I. The Best Self-Help Book Ever Written

I will avoid burying the lede here: I think Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks is the best self-help book ever written, and is possibly the only one worth reading, with a few exceptions.

Typically self-help books rely on the following format:

Here’s a problem with Modernity, and
Here’s a lens of looking at the problem that shows you can meaningfully change it, and
Here’s One Weird Trick you can use to fix it for good

What makes Four Thousand Weeks so good is that Burkeman shrugs his shoulders in response to the standard-issue self-help format. He says that there is no One Weird Trick, and in fact, deluding yourself into thinking there actually could be One Weird Trick that solves all of your problems is actually your biggest problem.

To get more concrete: Burkeman says that the reason why you seek Weird Tricks to become more productive is that you are in denial about your own limitations. You look at the world with tunnel vision, and think that there is One Weird Trick or Golden Technique available to make it possible to get all of your work done. But in reality, you are limited, and over long enough timescales, you will only be rewarded with a heavier workload once you consistently get all of your work done, which will then require more Weird Tricks to become even more efficient to complete, and when you succeed at that, you will eventually reach a state where it is physically impossible for you to complete all of the work assigned to you on time. Solve for the equilibrium.

Four Thousand Weeks is about what happens when you reach that equilibrium: where you have no choice but to confront the fact that you actually cannot get everything done. You realize that all of the things that you could do, with good reasons for them, far exceeds the time and attention you actually have available to give. In other words, you are permanently stretched too thin. Once you acknowledge that, the main question to answer is no longer “how can I get everything done?” but “what are the things I should actually spend my limited time doing?”

In my experience, asking those questions of yourself is extremely uncomfortable. When you stop persisting in the delusion that you could get everything done if only you had the perfectly engineered productivity system, you are forced to wrestle with the hard choices in front of you. You can no longer ignore the opportunity costs of completing each task you decide to take on. Which means you must also choose which tasks will never get done.

Ignoring accumulating tasks is the only possible way to get anything done. As Burkeman says, focusing on what matters most requires “tolerating the discomfort of knowing that, as you do so, the decks will be filling up further, with emails and errands and other to-dos, many of which you will never get around to at all.” And we would much rather make believe that we could mold ourselves in such a way that we could get everything done, than accept the plain fact that we can’t.

This is an extremely obvious point. But it is also an unacceptable affront to the self-concept of someone who is a Corporate Samurai. The Corporate Samurai likes to believe that they can operate in a state of perfection where everything asked of them is completed, with no fussing. But even for normal workers, this is a difficult thing to deal with - when they let balls drop, they will be found out by their colleagues, who will think them incompetent because they’re not getting all their work done. But those colleagues are also trying to hide from the people whose work they are not completing, and so on and so forth.

The common equilibrium that I have seen is that overloaded people (me) spend all their time trying to avoid being direct about which work they are going to complete vs. which work they will let drop because they want to avoid confronting other members of the organization with the fact that their request just isn’t high priority enough to bring to fruition. The result is a state of denial where everyone in the organization has an uneasy feeling that there is simply too much work to do for the amount of people available to do it. But it is hard to specifically point to which areas need the most help. Not without good metrics and an actual interest in tracking which work is getting done versus not.

II. Being More Effective Is Still Good, Right?

Burkeman’s sense of resignation - his thesis that you should give up on ever attaining mastery over your time - is not, I believe, a call to give up on all improvement efforts altogether.

We should still strive to be more productive and effective in daily life. Doing more good work is still, well…. Good. Some amount of selective pressure is necessary to spur innovation in the way we manage our time. If you are consistently pressed for time, you will be incentivized to look for more efficient ways to do things, or delegate them if you can assign ownership of the task to someone else.

Burkeman just asks about whether the things we are working on are worth doing at all, which is a question that many people feel like they are not allowed to ask themselves. There are an awful lot of busybodies out there who love doling out make-work, and people-pleasers like myself have a hard time ignoring them, because busybodies are very good about following up. Taking Burkeman’s advice would make you more effective by virtue of changing where your focus is directed. If it’s directed to the most important things, then you are doing things correctly. As he says, “the real measure of any time management technique is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things.”

What I like the most about Burkeman’s approach is his appeal to our common humanity: the idea that we are not trapped in this moral crucible 24/7, and that we have some choice to take a step back and consider what our own life project should consist of. Tim Ferriss coined the “deferred life plan” way back in 2005: the idea that you are postponing your real life, and that it will truly begin once you retire (or complete whatever milestone you are currently working towards). Burkeman drops this classic John Maynard Keynes quote that is worth repeating in full:

The ‘purposive’ man is always trying to secure a spurious and delusive immortality for his actions by pushing his interests in them forward into time. He does not love his cat, but his cat’s kittens; nor in truth the kittens, but only the kittens’ kittens, and so on forward forever to the end of cat-dom. For him, jam is not jam unless it is a case of jam tomorrow and never jam today. Thus by pushing his jam always forward into the future, he strives to secure for his act of boiling it an immortality.

The tragedy for those who follow the deferred life plan is that problems never go away. For those chasing retirement, they defer their lives until their health is in deep decline, and they find that they are unable to even enjoy their lives in the way they imagined. Similarly, if you’re the type of workaholic who can only decompress on vacations, you’ll always be chasing the next vacation to give yourself permission to relax.

Burkeman’s point, which he repeats over and over again (because he has to!) is that the utopian future where you think you will have everything handled simply doesn’t exist. Without fundamental changes to your way of life, your future self will likely be just as rushed and stressed out as your current self, so you cannot count on a “real life” where you magically have everything handled to begin once you solve whatever it is you think your organization or productivity problems are. There is a choice to be distracted or rushed, even though you will have just as much to do.

This realization has been helpful in getting me to set boundaries, something I had previously been very bad at doing. (I am still very bad at it, but at least I have a few!) One set of clear boundaries I have is around weekend wine night: every Friday, Saturday and Sunday night that I don’t have other plans, the default is for my wife and I to open a bottle of wine around 6:00 and enjoy some 1-on-1 time together. This means we are guaranteed to have a consistent amount of time to unwind with each other each week, and that our free time is focused on our family, not just indulging in our hobbies. If I didn’t set this boundary, I would fear that my wife and I would grow estranged. Similar boundaries exist to force me to spend time with my daughter, like dropping her off and picking her up from daycare every day, and spending 1-on-1 time with her every weekend morning. I have noticed the skulls of ambitious parents who have come before me and do not wish to repeat their mistakes.

III. The Bind of the Self-Conscious

In “You Are Here”, one of the stronger chapters of Four Thousand Weeks, Burkeman talks about the bind of the self-aware: the idea that self-consciously trying to live in the moment does not bring the promised benefits of living in the moment. And yet, he points out that there are so many things that we are doing for the last time, without even realizing that it is the last time, so we ought to slow down to appreciate them more.

This is the bind of the self-conscious: the effort to eke out more goodness from life by trying to enjoy it more does not result in real enjoyment. The real problem is effort. Straining to enjoy something is guaranteed to repel joy. Burkeman cleverly compares this to the idea of trying too hard to fall asleep, causing a night of insomniac distress.

Burkeman points the way to the resolution in a passage that I missed on my first couple of reads through the book. He says:

A more fruitful approach to the challenge of living more fully in the moment starts from noticing that you are, in fact, always already living in the moment anyway, whether you like it or not.

What I believe Burkeman is pointing at - like a lot of the McMindfulness/Western Buddhist folks who have promoted this idea - is a way to suspend effort altogether through perfect acceptance of the moment. The delusion that Four Thousand Weeks seeks to dispel is the idea that we could ever have perfect control over our time, and we crave that control because we are seeking existential security. That is, if we ever attained that control, we could relax, content that we are masters of our lives. Not that it could ever remain that way!

IV. Some Ways I’ve Changed From Reading Four Thousand Weeks

Reading Four Thousand Weeks changed my day-to-day actions more than most books in the genre.

I’m fond of saying an A+ cookbook is one that has 3 recipes that become staples in your cooking repertoire. 3 recipes that you make each about once every quarter, over a lifetime, is quite a lot of meals. (I find comparing the price of the cookbook to the price of the ingredients of each of the recipes quite instructive, as information transmission is fantastically cheap by comparison)

Likewise, I think Four Thousand Weeks is an excellent book because I’ve made three serious interventions since reading it. It’s not like they’ve doubled my salary, or made me incredibly more efficient, but they have nonetheless given me significant improvements in my quality of life.

The highest impact intervention was giving up on “clearing the decks.” For years I had implemented Getting Things Done-style weekly reviews that I did every Sunday. The main portion of those weekly reviews was spent getting my inbox down to zero so I could feel guilt-free. I would spend about an hour collecting all the emails from my inbox and disperse them to project-specific archives and follow-up folders on emails that needed responses when I returned to work. If there were requests I was waiting for updates on, I would go to my “waiting for” folder and ping people to send me updates when they were back in the office Monday morning.

This practice once made me more effective simply because I was refreshing my situation awareness of my projects more frequently. But as the scope of the things that I was responsible for exploded and I became a manager, it was no longer realistic to continue clearing the decks. My input stream became too saturated for me to be able to pick up every item, examine it, and decide where to file it; too many people (and systems) filled my inbox with junk.

Now, my approach to email is more like surfing. I scan my inbox for important messages, and if I know I will need to follow up, I will file it away as I come upon it. But I don’t sweat whether I will miss something super important; my inbox triage is good enough that the truly important items don’t slip through the cracks most of the time. And if they do, someone will remind me. I’ve learned that there is no way to escape dropping items, so I don’t worry about it too much, at least on the conscious level.

I can sense David Allen frowning at me as I let my inbox grow unwieldy (over 2000 unread emails and counting!). But some things that seem like a good idea just aren’t worth capturing. I struggle with achieving the right balance between capturing to my Kanban board (more on that below) and just letting low priority items go. As I’ve fallen more victim to the manager’s schedule, processing all the notes I collect from meetings just isn’t possible any longer, and I have to make a choice about which meetings I collect the action items from vs. action items I don’t. Otherwise, the upkeep of my glorious system would completely take over my schedule and leave no time for real work to get done.

The second thing I changed from reading Four Thousand Weeks was adopting a weekly journaling practice. This is not something discussed in the book, but is my way of grappling with my finitude. The journaling practice is fairly general, but the thing that I do at the top of each journal entry is record which week of my life it is. (At the time of writing, it’s week 1625.) The idea behind this journal is it’s written in longhand in a physical journal. I am very self-consciously producing a physical artifact that will survive decades; digital alternatives just don’t seem likely to survive that long. I will admit that I feel guilty when I sit down to write my weekly journal entry since there are always many other valuable things It feels like I’m stealing time from the present to enrich my future. (Burkeman discusses these types of activities as “atelic”; that is, they are not performed with their telos, or ultimate aim, in mind. You might just call them hobbies.)

At first, I started with a template based on the areas of my life, but in recent weeks, I’ve just recorded whatever seemed most salient about how things are going and what sort of currents are causing change in my life. On average, I get to this about every other week. Building this archive into the future will be rewarding… I hope. For now it’s mostly complaining about my struggles to be more disciplined with my time so that I actually uphold the commitment of daily exercise. I have to remind myself to break free from that and focus on capturing evergreen snapshots of how life is now, because that is the memory that will fade the most with time.

The third intervention that I employed was moving my task management to a Kanban board in Notion to help prioritize. Burkeman gives a shout-out to Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria’s book Personal Kanban, which I purchased and read. What’s nice about a Kanban board is that it helps you visualize your work-in-progress and provides limits to force you to get your work-in-progress items complete before picking up something new. While I am terrible at adhering to the rule of a maximum of 3 items in progress at any given time, I do appreciate the extra, lateral dimension a Kanban board gives me to separate backlogged items from items that are in queue, as well as an extra category of things that I expect to do today and items that are in progress. A typical digital to-do list just has one dimension (vertical), which can incorporate sorting by due date or priority level, but the Kanban’s horizontal dimension makes it easier to see how items are spread out. Plus there’s the satisfaction in sliding things to the “done” category. (For those who are interested, I recommend buying the book, but there are just two basic rules: 1. Visualize your work and 2. Limit your work in progress. As long as you follow these basic rules, you will be more effective)

V. Missing the Point

But to flatten the book down to the tactical changes that I’ve made is somewhat missing the point.

There is a quote on p28 that is Four Thousand Weeks’s raison d'être, and worth capturing in any review of the book:

Though I’d been largely unaware of it, my productivity obsession had been serving a hidden emotional agenda. For one thing, it helped me to combat the sense of precariousness inherent to the modern world of work: if I could meet every editor’s every demand, while launching several side projects of my own, maybe one day I’d finally feel secure in my career and my finances. But it also held at bay certain scary questions about what I was doing with my life, and whether major changes might not be needed. If I could get enough work done, my subconscious had apparently concluded, I wouldn’t need to ask if it was all that healthy to be deriving so much of my sense of self-worth from work in the first place. And as long as I was always just on the cusp of mastering my time, I could avoid the thought that what life was really demanding from me might involve surrendering the craving for mastery and diving into the unknown instead. [emphasis mine]

It should be plainly obvious to you, my reader, that I am grappling with the role that work plays in my life, once again. Buying Four Thousand Weeks and writing this review is part of that process.

I orient my life around work, to the point that I feel guilty on weekend afternoons when I’m not working, because they are my one chance to have uninterrupted focus for 2-3 hour stretches during the week. It’s intensely meaningful to me because it is a competitive and social arena. It is a bottomless pit that I can sink in my time to and make good things happen for my comrades.

Things only should be a bottomless pit when survival is at stake. And, yes, while firms are engaged in fierce capitalistic competition, where some live and some die, as an employee, I have adopted an unconscious mindset that my very survival depends on my company. Obviously, if it did go under, I would still have opportunities elsewhere. Would it be a major inconvenience? Yes. But given who I’ve seen move on and secure other positions in the industry, a cool-headed assessment tells me that a) I would be able to find other work somehow and b) even though it would absolutely suck to have to move on the basis of finding other work, this does not justify sacrificing the things that make living life meaningful and working extra hours to marginally reduce the risk that my company fails.

This means that my four thousand weeks have to be a carefully-managed tradeoff between different important arenas: work, family, health and other maintenance, hobbies. I have deeply internalized that opportunity costs are a fact of life. What matters, then, is that I choose what I spend your time on carefully and commit to living intensely in the moment once I’ve made my decision. It is easy to obsess over the weight of every decision I make now that I’ve started seeing opportunity costs everywhere, and one of the temptations of the Corporate Samurai way of life is that a monomaniacal obsession with work lets you bypass recognizing these opportunity costs. One way I temper this feeling of heaviness is by preserving the potential upside of serendipity, which cannot happen without taking risks. In other words, sometimes you have to defy the urge to calculate, or the urge to be truly certain that the thing you’re engaging is capital-I important before you commit. Sometimes you can’t - and shouldn’t - know in advance, and you have to go with your gut.

VI. A Prediction

I originally wanted to submit this to publish today, May 8 2024, but wanted to add this section in due to an interesting confluence of circumstances.

Most of the above post was written in March/April 2024. As I wrote in my last post, life has been rather busy lately, with little time carved out for hobbies or leisure.

In late April, my wife and I took a 2-week vacation to Berlin (with a short stay in Philadelphia for a wedding). Foreign travel is a surefire way for me to unplug from work; I even deleted Teams and Outlook from my phone.

Now we’re back. And within 3 days at the office, a new crisis has arisen at work that begs for my attention to resolve quickly. The question is: will all this philosophizing about keeping work from taking over my life be swept away with the introduction of this new crisis? Or am I going to stick to my boundaries and sit with the tension of not acting like this situation is of life-and-death importance?

My prediction is that, at long last, my resolve to strike a balance will stick. That’s part of the reason why I’m writing this post; I view it as a kind of commitment device.

The most objective signal of whether this prediction comes true is my future posting cadence, which will be the product of my commitment to write for 10 minutes a day, every day. If I’m able to maintain that habit, I think things are going well. If not, then something new has swallowed me whole.