Favorite Quotes from Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman

“Meanwhile, no catalog of our time related troubles would be complete without mentioning that alarming phenomenon, familiar to anyone older than about thirty, whereby time seems to speed up as you age—steadily accelerating until, to judge from the reports of people in the seventies and eighties, months begin to flash by in what feels like minutes.” (p. 7)

“Or else, eventually, to break down: it’s now common to encounter reports, especially from younger adults, of all-encompassing, bone-deep burnout, characterized by exhaustion of ‘a generation of finely honed tools, crafted from embryos to be lean, mean production machines’…”(p. 9)

“Our struggle to stay on top of everything may serve someone’s interests; working longer hours—and using any extra income to buy more consumer goods—turns us into better cogs in the economic machine. but it doesn’t result in peace of mind, or lead us to spend more of our finite time on those people any things we care most deeply about ourselves.” (p. 13)

“Soon, your sense of self-worth gets completely bound up with how you’re using time: it stops being merely the water in which you swim and turns in to something you feel you need to dominate or control, if you’re to avoid feeling guilty, panicked or overwhelmed.” (p. 25)

“We recoil from the notion that this is it—that this life, with all its flaws and inescapable vulnerabilities, its extreme brevity, and our limited influence over how it unfolds, is the only one we get a shot at.” (p. 29)

“Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself.” (p. 31)

“…because it’s scary to confront the truth that almost everything worth doing, from marriage and parenting to business or politics, depends on cooperating with others, and therefore exposing yourself to the emotional uncertainties of relationships.” (p. 31)

“…’missing out’ is what makes our choices meaningful in the first place.” (p. 33)

“…the unfashionable but powerful notion of 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.” (p. 34)

“We would be forced to acknowledge that there are hard choices to be made; which balls to let drop, which people to disappoint, which cherished ambitions to abandon, which roles to fail at.” (p. 39)

“…there’s no reason to believe you’ll ever feel ‘on top of things,’ or make time for everything that matters, simply by getting more done.” (p. 41)

“’Work expands to fill the time available for its completion,’ the English humorist and historian C. Northcote Parkinson wrote in 1955, coning what became known as Parkinson’s law. But it’s not merely a joke, and it doesn’t apply only to work. It applies to everything that needs doing. In fact, it’s the definition of ‘what needs doing’ that expands to fill the time available.” (p. 42)

“Rendering yourself more efficient—either by implementing various productivity techniques or be driving yourself harder—won’t generally result in the feeling of having ‘enough time,’ because, all else being equal, the demands will increase to offset any benefits. Far from getting things done, you’ll be creating new things to do.” (p. 43)

“You begin to grasp that when there’s too much to do, and there always will be, the only route to psychological freedom is to let go of the limit-denying fantasy of getting it all done and instead to focus on doing a few things that count.” (p. 44)

“If you never stop to ask yourself if the sacrifice is worth it, your days will automatically begin to fill with not just more things, but with more trivial or tedious things, because they’ve never had to clear the hurdle of being judged more important than something else.” (p. 48)

“You’ll sometimes still decide to drive yourself hard in an effort to squeeze more in, when circumstances absolutely require it. But that won’t be your default mode, because you’ll no longer be operating under the illusion of one day making time for everything.” (p. 50)

“When you render the process more convenient, your drain it of its meaning.” (p. 52)

“’How else are we to get to know this place where we have been set, apart from tending to it?’” (p. 55)

“…we embark on the futile attempt to ‘get everything done,’ which is really another way of trying to evade the responsibility of deciding what to do with your finiite time—because if you actually could get everything done, you’d never have to choose amoung mutually exclusive possibilities.” (p. 61)

“All at once, it can seem amazing to be there at all, having any experience, in a way that’s overwhelmingly more important than the face that the experience happens to be an annoying one.” (p. 67)

“Lye’s focus was no longer exclusively on what he was doing in such moments or what he’d rather be doing instead; now, he noticed also that he was doing it, with an upwelling of gratitude that took him by surprise.” (p. 68)

“It is the thrilling recognition that you wouldn’t even really want to be able to do everything, since if you didn’t have to decide what to miss out on, your choices couldn’t truly mean anything.” (p. 69)

“The real measure of any time management technique is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things.” (p. 72)

“Principle number one is to pay yourself first when it comes to time.” (p. 73)

“Abel saw that her only viable option was claim time instead—to just start drawing, for an hour or two, every day, and to accept the consequences, even if those included neglecting other activities she sincerely valued. ‘If you don’t save a bit of your time for you, now, out of every week,’ as she puts it, ‘there is no moment in the future when you’ll magically be magically be done with everything and have loads of free time.’” (p. 75)

“You get to preserve our sense of being in control of things, but at the cost of never finishing anything important.” (p. 75)

“You need to learn how to start saying no to things you do want to do, with the recognition that you have only one life.” (p. 78)

“Dispiriting as this might sound at first, it contains a liberating message: if you’re procrastinating on something because you’re worried you won’t do a good enough job, you can relax—because judged by the flawless standards of your imagination, you definitely won’t do a good enough job. So you might as well make a start.” (p. 80)

“Likewise, there’s no possibility of a romantic relationship being truly fulfilling unless you’re willing, at least for a while, to settle for that specific relationship, with all its imperfections—which means spurning the seductive lure of an infinite number of superior imaginary alternatives.” (p. 85)

“When you can no longer turn back, anxiety falls away, because now there’s only one direction to travel: forward into the consequences of your choice.” (p. 88)

“So when you pay attention to something you don’t especially value, it’s not an exaggeration to say that you’re paying with your life.” (p. 91)

“Their attention has been commandeered by forces that don’t have their highest interests at heart.” (p. 92)

“…when you can’t predict whether or not refreshing the screen will bring new posts to read, the uncertainty makes you more likely to keep trying, again and again and again, just as would a slot machine.” (p. 95)

“It’s not usually that you’re sitting there, concentration rapturously, when your attention is dragged away against your will. In truth, you’re eager for the slightest excuse to turn away from what you’re doing in order to escape how disagreeable it feels to be doing it; you slide away to the Twitter pile-on or the celebrity gossip site with a feeling not of reluctance but of relief.” (p. 104)

“’One of the puzzling lessons I have learned,’ observes Gregg Krech, describing his own experience of the same urge, ‘is that, more often than not, I do not feel like doing most of the things that need doing. I’m not just speaking about cleaning the toilet bowl or doing my tax returns. I’m referring to those things I genuinely desire to accomplish.’” (p. 104)

“When you try to focus on something you deem important, you’re forced to face your limits, an experience that feels especially uncomfortable precisely because the task at hand is one you value so much.” (p. 105)

“You’re obliged to deal with how your experience is unfolding in this moment, to resign yourself to the reality that this is it.” (p. 106)

“The way to find peaceful absorption in a difficult project, or a boring Sunday afternoon, isn’t to chase feelings of peace or absorption, but to acknowledge the inevitability of discomfort, and to turn more of your attention to the reality of your situation that to railing against it.” (p. 109)

“The obsesesive planner, essentially, is demanding certain reassurances from the future—but the future isn’t the sort of thing that can ever provide the reassurance he craves, for the obvious reason that it’s still in the future.” (p. 116)

“Really, no matter how far ahead you plan, you never get to relax in the certainty that everything’s going to go the way you’d like. Instead, the frontier of your uncertainty just get pushed further and further toward the horizon.” (p. 116)

“You ca never truly be certain about the future. And so your reach will always exceed your grasp.” (p. 117)

“Instead, you just find yourself in each moment as it comes, already thrown into this time and place, with all the limitations that entails, and unable to feel certain about what might happen next.” (p. 118)

“Whatever you value most about your life can always be traced back to some jumble of chance occurrences your couldn’t possibly have planned for, and you certainly can’t alter retrospectively now.” (p. 119)

“…each of us has made it through to this point in our lives—so it might at least be worth entertaining the possibility that when the uncontrollable future arrives, we’ll have what it takes to weather that as well. And that you shouldn’t necessarily even want such control, given how much of what you value in life only ever came to pass thanks to circumstances you never chose.” (p. 121)

“But to the extent that we can stop demanding certainty that things will go our way later on, we’ll be liberated from anxiety in the only moment it ever actually is, which is this one.” (p. 123)

“But all a plan is—all it could ever possibly be—is a present-moment statement of intent. It’s an expression of your current thoughts about how you’d ideally like to deploy your modest influence over the future. The future, of course, is under no obligation to comply.” (p. 123)

“And indeed there’s a sense in which every moment of life is a ‘last time.’ It arrives; you’ll never get it again—and once it’s passed, your remaining supply of moments will be one smaller than before. To treat these moments solely as stepping-stones to some future moment is to demonstrate a level of obliviousness to our real situation that would be jaw-dropping if it weren’t for the fact that we all do it, all the time.” (p. 133)

“Our obsession with extracting the greatest future value out of our time blinds us to the reality that, in fact, the moment of truth is always not—that life is nothing but a succession of present moments, culminating in death, and that you’ll probably never get to a point where you feel you have things in perfect working order.” (p. 136)

“Even an undertaking as seemingly hedonistic as a year spent backpacking around the globe could fall victim to the same problem, if your purpose isn’t to explore the world but—a subtle distinction, this—to add to your mental storehouse of experiences, in the hope that you’ll feel, later on, that you’d used your life well.” (p. 143)

“In order to most fully inhabit the only life you ever get, you have to refrain from using ervery spare hour for personal growth. From this perspective, idleness isn’t merely forgivable; it’s practically an obligation.” (p. 147)

“As the Cat in the Hat says, ‘It is fun to have fun but you have to know how.’” (p. 152)

“In such an era, it’s virtually guaranteed that truly stopping to rest—as opposed to training for a 10K, or heading off on a meditation retreat with the goal of attaining spiritual enlightenment—is initially going to provoke some serious feelings of discomfort, rather than of delight. That discomfort isn’t a sign that you shouldn’t be doing it, though. It’s a sign that you definitely should.” (p. 154)

“We might seek to incorporate into our daily lives more things we do for their own sake alone—to spend some our time, that is, on activities in which the only thing we’re trying to get from them is the doing itself.” (p. 158)

“’I experience something else: patience and humility, definitely, but also freedom. Freedom to pursue the futile. And the freedom to suck without caring is revelatory.’ Results aren’t everything. Indeed, they’d better not be, because results always come later—and later is always too late.” (p. 160)

“And the same goes for many of our other efforts to force reality’s pace.” (p. 162)

“Reaching for the smartphone, diving back into the to-do list, pounding away on the elliptical machine at the gym—all these forms of high-speed living were serving as some kind of emotional avoidance.” (p. 166)

“And whereas if you find yourself sliding into alcoholism, compassionate freinds may try to intervene, to help steer you in the direction of a healthier life, speed addition tends to be socially celebrated. Your friends are more likely to praise you for being ‘driven.’” (p. 169)

“Digging in to a challenging work project that can’t be hurried becomes not a trigger for stressful emotions but a bracing act of choice; giving a difficult novel the time it demands becomes a source of relish.” (p. 170)

“You breathe a sign a of relief, and as you dive into life as it really is, in clear-eyed awareness of your limitations, you begin to acquire what has become the least fashionable but perhaps most consequential of superpowers: patience.” (p. 171)

“The second-order change has occurred: now that you’ve abandoned your futile efforts to dictate the speed at which the experience moves, the real experience can begin.” (p. 177)

“The first is to develop a taste for having problems. Behind our urge to race through every obstacle or challenge, in an effort to get it ‘dealt with,’ there’s usually the unspoken fantasy that you might one day finally reach the state of having no problems whatsoever.” (p. 180)

“The second principle is to embrace radical incrementalism.” (p. 181)

“The final principle is that, more often than not, originality lies on the far side of unoriginality.” (p. 182)

“But it begins at all only for those who can muster the patience to immerse themselves in the earlier stage—the trial-and-error phase of copying others, learning new skills, and accumulating experience.” (p. 183)

“…the Soviet government has inadvertently demonstrated how much of the value of time comes not from the sheer quantity you have, but from whether you’re in sync with the people you care about most.” (p. 194)

“…there’s the profound sense of meaning that comes from being willing to fall in with the rhythms of the rest of the world; to be free to engage in all the worthwhile collaborative endeavors that require at lease some sacrifice of your sole control over what you do and when.” (p. 198)

“And if, like me, you possess the productivity geek’s natural inclination toward control-freakery when it comes to your time, you can experiment with what it feels like to not try to exert an iron grip on your timetable: to sometimes let the rhythms of family life and friendships and collective action take precedence over your perfect morning routine or your system for scheduling your week.” (p. 201)

“Truly doing justice to the astonishing gift of a few thousand weeks isn’t a matter of resolving to ‘do something remarkable’ with them. In fact, it entails precisely the opposite: refusing to hold them to an abstract and over-demanding standard of remarkableness, against which they can only ever be found wanting, and taking them instead on their own terms, dropping back down from godlike fantasies of cosmic significance into the experience of life as it concretely, finitely—and often enough, marvelously—really is.” (p. 213)

“A life spend focused on achieving security with respect to time, when in fact such security is unattainable, can only ever end up feeling provisional—as if the point of having been born still lies in the future, just over the horizon, and your life in all its fullness can begin as soon you’ve gotten it in perfect working order.” (p. 217)

“Does this choice diminish me, or enlarge me?” (p. 221)

“…asking what would make you happiest is likely to lure you toward the most comfortable option, or else leave you paralyzed by indecision.” (p. 221)

“Let your impossible standards crash to the ground. Then pick a few meaningful tasks from the rubble and get started on them today.” (p. 222)

“Not knowing what’s coming next—which is the situation you’re always in, with regard to the future—presents an ideal opportunity for choosing curiosity (wondering what might happen next) over worry (hoping that a certain specific thing will happen next, and feating it might not) whenever you can.” (p. 243)

“And if it ever feels beyond your powers, we always have a task in every situation. And that task is essentially working out, What is it that moves me from a sense of victimhood to a sense of active participation in what’s happening in my life?” (p. 253)

“But if you don’t have a compass and you don’t know to look within, you’re going to be very much adrift.” (p. 258)