You only have 4,000 weeks to live. Forget productivity and learn to prioritize.
We’ve been granted the mental capacities to make almost infinitely ambitious plans, yet practically no time at all to put them into action.” This, an opening line from Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, belongs on a tombstone.
It was during the pandemic that Burkeman – former reporter at The Guardian and author of hit book The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking – was struck by the reality of a short existence. The average human in the western hemisphere has a lifespan of just 4,000 weeks. I didn’t believe it at first. A quick calculation says that’s approximately 77 years, but even that doesn’t fully land until Burkeman points out the frankly tiny number of just 310,000 weeks since the beginning of human civilization with the ancient Sumerians of Mesopotamia.
Suddenly, the sayings of evolutionary biologists – such as, “On a clock, humanity accounts for just the last minute before midnight” – weigh in with a new impact. We are a tiny fraction of a minuscule portion of a vast planet, galaxy, universe, and time. So what do we do now?
Get more done by doing less
Four Thousand Weeks says, first, stop trying to do everything. Our dreams and plans are destined to occupy a timeline far longer than our fleshy bodies will ever survive. That is humanity’s curse, says Burkeman, and the only way to combat it is to accept it; to accept our finitude and our limitation.
In this regard, Four Thousand Weeks breaks the trend of ‘productivity’ books published in recent years – in fact, productivity is the antithesis of this book. Burkeman highlights work from historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan, who noted that when homemakers first accessed labour-saving devices like washing machines and vacuum cleaners, no time was saved, because society’s standards of cleanliness rose to offset the balance. Likewise, think of your inbox and the never-ending quest to hit ‘zero’ unread emails; the more emails you respond to, the more replies you get.
We must abandon productivity in favour of prioritization. In a March 2022 discussion with Steven Bartlett on his podcast, The Diary of a CEO, Burkeman points to a semi-apocryphal lesson from mogul Warren Buffet for inspiration.
His tip is to make a list of your top 25 priorities – then put a circle around the top five. Avoid numbers 6-25 like the plague, because they’re just interesting enough to distract you from the top five, but not valuable enough to be worth your full attention.
I tried this exercise with my much-prized to-do list this quarter. I did indeed deliver the top five priorities, and I encountered few consequences or setbacks from neglecting the others. However, I felt that my focus was limited, trained on the five goals; it was like guiderails on a bowling lane. There was no room for the stunning shot that teeters on the edge – for drama, tension, legend. There was only a series of predictable, clinical strikes.
Prioritization is for winners, not hobbyists, and feelings of satisfaction are conditional on whether you really believe the five items are the most important.
Inhibitory cortex and the human condition
Burkeman suggests that “arguably, time management is all life is”. In addition to millennia of philosophy that has focused on presence and mindfulness – not, as Burkeman jokes, on cranking out as many tasks as possible by being ‘productive’ or cooking all our dinners for the week in one big batch on Sundays – there is a strong biological element to support the connection between prioritization and the human condition. Almost one-fifth of the human brain is made up of ‘inhibitory cortex’ that is designed to supress other thoughts, movements, actions, speech and feelings. It affects almost every part of what makes us ‘human.’ As a neuroscience professor once explained it to me, “Being human is less a case of ‘free-will’, and more a case of ‘free-won’t’.”
In this way, the human brain is designed to make choices – speak or shout, blue or yellow, kindness or cruelty, one task or the other. With the choices described in Four Thousand Weeks underpinned by our very biology, I have started to think Burkeman (and the plethora of social essayists and philosophers he references) is right: discernment and brevity is the purpose of our race. Being able to calculate possibilities and choose between them is the gift.
Read it today, before you run out of time
As Burkeman writes, “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 7:00am… It’s painful to confront how limited your time is, because it means that tough choices are inevitable and that you won’t have time for all you once dreamed you might do.”
Four Thousand Weeks is thoughtful, crisp and (in places) brutal. There are no consulting-friendly models or panellist-happy talking points. Instead, this book is a stark philosophical essay that has earned its place on bookshelves around the world. It will change your way of thinking from the first page, and help readers approach life differently: as Burkeman says, live life not as an opportunity to implement predetermined plans for success, but a chance to respond to the needs of your place and your moment in history.
Kirsten Levermore is deputy editor of Dialogue.
