Four Thousand Weeks

The trouble it addresses

Oliver Burkeman wrote a weekly column on psychology and self-improvement for The Guardian for many years, and he has said that he spent much of that time as a productivity enthusiast, trying one system after another in the hope that the right one would finally let him get on top of everything. Four Thousand Weeks, published in 2021, is the book of someone who concluded that the hope itself was the problem.

Its title comes from a simple calculation. A person who lives to eighty has had a little over four thousand weeks. Put that way, a lifetime seems almost absurdly short, and most of the ways people try to manage it look like attempts to avoid facing that fact. The trouble the book addresses is the anxious feeling of never doing enough, and the productivity culture that promises to cure it and instead makes it worse.

The exercises

Expect to fail at getting everything done. Burkeman calls the core problem the efficiency trap. The faster you work through tasks, the more tasks arrive, because demand expands to fill capacity: answer emails quickly and more emails come back. The first exercise is to stop treating this as a personal failing and accept it as a fact of finite life. There will always be more worth doing than can be done.

Choose what to neglect. If not everything can be done, then life is made of choices about what not to do. Burkeman retells a story, often told about Warren Buffett, in which a person lists their twenty-five most important goals, circles the top five and is told to avoid the other twenty at all costs, because they are the most tempting distractions. He notes that the story is probably apocryphal, but the lesson holds: the good things you are not choosing are the hardest to give up.

Keep a short list. Among the practical tools at the end of the book, Burkeman recommends a fixed-volume approach: keep a limited list of tasks you are actively working on, perhaps ten, and add a new one only when another is finished. He recommends working on one large project at a time, serialising rather than running many in parallel, and deciding in advance what to fail at, which parts of life to let slide for a while so that others can get proper attention.

Notice what is done. Because the to-do list never empties, he suggests keeping a “done list”, which turns the day’s record from a reminder of what is undone into evidence of what was achieved.

Choose dull tools. Devices designed to capture attention defeat any attempt to spend time well. He recommends technology that does one thing, and making distracting apps harder to reach.

Find novelty in the ordinary. Time seems to speed up as people age, partly because routine days leave few distinct memories. Rather than chasing new experiences, Burkeman suggests paying closer attention to ordinary ones, which makes them richer and more memorable.

Practise patience and doing nothing. The book argues that much of the restlessness of modern life comes from impatience, from wanting things to go faster than they can. Some things, such as relationships, creative work and expertise, simply take time. He suggests practising doing nothing for short periods, letting go of the urge to control what happens next.

The picture of a life behind them

Beneath the practical tools is a philosophical claim, drawn partly from Martin Heidegger. For Heidegger, human beings are fundamentally finite, and our awareness of death is not one fact among others but the condition that gives our choices their weight. To live authentically is to accept that finitude rather than flee it into busyness. Burkeman translates the idea into everyday terms. Our refusal to accept limits makes us anxious and scattered; our acceptance of them lets us commit to things wholeheartedly.

He also borrows from the psychologist Carl Jung’s idea of the eternal youth, the person who refuses to commit to anything because commitment would close off other possibilities, and from what he calls cosmic insignificance therapy. Seen against the scale of the universe, our lives are tiny, and that recognition can be a relief rather than a threat. It frees us from the impossible burden of making every moment count in some grand sense, and allows us to do what matters on an ordinary human scale.

The book ends with what Burkeman calls a beyond-hope approach to life. Once one stops hoping that a perfect system will one day free one from limits, one can begin living within them.

Carrying it into ordinary work

The book’s challenge to working life is pointed. Many organisations run on the premise that, with the right tools and enough effort, everything can be done. Burkeman’s argument suggests that every plan is also a choice about what will not be done, and that pretending otherwise causes overload and poor priorities.

Two practices are worth trying at once. Limit your active work to a fixed number of items, and do not start a new one until one is finished. And at the start of each quarter, name explicitly what you will neglect so that something more important can have your attention. Telling your team what you are choosing not to do is often more useful than telling them what you will do.