of productivity as a way to tackle this conundrum of limited time and unlimited plans. And in so doing, he tried about everything under the sun and wrote about his experience in his Guardian column. This led him to some jarring conclusions about time management, primarily that it works too well in the wrong way.

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He highlights that modern life is like a conveyor belt, in which the more you get done, the more it gives you to do. The faster you seemingly get things accomplished, the faster the belt keeps up with you. I can only think of Lucy and Ethel at the chocolate factory trying to keep up with the capitalist machine. In the end, one feels exhausted, tired, stressed, all the usual modern anxieties that plague us. All the while, the endless conveyor belt keeps rolling along until it inevitably breaks.

“Our days our 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 seems to move” (p. 13).

This is when Burkeman started to shift his thinking and wrote Four Thousand Weeks in the belief that “time management as we know it has failed miserably, and we need to stop pretending otherwise” (p. 13).

I imagine that there are systems out there that people have used that have been helpful; not everyone is built the same, or may be more in tune with their actual values, rather than the business of life. So I refrain from accepting his generalization too much. Still, I see his point that life does seem busier and filled with stuff now more than ever. Being busy seems to be an emblem to be worn proudly, or a curse to be complained about endlessly, all the while using it as a way to avoid the more important matters, whatever they may be. I know I have been guilty of that.

“…time management - like it’s hipper cousin, productivity - is a depressingly narrow-minded affair focused on how to crank through as many work tasks as possible, or on devising the perfect morning routine, or on cooking all your dinners for the week in one big batch on Sundays. These things matter to some extent, no doubt. But they are hardly all that matters. The world is bursting with wonder, and yet it’s the rare productivity guru who seems to have considered the possibility that the ultimate point of all our frenetic doing might be to experience more of that wonder” (p. 5).

Who couldn’t use a little more wonder? I know I could and I will be thinking about it over the next week as I begin to reconsider my own limited time I’ve been dealt.

Becoming more aware of how we use time (or how time is using us) lets us have some space to think a little more about what does matter. What do I want my life to be? What do I want to do? It’s easy to fill things up, but maybe deciding, even for a day, to ignore the endless to-do list and shift to something more meaningful might be the thing to consider.

In the end, it all comes down to the idea that we only have a few thousand weeks, so maybe it’s time to really think about what matters and start to learn how to leave the conveyor belt behind.

- What comes to mind when you think of your life as a limited number of weeks?

- What is something you would like to experience or focus attention on that the busyness of life keeps you from?

This week, I’m going to try and set aside some space to reflect. Maybe a short walk without any podcast distracting my ears, sitting quietly with a cup of coffee before the day starts waiting for the sun to rise, or listening to a vinyl without my phone nearby. What do you notice when you take an intentional moment like that? If you feel comfortable, share if you have tried anything and how it went in the comments.

Oliver Burkeman’s website.
On the Shortness of Life by Seneca