4000 Weeks
4,000 Weeks sounds like a long time, but it’s about 80 years. If we think about life, it’s about 0.025% per week. Time is our most precious resource. Even with access to unlimited money and resources, no person in history has been immortal. At some point our journey on earth, and this life, must end. It’s not to be sour about it, but to recognize the fleeting moments when we can create or achieve something new in our existence. The author refers to these 4000 weeks as “absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short.” He continues later with the point, “We’ve been granted the mental capacities to make almost infinitely ambitious plans, yet practically no time at all to put them into action.” We all will go through this. We are capable of such abstract, futuristic, absurd things to process but we do so little. I often wonder about those who pass away at 75, but never really living or challenging or experiencing a full life. Full life is subjective of course. We eventually will settle into routines and parts of life might feel boring, repetitive, or lackluster. It’s in the moment like this to recognize the why of what we want of life. For example, I don’t need to train or eat healthy. However, if I never push to improve, I’m destined to regress. I train so I never have to think about needing help off the toilet. I train so I can walk the earth a bit longer.
One of the interesting points is we created time. At some point, we arbitrarily birthed a measurement of the day to segments. Even then the segment is broken, the earth does not complete a full revolution in 24 hours, it’s more like 23 and change. So based on the nature of where we ended up in space and how fast the natural rotation of the planet dictates, we picked time to be a construct. Time technically isn’t real, but neither is money, but who would not accept more of it.
Previously in humanity, before we hyper scheduled our days, feudal times were quite productive but there was time to reflect. People would tend to the animals daily, but crops needed time to grow. This left large breaks through the day as it wasn’t pivotal to race to the next task. The day just took the day. The repetition day to day brought about streamlining and priority. People could spend more time with their large families (splitting chores). The days weren’t hyper-scheduled and looser than our time now. We became obsessed with time.
Obsessions rarely amount to a positive. Our nonstop hustle mentality grew from within us. We were able to segment down and now we measure time in hours, minutes, and seconds. We continue to add hacks and productivity at advancing levels. We think getting more done amounts to a better life, but that can’t be true. We focus so much on time we miss out on our lives, “thanks to their finitude, are inevitably full of activities that we’re doing for the very last time. Just as there will be a final occasion on which you pick up your kids—a thought that appalls me, but one that’s hard to deny, since you surely won’t be doing it when the kid is thirty.”
The book covers a lot of enjoy the moments of life. The author discusses an assignment to go to a museum and stare at a painting for three hours. He details out the first moments of taking the painting in. After a while, the nuance and detailed strokes became prominent. The paint would actually start to change right before his eyes. This begs the question, what uncomfortable things are you avoiding. Why are you putting off great moments in life or avoiding the beauty in the mundane.
Now instead of rewriting the next section. Here is the appendix to help manage time.
Appendix: Ten Tools for Embracing Your Finitude
1. Adopt a “fixed volume” approach to productivity. (...) Begin from the assumption that tough choices are inevitable and to focus on making them consciously and well. (...) Keep two to-do lists, one “open” and one “closed.” The open list is for everything that’s on your plate and will doubtless be nightmarishly long. (...) Feed tasks from the open list to the closed one — that is, a list with a fixed number of entries, ten at most. The rule is that you can’t add a new task until one’s completed. (You may also require a third list, for tasks that are “on hold” until someone else gets back to you.) (...) Establish predetermined time boundaries for your daily work (e.g. 9am-5pm).
2. Serialize, serialize, serialize. (...) Focus on one big project at a time (or at most, one work project and one nonwork project) and see it to completion before moving on to what’s next.
3. Decide in advance what to fail at. (...) Nominating in advance whole areas of life in which you won’t expect excellence of yourself. (...) Even in these essential domains, there’s scope to fail on a cyclical basis: to aim to do the bare minimum at work for the next two months, for example, while you focus on your children.
4. Focus on what you’ve already completed, not just on what’s left to complete. (...) Keep a “done list,” which starts empty first thing in the morning, and which you then gradually fill with whatever you accomplish through the day. (...) There’s good evidence for the motivating power of “small wins”.
5. Consolidate your caring. (...) Consciously pick your battles in charity, activism, and politics.
6. Embrace boring and single-purpose technology. (...) Digital distractions are so seductive because they seem to offer the chance of escape to a realm where painful human limitations don’t apply. (...) Making your devices as boring as possible — first by removing social media apps, even email if you dare, and then by switching the screen from color to grayscale. (...) Choose devices with only one purpose, such as the Kindle ereader, on which it’s tedious and awkward to do anything but read.
7. Seek out novelty in the mundane. (...) Time seems to speed up as we age. (...) The likeliest explanation for this phenomenon is that our brains encode the passage of years on the basis of how much information we process in any given interval. Childhood involves plentiful novel experiences, so we remember it as having lasted forever; but as we get older, life gets routinized — we stick to the same few places of residence, the same few relationships and jobs — and the novelty tapers off. (...) The standard advice for counteracting this is to cram your life with novel experiences, and this does work. But it’s liable to worsen another problem, “existential overwhelm”. (...) Much of life will necessarily be somewhat routine, and opportunities for exotic travel may be limited. An alternative, Shinzen Young explains, is to pay more attention to every moment, however mundane (...) by plunging more deeply into the life you already have. (...) Meditation helps here. But so does going on unplanned walks to see where they lead you, using a different route to get to work, taking up photography or birdwatching or nature drawing or journaling.
8. Be a “researcher” in relationships. (...) When presented with a challenging or boring moment, try deliberately adopting an attitude of curiosity, in which your goal isn’t to achieve any particular outcome, or successfully explain your position, but, as Hobson puts it, “to figure out who this human being is that we’re with.”
9. Cultivate instantaneous generosity. (...) Whenever a generous impulse arises in your mind — to give money, check in on a friend, send an email praising someone’s work — act on the impulse right away.
10. Practice doing nothing. (...) If you can’t bear the discomfort of not acting, you’re far more likely to make poor choices with your time, simply to feel as if you’re acting.