Every year or so, I try a new productivity tool thinking (hoping) it will be the thing that will finally help me check everything off my to-do list and help me fit in all the things I want to do. I’ve made a personal wiki page on Notion, cycled through a dozen to-do list apps, re-downloaded the habit tracking apps Habitica five times, and at one point started my own personalized, backlinked life database on Obsidian. This is what most of the gurus and enthusiasts in the productivity space suggest. If you can just learn to do this one thing (a habit journal every morning, optimize your information-gathering workflow, be a Pomodoro ninja), then your productivity ailments will dissipate. If only you had the right set of habits, routines, and lifehacks, you would be freed from the shackles of time and be able to achieve everything you strive for. Right?
Alternatively, Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals points at the elephant in the room - You are a finite creature, you can’t do it all, you are going to have to make sacrifices, and this might suck. The end.
Starting from this bedrock, time management and productivity look a lot different. If we stop avoiding looking at this truth, we can make better-informed decisions about meaning, distraction, and goals than our Pomodoro, habit-tracking, early-rising-intention-setting comrades ever will. Below is a non-exhaustive list of themes (with direct quotes in block quotes) and themes from the book. If they resonate, you should read the book.
I
The defining problem of human existence: we've been granted the mental capacities to make almost infinitely ambitious plans, yet practically no time at all to put them into action
Your to-do list will not end. The number of things you could be doing will always be more than what you are able to do. It is not a matter of cutting the wheat from the chaff - It’s all wheat. There are more worthwhile goals, podcasts, books, and experiences that are exciting and interesting to your unique tastes than there is time to do them. Opportunity abounds, and you can’t have it all. There’s no secret shortcut. You simply will have to make hard choices on what you want to value and do with your time.
Since hard choices are unavoidable, what matters is learning to make them consciously, deciding what to focus on and what to neglect, rather than letting them get made by default.
An obvious example is where you choose to live. Place A has things you want (family and friends, cost of living, etc.) But Place B also has things you want (pristine nature, exciting, innovative job opportunities). But you can’t physically live in Place A and Place B - they are literally separate places, and there is only one of you. There is not a right choice here. There are shades of gray with overlapping probabilistic confidence bars, and once you choose one, your values and preferences will change over time in an unpredictable way as you go down that life path. Life is an endless series of trade-offs - the most important thing you can do is make sure you trade for what you truly want.
But, let’s say you chose Place B. You still will face trade-offs between that exciting job and the beautiful nature that drew you there in the first place. This, of course, will still be balanced against your social and family life, which now requires more conscious energy to maintain. Except now, it is much easier to think that we are supposed to be able to do all those things - after all, we are no longer trying to break the laws of physics and be in two places at once. If I try hard enough, I can balance all these things, right?
No. It’s not as obvious, but the laws of physics bind you in this situation too. Alas, you are finite. If you attempt to have everything, you will 1) fail and 2) be dissatisfied (which is an ironic outcome for someone who is literally only doing things they want to do).
It can't be the case that you must do more than you can do. That notion doesn't make any sense: if you truly don't have time for everything you want to do, or feel you ought to do, or that others are badgering you to do, then, well, you don't have time-no matter how grave the consequences of failing to do it all might prove to be.
It may be very important to you to fit A, B, and C into your life, but the universe doesn’t care. Consequences be damned.1 Even if it hurts you. Even if it hurts those around you. Finitude is a hard pill to swallow.
So why swallow it?
First, you get equanimity. It is not your fault that you cannot juggle all of the balls. You were not meant to in the first place. Guilt and shame don’t have a footing anymore.
Second, you get freedom. It seems paradoxical at first. How is swallowing the pill of finitude - i.e. the pill of ‘I have limited time’- freeing? Shouldn’t it be constraining? By accepting finitude and internalizing it all the way through, you are no longer trapped by the expectation to do more. The truth is you are finite whether you hold this truth front and center or not. You are going to miss out on almost every experience the world has to offer. There is a very down-to-earth kind of liberation in grasping that there are certain truths about being a limited human from which you'll never be liberated. You don't get to dictate the course of events. And the reward for accepting reality's constraints is that they no longer feel so constraining; it was an illusion in the first place.
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. Instead, you get to focus on fully enjoying the tiny slice of experiences you actually do have time for - and the freer you are to choose, in each moment, what counts the most.
II
You don’t have a limited amount of time, you are a limited amount of time. Time is often viewed as a resource. But unlike food, water, and electricity, our time so completely defines what you are that the distinction between the two is misleading. You are the sum of your days, regardless of how they are spent. How you spend your time is how you spend your days. And how you spend your days, in the words of poet Annie Dillard, is how you spend your life.
Our lives, thanks to their finitude, are inevitably full of activities that we're doing for the very last time...Yet usually there'll be no way to know, in the moment itself, that you're doing it for the last time… Indeed, there's a sense in which every moment of life is a “last time." It arrives; you'll never get it again-and once it's passed, your remaining supply of moments will be one smaller than before. To treat all these moments solely as steppingstones to some future moment is to demonstrate a level of obliviousness to our real situation that would be jaw-dropping if it weren't for the fact that we all do it, all the time.
You are comprised of only so many moments, many of them already gone. Regardless of their valence, you won’t ever get them again. Don’t wait to recognize your finitude until you are ‘cared for’ by people in a hospital working shift jobs who will not remember your name next week. This isn’t a dress rehearsal. This is it. Right now. Time is slipping by even as you read this, but it’s better understood as you are slipping by right now. Finitude was a pill, but now it’s a coin, and on its other side is mortality.
The time won’t come when things are finally calm and figured out. The Problem with Problems is not the problems but the fact that they will never end. So drop that poisoned dream. Death is coming; you don’t know when, and when it arrives, it takes everything you cared about with it.
Mortality makes it impossible to ignore the absurdity of living solely for the future. Where's the logic in constantly postponing fulfillment until some later point in time when soon enough you won't have any “later" left.
I happen to be alive, and there's no cosmic law entitling me to that status. Being alive is just happenstance, and not one more day of it is guaranteed.
All this nonsense about being productive, achieving your dreams, ‘getting an education’, are purposive uses of time. They are examples of trading your guaranteed current moments in exchange for your non-guaranteed future moments. To be clear, this is not inherently bad. You should sacrifice some now to save for retirement later; don’t be foolish. But purposive uses of time have a knack for becoming empty substitutes for being in life.
"The purposive' man," Keynes wrote, "is always trying to secure a spurious and delusive immortality for his actions by pushing his interests in them forward into time. He does not love his cat, but his cat's kittens; nor in truth the kittens, but only the kittens' kittens, and so on forward forever to the end of cat-dom. For him, jam is not jam unless it is a case of jam tomorrow and never jam today. Thus by pushing his jam always forward into the future, he strives to secure for his act of boiling it an immortality." Because he never has to "cash out" the meaningfulness of his actions in the here and now, the purposive man gets to imagine himself an omnipotent god, whose influence over reality extends infinitely off into the future; he gets to feel as though he's truly the master of his time. But the price he pays is a steep one. He never gets to love an actual cat, in the present moment. Nor does he ever get to enjoy any actual jam. By trying too hard to make the most of his time, he misses his life… Results aren't everything. Indeed, they'd better not be, because results always come later and later is always too late.
‘Delay, delay, delay’ the Great Scam will tell you. ‘After all, this is not real life yet. Real life is around the corner. Just get through this’ it will whisper in your ear. ‘That fantastical future is just ahead; just keep striving. You are almost there,’ it will assure you as you produce for it the great fruits of economic value and evolutionary fitness at the cost of experiencing life.
III
You did it. You let go of the naive belief of one day mastering your time and having everything under control. You are now actually free from the shackles of time. Now, what do you do with your life?
Hell if I know.
Jung replied, "Your questions are unanswerable, because you want to know how to live. 'One lives as one can. There is no single, definite way... If that's what you want, you had best join the Catholic Church, where they tell you what's what."
That’s something you figure out based on your unique psychological fingerprint. There are biological constraints that help limit the state space of what would be best to do; I.e., Cortico-Striatal-Thalamic loops will keep individual-level happiness on a hedonic treadmill. Whatever it is you do, it is a mistake to pursue the vapid, short-lived pop-culture sense of ‘happiness.’ James Hollis, a psychoanalyst, offers a principle instead of a direct answer:
The idea that when you're facing a significant fork in the road, or a choice about how to live your life, a better question than asking "What will make me happy?" is "Does this choice enlarge me or diminish me?". Choose uncomfortable enlargement over comfortable diminishment whenever you can.
But even now, we’re trying too hard. Spending too much time figuring out ‘meaning’ in life may accidentally give off the impression that you are important. At the end of the day2, It doesn’t really matter how you use your time; the universe could not care less. Burkeman encourages ‘cosmic insignificance therapy’ - which is simply sitting with this revelation when things seem stressful. You don’t have a cosmic significance. The blunt truth is you are a blip that will be forgotten in three generations. When the Grand Importance of everything fades away, you are left with the here and now.
We're all in the position of medieval stonemasons, adding a few more bricks to a cathedral whose completion we know we'll never see. The cathedral's still worth building, all the same.
Add your small brick, step back and marvel at the cathedral, and move on. That’s how mortals should manage their time.
IV
A handful of more actionable tips and tricks for managing time as a mortal living in the modern world (many taken from his short course on the Waking Up app, here):
Redefine what counts as an interruption: Avoiding context switching, setting aside dedicated time, etc. are all good in theory, but they come at an unexpected price. Living a life with a strong emphasis on not getting interrupted makes the experience of being interrupted really unpleasant. And it causes more things to be defined as ‘an interruption’. If you go through life with the default assumption that it is filled with people and things that will ‘get in the way’ of your plans, then that’s what happens - you just find people and things constantly in the way. But who is to blame for this experience? Them or you? Often, interruptions aren’t interruptions; they are simply life.
Avoid rigid structures of your time: To pretend that things have to happen at a specific time is to ignore the reality of an unpredictable life. Instead of having an immutable morning routine, have a running order. Start at the top, and do as much as you can. A plan, afterward, is just a thought that the universe has no obligation to carry out.
It’s worse than you think: Often in life, problems that are impossible (you literally lack the time needed) masquerade as ‘hard’ problems that just need more thought and effort put into them. For example, pretend you are concerned about what the future holds, so you engage in constant effortful planning. Relentlessly preparing for all the failure modes you can envision. But preparing for the future in this sense isn’t just ‘hard’. It’s impossible. Unpredictable things happen, and sometimes they have harsh consequences. This is a fact that no amount of preparation will change. Of course, planning and preparing for an uncertain future is a useful thing to do, but it won’t ever reduce uncertainty to zero. Realizing this, you notice how much of your negative experience arises not from the problem itself, but from your efforts to (impossibly) resolve it.
Rivers, not buckets: There is too much wheat (as opposed to chaf) in the world. You will continue to get deluged with Podcasts, books, and activities that have a legitimate claim to your attention. They are interesting. We naturally think of placing these things into ‘buckets’ as they come to our attention. For example, you hear about a book that you want to read, and it goes on your ever-growing reading list - i.e., the 'book bucket’. The bucket slowly builds up, and you try your best to empty it out by reading it, but you can never keep up. The same goes for podcasts, articles, and all sorts of information. This approach won’t work as long as there is so much relevant, interesting information flowing around you. Instead, we should think of these things as items in a stream passing us by. Approaching it in this way, you get to relax and ‘sit on the riverbank’ as it were. Water (books, podcasts, articles, opportunities, etc.) that flows by you isn’t something you missed out on or didn’t handle properly. It is just the river passing by. Dip your toes in when you want, but don’t try to capture it all - there will be more coming along. The truth is, you have no other option. The buckets were overflowing.
The chief resident in my training program pued me aside during the first week of residency and told me the following: some days, you will be a great doctor and a shitty husband/father (staying late, working weekends, the family left to fend for themselves). On other days, you would be a shitty doctor and a great husband/parent (leaving mountains of work to the next shift so you leave on time, setting hard boundaries on bringing work home, etc.). That is just being human, but make sure to put the hospital second whenever you can because it will endlessly eat at your life if you let it.
pun alert