In his book, “4000 weeks”, Oliver Burkeman questions our desperation behind thinking of time as a resource external to our being. The ideas in the book challenged me to think about the insecurity that comes from trying to live an ultra productive life and what fuels it. In this post I try and describe my key takeaways from this book.
Time as a conveyer belt
There are various analogies of time in the book but the one that stuck with me was that of a conveyer belt which is constantly running with containers that we must fill with activities. Those containers that pass us by empty are a loss. A medieval peasant was less a slave to time than us. He milked the cows when they needed milking, woke up and slept with the sun, watched a cockfight when there was one and so on. There was no external schedule to keep up with and they lived in “timelessness”.
The biggest problem this creates is that we think every moment is an investment for a future goal. According to the ancient Greek philosophers, accepting our “finitude” (limitations of our existence) forms the basis of living life which loosely translates to making choices knowing full well we can’t achieve everything we want in our lifetime. In other words, choosing to miss out on some things is what makes our choices meaningful.
The efficiency trap
There is simply no reason to try and control time as work and aspirations and needs expand to fill available time. By trying to make every passing moment productive, we only end up creating more need to be more productive. The reality of todays world is that we can never catch up with Joneses nor keep our inboxes 0 for long nor fulfill all our needs as all these goal posts keep shifting.
Another side effect of becoming more efficient is more people come to use us as their reliable go to person. This automatically means we get more less important or low quality stuff on our plate, which we have to weed through to get to the important stuff.
Not making our peace of mind dependent on trying to be ruthlessly efficient is actually a better way to find peace of mind. For what it’s worth, I am still trying to make peace with this rather radical idea of not constantly trying to be more efficient and in fact seeking out boredom and idleness.
A related point that I found quite intriguing, was that of the “convenience trap”. It is when we “save time” that would have otherwise gone into a chore, through a use of a clever app or on-demand workforce, etc. This all very well but the original experience, the one that was more inconvenient or painful, was somehow more meaningful. Startups that aim to understand “pain points” or “inconvenience” and then remove them from our lives or make them easy, can often make things less meaningful.
When we render a process more convenient, we drain it of its meaning
Always settle
This was my favourite part of the book. We are essentially always settling - either in choosing an option (settling for an option while a better one may be out there) or continuing to seek a better option (settling to use your limited time in pursuit of a better option rather than do something else with it). The reason we must never be afraid of settling is because it is a given. Only in our fantasy life do we find that we do our best or find the most ideal flawless partner or spend money most optimally, etc. In reality everything is finite and flawed so in comparison to our fantasy we will always fall short or fail. This should ideally liberate us 🙂
Egocentricity bias and cosmic insignificance
Egocentricity bias is when we believe what we do is supremely more important than regular stuff that others do. It is thinking that our 4000 or so weeks are somehow instrumental and the years before were leading up to this. The reality is the univserse just doesn’t give a 💩 about us. In the larger scheme of things the whole human history happened in the blink of an eye. Taking the time to make peace with this is called the Cosmic Insignificance Theory. Once we make peace with the fact that we are perhaps not likely to change the world, we can find meaning in some of the things that we already do, like taking care of a relative, parenting, dog sitting for a friend, teaching the elderly couple next door how to use their new iphone, etc.
On the power of patience and anxiety
Anxiety comes from our urge to feel secure about future. The reason we obsess exessively over travel plans or worry about relationships is that we want certainity in these things.
Anxiety, however, never dies as when we finally encounter the future (imagine reaching the terminal on time and cooling your shoes) the anxiety is all in the past and new anxiety about the new impending future (will the flight reach on time, will i find a taxi cab, etc) strikes. Relief from anxiety comes from knowing that there is absolutely no assurance that the future will pan out in the one we like.
Patience is about exploring what lies on the other end of the loss of control over how fast things are going around us. In that sense, patience has the power to alleviate anxiety. Taking the time to let reality unfold at its own speed allows solutions to present themselves.
The author describes three simple ways to harness patience
- Embrace having problems - life devoid of problems is meaningless. A problem is something that demands we address ourselves to it and that helps us grow.
- Embrace radical incrementalism - don’t ignore the impact of improving oneself in small incremements.
- Originality lies on the other side of unoriginality - stay on the course of learning and accumulating skills by copying and redoing what others have done. Our original work almost always arrives once we’re ready for it.
I run a startup called Harmonize. We are hiring and if you’re looking for an exciting startup journey, please write to jobs@harmonizehq.com. Apart from this blog, I tweet about startup life and practical wisdom in books.