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

  Young’s ordeal demonstrates an important point about what’s going on when we succumb to distraction, which is that we’re motivated by the desire to try to flee something painful about our experience of the present. This is obvious enough when the pain in question is physical, like icy water on naked skin and a flu jab at the doctor’s office—cases in which the difficult sensations are so hard to ignore that it takes real effort to shift your attention elsewhere. But it’s also true, in a subtler way, when it comes to everyday distraction. Consider the archetypal case of being lured from your work by social media: It’s not usually that you’re sitting there, concentrating rapturously, when your attention is dragged away against your will. In truth, you’re eager for the slightest excuse to turn away from what you’re doing, in order to escape how disagreeable it feels to be doing it; you slide away to the Twitter pile-on or the celebrity gossip site with a feeling not of reluctance but of relief. We’re told that there’s a “war for our attention,” with Silicon Valley as the invading force. But if that’s true, our role on the battlefield is often that of collaborators with the enemy.

  Mary Oliver calls this inner urge toward distraction “the intimate interrupter”—that “self within the self, that whistles and pounds upon the door panels,” promising an easier life if only you’d redirect your attention away from the meaningful but challenging task at hand, to whatever’s unfolding one browser tab away. “One of the puzzling lessons I have learned,” observes the author Gregg Krech, describing his own experience of the same urge, “is that, more often than not, I do not feel like doing most of the things that need doing. I’m not just speaking about cleaning the toilet bowl or doing my tax returns. I’m referring to those things I genuinely desire to accomplish.”

  The Discomfort of What Matters

  It’s worth pausing to notice how exceptionally strange this is. Why, exactly, are we rendered so uncomfortable by concentrating on things that matter—the things we thought we wanted to do with our lives—that we’d rather flee into distractions, which, by definition, are what we don’t want to be doing with our lives? Certain specific tasks might be so unpleasant or intimidating that a preference for avoiding them wouldn’t be very remarkable. But the more common issue is one of boredom, which often arises without explanation. Suddenly, the thing you’d resolved to do, because it mattered to you to do it, feels so staggeringly tedious that you can’t bear to focus on it for one moment more.

  The solution to this mystery, dramatic though it might sound, is that whenever we succumb to distraction, we’re attempting to flee a painful encounter with our finitude—with the human predicament of having limited time, and more especially, in the case of distraction, limited control over that time, which makes it impossible to feel certain about how things will turn out. (Except, that is, for the deeply unpleasant certainty that one day death will bring it all to an end.) When you try to focus on something you deem important, you’re forced to face your limits, an experience that feels especially uncomfortable precisely because the task at hand is one you value so much. Unlike the architect from Shiraz, who refused to bring his ideal mosque into the world of time and imperfection, you’re obliged to give up your godlike fantasies and to experience your lack of power over things you care about. Perhaps the cherished creative project will prove beyond your talents, or maybe the difficult marital conversation for which you’d been steeling yourself will unravel into a bitter argument. And even if everything proceeds wonderfully, you couldn’t have known in advance that it was going to do so, so you’ll still have had to give up the feeling of being the master of your time. To quote the psychotherapist Bruce Tift once more, you’ll have had to allow yourself to risk feeling “claustrophobic, imprisoned, powerless, and constrained by reality.”

  This is why boredom can feel so surprisingly, aggressively unpleasant: we tend to think of it merely as a matter of not being particularly interested in whatever it is we’re doing, but in fact it’s an intense reaction to the deeply uncomfortable experience of confronting your limited control. Boredom can strike in widely differing contexts—when you’re working on a major project; when you can’t think of anything to do on a Sunday afternoon; when it’s your job to care for a two-year-old for five hours straight—but they all have one characteristic in common: they demand that you face your finitude. You’re obliged to deal with how your experience is unfolding in this moment, to resign yourself to the reality that this is it.

  No wonder we seek out distractions online, where it feels as though no limits apply—where you can update yourself instantaneously on events taking place a continent away, present yourself however you like, and keep scrolling forever through infinite newsfeeds, drifting through “a realm in which space doesn’t matter and time spreads out into an endless present,” to quote the critic James Duesterberg. It’s true that killing time on the internet often doesn’t feel especially fun, these days. But it doesn’t need to feel fun. In order to dull the pain of finitude, it just needs to make you feel unconstrained.

  This also makes it easier to see why the strategies generally recommended for defeating distraction—digital detoxes, personal rules about when you’ll allow yourself to check your inbox, and so forth—rarely work, or at least not for long. They involve limiting your access to the things you use to assuage your urge toward distraction, and in the case of the most addictive forms of technology, that’s surely a sensible idea. But they don’t address the urge itself. Even if you quit Facebook, or ban yourself from social media during the workday, or exile yourself to a cabin in the mountains, you’ll probably still find it unpleasantly constraining to focus on what matters, so you’ll find some way to relieve the pain by distracting yourself: by daydreaming, taking an unnecessary nap, or—the preferred option of the productivity geek—redesigning your to-do list and reorganizing your desk.

  The overarching point is that what we think of as “distractions” aren’t the ultimate cause of our being distracted. They’re just the places we go to seek relief from the discomfort of confronting limitation. The reason it’s hard to focus on a conversation with your spouse isn’t that you’re surreptitiously checking your phone beneath the dinner table. On the contrary, “surreptitiously checking your phone beneath the dinner table” is what you do because it’s hard to focus on the conversation—because listening takes effort and patience and a spirit of surrender, and because what you hear might upset you, so checking your phone is naturally more pleasant. Even if you place your phone out of reach, therefore, you shouldn’t be surprised to find yourself seeking some other way to avoid paying attention. In the case of conversation, this generally takes the form of mentally rehearsing what you’re going to say next, as soon as the other person has finished making sounds with their mouth.

  I wish I could reveal, at this point, the secret for uprooting the urge toward distraction—the way to have it not feel unpleasant to decide to hold your attention, for a sustained time, on something you value, or that you can’t easily choose not to do. But the truth is that I don’t think there is one. The most effective way to sap distraction of its power is just to stop expecting things to be otherwise—to accept that this unpleasantness is simply what it feels like for finite humans to commit ourselves to the kinds of demanding and valuable tasks that force us to confront our limited control over how our lives unfold.

  Yet there’s a sense in which accepting this lack of any solution is the solution. Young’s discovery on the mountainside, after all, was that his suffering subsided only when he resigned himself to the truth of his situation: when he stopped fighting the facts and allowed himself to more fully feel the icy water on his skin. The less attention he devoted to objecting to what was happening to him, the more attention he could give to what was actually happening. My powers of concentration might not come close to Young’s, but I’ve found the same logic applies. The way to find peaceful absorption in a difficult project, or a boring Sunday afternoon, isn’t to chase feelings of peace or ab
sorption, but to acknowledge the inevitability of discomfort, and to turn more of your attention to the reality of your situation than to railing against it.

  Some Zen Buddhists hold that the entirety of human suffering can be boiled down to this effort to resist paying full attention to the way things are going, because we wish they were going differently (“This shouldn’t be happening!”), or because we wish we felt more in control of the process. There is a very down-to-earth kind of liberation in grasping that there are certain truths about being a limited human from which you’ll never be liberated. You don’t get to dictate the course of events. And the paradoxical reward for accepting reality’s constraints is that they no longer feel so constraining.

  Part II

  Beyond Control

  7.

  We Never Really Have Time

  The cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter is famous, among other reasons, for coining “Hofstadter’s law,” which states that any task you’re planning to tackle will always take longer than you expect, “even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.” In other words, even if you know that a given project is likely to overrun, and you adjust your schedule accordingly, it’ll just overrun your new estimated finishing time, too. It follows from this that the standard advice about planning—to give yourself twice as long as you think you’ll need—could actually make matters worse. You might be well aware of, say, your unrealistic tendency to assume that you can complete the weekly grocery shopping in an hour, door to door. But if you allow yourself two hours, precisely because you know that you’re usually overoptimistic, you may find it taking two and a half hours instead. (The effect becomes especially clear on a bigger scale: the government of New South Wales, being acutely conscious that big construction projects tend to overrun, allowed a seemingly ample four years for the building of the Sydney Opera House—but it ended up taking fourteen, at a cost of more than 1,400 percent of the original budget.) Hofstadter was half joking, of course. But I’ve always found something a little unsettling about his law, because if it’s true—and it certainly seems to be, in my experience—it suggests something very strange: that the activities we try to plan for somehow actively resist our efforts to make them conform to our plans. It’s as if our efforts to be good planners don’t merely fail but cause things to take longer still. Reality seems to fight back, an angry god determined to remind us that it retains the upper hand, no matter how much we try to supplicate to it by building extra slack into our schedules.

  To be fair, this sort of thing probably bothers me more than most, because I come from a family of people you might reasonably call obsessive planners. We’re the type who like to get our ducks in a row by confirming, as far in advance as possible, how the future is going to unfold, and who get antsy and anxious when obliged to coordinate with those who prefer to take life as it comes. My wife and I are lucky to make it to the end of June, in any given year, before receiving the first inquiry from my parents about our plans for Christmas; and I was raised to regard anyone who booked a flight or hotel room less than about four months before the proposed date of departure or occupancy as living life on the edge to an inexcusable degree. On family vacations, we could be guaranteed a three-hour wait at the airport, or an hour at the railway station, having left home much too far ahead of time. (“Dad Suggests Arriving at Airport 14 Hours Early,” reads a headline in The Onion, apparently inspired by my childhood.) All this annoyed me then, as it annoys me today, with that special irritation reserved for traits one recognizes all too clearly in oneself as well.

  At least I think I can say that my family comes by it honestly. My paternal grandmother, who was Jewish, was nine years old and living in Berlin when Hitler came to power in 1933, and she was fifteen by the time her stepfather, surveying the wreckage of Kristallnacht, finally made plans to get his family to Hamburg and thence on board the SS Manhattan, bound for Southampton in England. (The passengers, I was once told, popped champagne corks on deck, but only after they were certain the ship had left German waters.) Her own grandmother, my great-great-grandmother, never made it out, and later died in the concentration camp at Theresienstadt. It’s not especially hard to see how an adolescent German-Jewish girl, arriving in London on the eve of the Second World War, might acquire, and later pass on to her children, the unshakable belief that if you didn’t plan things exactly right, some very bad fate might befall you or those you loved. Sometimes, when you’re leaving on a trip, it really is important to get to your point of departure in plenty of time.

  The trouble with being so emotionally invested in planning for the future, though, is that while it may occasionally prevent a catastrophe, the rest of the time it tends to exacerbate the very anxiety it was supposed to allay. The obsessive planner, essentially, is demanding certain reassurances from the future—but the future isn’t the sort of thing that can ever provide the reassurance he craves, for the obvious reason that it’s still in the future. After all, you can never be absolutely certain that something won’t make you late for the airport, no matter how many spare hours you build in. Or rather you can be certain—but only once you’ve arrived and you’re cooling your heels in the terminal, at which point there’s no solace to be gained from the fact that everything turned out fine, because that’s all in the past now, and there’s the next chunk of the future to feel anxious about instead. (Will the plane land at its destination in time for you to catch your onward train? And so on and so on.) Really, no matter how far ahead you plan, you never get to relax in the certainty that everything’s going to go the way you’d like. Instead, the frontier of your uncertainty just gets pushed further and further toward the horizon. Once your Christmas plans are nailed down, there’s January to think about, then February, then March …

  I’m using my neurotic family by way of example here, but it’s important to see that this underlying longing to turn the future into something dependable isn’t confined to compulsive planners. It’s present in anyone who worries about anything, whether or not they respond by devising elaborate timetables or hypercautious travel plans. Worry, at its core, is the repetitious experience of a mind attempting to generate a feeling of security about the future, failing, then trying again and again and again—as if the very effort of worrying might somehow help forestall disaster. The fuel behind worry, in other words, is the internal demand to know, in advance, that things will turn out fine: that your partner won’t leave you, that you will have sufficient money to retire, that a pandemic won’t claim the lives of anyone you love, that your favored candidate will win the next election, that you can get through your to-do list by the end of Friday afternoon. But the struggle for control over the future is a stark example of our refusal to acknowledge our built-in limitations when it comes to time, because it’s a fight the worrier obviously won’t win. You can never be truly certain about the future. And so your reach will always exceed your grasp.

  Anything Could Happen

  In much of this book so far, I’ve emphasized the importance of confronting, rather than avoiding, the uncomfortable reality about how little time we have. But it should also be becoming clear that there’s something suspect about the idea of time as a thing we “have” in the first place. As the writer David Cain points out, we never have time in the same sense that we have the cash in our wallets or the shoes on our feet. When we claim that we have time, what we really mean is that we expect it. “We assume we have three hours or three days to do something,” Cain writes, “but it never actually comes into our possession.” Any number of factors could confound your expectations, robbing you of the three hours you thought you “had” in which to complete an important work project: your boss could interrupt with an urgent request; the subway could break down; you could die. And even if you do end up getting the full three hours, precisely in line with your expectations, you won’t know this for sure until the point at which those hours have passed into history. You only ever get to feel certain about the future once it’s already t
urned into the past.

  Likewise, and despite everything I’ve been saying, nobody ever really gets four thousand weeks in which to live—not only because you might end up with fewer than that, but because 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. Reflect on this a little, and Heidegger’s idea that we are time—that there’s no meaningful way to think of a person’s existence except as a sequence of moments of time—begins to make more sense. And it has real psychological consequences, because the assumption that time is something we can possess or control is the unspoken premise of almost all our thinking about the future, our planning and goal-setting and worrying. So it’s a constant source of anxiety and agitation, because our expectations are forever running up against the stubborn reality that time isn’t in our possession and can’t be brought under our control.

  My point, to be clear, isn’t that it’s a bad idea to make plans, or save money for retirement, or remember to vote, so as to increase the chances that the future will turn out the way you’d like. Our efforts to influence the future aren’t the problem. The problem—the source of all the anxiety—is the need that we feel, from our vantage point here in the present moment, to be able to know that those efforts will prove successful. It’s fine, of course, to strongly prefer that your partner never leave you, and to treat him or her in ways that make that happy outcome more likely. But it’s a recipe for a life of unending stress to insist that you must be able to feel certain, now, that this is how your relationship is definitely going to unfold in the future. So a surprisingly effective antidote to anxiety can be to simply realize that this demand for reassurance from the future is one that will definitely never be satisfied—no matter how much you plan or fret, or how much extra time you leave to get to the airport. You can’t know that things will turn out all right. The struggle for certainty is an intrinsically hopeless one—which means you have permission to stop engaging in it. The future just isn’t the sort of thing you get to order around like that, as the French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal understood: “So imprudent are we,” he wrote, “that we wander in the times which are not ours … We try to [give the present the support of] the future, and think of arranging matters which are not in our power, for a time which we have no certainty of reaching.”