Four Thousand Weeks by Burkeman| Reading Notes

| 15 Mar 2022 min read

I thoroughly enjoy reading this book. It has singlehandedly changed my relationship with time management, and therefore it gets a 10/10 from me. I don’t have many books that I rated that high.

Here are my highlights:

  1. The point of being rich is to have more options to enjoy your time, not to work more.
  2. It looks like you’re in control over your own time and your own schedule, but everything worth doing depends on cooperating with others and therefore exposing yourself to the emotional uncertainties of relationships.
  3. Core challenge of time management is to decide what NOT to do and to be ok with not doing it.
  4. We define attention as a resource such as food and water, but these things only support life, whereas attention IS life. Our experience of being alive consists nothing more than what you pay attention to.
  5. Trying to achieve total control of your attention is futile and also unwanted. “bottom-up” attention is what keeps us alive, whereas top-down voluntary attention is what can make a difference between a life well-lived and a hellish one.
  6. The effort to be present in the moment is similar to trying to experience life to its fullest. The thought and effort distract from life itself, like trying too hard to fall asleep.
  7. You are already living in the present moment. Trying to live in the present moment implies that you’re somehow separate from the moment. Living more fully in the present may simply be realising you never had any other option but to be here now.
  8. Hobby is excellent because you will only be mediocre at those. Where there’s a chance that you may be brilliant at it, it’s harder to enjoy the process.
  9. Time is not a resource to be all used yourself. Time is a network resource: the more you use it to connect with other people, the better it will be. Using time to get a sense of connection makes people happier. Sweden is a good example because the summer vacation is held for the entire country. It’s not just about having a long break but also about having the same vacation time as everybody else.
  10. Your life is probably not going to be remarkable, unlike Michaelangelo or any other famous people you’ve heard of, so stop thinking that it has to be that remarkable for it to be meaningful. It’s probably just going to be a modestly meaningful life, and that’s ok.
  11. We are time. We cannot master time if we are time.

Questions to ask what you should do with your time:

  • Where are the areas where you can choose little discomfort to enlarge your life (rather than shrinking it)?

  • In what areas are you still a perfectionist?

  • In what circumstances have you accepted that there’s no other life than the now? there’s no dress rehearsal

  • Where are you holding back until you know what you’re doing?

  • If you don’t care about completing, what would you try doing?

Appendix: Ten tools for embracing your finitude

  • do a fixed volume productivity

  • serialise and don’t multitask

  • decide what to fail at

  • focus on what you’ve completed rather than what’s left to complete

  • consolidate what you care about in the world, don’t succumb to social media rage

  • embrace boring and single-purpose tech

  • seek novelty in the mundane

  • be curious with who other people are

  • act on generous thoughts immediately

  • practice do nothing, i.e. meditation