Four Thousand Weeks summary

If you were a peasant in early medieval England, your problems might have included rampant disease, making payments to the Church, or performing backbreaking labor for the lord who owned the land you lived on. But one problem you wouldn’t have faced was struggling with your time.

As a farmer, you’d have risen with the sun and gone to sleep at dusk. Tasks like milking the cows and harvesting crops would have been done as needed. As for timing things? You might have said that a task took as long as a “Miserere whyle,” or the time it takes to recite Psalm 50 from the Bible. And since farm work was indefinite, there was no need to rush to complete a task.

Any inquiry into time would be incomplete without considering the work of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. In his magnum opus Being and Time, Heidegger argues that our finite human existence is bound with time. In other words, we are the limited time that we spend on this planet. Our finitude defines our existence.

Unfortunately, most of us spend our time avoiding or denying this fact. Heidegger calls this “falling.” Some of us avoid the idea of finitude by seeking distractions or losing ourselves in the daily grind. Others take comfort with the belief that they don’t have to choose what to do at all. These people follow a prescriptive existence by getting married or remaining in a soul-destroying job.

Philosophers like Heidegger who have written about finitude tend to avoid giving practical advice about time management for fear of wandering too close to the self-help genre. But by considering Heidegger’s idea that deciding what we don’t want to spend time on is a core challenge, we can draw some conclusions. In short, we need to improve our ability to procrastinate.

Many of us reprimand ourselves for our tendency to procrastinate. But procrastination is a human tendency and is inevitable. To become better procrastinators, it’s time to shift our focus from attempting to get everything done to prioritizing what matters most.

Even if you live to be 80, you won’t really have 4,000 weeks. Life is filled with all kinds of unexpected events. And we also tend to get distracted.

Philosophers since the time of the ancient Greeks have been concerned about the human proclivity toward distraction. Their chief concern has been the fact that our reality is defined by our attention.

Have you ever felt like tasks always take longer than planned? The cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter realized this phenomenon and gave it a name: “Hofstadter’s law.” According to this law, if you try to give yourself extra time to account for running overtime, you’ll still end up running over your new estimated time.

Hofstadter proclaimed his law somewhat in jest. But if you’ve ever tried to plan a project, you know its principle tends to be true. Yet, while we realize that life is often out of our control, many of us spend our lives tediously trying to schedule every minute of our time.

In his 1962 book The Decline of Pleasure, the critic Walter Kerr noted our increasing tendency to fill our free time with productive activities. We party to expand our network or spend a weekend at home to renovate the house. But increasingly, we fail to find the time to relax.

The decline of leisure was a byproduct of the Industrial Revolution. Factory owners encouraged workers to use their time off in ways that would enhance their productivity at work. This was, ironically, exacerbated by labor reformers and union leaders who argued that workers would use their additional free time to improve themselves through education or cultural activities.

One day, flying above the American Midwest during a business trip, the vice president of a medical instruments company had an epiphany – that she hated her life. Though she used to feel passionate about her work, it had ceased to feel meaningful. Now she simply clung on to the hope that her hard work might lead to happiness down the line.

Finding yourself doubting how you spend your days can be deeply unsettling. But it’s a necessary first step toward building a fulfilling life. Which leads us to a fundamental question about time management: how do we make the time we have count?