Rethinking Time Management

2022 is now behind us. Another 52 weeks of what, as Oliver Burkeman’s most recent book (4000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals) suggests, is a lifetime that will number somewhere around 4000 weeks if we’re reasonably lucky, maybe another thousand or so, if we are particularly long-lived. I read Burkeman’s book at the close of 2021. It was an uncomfortably busy year—one in which I never seemed to have enough time. His perspective on time helped me to consider new ways to create more space and less busyness in my life. Knowing that I am not alone in feeling too busy and very often overwhelmed, I thought I’d share some of what I found valuable and truly made a difference for me. I will warn you in advance. Burkeman does not offer easy answers—he asks us to examine our relationship to time and to the meaning we ascribe to our lives. From that exploration real change is possible—well over a year after I read the book, I not only continue to think about and recommend it, I have genuinely felt that my life is closer to what I want it to be and that my relationship to time is healthier.

Oliver Burkeman wrote for the Guardian until a couple of years ago. (His final column, found here, offers up his parting wisdom. It’s a joy!) In that capacity he wrote about, among other things, productivity tools. In 4000 Weeks, he challenges the notion that these tools will help us live better and richer lives. Instead, he argues for getting real about the finitude of our lives (thus the “for mortals” part of the title!) He suggests a radical rethinking of how we relate to time.

Here are a few of the things that were particularly meaningful for me in the book. Know that I am just scratching the surface—if what I’ve shared here is compelling—the book itself offers much more:

• Burkeman suggests that “we’ve unwittingly inherited, and feel pressured to live by, a troublesome set of ideas about how to use our limited time, all of which are pretty much guaranteed to make things worse.” Our relationship to time stems from the Industrial Revolution—prior to which clock time did not have the force that it has today in determining how we lived our lives. “Before, time was just the medium in which life unfolded, the stuff that life was made of. Afterward, once ‘time’ and ‘life’ had been separated in most people’s minds, time became a thing that you used—and it’s this shift that serves as the precondition for all the uniquely modern ways in which we struggle with time today.” In the industrial and modern era, time became something to control. We are expected (and expect ourselves) to “fit everything in.” To “control” time we seek new tools, tricks, and hacks that end up serving to simply increase the amount that we aim to squeeze in.
  
  When I work with clients they often bring up “time management” as a challenge. When we dig deeper, we almost without exception, discover that managing time is not the real issue. Rather than controlling or managing time, we can accept that time is finite and get real about how we want to use the time we have. What can we do? What matters most? What do we say no to in order to create the space to say yes to what matters most? Asking these kinds of questions can be so much more powerful than attempting to “manage” time better.
  

• Taking this even further—truly and deeply acknowledging that our time is finite opens the door to creating a more manageable life. Burkeman suggests that our best strategy is “just facing the way things truly are. Letting time use you, approaching life not as an opportunity to implement your predetermined plans for success but as a matter of responding to the needs of your place and your moment in history.” A theme of Burkeman’s writing, hinted at early and more pointedly addressed later in the book, is that confronting our mortality allows and is perhaps a requirement for begin fully present to our finite lives. In his words: “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 ways we typically approach time management often result in diligent focus on the least important things—and postponing the most important. We work so hard to reduce the overwhelm that we peel off the easy to do, quick to complete tasks that can relieve that sense of overwhelm. Instead, Burkeman offers the possibility of learning to “stay with the anxiety of feeling overwhelmed, of not being on top of everything.” And, in a larger sense, doing the same with what he calls “existential overwhelm”—resisting the urge to pile on more and more experiences in our lives rather than truly enjoying the “tiny slice of experiences you actually do have time for.”
  
  I’ve never liked the idea of a bucket list—Burkeman helped me understand my resistance to the idea of having one. And I was able to confidently tell my husband that I wanted to visit a place we’d been before and loved rather than put a new pin on the map. I don’t need to collect experiences, I actually want to enjoy them!
  

• Practice inefficiency. While I love my apps and the ease through which I can get things done, Burkeman points out that the business of Silicon Valley is to ease “pain points”—the small annoyances of life—like physically calling a restaurant or a cab. The cost of solving those pain points is often the loss of the relationships that create a cohesive and coherent community. Recently I called a Southern Indian restaurant to place a take-out order and went to pick it up. No Uber Eats, Door Dash or Chowhound! It was lovely to hear the voices of the family members who own the restaurant and interact with them when I picked up the order. It took more time, it wasn’t terribly efficient, and I didn’t regret it for a moment.
  
  Inefficiency is part of what I practiced during the pandemic when I turned my Los Angeles neighborhood into a village, getting to know the local merchants, walking to more places, and reducing my reliance on delivery services. It became a way to connect in an increasingly unconnected time.

• Embrace Patience. I work with both corporate and non-profit leaders. Most of them have, at some point, acknowledged how hard it is for them to be patient. At times this is said with pride—patience is not a particularly highly regarded virtue in our sped-up reality. We can’t afford to be patient when there’s so much to do and it has to be done so quickly. Burkeman points out that, perhaps counterintuitively, rather than being a sign of passivity, patience can, in a world that is speeding up, become a form of power. Again, in his words: “The capacity to resist the urge to hurry—to allow things to take the time they take—is a way to gain purchase on the world, to do the work that counts, and to derive satisfaction from the doing itself, instead of deferring all your fulfillment to the future.”
  
  Burkeman offers three principles of patience. The one I particularly appreciate is to develop a taste for having problems. Rather than trying to keep pushing to get rid of problems, he suggests that we “develop an appreciation for the fact that life just is a process of engaging with problem after problem, giving each one the time it requires.” Problems, he suggests, aren’t “an impediment to a meaningful existence but the very substance of one.”

Before I close, I’ll share one of the more provocative ideas that Burkeman offers. He suggests that we learn to see our individual lives in a larger context and recognize 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.” Calling this “cosmic insignificance therapy” it’s an antidote to our innate egocentricity bias—which can result in our adopting “an unrealistic definition of what it means to use our time well.” Paradoxically, once we accept that we really don’t matter that much, we can set the bar a little lower and, moment to moment, live according to Carl Jung’s guidance to “quietly do the next and most necessary thing.”

Burkeman doesn’t promise that we can end our struggles with time or radically increase our happiness if we do. (For more on that, I recommend his book The Antidote, which shows the flaws with our focus on positive thinking and proposes a different way to think about happiness.) What he does offer is a different way to think about time so that we can both focus on what truly matters and be kinder to ourselves. Fifteen months after reading his book, I’m thrilled to share that taking in these perspectives has allowed me to do just that—imperfectly, inconsistently and quite significantly.