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Zusammenfassung von Four Thousand Weeks

Name: Four Thousand Weeks
Rating: 4.5 (816 reviews)
Author: Oliver Burkeman

Oliver Burkeman

Time Management for Mortals

4.5 (816 Bewertungen)

23 Min.

Kurz zusammengefasst

'Four Thousand Weeks' by Oliver Burkeman is a thought-provoking book that challenges us to reevaluate how we spend our limited time on Earth. Burkeman offers practical advice on how to embrace uncertainty, overcome anxiety, and lead a more meaningful life.

Themen

Westliche Philosophie Menschsein Zufriedenheit Zeitmanagement

Inhaltsübersicht

Four Thousand Weeks
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What’s in it for me? Recalibrate the time of your life.

The average human lifespan is abysmally brief. Living to be 80 years old gives you around 4,000 weeks. It’s no secret that time is one of our most precious resources. Today, many of us are haunted by the feeling that we should be more productive, more efficient, or devoting our time to something else entirely.

The truth is that our obsession with productivity is taking a toll. Instead of reaching a perfect state of efficiency, “life hacks” and time management techniques leave us feeling stressed and empty. In these blinks, you’ll discover ideas about time, and time management, that encourage you to let go of traditional approaches and embrace the joy of finitude.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

why you should take up a hobby rather than a side hustle;
how the premodern concept of eternity informed how people spent their time; and
how to improve your procrastination skills.

You’ll never be able to master your time.

For most of human history, people have wanted to be rich so that they wouldn’t have to work as hard. But in recent years, being busy has become a lauded life choice known as hustle. Research shows that the wealthier you are, the more likely you are to be anxious about not having enough time to get everything done. And our capitalist economy is to blame.

Capitalism drives us to leverage our time, abilities, and resources in order to reap the greatest profit. In the process, many wealthy people achieve success at the cost of living a meaningful life. Meanwhile, the gig economy has forced those less fortunate to work multiple jobs with little financial security.

Of course, being too busy isn’t everybody’s problem. But for those of us who are obsessed with filling every waking moment with productivity, it’s time we took a deeper look at this desire.

The key message here is: You’ll never be able to master your time.

As a self-proclaimed productivity nut, the author spent years attempting to optimize his time-management skills. He bought expensive notepads, experimented with techniques like scheduling his day in 15-minute blocks, and sorted his life into A, B, and C priorities. These methods made him feel like he was always on the brink of mastering his productivity. But the day on which he finally conquered his time never arrived. Instead, he was left feeling more anxious than ever.

One day he had an epiphany: his efforts to optimize his time were futile. While he thought of himself as a productive person, the painful truth was that the tasks he fulfilled most effectively were insignificant. Sure, he could dutifully clear his inbox. But responding to emails only led to more emails. Meanwhile, things which were important to him, like researching an article he planned to write, were left undone.

The author’s experiences taught him an important lesson: the more you try to conquer your time, the more frustrated, stressed, and empty you feel. He calls this the paradox of limitation. But in reality, you’ll never be able to accomplish everything you’d like to. And by facing this fact, you can begin to focus on what matters. In the author’s case, giving up the desire to master time and surrendering to the unknown changed his life. He even committed to a long-term relationship and started a family.

Our ways of thinking about time are inherently modern.

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.

By facing our finitude, we can cultivate a fulfilling life.

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.

Become a better procrastinator by prioritizing limited goals.

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.

There’s more to your distractions than meets the eye.

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.

Live for the present moment rather than for the future.

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.

Take up hobbies or spend time with family and friends to reap the benefits of leisure 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.

Practice cosmic insignificance therapy instead of worrying about your life’s purpose.

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?

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Worum geht es in Four Thousand Weeks?

Four Thousand Weeks (2021) explores concepts of time and time management, arguing that our modern attempts to optimize our time leave us stressed and unhappy. Drawing upon the work of ancient and contemporary philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual leaders, this book proposes a path to cultivating a fulfilling life through embracing our limitations.

Wer Four Thousand Weeks lesen sollte

Time management gurus
Philosophy students
Aspiring creatives and entrepreneurs

Über den Autor

Oliver Burkeman is a feature writer for the Guardian. His accolades include winning the Foreign Press Association’s Young Journalist Award and being shortlisted for the Orwell Prize. He writes a popular weekly psychology column, This Column Will Change Your Life.

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