Last updated April 10, 2022

Status:: { Books MOC Author:: Medium:: #literature/books/finished Tags:: Links: { Four Thousand Weeks- Time Management for Mortals Application

{ Four Thousand Weeks- Time Management for Mortals

Introduction

The introduction emphasizes the restrictions and scarcity of our time, and the ways we’ve obsessed over it through routines, productivity practices, and

Productivity is a trap. Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster. Nobody in the history of humanity has ever achieved “work-life balance,” whatever that might be, and you certainly won’t get there by copying the “six things successful people do before 7:00 a.m.” The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control—when the flood of emails has been contained; when your to-do lists have stopped getting longer; when you’re meeting all your obligations at work and in your home life; when nobody’s angry with you for missing a deadline or dropping the ball; and when the fully optimized person you’ve become can turn, at long last, to the things life is really supposed to be about. Let’s start by admitting defeat: none of this is ever going to happen. But you know what? That’s excellent news.

• Maybe cramming all these hours isn’t the play.

1

• There are different ways we can perceive time:
  • Task-oriented is when we base our satisfaction on our productivity
    • In earlier days, people wouldn’t stress over being overworked during busy days or being unproductive during quiet days.
  • Deep time is when we don’t pay attention to the time, and just do things
    • How are we supposed to get into flow state if all we do is check the clock?
• By viewing time as a resource and trying to optimize it, time management becomes a rigged game that never leads to personal contentment
  • This book is claiming that sacrificing long-term is worse because the long-term is never guaranteed
• The author has gone through the motions of time management
• Time management with an aim for long-term success can be tied to neurosis, one’s inner struggle against the distressing constraints of reality

our culture’s ideal is that you alone should control your schedule, doing whatever you prefer, whenever you want—because it’s scary to confront the truth that almost everything worth doing, from marriage and parenting to business or politics, depends on cooperating with others, and therefore on exposing yourself to the emotional uncertainties of relationships.

• I don’t know what to say about this one… there definitely is some truth to it

• Ultimately, we need to learn to acknowledge and accept reality and its limitations, and to stop sacrificing our mental health for the unattainable dream

  • we want to do, so we can stop being so harsh on ourselves

Limit-embracing attitude

• Organize our day knowing that we don’t have enough time for everything

• Can be incorporated by knowing that we don’t have time for everything, so we can stop beating ourselves up for failing

  • Just be conscious in our decisions, and don’t feel bad about FOMO as its always inevitable

• Hurrying can turn into a never-ending cycle where we become angry at things in the world that are slowing down our hustle, causing us to be more frugal with our time

  • Instead, we should reduce friction and accept our mortality through a limit-embracing attitude

seeing and accepting our limited powers over our time can prompt us to question the very idea that time is something you use in the first place. There is an alternative: the unfashionable but powerful notion of letting time use you, approaching life not as an opportunity to implement your predetermined plans for success but as a matter of responding to the needs of your place and your moment in history.

• Ties in with finding our purpose

• Ultimately, this chapter helps us break out of the ideology that infinite productivity and efficiency is a guaranteed way for contentment

2 - The Efficiency Trap

• No matter your status in the economic ladder, you will always feel overwhelmed with the feeling to do more
• Recommends “How to live on 24 hours a day”, except for the fact that it leads to fullfillment; we shouldn’t expect to get things done just because we are spending more time, especially due to our constantly expanding aspirations
• Email is like an infinite ladder, and the most we can do is improve our efficiency or understand our limitations

the only route to psychological freedom is to let go of the limit-denying fantasy of getting it all done and instead to focus on doing a few things that count.

• today’s big 3, prioritizing

The technologies we use to try to “get on top of everything” always fail us, in the end, because they increase the size of the “everything” of which we’re trying to get on top.

• Why settle for less when you can have more?

• The more urgency we have towards completing everything, the less contemplation we’ll have to consider whether things truly are important

• Attending to minute and irrelevant distractions prevent us from the unbroken, quality time we require for our more important tasks

learn to stay with the anxiety of feeling overwhelmed, of not being on top of everything, without automatically responding by trying to fit more in

• embrace the unfinished to continue working on what’s most important
  • Can also be applied to existential overwhelm; resist the urge to consume more, and understand that we cannot consume everything to fully enjoy the things we do have time for. Don’t treat it as a checklist, but as the experience it truly is.

Convenience

• When we free up our time through suggested practices, we are then obligated to use that time to do more things, increasing our amount of stress and overwhelm
• Can lead to a conflict with our own inner preferences, and makes us resent practices that aren’t as convenient

3

• We are time, our mortality is one of our important qualities?
• To live fully, we need to understand the unpredictability of our death and the options we turn down when choosing how we spend our time
• Believing that we live forever devalues everything and our experiences, nothing is ever at stake

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.

when you’re trying to Master Your Time, few things are more infuriating than a task or delay that’s foisted upon you against your will, with no regard for the schedule you’ve painstakingly drawn up in your overpriced notebook. But when you turn your attention instead to the fact that you’re in a position to have an irritating experience in the first place, matters are liable to look very different indeed. All at once, it can seem amazing to be there at all, having any experience, in a way that’s overwhelmingly more important than the fact that the experience happens to be an annoying one.

• Actively choosing how we spend our time is an affirmation to what’s most important
  • The joy of missing out, being happy because we’re doing what we want to do

4 - Better Procrastinator

• Procrastination is inevitable due to the amount of things we want to do, so we must master it
• Time management techniques should be measured by whether it helps you neglect the right things

Principles for choosing from various important activities

• Pay yourself first in time

  • Important things vs things we enjoy, leisure time
    • If we always schedule important things, we’ll end up little time for leisure as the amount of important things always piles up
      • Implemented through spending 1 hour on most important projects, and then self-meetings for reflection?

• Limit work in progress

  • No more than 3 projects
  • Helps us actually make progress when we block chunks of time

• Resist middling priorities

  • warren buffet- top 25 things in life, choose top 5 and actively avoid bottom 20

    You need to learn how to start saying no to things you do want to do, with the recognition that you have only one life.

• Perfection paralysis

  • If we’re procrastinating on something because we fear a lack of perfection, our standards will ensure it, so we might as well start because we would never have

11 - Staying on the Bus

• Patience is becoming more valuable as it helps us resist impulsive urges of speed, finding satisfaction in your current moment
  • Not just a way of living life, but a skill
    • Face the unknown and uncertainty to eventually come across the right answer
      • Useful for abstract solutions, maintaining romantic relationships
• Harvard experiment where you look at a painting for 3 hours straight
  • Initially you resist the absurd time length, but at some point you embrace it

Principles of patience

• Embrace having problems
  • We believe there will eventually be a state with no problems
    • Impossible, as problems comprise our life’s satisfaction
• Embrace radical incrementalism
  • Slow game vs chunking things to promote sustainability
    • 10 mins to 4 hours, weekends off
  • The urge to continue working on something past your time allotment is due to impatience on something unfinished, strengthening our patience and our ability to return to our projects again and again
    • wow
• originality lies on the far side of unoriginality
  • We need to be comfortable with staying a bit longer on paths, longer than our peers
  • To truly know, we need to stay

12 - The Loneliness of the Digital Nomad

• Our time becomes more valuable when other people also share such free time

  • The desire for belongingess and relation

• When people set out for independent grinds, they live truly lonely lives

  Mark Manson wrote, back when he was still a nomad himself. “Last year, I saw the Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China and Machu Picchu in the span of three months … But I did all this alone.” A fellow wanderer, Manson learned, “burst into tears in a small suburb in Japan watching families ride their bikes together in a park,” as it dawned on him that his supposed freedom—his theoretical ability to do whatever he wanted, whenever he chose—had put such ordinary pleasures beyond reach. p. 236

  • Is the isolation worth the missed memories and human belonging?
  • It’s harder to develop deep relationships due to a lack of shared space and time
    • How are you supposed to have familial dinners??

• In Sweden, usage for anti-depressants fell when people got on vacation simultaneously

• Thus, it’s important to stay in sync with other people’s timeframes

  • ex) Same bedtime, same breaks, weekends for relaxation, etc

• Also applies to activities done in that time

• Normal productivity advice helps us control our own time management

  • morning routines, personal schedules, sayhing no

• Consider breaking out of rigid scheduling to let relational life override your plans for the week, to remind us that our time should be shared

13 - Cosmic Insignificance Therapy

• The author claims that the safety of religion, ensuring satisfaction once we go to heaven, is being replaced by consumerism, ensuring satisfaction once we have the luxuries in life
• Questioning and being critical of our life helps us work towards finding out what our most fulfilling use of our time would be
  • Covid has helped us achieve that, giving us a pause to spend more time with family, allowing us time to show gratitude to other’s compassion
    • Think about the enriching activities and aspects we want to resume in our lives

Which is why it’s useful to begin this last stage of our journey with a blunt but unexpectedly liberating truth: that what you do with your life doesn’t matter all that much—and when it comes to how you’re using your finite time, the universe absolutely could not care less.

• When we start to get overwhelmed, we can remember that at the end of the day, what we do doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of the universe

And it is likewise “implausible, for almost all people, to demand of themselves that they be a Michelangelo, a Mozart, or an Einstein … There have only been a few dozen such people in the entire history of humanity.” In other words, you almost certainly won’t put a dent in the universe. Indeed, depending on the stringency of your criteria, even Steve Jobs, who coined that phrase, failed to leave such a dent. Perhaps the iPhone will be remembered for more generations than anything you or I will ever accomplish; but from a truly cosmic view, it will soon be forgotten, like everything else.

No wonder it comes as a relief to be reminded of your insignificance: it’s the feeling of realizing that you’d been holding yourself, all this time, to standards you couldn’t reasonably be expected to meet. And this realization isn’t merely calming but liberating, because once you’re no longer burdened by such an unrealistic definition of a “life well spent,” you’re freed to consider the possibility that a far wider variety of things might qualify as meaningful ways to use your finite time. You’re freed, too, to consider the possibility that many of the things you’re already doing with it are more meaningful than you’d supposed—and that until now, you’d subconsciously been devaluing them, on the grounds that they weren’t “significant” enough.

• It is highly unlikely we will reach such levels of mastery, so we might as well start

Cosmic insignificance therapy is an invitation to face the truth about your irrelevance in the grand scheme of things. To embrace it, to whatever extent you can. (Isn’t it hilarious, in hindsight, that you ever imagined things might be otherwise?) Truly doing justice to the astonishing gift of a few thousand weeks isn’t a matter of resolving to “do something remarkable” with them. In fact, it entails precisely the opposite: refusing to hold them to an abstract and overdemanding standard of remarkableness, against which they can only ever be found wanting, and taking them instead on their own terms, dropping back down from godlike fantasies of cosmic significance into the experience of life as it concretely, finitely—and often enough, marvelously—really is.

14 - Human Disease

• By accepting all the things we can’t do, we get to be in the present, focusing on what’s in front of us without having to worry about what we have to do next week

On December 15, 1933, Carl Jung wrote a reply to a correspondent, Frau V., responding to several questions on the proper conduct of life, and his answer is a good one with which to end this book. “Dear Frau V.,” Jung began, “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.” By contrast, the individual path “is the way you make for yourself, which is never prescribed, which you do not know in advance, and which simply comes into being itself when you put one foot in front of the other.” His sole advice for walking such a path was to “quietly do the next and most necessary thing. So long as you think you don’t yet know what that is, you still have too much money to spend in useless speculation. But if you do with conviction the next and most necessary thing, you are always doing something meaningful and intended by fate.” A modified version of this insight, “Do the next right thing,” has since become a slogan favored among members of Alcoholics Anonymous, as a way to proceed sanely through moments of acute crisis. But really, the “next and most necessary thing” is all that any of us can ever aspire to do in any moment. And we must do it despite not having any objective way to be sure what the right course of action even is. Fortunately, precisely because that’s all you can do, it’s also all that you ever have to do. If you can face the truth about time in this way—if you can step more fully into the condition of being a limited human—you will reach the greatest heights of productivity, accomplishment, service, and fulfillment that were ever in the cards for you to begin with. And the life you will see incrementally taking shape, in the rearview mirror, will be one that meets the only definitive measure of what it means to have used your weeks well: not how many people you helped, or how much you got done; but that working within the limits of your moment in history, and your finite time and talents, you actually got around to doing—and made life more luminous for the rest of us by doing—whatever magnificent task or weird little thing it was that you came here for.

Five Questions

1. Where in your life or your work are you currently pursuing comfort, when what’s called for is a little discomfort?

• Ask ourselves if every singificant decision in life diminishes or enlarges us
• Choose uncomfortable enlargement over uncomfortable diminishment

2. Are you holding yourself to, and judging yourself by, standards of productivity or performance that are impossible to meet?

• Make sure you’re not trying to achieve the impossible

3. In what ways have you yet to accept the fact that you are who you are, not the person you think you ought to be?

• Don’t try to mask the pain of our current selves/mortality by trying to be someone new

4. In which areas of life are you still holding back until you feel like you know what you’re doing?

• Most aspects in life require us to learn as we go

5. How would you spend your days differently if you didn’t care so much about seeing your actions reach fruition?

• Instead of solely focusing on our results, think about the change and impact we’re making in the grand scheme of things
• What can we do today that can be meaningful for the world?
  • Helping build bricks

Afterword

• Hope prevents us from realizing the seriousness of the situation, so we adress it differently

“Abandoning hope is an affirmation, the beginning of the beginning,” Chödrön says. You realize that you never really needed the feeling of complete security you’d previously felt so desperate to attain. This is a liberation. Once you no longer need to convince yourself that the world isn’t filled with uncertainty and tragedy, you’re free to focus on doing what you can to help. And once you no longer need to convince yourself that you’ll do everything that needs doing, you’re free to focus on doing a few things that count.

The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short. But that isn’t a reason for unremitting despair, or for living in an anxiety-fueled panic about making the most of your limited time. It’s a cause for relief. You get to give up on something that was always impossible—the quest to become the optimized, infinitely capable, emotionally invincible, fully independent person you’re officially supposed to be. Then you get to roll up your sleeves and start work on what’s gloriously possible instead.

Embracing Fintude

1. Adopt a “fixed volume” approach to productivity.

• Have two todo lists:
  • One for all the tasks (open), and a closed one that only contains x amount
• Also provide a fixed volume to your work
  • Parkinson’s law

2. Serialize, serialize, serialize.

• Only focus on one big project at a time before moving on to the next
  • Reduces anxiety from over-responsibility
  • Focusing on one helps us bear with the anxiety of not working on other things

3. Decide in advance what to fail at.

• Come to terms with your underperformance in a certain life area to mitigate the pain
  • ex) Accepting you failed the exam lmao
• Don’t be afraid to do the bare minimum sometimes

4. Focus on what you’ve already completed, not just on what’s left to complete.

• Keep track of finished things for the day
  • Small wins

5. Consolidate your caring.

• Choose what we want to care about

6. Embrace boring and single-purpose technology.

• Remove social media
• Grayscale

7. Seek out novelty in the mundane.

• It is possible we perceive our time through the amount of information processed
  • Childhood lasts a while since we spend lots of time doing new things, but as we grow older, we begin to fall into routines and familiar environments
    • Same house, same partner, same job, etc
  • We can counteract this by further exploring these rather mundane activities our lives are now filled with
    • Meditation, playing with children, photography, journalling

8. Be a “researcher” in relationships.

when presented with a challenging or boring moment, try deliberately adopting an attitude of curiosity, in which your goal isn’t to achieve any particular outcome, or successfully explain your position, but, as Hobson puts it, “to figure out who this human being is that we’re with.” Curiosity is a stance well suited to the inherent unpredictability of life with others, because it can be satisfied by their behaving in ways you like or dislike—whereas the stance of demanding a certain result is frustrated each time things fail to go your way.

9. Cultivate instantaneous generosity.

• When we want to do good for someone, do it instantly
• Just helps with general hapiness of others and yourself

10. Practice doing nothing.

• If we can’t live with idleness, then we won’t have the skill to think fast and slow to do what truly is important
  • Similar to how grinding is useless if it’s not even what we want to do

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.

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Created:: 2021-12-15