Four Thousand Weeks : Time Management for Mortals (9780374715243) Read online

  But the main effect for ordinary citizens of the USSR, as the writer Judith Shulevitz has explained, was to destroy the possibility of social life. It was a simple question of scheduling. Two friends assigned to two different calendar groups would never be free to socialize on the same day. Husbands and wives were supposed to be assigned to the same group, but they often weren’t, placing intense stress on families; and for obvious reasons, Sunday religious gatherings were disrupted, too—neither of which posed a problem from Moscow’s point of view, since it was part of communism’s mission to undermine the rival power centers of family and church. (E. G. Richards, a historian who chronicled the experiment, noted that “Lenin’s widow, in good Marxist fashion, regarded Sunday family reunions as a good enough reason to abolish that day.”) As one worker rather daringly complained to the official newspaper Pravda: “What are we to do at home if the wife is in the factory, the children in school, and no one can come to see us? What is left but to go to the public tea room? What kind of life is that, when holidays come in shifts, and not for all workers together? That’s no holiday, if you have to celebrate it by yourself.” The restructured workweek persisted in some form until 1940, when it was abandoned because of problems it caused with the maintenance of machinery. But not before the Soviet government had inadvertently demonstrated how much of the value of time comes not from the sheer quantity you have, but from whether you’re in sync with the people you care about most.

  Keeping Together in Time

  There is an even more visceral sense, as well, in which time just feels realer—more intense, more vivid, more filled with meaning—when you’re synchronized well with others. In 1941, a young American named William McNeill was drafted into the United States Army and sent for basic training at a camp on a dusty expanse of Texas scrubland. Nominally, his task was to learn how to fire antiaircraft guns, but since the camp had only one such gun among thousands of trainees, and since even that gun wasn’t fully functional, the officers in charge filled the long stretches of empty time with traditional military marching drills instead. On the face of it, as even a novice like McNeill understood, such exercises were completely pointless: by the time of the Second World War, troops were being transported across large distances in trucks and trains, not on foot; and in the era of the machine gun, to engage in formal marching in the heat of battle itself was essentially asking the enemy to slaughter you. And so McNeill was unprepared for the way in which the experience of marching with his fellow soldiers overwhelmed him:

  Marching aimlessly about on the drill field, swaggering in conformity with prescribed military postures, conscious only of keeping in step so as to make the next move correctly and in time somehow felt good. Words are inadequate to describe the emotion aroused by the prolonged movement in unison that drilling involved. A sense of pervasive well-being is what I recall; more specifically, a strange sense of personal enlargement; a sort of swelling out, becoming bigger than life, thanks to participation in collective ritual … Moving briskly and keeping in time was enough to make us feel good about ourselves, satisfied to be moving together, and vaguely pleased with the world at large.

  The experience stuck with McNeill, and after the war, when he became a professional historian, he returned to the idea in a monograph called Keeping Together in Time. In it, he argues that synchronized movement, along with synchronized singing, has been a vastly underappreciated force in world history, fostering cohesion among groups as diverse as the builders of the pyramids, the armies of the Ottoman Empire, and the Japanese office workers who rise from their desks to perform group calisthenics at the start of each workday. Roman generals were among the first to discover that soldiers marching in synchrony could be made to travel for far longer distances before they succumbed to fatigue. And some evolutionary biologists speculate that music itself—a phenomenon that has proved difficult to account for in terms of Darwinian natural selection, except as a pleasurable by-product of more important mechanisms—might have emerged as a way of coordinating large groups of tribal warriors, who could move in unison by following rhythms and melodies, where other forms of communication would have proved too cumbersome for the job.

  In daily life, as well, we fall into synchrony all the time, usually without realizing it: at the theater, applause gradually organizes itself into a rhythm; and if you walk down the street alongside a friend, or even a stranger, you’ll soon find your paces starting to match. This subliminal urge toward coordinated action is so powerful that even sworn rivals can’t resist it. It would be difficult to imagine two men more committed to defeating each other—on a conscious level, at least—than the sprinters Usain Bolt and Tyson Gay, competing for the men’s hundred-meter title at the World Athletics Championships in 2009. But a study based on a frame-by-frame analysis of the race shows that despite presumably being consumed by the desire to win, Bolt couldn’t help falling into line with Gay’s steps. And Bolt almost certainly benefited as a result: other research has indicated that conforming to an external rhythm renders one’s gait imperceptibly more efficient. So it’s likely that Gay, in spite of himself, helped his opponent to reach a new world record.

  And as dancers know, when they lose themselves in the dance, synchrony is also a portal to another dimension—to that sacred place where the boundaries of the self grow fuzzy, and time seems not to exist. I’ve felt it as a member of a community choir, when the sharp and flat tones of amateur voices combine into a perfection that few of the singers involved could attain on their own. (The extraordinary psychological benefits of choral singing, one 2005 study drily concluded, are not reduced “when the vocal instrument is of mediocre quality.”) For that matter, I’ve felt it in settings that are even more mundane—working my monthly shift at the food cooperative, for example, slinging boxes of carrots and broccoli onto the conveyor belt, in time with other workers I barely know but with whom, for a few hours, I share a bond that feels deeper than the one I have with some of my real friends. For a while, it’s as if we’re participating in the communal rhythms of a monastery, in which the synchronized hours of prayer and labor impart coherence and a sense of shared purpose to the day.

  Something mysterious is at work in such moments—and there may be no better proof of how potent it is than the fact that it can be harnessed for dangerous and indeed fatal ends. From the point of view of military commanders, after all, the chief benefit of synchrony among soldiers isn’t that they’ll march for longer distances. It’s that once they feel they belong to something greater than themselves, they’ll be more willing to lay down their life for their unit. Midway through a rehearsal of Handel’s Messiah in a high-ceilinged church, it becomes just about possible for an amateur singer to imagine how a person might enter that state of mind. The world “doesn’t open up into a million shimmering dimensions of hope and possibility when I sing alone,” the writer and choir member Stacy Horn observes. That happens only “when I’m surrounded by my fellow choristers, and all the different sounds we’re making combine to leave us thrumming in harmony—lit up together like fireflies flashing in synchrony by whatever masterpiece is currently racing through our brains, bodies, and hearts.”

  The Freedom to Never See Your Friends

  The question is, What kind of freedom do we really want when it comes to time? On the one hand, there’s the culturally celebrated goal of individual time sovereignty—the freedom to set your own schedule, to make your own choices, to be free from other people’s intrusions into your precious four thousand weeks. On the other hand, there’s the profound sense of meaning that comes from being willing to fall in with the rhythms of the rest of the word: to be free to engage in all the worthwhile collaborative endeavors that require at least some sacrifice of your sole control over what you do and when. Strategies for achieving the first kind of freedom are the sort of thing that fills books of productivity advice: ideal morning routines, strict personal schedules, and tactics for limiting how long you spend answering email each day, plus
homilies on the importance of “learning to say no”—all of them functioning as bulwarks against the risk that other people might exert too much influence over how your time gets used. And undoubtedly these have a role to play: we do need to set firm boundaries so that bullying bosses, exploitative employment arrangements, narcissistic spouses, or a guilty tendency toward people-pleasing don’t end up dictating the course of every day.

  And yet the trouble with this kind of individualist freedom, as Judith Shulevitz points out, is that a society in thrall to it, as ours is, ends up desynchronizing itself—imposing upon itself something surprisingly similar, in its results, to the disastrous Soviet experiment with a staggered five-day week. We live less and less of our lives in the same temporal grooves as one another. The unbridled reign of this individualist ethos, fueled by the demands of the market economy, has overwhelmed our traditional ways of organizing time, meaning that the hours in which we rest, work, and socialize are becoming ever more uncoordinated. It’s harder than ever to find time for a leisurely family dinner, a spontaneous visit to friends, or any collective project—nurturing a community garden, playing in an amateur rock band—that takes place in a setting other than the workplace.

  For the least privileged, the dominance of this kind of freedom translates into no freedom at all: it means unpredictable gig-economy jobs and “on-demand scheduling,” in which the big-box retailer you work for might call you into work at any moment, its labor needs calculated algorithmically from hour to hour based on sales volume—making it all but impossible to plan childcare or essential visits to the doctor, let alone a night out with friends. But even for those of us who genuinely do have much more personal control over when we work than previous generations ever did, the result is that work seeps through life like water, filling every cranny with more to-dos, a phenomenon that seemed to only intensify during the coronavirus lockdown. It starts to feel as though you, your spouse, and your closest friends have all been assigned to different color-coded Soviet work groups. The reason it’s so hard for my wife and me to find an hour in the week for a serious conversation, or for me and my three closest friends to meet for a beer, isn’t usually that we “don’t have the time,” in the strict sense of that phrase, though that’s what we may tell ourselves. It’s that we do have the time—but that there’s almost no likelihood of it being the same portion of time for everyone involved. Free to pursue our own entirely personal schedules, yet still yoked to our jobs, we’ve constructed lives that can’t be made to mesh.

  All this comes with political implications, too, because grassroots politics—the world of meetings, rallies, protests, and get-out-the-vote operations—are among the most important coordinated activities that a desynchronized population finds it difficult to get around to doing. The result is a vacuum of collective action, which gets filled by autocratic leaders, who thrive on the mass support of people who are otherwise disconnected—alienated from one another, stuck at home on the couch, a captive audience for televised propaganda. “Totalitarian movements are mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals,” wrote Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism. It’s in the interests of an autocrat that the only real bond among his supporters should be their support for him. On those occasions when synchronized action does pierce through the isolation, as during the worldwide demonstrations that followed the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in 2020, it’s not unusual to hear protesters describe experiences that call to mind William McNeill’s “strange sense of personal enlargement”—a feeling of time thickening and intensifying, tinged with a kind of ecstasy.

  Like our other troubles with time, our loss of synchrony obviously can’t be solved exclusively at the level of the individual or the family. (Good luck persuading everyone in your neighborhood to take the same day off work each week.) But we do each get to decide whether to collaborate with the ethos of individual time sovereignty or to resist it. You can push your life a little further in the direction of the second, communal sort of freedom. For one thing, you can make the kinds of commitments that remove flexibility from your schedule in exchange for the rewards of community, by joining amateur choirs or sports teams, campaign groups or religious organizations. You can prioritize activities in the physical world over those in the digital one, where even collaborative activity ends up feeling curiously isolating. And if, like me, you possess the productivity geek’s natural inclination toward control-freakery when it comes to your time, you can experiment with what it feels like to not try to exert an iron grip on your timetable: to sometimes let the rhythms of family life and friendships and collective action take precedence over your perfect morning routine or your system for scheduling your week. You can grasp the truth that power over your time isn’t something best hoarded entirely for yourself: that your time can be too much your own.

  13.

  Cosmic Insignificance Therapy

  The Jungian psychotherapist James Hollis recalls the experience of one of his patients, a successful vice president of a medical instruments company, who was flying over the American Midwest on a business trip, reading a book, when she was accosted by a thought: “I hate my life.” A malaise that had been growing in her for years had crystallized in the understanding that she was spending her days in a way that no longer felt as if it had any meaning. The relish she’d had for her work had drained away; the rewards she’d been pursuing seemed worthless; and now life was a matter of going through the motions, in the fading hope that it somehow all might yet pay off in future happiness.

  Perhaps you know how she felt. Not everyone has this kind of sudden epiphany, but 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. Or maybe you’re familiar with the experience of returning to your daily routines, following an unusually satisfying weekend in nature or with old friends, and being struck by the thought that more of life should feel that way—that it wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect the deeply engrossing parts to be more than rare exceptions. The modern world is especially lacking in good responses to such feelings: religion no longer provides the universal ready-made sense of purpose it once did, while consumerism misleads us into seeking meaning where it can’t be found. But the sentiment itself is an ancient one. The writer of the book of Ecclesiastes, among many others, would instantly have recognized the suffering of Hollis’s patient: “Then I considered all that my hands had done, and the toil I had spent in doing it, and behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun.”

  It’s deeply unsettling to find yourself doubting the point of what you’re doing with your life. But it isn’t actually a bad thing, because it demonstrates that an inner shift has already occurred. You couldn’t entertain such doubts in the first place if you weren’t already occupying a new vantage point on your life—one from which you’d already begun to face the reality that you can’t depend on fulfillment arriving at some distant point in the future, once you’ve gotten your life in order, or met the world’s criteria for success, and that instead the matter needs addressing now. To realize midway through a business trip that you hate your life is already to have taken the first step into one you don’t hate—because it means you’ve grasped the fact that these are the weeks that are going to have to be spent doing something worthwhile, if your finite life is to mean anything at all. This is a perspective from which you can finally ask the most fundamental question of time management: What would it mean to spend the only time you ever get in a way that truly feels as though you are making it count?

  The Great Pause

  Sometimes this perceptual jolt affects a whole society at once. I wrote the first draft of this chapter under lockdown in New York City, during the coronavirus pandemic, when, amid the grief and anxiety, it became normal to hear people express a sort of bittersweet
gratitude for what they were experiencing: that even though they were furloughed and losing sleep about the rent, it was a genuine joy to see more of their children, or to rediscover the pleasures of planting flowers or baking bread. The enforced pause in work, school, and socializing put on hold numerous assumptions about how we had to spend our time. It turned out, for example, that many people could perform their jobs adequately without an hour-long commute to a dreary office, or remaining at a desk until 6:30 p.m. solely in order to appear hardworking. It also turned out that most of the restaurant meals and takeout coffees I’d grown accustomed to consuming, presumably on the grounds that they enhanced my life, could be forsworn with no feeling of loss (a double-edged revelation, given how many jobs depended on providing them). And it became clear—from the ritual applauding of emergency workers, grocery runs undertaken for housebound neighbors, and many other acts of generosity—that people cared about one another far more than we’d assumed. It was just that before the virus, apparently, we hadn’t had the time to show it.

  Things hadn’t changed for the better, obviously. But alongside the devastation that it wrought, the virus changed us for the better, at least temporarily, and at least in certain respects: it helped us perceive more clearly what our pre-lockdown days had been lacking and the trade-offs we’d been making, willingly or otherwise—for example, by pursuing work lives that left no time for neighborliness. A New York writer and director named Julio Vincent Gambuto captured this sense of what I found myself starting to think of as “possibility shock”—the startling understanding that things could be different, on a grand scale, if only we collectively wanted that enough. “What the trauma has shown us,” Gambuto wrote, “cannot be unseen. A carless Los Angeles has clear blue skies, as pollution has simply stopped. In a quiet New York, you can hear the birds chirp in the middle of Madison Avenue. Coyotes have been spotted on the Golden Gate Bridge. These are the postcard images of what the world might be like if we could find a way to have a less deadly effect on the planet.” Of course, the crisis also revealed underfunded healthcare systems, venal politicians, deep racial inequities, and chronic economic insecurity. But these, too, contributed to the feeling that now we were seeing what actually mattered, what demanded our attention—and that on some level we’d known it all along.