Oliver Burkemen wants you to remember that life is brief and you can’t have it all.

This may sound like a bummer, but Burkemen argues that embracing this truth can make our lives much happier, more fulfilling, and more purposeful. This argument is at the core of his book, “Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals.”

In this post, I’ll summarize the key ideas in Burkemen’s book.

Burkeman’s thesis is a unique one. Most time management books (and self-help books for that matter) promise to help us pack more into our limited time. They tell us that yes, despite all of the evidence to the contrary, we can accomplish all of our goals. They encourage the belief that, if we just set SMART goals, establish bulletproof habits, find the right format for our tracker, and meditate every day, we can get everything done.

Burkemen calls bullshit. We’re busy enough, he says. The answer is not finding new ways to become even busier. Productivity, he writes, is a trap:

“Time feels like an unstoppable conveyor belt, bringing us new tasks as fast as we can dispatch the old ones; and becoming ‘more productive’ just seems to cause the belt to speed up.”

Instead, he argues, we would be much better off accepting and embracing the truth that none of us has the time to do everything we want to do. By acknowledging the limitations of our relatively short existence, we can approach the question of how we should spend our time more honestly and healthily.

After all, the average life, as the title alludes to, is only four thousand weeks.

This will be the first part of a two-part post. In part one, we’ll take a look at four key ideas for managing time as mortals. I’ll cover the following:

1. “More” is not the answer: why we can’t solve our problems by packing more in
2. The perils of distraction: how distraction can prevent us from making meaningful choices about how to use our time
3. Playing cat and mouse with the truth: ways that we hold ourselves back by avoiding the truth about our limited time
4. The most important word in time management: one way that we can begin to reclaim our time

“More” is not the answer

Becoming more productive only makes us feel busier.

Many of us suffer from feelings of pervasive busyness. There is always more to do than there is time to do it. Our common response to this is… to try and do everything anyway. So we resolve to wake up earlier, reboot our organizational system, and find new efficiencies.

Burkemen argues that the answer to the problem of feeling like we don’t have enough time is not cramming more into our already full lives because becoming more productive often has the perverse effect of making us busier.

When I worked at Google, I noticed that the faster I responded to emails the more I seemed to get. It was like my reward for getting through my inbox was an even fuller inbox. This does make sense. When you want something — like an answer to a question or a document — you’ll reach out to someone who will reliably give you a quick response.

Becoming more efficient in our lives does the same thing. It just frees up time to get more done, which makes us feel even busier.

What’s more, this efficiency-minded approach to life causes us to live our lives in the future. We’re always looking beyond what we’re doing to the moment when we can cross it off our to-do list and move on to the next task.

This is, ultimately, an empty and meaningless way to live because it robs us of the opportunity to fully experience what we are doing.

The perils of distraction

Distraction makes it more challenging to make good use of our limited time.

We are surrounded by endless opportunities for distraction. The internet, and social media in particular, only makes those opportunities more accessible and more enticing.

The consequences of frittering our time away on Tik-Tok, Burkemen says, are quite dire:

“Attention, on the other hand, just is life: 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.”

While it’s easy to bash social media companies (and they do deserve their fair share of bashing), we’re often all too complicit. Distraction feels good. It’s a “place” to go when things feel difficult, boring, or unpleasant in some way.

We can help ourselves by working to accept uncomfortable experiences, like boredom, and offering less resistance to them. But Burkemen isn’t so quixotic as to think distraction can be banished from our lives. It’s part of the human experience. He writes:

“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 paradoxical reward for accepting reality’s constraints is that they no longer feel so constraining.”

Playing cat and mouse with the truth

Many of us spend copious amounts of energy and large chunks of our lives avoiding both (1) negative emotions and experiences, and (2) the truth that we have very little time and that we will die.

Burkeman argues that being willing to experience negative and uncomfortable emotions and accepting our mortality is critical to achieving the clear-sightedness required to make good decisions about how to use our time. Avoiding reality is always bound to fail, no matter how hard we try.

We often do this by dodging difficult questions and experiences, procrastinating and waffling in indecision, and numbing ourselves to reality with distractions.

#1: We avoid difficult questions and uncomfortable experiences to protect ourselves.

For example, Burkemen writes:

“We don’t want to feel the anxiety that might arise if we were to ask ourselves whether we’re on the right path, or what ideas about ourselves it could be time to give up.

We don’t want to risk getting hurt in relationships or failing professionally.

We don’t want to accept that we might never succeed in pleasing our parents or in changing certain things we don’t like about ourselves.”

We worry that grappling with difficult questions and taking big risks will expose us to life as it is: imperfect and scary. Instead, we live in our heads, where we are in control, secure, and free to paint a picture of reality without limitations, exactly as we would like it to be.

#2: We use procrastination and its close cousin, indecision, as another way to avoid reality.

When we procrastinate, we sustain the illusion that we are in control of our lives and not subject to the whims of others, of randomness, or systems that are bigger than any individual.

When we don’t make a decision, we believe that we’re protecting ourselves by avoiding making the wrong decision. But not deciding is itself a decision, and usually a suboptimal one when compared to the other choices available. Usually, procrastination and indecision just leave us worse off.

#3: We numb ourselves with distraction.

I summarized Burkemen’s take on distraction above. But it’s worth bringing up again in the context of avoiding the truth of our mortality. In the United States, work is one of the most common ways we distract ourselves.

When we immerse ourselves in work and all of the busyness that it entails, we don’t have to think about all of the other problems in our lives: our health, our families, our kids.

All three of these techniques are acts of self-deception. They delude us into believing we are masters of our fate when in fact, we are not.

The most important word in time management

The secret to time management is in identifying what not to do and feeling okay about it. Burkemen, therefore, makes the argument that “no” is the most important word in time management.

He writes: “the real measure of any time management technique is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things.”

He offers three suggestions for becoming a “better procrastinator”

1. Pay yourself first. If something matters to you, the only way to make sure it happens is to do it for at least some amount of time, no matter how many other things are begging for your attention. Claim the time and accept the consequences, among which are saying no to any number of other things.
   
   
2. Limit the number of “works in progress” at any given time. Burkemen references Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry’s book, “Personal Kanban” which recommends working on a maximum of three “works in progress” at one time.
   
   
3. Resist the “allure of middling priorities.” This means saying no to the things you genuinely want to do in service of the things you really want to do.

Read more

• Part 2 coming soon
• Burkemen’s argument that accepting the truth of our limited time will make us better off overlaps with Bill Perkin’s arguments in his recent book, Die With Zero.