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

  Though I’d been largely unaware of it, my productivity obsession had been serving a hidden emotional agenda. For one thing, it helped me combat the sense of precariousness inherent to the modern world of work: if I could meet every editor’s every demand, while launching various 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. In my case, that turned out to mean committing to a long-term relationship and, later, making the decision with my wife to try to start a family—two things I’d notably failed to get done with any number of systems for getting things done. It had been more comforting to imagine that I might eventually “optimize” myself into the kind of person who could confront such decisions without fear, feeling totally in charge of the process. I didn’t want to accept that this was never going to happen—that fear was part of the deal, and that experiencing it wouldn’t destroy me.

  But (don’t worry!) we won’t be dwelling here on my personal hang-ups. The universal truth behind my specific issues is that most of us invest a lot of energy, one way or another, in trying to avoid fully experiencing the reality in which we find ourselves. We don’t want to feel the anxiety that might arise if we were to ask ourselves whether we’re on the right path, or what ideas about ourselves it could be time to give up. We don’t want to risk getting hurt in relationships or failing professionally; we don’t want to accept that we might never succeed in pleasing our parents or in changing certain things we don’t like about ourselves—and we certainly don’t want to get sick and die. The details differ from person to person, but the kernel is the same. We recoil from the notion that this is it—that this life, with all its flaws and inescapable vulnerabilities, its extreme brevity, and our limited influence over how it unfolds, is the only one we’ll get a shot at. Instead, we mentally fight against the way things are—so that, in the words of the psychotherapist Bruce Tift, “we don’t have to consciously participate in what it’s like to feel claustrophobic, imprisoned, powerless, and constrained by reality.” This struggle against the distressing constraints of reality is what some old-school psychoanalysts call “neurosis,” and it takes countless forms, from workaholism and commitment-phobia to codependency and chronic shyness.

  Our troubled relationship with time arises largely from this same effort to avoid the painful constraints of reality. And most of our strategies for becoming more productive make things worse, because they’re really just ways of furthering the avoidance. After all, it’s painful to confront how limited your time is, because it means that tough choices are inevitable and that you won’t have time for all you once dreamed you might do. It’s also painful to accept your limited control over the time you do get: maybe you simply lack the stamina or talent or other resources to perform well in all the roles you feel you should. And so, rather than face our limitations, we engage in avoidance strategies, in an effort to carry on feeling limitless. We push ourselves harder, chasing fantasies of the perfect work-life balance; or we implement time management systems that promise to make time for everything, so that tough choices won’t be required. Or we procrastinate, which is another means of maintaining the feeling of omnipotent control over life—because you needn’t risk the upsetting experience of failing at an intimidating project, obviously, if you never even start it. We fill our minds with busyness and distraction to numb ourselves emotionally. (“We labour at our daily work more ardently and thoughtlessly than is necessary to sustain our life,” wrote Nietzsche, “because to us it is even more necessary not to have leisure to stop and think. Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself.”) Or we plan compulsively, because the alternative is to confront how little control over the future we really have. Moreover, most of us seek a specifically individualistic kind of mastery over time—our culture’s ideal is that you alone should control your schedule, doing whatever you prefer, whenever you want—because it’s scary to confront the truth that almost everything worth doing, from marriage and parenting to business or politics, depends on cooperating with others, and therefore on exposing yourself to the emotional uncertainties of relationships.

  Denying reality never works, though. It may provide some immediate relief, because it allows you to go on thinking that at some point in the future you might, at last, feel totally in control. But it can’t ever bring the sense that you’re doing enough—that you are enough—because it defines “enough” as a kind of limitless control that no human can attain. Instead, the endless struggle leads to more anxiety and a less fulfilling life. For example, the more you believe you might succeed in “fitting everything in,” the more commitments you naturally take on, and the less you feel the need to ask whether each new commitment is truly worth a portion of your time—and so your days inevitably fill with more activities you don’t especially value. The more you hurry, the more frustrating it is to encounter tasks (or toddlers) that won’t be hurried; the more compulsively you plan for the future, the more anxious you feel about any remaining uncertainties, of which there will always be plenty. And the more individual sovereignty you achieve over your time, the lonelier you get. All of this illustrates what might be termed the paradox of limitation, which runs through everything that follows: the more you try to manage your time with the goal of achieving a feeling of total control, and freedom from the inevitable constraints of being human, the more stressful, empty, and frustrating life gets. But the more you confront the facts of finitude instead—and work with them, rather than against them—the more productive, meaningful, and joyful life becomes. I don’t think the feeling of anxiety ever completely goes away; we’re even limited, apparently, in our capacity to embrace our limitations. But I’m aware of no other time management technique that’s half as effective as just facing the way things truly are.

  An Icy Blast of Reality

  In practical terms, a limit-embracing attitude to time means organizing your days with the understanding that you definitely won’t have time for everything you want to do, or that other people want you to do—and so, at the very least, you can stop beating yourself up for failing. Since hard choices are unavoidable, what matters is learning to make them consciously, deciding what to focus on and what to neglect, rather than letting them get made by default—or deceiving yourself that, with enough hard work and the right time management tricks, you might not have to make them at all. It also means resisting the seductive temptation to “keep your options open”—which is really just another way of trying to feel in control—in favor of deliberately making big, daunting, irreversible commitments, which you can’t know in advance will turn out for the best, but which reliably prove more fulfilling in the end. And it means standing firm in the face of FOMO, the “fear of missing out,” because you come to realize that missing out on something—indeed, on almost everything—is basically guaranteed. Which isn’t actually a problem anyway, it turns out, because “missing out” is what makes our choices meaningful in the first place. Every decision to use a portion of time on anything represents the sacrifice of all the other ways in which you could have spent that time, but didn’t—and to willingly make that sacrifice is to take a stand, without reservation, on what matters most to you. I should probably clarify that I have yet to attain perfection in any of these attitudes; I wrote this book for myself, as much as for anyone else, putting my faith in the words of the author Richard Bach: “You teach best what you most need to learn.”

  This confrontation with limitation also reveals the truth that freedom, sometimes,
is to be found not in achieving greater sovereignty over your own schedule but in allowing yourself to be constrained by the rhythms of community—participating in forms of social life where you don’t get to decide exactly what you do or when you do it. And it leads to the insight that meaningful productivity often comes not from hurrying things up but from letting them take the time they take, surrendering to what in German has been called Eigenzeit, or the time inherent to a process itself. Perhaps most radically of all, seeing and accepting our limited powers over our time can prompt us to question the very idea that time is something you use in the first place. 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.

  I want to be clear that I’m not suggesting our troubles with time are somehow all in the mind, or that a simple change of outlook will cause them all to vanish. Time pressure comes largely from forces outside ourselves: from a cutthroat economy; from the loss of the social safety nets and family networks that used to help ease the burdens of work and childcare; and from the sexist expectation that women must excel in their careers while assuming most of the responsibilities at home. None of that will be solved by self-help alone; as the journalist Anne Helen Petersen writes in a widely shared essay on millennial burnout, you can’t fix such problems “with vacation, or an adult coloring book, or ‘anxiety baking,’ or the Pomodoro Technique, or overnight fucking oats.” But my point here is that however privileged or unfortunate your specific situation, fully facing the reality of it can only help. So long as you continue to respond to impossible demands on your time by trying to persuade yourself that you might one day find some way to do the impossible, you’re implicitly collaborating with those demands. Whereas once you deeply grasp that they are impossible, you’ll be newly empowered to resist them, and to focus instead on building the most meaningful life you can, in whatever situation you’re in.

  This notion that fulfillment might lie in embracing, rather than denying, our temporal limitations wouldn’t have surprised the philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome. They understood limitlessness to be the sole preserve of the gods; the noblest of human goals wasn’t to become godlike, but to be wholeheartedly human instead. In any case, this is just how reality is, and it can be surprisingly energizing to confront it. Back in the 1950s, a splendidly cranky British author named Charles Garfield Lott Du Cann wrote a short book, Teach Yourself to Live, in which he recommended the limit-embracing life, and he responded saltily to the suggestion that his advice was depressing. “Depressing? Not a bit of it. No more depressing than a cold [shower] is depressing … You are no longer befogged and bewildered by a false and misleading illusion about your life—like most people.” This is an excellent spirit in which to confront the challenge of using time well. None of us can single-handedly overthrow a society dedicated to limitless productivity, distraction, and speed. But right here, right now, you can stop buying into the delusion that any of that is ever going to bring satisfaction. You can face the facts. You can turn on the shower, brace yourself for some invigoratingly icy water, and step in.

  2.

  The Efficiency Trap

  Let’s begin with busyness. It isn’t our only time problem, and it isn’t everyone’s problem. But it’s a uniquely vivid illustration of the effort we invest in fighting against our built-in limitations, thanks to how normal it has become to feel as though you absolutely must do more than you can do. “Busyness” is a misnomer for this state of affairs, really, because certain forms of busyness can be delightful. Who wouldn’t want to live in Busytown, the setting of the iconic 1960s children’s books by the American illustrator Richard Scarry? His grocer cats and firefighting pigs are certainly busy; nobody in Busytown is idle—or if they are, they’re carefully hidden from view by the authorities, Pyongyang-style. What they aren’t, though, is overwhelmed. They exude the cheery self-possession of cats and pigs who have plenty to do, but also every confidence that their tasks will fit snugly into the hours available—whereas we live with the constant anxiety of fearing, or knowing for certain, that ours won’t.

  Research shows that this feeling arises on every rung of the economic ladder. If you’re working two minimum-wage jobs to put food in your children’s stomachs, there’s a good chance you’ll feel overstretched. But if you’re better off, you’ll find yourself feeling overstretched for reasons that seem, to you, no less compelling: because you have a nicer house with higher mortgage payments, or because the demands of your (interesting, well-paid) job conflict with your longing to spend time with your aging parents, or to be more involved in your children’s lives, or to dedicate your life to fighting climate change. As the law professor Daniel Markovits has shown, even the winners in our achievement-obsessed culture—the ones who make it to the elite universities, then reap the highest salaries—find that their reward is the unending pressure to work with “crushing intensity” in order to maintain the income and status that have come to seem like prerequisites for the lives they want to lead.

  It’s not just that this situation feels impossible; in strictly logical terms, it really is impossible. It can’t be the case that you must do more than you can do. That notion doesn’t make any sense: if you truly don’t have time for everything you want to do, or feel you ought to do, or that others are badgering you to do, then, well, you don’t have time—no matter how grave the consequences of failing to do it all might prove to be. So, technically, it’s irrational to feel troubled by an overwhelming to-do list. You’ll do what you can, you won’t do what you can’t, and the tyrannical inner voice insisting that you must do everything is simply mistaken. We rarely stop to consider things so rationally, though, because that would mean confronting the painful truth of our limitations. We would be forced to acknowledge that there are hard choices to be made: which balls to let drop, which people to disappoint, which cherished ambitions to abandon, which roles to fail at. Maybe you can’t keep your current job while also seeing enough of your children; maybe making sufficient time in the week for your creative calling means you’ll never have an especially tidy home, or get quite as much exercise as you should, and so on. Instead, in an attempt to avoid these unpleasant truths, we deploy the strategy that dominates most conventional advice on how to deal with busyness: we tell ourselves we’ll just have to find a way to do more—to try to address our busyness, you could say, by making ourselves busier still.

  Sisyphus’s Inbox

  This is a modern reaction to a modern problem, but it is not brand-new. In 1908, the English journalist Arnold Bennett published a short and grouchy book of advice, the title of which demonstrated that this anxious effort to fit more in was already afflicting his Edwardian world: How to Live on 24 Hours a Day. “Recently, in a daily organ, a battle raged round the question [of] whether a woman can exist nicely in the country on £85 a year,” Bennett wrote. “I have [also] seen an essay, ‘How to live on eight shillings a week.’ But I have never seen an essay, ‘How to live on twenty-four hours a day.’” The joke—to spell it out—is how absurd it is that anyone should need such advice, since nobody has ever had more than twenty-four hours a day in which to live. Yet people did need it: to Bennett and his target audience, suburban professionals commuting by tram and train to office jobs in England’s increasingly prosperous cities, time was starting to feel like a container too small for all it was required to hold. He was writing, he explained, for his “companions in distress—that innumerable band of souls who are haunted, more or less painfully, by the feeling that the years slip by, and slip by, and slip by, and that they have not yet been able to get their lives into proper working order.” His blunt diagnosis was that most people wasted several hours each day, especially in the evenings; they told themselves they were tired when they could just as easily pull up their socks and get on with all the life-enriching activities th
ey claimed they never had time for. “What I suggest,” wrote Bennett, “is that at six o’clock you look facts in the face and admit that you are not tired (because you are not, you know).” As an alternative strategy, he suggests rising earlier instead; his book even contains instructions on how to brew your own tea, in case you’re up before the servants.

  How to Live on 24 Hours a Day is a wonderfully stimulating book, full of practical suggestions that make it well worth reading today. But the whole thing rests on one extremely dubious assumption (apart from the assumption that you have servants, I mean). Like virtually every time management expert who was to come after him, Bennett implies that if you follow his advice, you’ll get enough of the genuinely important things done to feel at peace with time. Fit a bit more activity into each day’s container, he suggests, and you’ll reach the serene and commanding status of finally having “enough time.” But that wasn’t true in 1908, and it’s even less true today. This was what I had begun to grasp, on that park bench in Brooklyn, and I still think it’s the single best antidote to the feeling of time pressure, a splendidly liberating first step on the path of embracing your limits: the problem with trying to make time for everything that feels important—or just for enough of what feels important—is that you definitely never will.

  The reason isn’t that you haven’t yet discovered the right time management tricks or applied sufficient effort, or that you need to start getting up earlier, or that you’re generally useless. It’s that the underlying assumption is unwarranted: there’s no reason to believe you’ll ever feel “on top of things,” or make time for everything that matters, simply by getting more done. For a start, what “matters” is subjective, so you’ve no grounds for assuming that there will be time for everything that you, or your employer, or your culture happens to deem important. But the other exasperating issue is that if you succeed in fitting more in, you’ll find the goalposts start to shift: more things will begin to seem important, meaningful, or obligatory. Acquire a reputation for doing your work at amazing speed, and you’ll be given more of it. (Your boss isn’t stupid: Why would she give the extra work to someone slower?) Figure out how to spend enough time with your kids and at the office, so you don’t feel guilty about either, and you’ll suddenly feel some new social pressure: to spend more time exercising or to join the parent-teacher association—oh, and isn’t it finally time you learned to meditate? Get around to launching the side business you’ve dreamed of for years, and if it succeeds, it won’t be long before you’re no longer satisfied with keeping it small. The same goes for chores: in her book More Work for Mother, the historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan shows that when housewives first got access to “labor-saving” devices like washing machines and vacuum cleaners, no time was saved at all, because society’s standards of cleanliness simply rose to offset the benefits; now that you could return each of your husband’s shirts to a spotless condition after a single wearing, it began to feel like you should, to show how much you loved him. “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion,” the English humorist and historian C. Northcote Parkinson wrote in 1955, coining what became known as Parkinson’s law. But it’s not merely a joke, and it doesn’t apply only to work. It applies to everything that needs doing. In fact, it’s the definition of “what needs doing” that expands to fill the time available.