Four Thousand Weeks : Time Management for Mortals (9780374715243)

by Burkeman, Oliver

  Technically, it’s impossible to do nothing at all: as long as you remain alive, you’re always breathing, adopting some physical posture, and so forth. So training yourself to “do nothing” really means training yourself to resist the urge to manipulate your experience or the people and things in the world around you—to let things be as they are. Young teaches “Do Nothing” meditation, for which the instructions are to simply set a timer, probably only for five or ten minutes at first; sit down in a chair; and then stop trying to do anything. Every time you notice you’re doing something—including thinking, or focusing on your breathing, or anything else—stop doing it. (If you notice you’re criticizing yourself inwardly for doing things, well, that’s a thought, too, so stop doing that.) Keep on stopping until the timer goes off. “Nothing is harder to do than nothing,” remarks the author and artist Jenny Odell. But to get better at it is to begin to regain your autonomy—to stop being motivated by the attempt to evade how reality feels here and now, to calm down, and to make better choices with your brief allotment of life.

  Notes

  The page numbers for the notes that appear in the print version of this title are not in your ebook. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for the relevant passages documented or discussed.

  Introduction: In the Long Run, We’re All Dead

  the Frenchwoman who was thought to be 122 when she died in 1997: Two decades after Jeanne Calment died, a pair of Russian researchers made the startling claim that “Jeanne” was actually Yvonne, Jeanne’s daughter, who had assumed her mother’s identity upon her death years before. For the definitive account of the controversy—now largely settled in favor of the original version of events—see Lauren Collins, “Living Proof,” New Yorker, February 17 and 24, 2020.

  Biologists predict that lifespans within striking distance of Calment’s: For example, Bryan Hughes and Siegfried Hekimi, “Many Possible Maximum Lifestyle Trajectories,” Nature 546 (2017): E8–E9.

  “This space that has been granted to us”: Seneca, “De Brevitate Vitae,” in Moral Essays, vol. 2, trans. John W. Basore (Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1932), 287.

  “we will all be dead any minute”: Thomas Nagel, “The Absurd,” Journal of Philosophy 68 (1971): 716–27.

  Surveys reliably show that we feel more pressed for time: See Jonathan Gershuny, “Busyness as the Badge of Honor for the New Superordinate Working Class,” Social Research 72 (2005): 287–315.

  in 2013, research by a team of Dutch academics: Anina Vercruyssen et al., “The Effect of Busyness on Survey Participation: Being Too Busy or Feeling Too Busy to Cooperate?,” International Journal of Social Research Methodology 17 (2014): 357–71.

  It’s because our time and attention are so limited: See James Williams, Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

  “in a new kind of everlasting present”: Fredrick Matzner, quoted in Matt Simon, “Why Life During a Pandemic Feels So Surreal,” Wired, March 31, 2020, available at www.wired.com/story/why-life-during-a-pandemic-feels-so-surreal/.

  the American anthropologist Edward T. Hall once pointed out: Edward T. Hall, The Dance of Life: The Other Dimension of Time (New York: Anchor, 1983), 84.

  “a generation of finely honed tools”: Malcolm Harris, Kids These Days: The Making of Millennials (New York: Back Bay Books, 2018), 76.

  it is “possible for a person to have an overwhelming number of things to do”: David Allen, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity (New York: Penguin, 2015), 3.

  “what the martial artists call a ‘mind like water’”: Allen, Getting Things Done, 11.

  “For the first time since his creation”: John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” (1930), downloaded from www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf.

  “Life, I knew, was supposed to be more joyful than this”: Charles Eisenstein, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2013), 2.

  “The spirit of the times is one of joyless urgency”: Marilynne Robinson, The Givenness of Things: Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), 4.

  1. The Limit-Embracing Life

  St. Anthony’s fire: See Ángel Sánchez-Crespo, “Killer in the Rye: St. Anthony’s Fire,” National Geographic, November 27, 2018, available at www.nationalgeographic.com/history/magazine/2018/11–12/ergotism-infections-medieval-europe/.

  “an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences”: Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 15.

  Medieval people might speak of a task lasting a “Miserere whyle”: E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past and Present 38 (1967): 81.

  Richard Rohr, a contemporary Franciscan priest and author: Richard Rohr, “Living in Deep Time,” On Being podcast, available at https://www.wnyc.org/story/richard-rohr--living-in-deep-time/.

  “into a realm where there is enough of everything”: Gary Eberle, Sacred Time and the Search for Meaning (Boston: Shambhala, 2002), 7.

  “The clock does not stop, of course”: Eberle, Sacred Time and the Search for Meaning, 8.

  “From a low hill in this broad savanna”: Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (New York: Vintage, 1989), 255.

  “I have by sundry people [been] horribly cheated”: Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” 81. I have modernized the spelling here.

  “One thinks with a watch in one’s hand”: Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (New York: Vintage, 1974), 259.

  a book that arrived on my desk the other day: This is Brian Tracy, Master Your Time, Master Your Life: The Breakthrough System to Get More Results, Faster, in Every Area of Your Life (New York: TarcherPerigee, 2016).

  “Eternity ceased gradually to serve as the measure and focus”: Mumford, Technics and Civilization, 14.

  “we don’t have to consciously participate”: Bruce Tift, Already Free: Buddhism Meets Psychotherapy on the Path of Liberation (Boulder: Sounds True, 2015), 152.

  “We labour at our daily work more ardently”: Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 158.

  “You teach best what you most need to learn”: Richard Bach, Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah (New York: Delta, 1998), 48.

  what in German has been called Eigenzeit: Morten Svenstrup, Towards a New Time Culture, trans. Peter Holm-Jensen (Copenhagen: Author, 2013), 8.

  as the journalist Anne Helen Petersen writes: Anne Helen Petersen, “How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation,” BuzzFeed, January 5, 2019, available at www.buzzfeednews.com/article/annehelenpetersen/millennials-burnout-generation-debt-work.

  “Depressing? Not a bit of it”: Charles Garfield Lott Du Cann, Teach Yourself to Live (London: Teach Yourself, 2017), loc. 107 of 2101, Kindle.

  2. The Efficiency Trap

  Research shows that this feeling arises on every rung of the economic ladder: On the ways “time poverty” and economic poverty interact, see for example Andrew S. Harvey and Arun K. Mukhopadhyay, “When Twenty-Four Hours Is Not Enough: Time Poverty of Working Parents,” Social Indicators Research 82 (2007): 57–77. But feelings of (and complaints about) busyness are actually worse among those earning more: See Daniel Hammermesh, Spending Time: The Most Valuable Resource (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).

  As the law professor Daniel Markovits has shown: Daniel Markovits, “How Life Became an Endless, Terrible Competition,” The Atlantic, September 2019, available at www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/09/meritocracys-miserable-winners/594760/.

  the English journalist Arnold Bennett published a short and grouchy book: All quotations from How to Live on 24 Hours a Day are from the unpaginated Project Gutenberg transcription, available at www.gutenberg.org/files/2274/2274-h/2274-h.htm.

  in her book More Work for Mother:
Ruth Schwartz Cowan, “The Invention of Housework: The Early Stages of Industrialization,” in More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (London: Free Association, 1989), 40–68.

  “Work expands so as to fill the time available”: C. Northcote Parkinson, “Parkinson’s Law,” The Economist, November 19, 1955, available at www.economist.com/news/1955/11/19/parkinsons-law.

  As the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa explains: Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity, trans. Jonathan Trejo-Mathys (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).

  “The more we can accelerate our ability to go to different places”: Jonathan Trejo-Mathys, “Translator’s Introduction,” in Rosa, Social Acceleration, xxi.

  “a limitless reservoir for other people’s expectations”: Jim Benson, personal communication.

  “don’t even realize something is broken”: Alexis Ohanian, Without Their Permission: How the 21st Century Will Be Made, Not Managed (New York: Business Plus, 2013), 159.

  “I prefer to brew my coffee”: Tim Wu, “The Tyranny of Convenience,” New York Times, February 18, 2018.

  “Every morning I carefully scrape out the ash of yesterday”: Sylvia Keesmaat, “Musings on an Inefficient Life,” Topology, March 16, 2017, available at www.topologymagazine.org/essay/throwback/musings-on-an-inefficient-life/.

  “How else are we to get to know this place”: Keesmaat, “Musings on an Inefficient Life.”

  3. Facing Finitude

  “Being-towards-death”: Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), 277 and passim.

  “de-severance”: Heidegger, Being and Time, 139.

  “anxiety ‘in the face of’ that potentiality-for-Being”: Heidegger, Being and Time, 295.

  “a world is worlding all around us”: Martin Heidegger, quoted in Richard Polt, Heidegger: An Introduction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 1.

  “the brute reality on which all of us ought to be constantly stubbing our toes”: Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails (New York: Other Press, 2016), 51.

  “If I believed that my life would last forever”: Martin Hägglund, This Life: Why Mortality Makes Us Free (London: Profile, 2019), 5.

  “Heaven: Will It Be Boring?”: Quoted in Hägglund, This Life, 4.

  “Something has happened. A piece of news”: Marion Coutts, The Iceberg: A Memoir (New York: Black Cat, 2014), loc. 23 of 3796, Kindle.

  “bright sadness”: Richard Rohr, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2011), 117.

  “stubborn gladness”: A paraphrasing of Jack Gilbert’s poem “A Brief for the Defense,” published in Collected Poems (New York: Knopf, 2014), 213.

  “sober joy”: Bruce Ballard, review of “Heidegger’s Moral Ontology by James Reid,” Review of Metaphysics 73 (2020): 625–26.

  “a sort of personal affront”: Paul Sagar, “On Going On and On and On,” Aeon, September 3, 2018, available at aeon.co/essays/theres-a-big-problem-with-immortality-it-goes-on-and-on.

  “I was early … so I spent some time in a nearby park”: All quotations from David Cain in this chapter come from “Your Whole Life Is Borrowed Time,” Raptitude, August 13, 2018, available at www.raptitude.com/2018/08/your-whole-life-is-borrowed-time.

  4. Becoming a Better Procrastinator

  As the American author and teacher Gregg Krech puts it: Gregg Krech, The Art of Taking Action: Lessons from Japanese Psychology (Monkton, VT: ToDo Institute, 2014), 19.

  the extraordinarily irritating parable of the rocks in the jar: Stephen R. Covey, First Things First (New York: Free Press, 1996), 88.

  the graphic novelist and creativity coach Jessica Abel: Quotations from Jessica Abel come from “How to Escape Panic Mode and Embrace Your Life-Expanding Projects,” available at jessicaabel.com/pay-yourself-first-life-expanding-projects/.

  In their book Personal Kanban: Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry, Personal Kanban: Mapping Work, Navigating Life (Scotts Valley, CA: CreateSpace, 2011), 39.

  There is a story attributed to Warren Buffett: The tale of the purported origins of this story, and of Buffett’s comment that he can’t recall anything of the sort, is related in Ruth Umoh, “The Surprising Lesson This 25-Year-Old Learned from Asking Warren Buffett an Embarrassing Question,” CNBC Make It, June 5, 2018, available at www.cnbc.com/2018/06/05/warren-buffetts-answer-to-this-question-taught-alex-banayan-a-lesson.html.

  “it’s much harder than that”: Elizabeth Gilbert attributes this line to “a wise older woman” in a Facebook post dated November 4, 2015, available at www.facebook.com/GilbertLiz/posts/how-many-times-in-your-life-have-you-needed-to-say-thisand-do-you-need-to-say-it/915704835178299/.

  The philosopher Costica Bradatan illustrates the point: Costica Bradatan, “Why Do Anything? A Meditation on Procrastination,” New York Times, September 18, 2016.

  consider the case of the worst boyfriend ever, Franz Kafka: In addition to the original letters, reproduced in Letters to Felice, ed. Erich Heller and Jürgen Born (New York: Schocken, 1973), my account of Kafka’s relationship with Felice Bauer draws on Eleanor Bass, “Kafka Was a Terrible Boyfriend,” LitHub, February 14, 2018, available at lithub.com/kafka-was-a-terrible-boyfriend; and Rafia Zakaria, “Franz Kafka’s Virtual Romance: A Love Affair by Letters as Unreal as Online Dating,” The Guardian books blog, August 12, 2016, available at www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2016/aug/12/franz-kafkas-virtual-world-romance-felice-bauer.

  “neuroses are no different from ours”: Morris Dickstein, “A Record of Kafka’s Love for a Girl and Hate for Himself,” New York Times, September 30, 1973.

  “the future, which we dispose of to our liking”: Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2001), 9.

  “The idea of the future, pregnant with an infinity of possibilities”: Bergson, Time and Free Will, 10.

  “You must settle, in a relatively enduring way”: Robert E. Goodin, On Settling (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 65.

  Once, in an experiment, the Harvard University social psychologist Daniel Gilbert: Daniel Gilbert and Jane Ebert, “Decisions and Revisions: The Affective Forecasting of Changeable Outcomes,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 82 (2002): 503–14.

  5. The Watermelon Problem

  watching two reporters from BuzzFeed wrap rubber bands around a watermelon: Chelsea Marshall, James Harness, and Edd Souaid, “This Is What Happens When Two BuzzFeed Employees Explode a Watermelon,” BuzzFeed, April 8, 2016, available at www.buzzfeed.com/chelseamarshall/watermelon-explosion.

  “I want to stop watching so bad”: “In Online First, ‘Exploding Watermelon’ Takes the Cake,” Phys.org, April 8, 2016, available at phys.org/news/2016–04-online-watermelon-cake.html.

  “I’ve been watching you guys put rubber bands around a watermelon”: Tasneem Nashrulla, “We Blew Up a Watermelon and Everyone Lost Their Freaking Minds,” BuzzFeed, April 8, 2016, available at www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tasneemnashrulla/we-blew-up-a-watermelon-and-everyone-lost-their-freaking-min.

  according to one calculation, by the psychologist Timothy Wilson: Quoted in Jane Porter, “You’re More Biased Than You Think,” Fast Company, October 6, 2014, available at www.fastcompany.com/3036627/youre-more-biased-than-you-think.

  “baking their bodies in the sun”: Seneca, “De Brevitate Vitae,” in Moral Essays, vol. 2, trans. John W. Basore (Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1932), 327.

  the case of the Austrian psychotherapist Viktor Frankl: Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (Boston: Beacon, 2006).

  “Attention is the beginning of devotion”: Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays (New York: Penguin, 2016), loc. 166 of 1669, Kindle.

  the former Facebook investor turned detractor Roger McNamee: Quoted in “Full Q&A: Zucked Author Roger Mc
Namee on Recode Decode,” Vox, February 11, 2019, available at www.vox.com/podcasts/2019/2/11/18220779/zucked-book-roger-mcnamee-decode-kara-swisher-podcast-mark-zuckerberg-facebook-fb-sheryl-sandberg.

  In the words of the philosopher: Quoted in James Williams, Stand Out of Our Light (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), xii.

  “distracted from distraction by distraction”: T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” in Four Quartets (Boston: Mariner, 1968), 5.

  “a thousand people on the other side of the screen”: For example, in Bianca Bosker, “The Binge Breaker,” The Atlantic, November 2016, available at www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/11/the-binge-breaker/501122/.

  6. The Intimate Interrupter

  during the winter months of 1969: My account of Steve/Shinzen Young’s story, and all quotations from Young, come from my interview with him and from Shinzen Young, The Science of Enlightenment: How Meditation Works (Boulder: Sounds True, 2016).

  “the intimate interrupter”: Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays, loc. 305 of 1669, Kindle.

  “self within the self”: Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays, loc. 302 of 1669, Kindle.

  “One of the puzzling lessons I have learned”: Krech, The Art of Taking Action, 71.

  To quote the psychotherapist Bruce Tift once more: Tift, Already Free, 152.

  “a realm in which space doesn’t matter and time spreads out”: James Duesterberg, “Killing Time,” The Point Magazine, March 29, 2020, available at thepointmag.com/politics/killing-time/.

  Some Zen Buddhists hold: See, for example, John Tarrant, “You Don’t Have to Know,” Lion’s Roar, March 7, 2013, available at www.lionsroar.com/you-dont-have-to-know-tales-of-trauma-and-transformation-march-2013/.

  7. We Never Really Have Time

  “Hofstadter’s law”: Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 152.