TODO_AUTHOR, (Burkeman 2021)

Summary

Thoughts

Notes

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (Oliver Burkeman)

  • Your Highlight on page 7 | Location 101-102 | Added on Tuesday, June 30, 2015 5:08:29 AM

“hustle”—relentless work not as a burden to be endured but as an exhilarating lifestyle choice, ======== Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (Oliver Burkeman)

  • Your Highlight on page 14 | Location 202-203 | Added on Tuesday, June 30, 2015 5:16:01 AM

The real problem isn’t our limited time. The real problem—or so I hope to convince you—is that we’ve unwittingly inherited, and feel pressured to live by, a troublesome set of ideas about how to use our limited time, ======== Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (Oliver Burkeman)

  • Your Highlight on page 16 | Location 241-242 | Added on Tuesday, June 30, 2015 5:17:42 AM

“task orientation,” because the rhythms of life emerge organically from the tasks themselves, rather than from being lined up against an abstract timeline, ======== Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (Oliver Burkeman)

  • Your Highlight on page 22 | Location 337-343 | Added on Tuesday, June 30, 2015 5:20:52 AM

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. ======== Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (Oliver Burkeman)

  • Your Highlight on page 25 | Location 377-379 | Added on Tuesday, June 30, 2015 5:22:10 AM

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. ======== Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (Oliver Burkeman)

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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. ======== Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (Oliver Burkeman)

  • Your Highlight on page 43 | Location 647-649 | Added on Tuesday, June 30, 2015 5:26:32 AM

Convenience culture seduces us into imagining that we might find room for everything important by eliminating only life’s tedious tasks. But it’s a lie. You have to choose a few things, sacrifice everything else, and deal with the inevitable sense of loss that results. ======== Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (Oliver Burkeman)

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“How else are we to get to know this place where we have been set, apart from tending to it?” ======== Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (Oliver Burkeman)

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it’s precisely the fact that getting married forecloses the possibility of meeting someone else—someone who might genuinely have been a better marriage partner; who could ever say?—that makes marriage meaningful. ======== Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (Oliver Burkeman)

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it’s precisely the fact that I could have chosen a different and perhaps equally valuable way to spend this afternoon that bestows meaning on the choice I did make. ======== Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (Oliver Burkeman)

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The real measure of any time management technique is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things. ======== Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (Oliver Burkeman)

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Most productivity experts act merely as enablers of our time troubles, by offering ways to keep on believing it might be possible to get everything done. ======== Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (Oliver Burkeman)

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We’ll do almost anything to avoid burning our bridges, to keep alive the fantasy of a future unconstrained by limitation, yet having burned them, we’re generally pleased that we did so. ======== Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (Oliver Burkeman)

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elephant-in-the-room problem with everything I’ve been arguing so far about time and time management. That problem is distraction. ======== Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (Oliver Burkeman)

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it hardly matters how committed you are to making the best use of your limited time if, day after day, your attention gets wrenched away by things on which you never wanted to focus. ======== Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (Oliver Burkeman)

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the distracted person isn’t really choosing at all. Their attention has been commandeered by forces that don’t have their highest interests at heart. ======== Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (Oliver Burkeman)

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achieving total sovereignty over your attention is almost certainly impossible. ======== Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (Oliver Burkeman)

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The unsettling possibility is that if you’re convinced that none of this is a problem for you—that social media hasn’t turned you into an angrier, less empathetic, more anxious, or more numbed-out version of yourself—that might be because it has. Your finite time has been appropriated, without your realizing anything’s amiss. ======== Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (Oliver Burkeman)

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it’s unrealistic to expect users to resist the assault on their time and attention by means of willpower alone. ======== Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (Oliver Burkeman)

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Now, at last, he had been authorized to begin the hundred-day solo retreat that marked the first real step on the monastic journey—only to discover that it entailed living in a tiny unheated hut and conducting a thrice-daily purification ritual in which Young, who’d been raised beside the ocean in balmy California, had to douse himself with several gallons of bone-chilling melted snow. It was a “horrific ordeal,” he would recall years later. “It’s so cold that the water freezes the moment it touches the floor, and your towel freezes in your hand. So you’re sliding around barefoot on ice, trying to dry your body with a frozen hand towel.” ======== Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (Oliver Burkeman)

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At first, this was Young’s instinct, too: to recoil internally from the experience of the freezing water hitting his skin by thinking about something different—or else just trying, through an act of sheer will, not to feel the cold. This is hardly an unreasonable reaction: when it’s so unpleasant to stay focused on present experience, common sense would seem to suggest that mentally absenting yourself from the situation would moderate the pain. And yet as icy deluge followed icy deluge, Young began to understand that this was precisely the wrong strategy. In fact, the more he concentrated on the sensations of intense cold, giving his attention over to them as completely as he could, the less agonizing he found them—whereas once his “attention wandered, the suffering became unbearable.” After a few days, he began preparing for each drenching by first becoming as focused on his present experience as he possibly could so that, when the water hit, he would avoid spiraling from mere discomfort into agony. Slowly it dawned on him that this was the whole point of the ceremony. As he put it—though traditional Buddhist monks certainly would not have done so—it was a “giant biofeedback device,” designed to train him to concentrate by rewarding him (with a reduction in suffering) for as long as he could remain undistracted, and punishing him (with an increase in suffering) whenever he failed. After his retreat, Young—who is now a meditation teacher better known as Shinzen Young, his new first name having been bestowed on him by the abbot at Mount Koya—found that his powers of concentration had been transformed. Whereas staying focused on the present had made the agonies of the ice-water ritual more tolerable, it made less unpleasant undertakings—daily chores that might previously have been a source not of agony but of boredom or annoyance—positively engrossing. The more intensely he could hold his attention on the experience of whatever he was doing, the clearer it became to him that the real problem had been not the activity itself but his internal resistance to experiencing it. When he stopped trying to block out those sensations and attended to them instead, the discomfort would evaporate. ======== Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (Oliver Burkeman)

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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. ======== Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (Oliver Burkeman)

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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. ======== Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (Oliver Burkeman)

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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. ======== Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (Oliver Burkeman)

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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. ======== Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (Oliver Burkeman)

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The way to find peaceful absorption in a difficult project, or a boring Sunday afternoon, isn’t to chase feelings of peace or absorption, 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. ======== Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (Oliver Burkeman)

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The real problem isn’t planning. It’s that we take our plans to be something they aren’t. What we forget, or can’t bear to confront, is that, in the words of the American meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein, “a plan is just a thought.” We treat our plans as though they are a lasso, thrown from the present around the future, in order to bring it under our command. But all a plan is—all it could ever possibly be—is a present-moment statement of intent. It’s an expression of your current thoughts about how you’d ideally like to deploy your modest influence over the future. The future, of course, is under no obligation to comply. ======== Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (Oliver Burkeman)

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Inevitably, we become obsessed with “using it well,” whereupon we discover an unfortunate truth: the more you focus on using time well, the more each day begins to feel like something you have to get through, en route to some calmer, better, more fulfilling point in the future, which never actually arrives. The problem is one of instrumentalization. To use time, by definition, is to treat it instrumentally, as a means to an end, and of course we do this every day: you don’t boil the kettle out of a love of boiling kettles, or put your socks in the washing machine out of a love for operating washing machines, but because you want a cup of coffee or clean socks. Yet it turns out to be perilously easy to overinvest in this instrumental relationship to time—to focus exclusively on where you’re headed, at the expense of focusing on where you are—with the result that you find yourself living mentally in the future, locating the “real” value of your life at some time that you haven’t yet reached, and never will. ======== Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (Oliver Burkeman)

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spurious man end of kittendom ======== Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (Oliver Burkeman)

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weren’t really looking at the Rosetta Stone, the ancient Egyptian artifact on display in front of them, so much as preparing to look at it later, by recording images and videos of it on their phones. So intently were they focused on using their time for a future benefit—for the ability to revisit or share the experience later on—that they were barely experiencing the exhibition itself at ======== Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (Oliver Burkeman)

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“You keep hearing people arguing that more time off might be good for the economy,” fumed John de Graaf, an ebullient seventyish filmmaker and the driving force behind Take Back Your Time. “But why should we have to justify life in terms of the economy? It makes no sense!” ======== Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (Oliver Burkeman)

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one of the sneakier problems with treating time solely as something to be used as well as possible, which is that we start to experience pressure to use our leisure time productively, too. Enjoying leisure for its own sake—which you might have assumed was the whole point of leisure—comes to feel as though it’s somehow not quite enough. It begins to feel as though you’re failing at life, in some indistinct way, if you’re not treating your time off as an investment in your future. ======== Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (Oliver Burkeman)

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The regrettable consequence of justifying leisure only in terms of its usefulness for other things is that it begins to feel vaguely like a chore—in other words, like work in the worst sense of that word. ======== Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (Oliver Burkeman)

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“We are all of us compelled,” Kerr wrote, “to read for profit, party for contacts…gamble for charity, go out in the evening for the greater glory of the municipality, and stay home for the weekend to rebuild the house.” ======== Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (Oliver Burkeman)

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In an age of instrumentalization, the hobbyist is a subversive: he insists that some things are worth doing for themselves alone, despite offering no payoffs in terms of productivity or profit. The derision we heap upon the avid stamp collector or train spotter might really be a kind of defense mechanism, to spare us from confronting the possibility that they’re truly happy in a way that the rest of us—pursuing our telic lives, ceaselessly in search of future fulfillment—are not. This also helps explain why it’s far less embarrassing (indeed, positively fashionable) to have a “side hustle,” a hobbylike activity explicitly pursued with profit in mind. ======== Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (Oliver Burkeman)

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it’s fine, and perhaps preferable, to be mediocre at them. ======== Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (Oliver Burkeman)

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The pointless honk is thus symptomatic of another important way in which we’re unwilling to acknowledge our limitations when it comes to our time: it’s a howl of rage at the fact that the honker can’t prod the world around him into moving as fast as he’d like it to. ======== Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (Oliver Burkeman)

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Jennifer Roberts, who teaches art history at Harvard University. When you take a class with Roberts, your initial assignment is always the same, and it’s one that has been known to elicit yelps of horror from her students: choose a painting or sculpture in a local museum, then go and look at it for three hours straight. ======== Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (Oliver Burkeman)

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develop a taste for having problems. ======== Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (Oliver Burkeman)

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embrace radical incrementalism. ======== Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (Oliver Burkeman)

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originality lies on the far side of unoriginality. ======== Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (Oliver Burkeman)

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The Finnish American photographer Arno Minkkinen dramatizes this deep truth about the power of patience with a parable about Helsinki’s main bus station. There are two dozen platforms there, he explains, with several different bus lines departing from each one—and for the first part of its journey, each bus leaving from any given platform takes the same route through the city as all the others, making identical stops. Think of each stop as representing one year of your career, Minkkinen advises photography students. You pick an artistic direction—perhaps you start working on platinum studies of nudes—and you begin to accumulate a portfolio of work. Three years (or bus stops) later, you proudly present it to the owner of a gallery. But you’re dismayed to be told that your pictures aren’t as original as you thought, because they look like knockoffs of the work of the photographer Irving Penn; Penn’s bus, it turns out, had been on the same route as yours. Annoyed at yourself for having wasted three years following somebody else’s path, you jump off that bus, hail a taxi, and return to where you started at the bus station. This time, you board a different bus, choosing a different genre of photography in which to specialize. But a few stops later, the same thing happens: you’re informed that your new body of work seems derivative, too. Back you go to the bus station. But the pattern keeps on repeating: nothing you produce ever gets recognized as being truly your own. What’s the solution? “It’s simple,” Minkkinen says. “Stay on the bus. Stay on the fucking bus.” A little farther out on their journeys through the city, Helsinki’s bus routes diverge, plunging off to unique destinations as they head through the suburbs and into the countryside beyond. That’s where the distinctive work begins. But it begins at all only for those who can muster the patience to immerse themselves in the earlier stage—the trial-and-error phase of copying others, learning new skills, and accumulating experience. ======== Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (Oliver Burkeman)

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Cosmic insignificance therapy is an invitation to face the truth about your irrelevance in the grand scheme of things. To embrace it, to whatever extent you can. ======== Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (Oliver Burkeman)

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And we chase the ultimate fantasy of time mastery—the desire, by the time we die, to have truly mattered in the cosmic scheme of things, as opposed to being instantly trampled underfoot by the advancing eons. ======== Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (Oliver Burkeman)

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There is a strange attitude and feeling that one is not yet in real life. ======== Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (Oliver Burkeman)

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There is a terrific fear of being pinned down, of entering space and time completely, and of being the unique human that one is. ======== Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (Oliver Burkeman)

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Where in your life or your work are you currently pursuing comfort, when what’s called for is a little discomfort? ======== Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (Oliver Burkeman)

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Are you holding yourself to, and judging yourself by, standards of productivity or performance that are impossible to meet? ======== Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (Oliver Burkeman)

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In what ways have you yet to accept the fact that you are who you are, not the person you think you ought to be? ======== Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (Oliver Burkeman)

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which areas of life are you still holding back until you feel like you know what you’re doing? ======== Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (Oliver Burkeman)

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How would you spend your days differently if you didn’t care so much about seeing your actions reach fruition? ======== Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (Oliver Burkeman)

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the individual path “is the way you make for yourself, which is never prescribed, which you do not know in advance, and which simply comes into being itself when you put one foot in front of the other.” ======== Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (Oliver Burkeman)

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“Do the next right thing,” ========

Bibliography

Burkeman, Oliver. 2021. Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. First edition. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.