# Four Thousand Weeks ![[Assets/4915e8e413a7ec4b2f3dcd15697130ab_MD5.jpg]] ## Metadata - Author: [[Oliver Burkeman]] - Full Title: Four Thousand Weeks - Category: #books ## Highlights - Assuming you live to be eighty, you’ll have had about four thousand weeks. ([Location 36](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=36)) - The world is bursting with wonder, and yet it’s the rare productivity guru who seems to have considered the possibility that the ultimate point of all our frenetic doing might be to experience more of that wonder. ([Location 55](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=55)) - So this book is an attempt to help redress the balance—to see if we can’t discover, or recover, some ways of thinking about time that do justice to our real situation: to the outrageous brevity and shimmering possibilities of our four thousand weeks. ([Location 60](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=60)) - 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. ([Location 163](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=163)) - The real problem isn’t our limited time. The real problem—or so I hope to convince you—is that we’ve unwittingly inherited, and feel pressured to live by, a troublesome set of ideas about how to use our limited time, all of which are pretty much guaranteed to make things worse. ([Location 177](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=177)) - Historians call this way of living “task orientation,” because the rhythms of life emerge organically from the tasks themselves, rather than from being lined up against an abstract timeline, the approach that has become second nature for us today. (It’s ([Location 219](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=219)) - The fundamental problem is that this attitude toward time sets up a rigged game in which it’s impossible ever to feel as though you’re doing well enough. Instead of simply living our lives as they unfold in time—instead of just being time, you might say—it becomes difficult not to value each moment primarily according to its usefulness for some future goal, or for some future oasis of relaxation you hope to reach once your tasks are finally “out of the way.” ([Location 282](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=282)) - 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. ([Location 390](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=390)) - the more firmly you believe it ought to be possible to find time for everything, the less pressure you’ll feel to ask whether any given activity is the best use for a portion of your time. ([Location 560](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=560)) - The real measure of any time management technique is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things. ([Location 837](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=837)) ## New highlights added May 2, 2025 at 2:56 PM - we’ve been granted the mental capacities to make almost infinitely ambitious plans, yet practically no time at all to put them into action. ([Location 42](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=42)) - (How can you be sure that people feel so busy? It’s like the line about how to know whether someone’s a vegan: don’t worry, they’ll tell you.) ([Location 65](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=65)) - Meanwhile, no catalog of our time-related troubles would be complete without mentioning that alarming phenomenon, familiar to anyone older than about thirty, whereby time seems to speed up as you age—steadily accelerating until, to judge from the reports of people in their seventies and eighties, months begin to flash by in what feels like minutes. It’s hard to imagine a crueler arrangement: not only are our four thousand weeks constantly running out, but the fewer of them we have left, the faster we seem to lose them. ([Location 84](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=84)) - In the modern world, the American anthropologist Edward T. Hall once pointed out, 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. ([Location 107](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=107)) ## New highlights added May 12, 2025 at 1:06 PM - Consider all the technology intended to help us gain the upper hand over time: by any sane logic, in a world with dishwashers, microwaves, and jet engines, time ought to feel more expansive and abundant, thanks to all the hours freed up. But this is nobody’s actual experience. Instead, life accelerates, and everyone grows more impatient. It’s somehow vastly more aggravating to wait two minutes for the microwave than two hours for the oven—or ten seconds for a slow-loading web page versus three days to receive the same information by mail. ([Location 114](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=114)) - It turns out that when people make enough money to meet their needs, they just find new things to need and new lifestyles to aspire to; ([Location 131](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=131)) - soon busyness becomes an emblem of prestige. ([Location 133](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=133)) - Four Thousand Weeks is yet another book about making the best use of time. But it is written in the belief that time management as we know it has failed miserably, and that we need to stop pretending otherwise. ([Location 159](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=159)) - I’ve squandered countless hours—and a fair amount of money, spent mainly on fancy notebooks and felt-tip pens—in service to the belief that if I could only find the right time management system, build the right habits, and apply sufficient self-discipline, I might actually be able to win the struggle with time, once and for all. ([Location 302](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=302)) - This struggle against the distressing constraints of reality is what some old-school psychoanalysts call “neurosis,” and it takes countless forms, from workaholism and commitment-phobia to codependency and chronic shyness. ([Location 339](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=339)) - Or we procrastinate, which is another means of maintaining the feeling of omnipotent control over life—because you needn’t risk the upsetting experience of failing at an intimidating project, obviously, if you never even start it. We fill our minds with busyness and distraction to numb ourselves emotionally. ([Location 348](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=348))