265 - Time, productivity, and purpose: insights from Four Thousand Weeks | Oliver Burkeman

KEYPOINTS

• 01

  Chasing productivity is often an attempt to avoid the emotional fact that we're finite.

  Burkeman, author of Four Thousand Weeks, tried about 100 productivity systems. He kept feeling just 'a month or two' away from effortless control, then starting again with a new app or notebook. He realised the systems never gave him the emotional peace he was after, so the problem was the question he was asking. He quotes Richard Bach: we teach what we most need to learn. He says he still struggles with all of it.

• 02

  Treating time as a resource to master is a fairly modern idea, and it makes us feel at odds with time.

  Philosophers have always grappled with death. But viewing time as something separate from you, to be handled efficiently, spread mainly around the industrial era. Burkeman argues that much of the stress around time comes from this view. Our most meaningful moments tend to be the ones where it falls away. He links the urge to David Brooks's 'insecure overachievers,' whose sense of worth depends on output.

• 03

  Efficiency brings in more work.

  In any system with effectively unlimited demands, processing faster just attracts more. Answer email quickly and people reply to your replies, and you get a reputation that brings more email. Burkeman says he misread David Allen's Getting Things Done, which is about staying calm with too much to do, as a way to stop having too much to do.

• 04

  The 'big rocks in the jar' story is rigged.

  The professor brought only as many big rocks as would fit. In real life there are always more things that truly matter than you have time for. The real skill is choosing which important things to neglect. Elizabeth Gilbert puts it this way: the true art of saying no is saying no to things you do want to do. In the (probably misattributed) Buffett story, you list 25 goals and then avoid numbers 6 to 25, the middling priorities, at all costs.

• 05

  Time is a network good, valuable mainly when shared.

  Unlike money, time is more like phones: valuable because others have them too. The Soviet Union tried a staggered five-day week with colour-coded groups so factories never stopped. It meant friends and even spouses rarely shared days off, and someone wrote to Pravda that a holiday spent alone in a café isn't a holiday. Burkeman says modern flexible schedules do something similar, which is why three friends struggle to meet for a beer. Choirs, sports and families all depend on shared time.

• 06

  Seeing that the task is impossible, not just hard, is freeing.

  In 2014, on a Brooklyn park bench, Burkeman was trying to schedule an impossible week. He realised it simply couldn't be done, and felt relief. Moving from 'really hard' to 'impossible' ends the self-blame. He suggests the same applies to longevity: living forever is impossible, but you can still improve your odds and the quality of your life.

• 07

  Meaning doesn't have to be cosmic.

  Burkeman draws on philosopher Iddo Landau. The nihilist thinks he's facing facts but is holding onto impossibly godlike standards for meaning. You don't call a dog useless because it can't drive. Helping a friend through a crisis, parenting and being a good neighbour are real meaning on a human scale. Attia describes swinging from wanting a surgical-manual 'legacy' in residency to feeling nothing matters, and lands on mattering to his family and friends.

• 08

  Living for the future postpones life.

  Burkeman quotes Keynes on the 'purposive' man who loves not his cat but its kittens, and their kittens, forever. Projecting meaning forward gives a false sense of immortality. Attia admits he spends enjoyable days thinking about the next one. Burkeman suggests 'atelic' activities (philosopher Kieran Setiya's term), such as hiking, done for their own sake.