Why you’ll always have too much to do... and only 4,000 WEEKS to do it in!
Four Thousand Weeks Oliver Burkeman
Bodley Head £16.99
★★★★
It’s a brilliant title. At first glance, it means nothing, but the simple explanation makes it unforgettable: 4,000 weeks is the sum total of an average human life. If you live to the age of 80, you will have lived roughly 4,000 weeks. If you make it to 90, you will have lived nearly 4,700 weeks.
Speaking for myself, the news sent me into a blind panic. Have I been wasting my time? I struggled to think of anything I did the year before last, or last week, or even yesterday.
Before he started writing this book, Oliver Burkeman asked various friends how many weeks the average person would live. Understandably, one friend thought the correct figure might be roughly 310,000 weeks. But, as Burkeman points out, 310,000 weeks actually takes you back to the dawn of civilisation.
Life is shockingly brief. Burkeman offers another yardstick, just as alarming, for measuring its extreme brevity. Throughout history, there have been people who have lived to the age of 100. When each of these people was born, there were other people alive at the same time who had themselves reached the age of 100. By this measure, it would take just 35 lifetimes to go back to the golden age of the Egyptian pharaohs, 20 lifetimes to go back to Jesus, and just five to go back to the court of King Henry VIII.
Panic stations! As Burkeman points out, most self-help books concentrate on helping you maximise the short time you have been given. They tell you how to cram as much activity as possible into your life, offering urgent tips on how you can do more work, make more friends, reach more goals, follow more dreams and achieve more inner wisdom than anyone else you know.
New technology also attempts to cut back on the time we waste. We think that if we buy this microwave, or that app, then we will have more time to spend on the things that really matter. But Burkeman sees it all as a wild goose chase. ‘The technologies we use to try to “get on top of everything” always fail us, in the end,’ he writes, ‘because they increase the size of the “everything” of which we’re trying to get on top.’
‘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 post.’
By the same yardstick, he argues that the time that is freed up by all these time-saving devices is immediately filled with yet more things you feel you have to do. This means, for instance, that the more emails you answer, the more emails you are doomed to receive.
‘The spirit of the times is one of joyless urgency,’ says the novelist Marilynne Robinson, and the evidence presented here makes it hard to disagree. Burkeman snappily defines social media as ‘a giant machine for getting you to spend your time caring about the wrong things’.
Unlike most self-help gurus, he is not remotely pious, and often confesses to falling victim to the distractions he is urging the reader to combat. For instance, he outs himself as a former ‘Twitter junkie’. ‘My newborn son would do something adorable,
and I’d catch myself speculating about how I might describe it in a tweet, as if what mattered wasn’t the experience but my (unpaid!) role as a provider of content for Twitter.’
He also used to be what he calls ‘a productivity geek’, forever trying to work out new ways of squeezing as much activity into the time available. He would obsessively schedule his day into 15-minute blocks, and make lists of his A, B and C priorities, and use a kitchen-timer to work only in periods of 25 minutes, with fiveminute breaks. ‘Using these techniques often made me feel as if I were on the verge of ushering in a golden era of calm, undistracted productivity and meaningful activity. But it never arrived. Instead, I just got more stressed and unhappy.’
Four Thousand Weeks is peppered with good stories. To illustrate the futility of overwork, Burkeman tells the tale of the New York businessman who talks to a Mexican fisherman. The fisherman says that he works for only a few hours a day, and spends the rest of his time drinking wine in the sun and playing music with his friends. The businessman is appalled by such time-wasting, and tells him that if he worked harder, he could invest the profits in a fleet of boats, pay others to do the fishing, make millions, and retire early. ‘And what would I do then?’ asks the fisherman. ‘Ah, well, then,’ replies the businessman, ‘you could spend your days drinking wine in the sun and playing music with your friends.’
What, then, are Burkeman’s solutions to our current blizzard of needless activity, most of it designed to cut back on the need for needless activity?
His book is subtle, provocative and multilayered, but the essence of his advice is to try to live in the moment, even if, as he wittily admits, the effort to live in the moment can itself be a distraction from living in the moment.
Too much of our time, he says, is spent in anxious preparation for the future. It is almost as though the present is merely a tedious rehearsal to slog our way through, in readiness for the curtain-call. This is particularly apparent in baby manuals, which either advocate strict rules or ‘natural parenting’, but which almost all regard the baby solely in terms of its future adulthood. Here he quotes a wise line from Tom Stoppard’s play The Coast Of Utopia: ‘Because children grow up, we think a child’s purpose is to grow up. But a child’s purpose is to be a child.’
Much of his advice is unshowy but sensible: accept that there will always be too much to do, and too many choices. Settle for what you have, and stop riddling your life with prevarication. Once you’ve made a choice, you inevitably feel happier and less anxious. This applies to everything from picking a holiday to looking for a partner. He cannily notes that people in search of an ideal partner are bound to be disappointed, as they tend to be yearning for two characteristics that are, in fact, mutually exclusive: unlimited excitement and unlimited stability. ‘Seeking both in one real human isn’t much less absurd than dreaming of a partner who’s both six and five feet tall.’
Above all, Burkeman argues that we can never hope to conquer our allotted 4,000 weeks of time, so instead, we should ride with it, and learn to enjoy the moment.
Sometimes while reading his advice, I found myself flinching. There can be an alarming ‘Panic! Don’t Panic! Panic! Don’t Panic!’ rhythm to his observations.
For all his Zen-like calls for calm, he also betrays signs of never quite having conquered many of his former busy-bee instincts. Having pooh-poohed list-making at the start of the book, in the final chapter he issues a ten-point list of tips. These include keeping ‘two to-do lists, one “open” and one “closed”’. He then suggests a third list ‘for tasks that are “on hold” ’. Two pages later, he advises also keeping a ‘“done list”, which… you then gradually fill with whatever you accomplish through the day’. Doesn’t this come perilously close to the sort of twitchy, workaholic behaviour he has spent the rest of the book warning us against?
But for the most part, Four Thousand Weeks offers many wise pointers to a happier, less stress-filled life, with none of the usual smug banalities of the self-help genre. To my surprise, I noticed that many of my current favourite activities – walking, cooking risotto, playing croquet and dancing the conga – are entirely in tune with Burkeman’s suggestion that we should slow down, live in the moment, and engage in communal activities. Happy days!