Four Thousand Weeks

we’ve been granted the mental capacities to make almost infinitely ambitious plans, yet practically no time at all to put them into action.

(You’d feel less self-loathing about wasting a morning on Facebook if the supply of mornings were inexhaustible.)

When you’re faced with too many demands, it’s easy to assume that the only answer must be to make better use of time, by becoming more efficient, driving yourself harder, or working for longer – as if you were a machine in the Industrial Revolution – instead of asking whether the demands themselves might be unreasonable.

I tried to align my daily actions with my goals, and my goals with my core values. 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.

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.

The real measure of any time management technique is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things.

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.’

We’ll do almost anything to avoid burning our bridges, to keep alive the fantasy of a future unconstrained by limitation, yet having burned them, we’re generally pleased that we did so.

When two spouses agree to stay together ‘for better or worse’, rather than bolting as soon as the going gets tough, they’re making an agreement that not only will help them weather the rough patches, but that also promises to make the good times more fulfilling, too – because having committed themselves to one finite course of action, they’ll be much less likely to spend that time pining after fantastical alternatives.

A better analogy, McNamee suggests, is that we’re the fuel: logs thrown on Silicon Valley’s fire, impersonal repositories of attention to be exploited without mercy, until we’re all used up.

in reality you never even get a single week, in the sense of being able to guarantee that it will arrive, or that you’ll be in a position to use it precisely as you wish. Instead, you just find yourself in each moment as it comes, already thrown into this time and place, with all the limitations that entails, and unable to feel certain about what might happen next.

Jesus says much the same thing in the Sermon on the Mount (though many of his later followers would interpret the Christian idea of eternal life as a reason to fixate on the future, not to ignore it). ‘Take no thought for the morrow, for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself,’ he advises.8 Then he adds the celebrated phrase ‘sufficient to the day is the evil thereof’, a line I’ve only ever been able to hear in a tone of wry amusement directed at his listeners: Do you first-century working-class Galileans really lead such problem-free lives, he seems to be teasing them, that it makes sense to invent additional problems by fretting about what might happen tomorrow?

– there will be a last time that you visit your childhood home, or swim in the sea, or make love, or have a deep conversation with a certain close friend. Yet usually there’ll be no way to know, in the moment itself, that you’re doing it for the last time.

Our obsession with extracting the greatest future value out of our time blinds us to the reality that, in fact, the moment of truth is always now – that life is nothing but a succession of present moments, culminating in death, and that you’ll probably never get to a point where you feel you have things in perfect working order.

And since the dawn of capitalism, it’s been radical in a second way: while capitalism gets its energy from the permanent anxiety of striving for more, the Sabbath embodies the thought that whatever work you’ve completed by the time that Friday (or Saturday) night rolls around might be enough – that there might be no sense, for now, in trying to get any more done.

anything. Once you give up on the unattainable goal of eradicating all your problems, it becomes possible to develop an appreciation for the fact that life just is a process of engaging with problem after problem, giving each one the time it requires – that the presence of problems in your life, in other words, isn’t an impediment to a meaningful existence but the very substance of one.

many of us know what it is to suspect that there might be richer, fuller, juicier things we could be doing with our four thousand weeks – even when what we’re currently doing with them looks, from the outside, like the definition of success.

From this new perspective, it becomes possible to see that preparing nutritious meals for your children might matter as much as anything could ever matter, even if you won’t be winning any cooking awards; or that your novel’s worth writing if it moves or entertains a handful of your contemporaries, even though you know you’re no Tolstoy. Or that virtually any career might be a worthwhile way to spend a working life, if it makes things slightly better for those it serves.

‘Time is the substance I am made of,’ writes Jorge Luis Borges.1 ‘Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.’

But ‘at a certain age’, writes the psychotherapist Stephen Cope, ‘it finally dawns on us that, shockingly, no one really cares what we’re doing with our life.