📖 Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman

Topic: Philosophy of Time | Medium: Audible | Rating: 5/5

This book is an in-depth philosophical discussion on time. It challenges the perspective of many productivity books and alleviates the stress of trying to achieve the unattainable goal of being "100% productive" and "getting everything done."

Three keynotes

1. We don't own or can't control time - we are a limited amount of time

Humans are obsessed with productivity hacks, and nothing ever seems quick enough. But waiting for anything is a blessing, not a right. We get impatient in busy traffic, long shopping queues, or waiting for a meal in a microwave. A few decades ago, the alternatives were much slower.

"So maybe it's not that you've been cheated out of an unlimited supply of time. Maybe it's almost incomprehensibly miraculous to have been granted any time at all."

"The title of a book that arrived on my desk the other day sums things up nicely. Master your time, master your life. The fundamental problem is that this attitude toward time sets up a rigged game in which it's impossible ever to feel as though you're doing well enough instead of simply living our lives as they unfold in time. Instead of just being time, you might say it becomes difficult not to value each moment primarily according to its usefulness some future goal or for some future oasis of relaxation you hope to reach once your tasks are finally out of the way. Superficially this seems like a sensible thing in the end."

"As the journalist and Helen Peterson 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."

2. Be present - our purpose is to exist now, not later

We need to let tasks take the time it takes. One example for me is stretching. Usually, I'm rushing throughout, focused on a workout. Now trying to allow it to take the time it takes.

"We think a child's purpose is to grow up at some sense but a child's purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn't display what only lives for a day. It pulls the whole of itself into each moment. Life's bounty isn't it's fun. Later, is too late."

3. Fill your time with connection and whatever the f*ck you want (it doesn't matter)

Technology can increase our schedule's flexibility. But who we spend our time with is correlated with our happiness, which is why holidays are the happiest times of the year.

"Every gain in personal temporal freedom entails a corresponding loss in how easy it is to coordinate your time with other people's the digital nomad lifestyle lacks the shared rhythms required for deep relationships to take root for the rest of us. Likewise, more freedom to choose when and where you work, makes it harder to forge connection through your job as well as less likely and be free to socialize when your friends are."

We are unlikely to "dent the universe" and will soon be forgotten. So, stop giving a f*ck! Something liberating about that.

"What you do with your life doesn't matter all that much. And when it comes to how you're using your finite time the universe absolutely could not care less."