Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

Life on the Conveyor Belt

In one sense, of course, nobody these days needs telling that there isn’t enough time. We’re obsessed with our overfilled inboxes and lengthening to-do lists, haunted by the guilty feeling that we ought to be getting more done, or different things done, or both. (How can you be sure that people feel so busy? It’s like the line about how to know whether someone’s a vegan: don’t worry, they’ll tell you.) Surveys reliably show that we feel more pressed for time than ever before; yet in 2013, research by a team of Dutch academics raised the amusing possibility that such surveys may understate the scale of the busyness epidemic – because many people feel too busy to participate in surveys.5, 6 Recently, as the gig economy has grown, busyness has been rebranded as ‘hustle’ – relentless work not as a burden to be endured but as an exhilarating lifestyle choice, worth boasting about on social media. In reality, though, it’s the same old problem, pushed to an extreme: the pressure to fit ever-increasing quantities of activity into a stubbornly non-increasing quantity of daily time.

And yet busyness is really only the beginning. Many other complaints, when you stop to think about them, are essentially complaints about our limited time. Take the daily battle against online distraction, and the alarming sense that our attention spans have shrivelled to such a degree that even those of us who were bookworms as children now struggle to make it through a paragraph without experiencing the urge to reach for our phones. What makes this so troubling, in the end, is that it represents a failure to make the best use of a small supply of time. (You’d feel less self-loathing about wasting a morning on Facebook if the supply of mornings were inexhaustible.) Or perhaps your problem isn’t being too busy but insufficiently busy, languishing in a dull job, or not employed at all. That’s still a situation made far more distressing by the shortness of life, because you’re using up your limited time in a way you’d rather not. Even some of the very worst aspects of our era – like our viciously hyperpartisan politics and terrorists radicalised via YouTube videos – can be explained, in a roundabout way, by the same underlying facts concerning life’s brevity. It’s because our time and attention are so limited, and therefore valuable, that social media companies are incentivised to grab as much of them as they can, by any means necessary – which is why they show users material guaranteed to drive them into a rage, instead of the more boring and accurate stuff.7

Then there are all those timeless human dilemmas like whom to marry, whether to have children, and what kind of work to pursue. If we had thousands of years in which to live, all those would be far less agonising, too, since there’d be sufficient time to spend decades trying out each kind of possible existence. Meanwhile, no catalogue 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 their seventies and eighties, months begin to flash by in what feels like minutes. It’s hard to imagine a crueller arrangement: not only are our four thousand weeks constantly running out, but the fewer of them we have left, the faster we seem to lose them.

And if our relationship to our limited time has always been a difficult one, recent events have brought matters to a head. In 2020, in lockdown during the coronavirus pandemic, with our normal routines suspended, many people reported feeling that time was disintegrating completely, giving rise to the disorientating impression that their days were somehow simultaneously racing by and dragging on interminably. Time divided us, even more than it had before: for those with jobs and small children at home, there wasn’t enough of it; for those furloughed or unemployed, there was too much. People found themselves working at strange hours, detached from the cycles of daytime and darkness, hunched over glowing laptops at home, or risking their lives in hospitals and mail-order warehouses. And it felt as though the future had been put on hold, leaving many of us stuck, in the words of one psychiatrist, ‘in a new kind of everlasting present’ – an anxious limbo of social media scrolling and desultory Zoom calls and insomnia, in which it felt impossible to make meaningful plans, or even to clearly picture life beyond the end of next week.8

All of which makes it especially frustrating that so many of us are so bad at managing our limited time – that our efforts to make the most of it don’t simply fail but regularly seem to make things worse. For years now, we’ve been deluged with advice on living the fully optimised life, in books with titles such as Extreme Productivity and The 4-Hour Workweek and Smarter Faster Better, plus websites full of ‘life hacks’ for whittling seconds off everyday chores. (Note the curious suggestion, in the term ‘life hack’, that your life is best thought of as some kind of faulty contraption, in need of modification so as to stop it from performing suboptimally.) There are numerous apps and wearable devices for maximising the pay-offs from your workday, your workouts and even your sleep, plus meal replacement drinks to eliminate time wasted eating dinner. And the chief selling point of a thousand other products and services, from kitchen appliances to online banking, is that they’ll help you achieve the widely championed goal of squeezing the most from your time.

The problem isn’t exactly that these techniques and products don’t work. It’s that they do work – in the sense that you’ll get more done, race to more meetings, ferry your kids to more after-school activities, generate more profit for your employer – and yet, paradoxically, you only feel busier, more anxious, and somehow emptier as a result. In the modern world, the American anthropologist Edward T. Hall once pointed out, time feels like an unstoppable conveyor belt, bringing us new tasks as fast as we can dispatch the old ones; and becoming ‘more productive’ just seems to cause the belt to speed up.9 Or else, eventually, to break down: it’s now common to encounter reports, especially from younger adults, of an all-encompassing, bone-deep burnout, characterised by an inability to complete basic daily chores – the paralysing exhaustion of ‘a generation of finely honed tools, crafted from embryos to be lean, mean production machines’, in the words of the millennial social critic Malcolm Harris.10

This is the maddening truth about time, which most advice on managing it seems to miss. It’s like an obstreperous toddler: the more you struggle to control it, to make it conform to your agenda, the further it slips from your control. Consider all the technology intended to help us gain the upper hand over time: by any sane logic, in a world with dishwashers, microwaves and jet engines, time ought to feel more expansive and abundant, thanks to all the hours freed up. But this is nobody’s actual experience. Instead, life accelerates, and everyone grows more impatient. It’s somehow vastly more aggravating to wait two minutes for the microwave than two hours for the oven – or ten seconds for a slow-loading web page versus three days to receive the same information by post.

The same self-defeating pattern applies to many of our attempts to become more productive at work. A few years ago, drowning in emails, I successfully implemented the system known as Inbox Zero, but I soon discovered that when you get tremendously efficient at answering emails all that happens is that you get much more email. Feeling busier – thanks to all that email – I bought Getting Things Done, by the time management guru David Allen, lured by his promise that it is ‘possible for a person to have an overwhelming number of things to do and still function productively with a clear head’ and ‘what the martial artists call a “mind like water”’.11, 12 But I failed to appreciate Allen’s deeper implication – that there’ll always be too much to do – and instead set about attempting to get an impossible amount done. In fact, I did get better at racing through my to-do list, only to find that greater volumes of work magically started to appear. (Actually, it’s not magic; it’s simple psychology, plus capitalism. More on that later.)

None of this is how the future was supposed to feel. In 1930, in a speech titled ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren’, the economist John Maynard Keynes made a famous prediction: within a century, thanks to the growth of wealth and the advance of technology, no one would have to work more than about fifteen hours a week. The challenge would be how to fill all our new-found leisure time without going crazy. ‘For the first time since his creation,’ Keynes told his audience, ‘man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem – how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares.’13 But Keynes was wrong. It turns out that when people make enough money to meet their needs, they just find new things to need and new lifestyles to aspire to; they never quite manage to keep up with the Joneses, because whenever they’re in danger of getting close, they nominate new and better Joneses with whom to try to keep up. As a result, they work harder and harder, and soon busyness becomes an emblem of prestige. Which is clearly completely absurd: for almost the whole of history, the entire point of being rich was not having to work so much. Moreover, the busyness of the better-off is contagious, because one extremely effective way to make more money, for those at the top of the tree, is to cut costs and make efficiency improvements in their companies and industries. That means greater insecurity for those lower down, who are then obliged to work harder just to get by.

On Getting the Wrong Things Done

But now here we get to the heart of things, to a feeling that goes deeper, and that’s harder to put into words: the sense that despite all this activity, even the relatively privileged among us rarely get round to doing the right things. We sense that there are important and fulfilling ways we could be spending our time, even if we can’t say exactly what they are – yet we systematically spend our days doing other things instead. This yearning for more meaning can take many forms: it’s there, for instance, in the desire to devote yourself to some larger cause, in the intuition that this particular moment in history, with all its crises and suffering, might demand more from you than the usual getting and spending. But it’s also there in the feeling of frustration at having to work a day job in order to buy slivers of time for the work you love, and in the simple longing to spend more of your brief time on earth with your kids, in nature, or, at the very least, not commuting. The environmentalist and spiritual writer Charles Eisenstein recalls first sensing this basic ‘wrongness’ in our use of time as a child, growing up amid material comfort in 1970s America:

Life, I knew, was supposed to be more joyful than this, more real, more meaningful, and the world was supposed to be more beautiful.14 We were not supposed to hate Mondays and live for the weekends and holidays. We were not supposed to have to raise our hands to be allowed to pee. We were not supposed to be kept indoors on a beautiful day, day after day.

And this feeling of wrongness is only exacerbated by our attempts to become more productive, which seem to have the effect of pushing the genuinely important stuff ever further over the horizon. Our days are spent trying to ‘get through’ tasks, in order to get them ‘out of the way’, with the result that we live mentally in the future, waiting for when we’ll finally get round to what really matters – and worrying, in the meantime, that we don’t measure up, that we might lack the drive or stamina to keep pace with the speed at which life now seems to move. ‘The spirit of the times is one of joyless urgency,’ writes the essayist Marilynne Robinson, who observes that many of us spend our lives ‘preparing ourselves and our children to be means to inscrutable ends that are utterly not our own’.15 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 and things we care most deeply about ourselves.

Four Thousand Weeks is yet another book about making the best use of time. But it is written in the belief that time management as we know it has failed miserably, and that we need to stop pretending otherwise. This strange moment in history, when time feels so unmoored, might in fact provide the ideal opportunity to reconsider our relationship with it. Older thinkers have faced these challenges before us, and when their wisdom is applied to the present day, certain truths grow more clearly apparent. Productivity is a trap. Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster. Nobody in the history of humanity has ever achieved ‘work–life balance’, whatever that might be, and you certainly won’t get there by copying the ‘six things successful people do before 7 a.m’. The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control – when the flood of emails has been contained; when your to-do lists have stopped getting longer; when you’re meeting all your obligations at work and in your home life; when nobody’s angry with you for missing a deadline or dropping the ball; and when the fully optimised person you’ve become can turn, at long last, to the things life is really supposed to be about. Let’s start by admitting defeat: none of this is ever going to happen.

But you know what? That’s excellent news.

Part I

CHOOSING TO CHOOSE

1.

The Limit-Embracing Life

The real problem isn’t our limited time. The real problem – or so I hope to convince you – is 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. To see how we got here, and how to escape into a better relationship with time, we need to rewind the clock – back to before there were clocks.

On balance, you should definitely be grateful you weren’t born a peasant in early-medieval England. For one thing, you’d have been much less likely to make it to adulthood; but even if you had, the life that stretched ahead of you would have been one defined by servitude. You’d have spent your back-breaking days farming the land on which the local lord permitted you to live, in exchange for giving him a crippling proportion of what you produced or the income you could generate from it. The church would have demanded regular contributions as well, and you’d have been much too scared of eternal damnation to disobey. At night, you would have retreated to your one-room hut, alongside not only the rest of your family (who, like you, would rarely have bathed or brushed their teeth) but also your pigs and chickens, which you brought indoors at night; bears and wolves still roamed the forests and would help themselves to any animals left outside after sunset. Disease would have been another constant companion: familiar sicknesses ranged from measles and influenza to bubonic plague and St Anthony’s fire, a form of food poisoning caused by mouldy grain, which left the delirious sufferer feeling as though his skin were burning or as if he were being bitten by unseen teeth.1

Time Before Timetables

But there’s one set of problems you almost certainly wouldn’t have experienced: problems of time. Even on your most exhausting days, it probably wouldn’t have occurred to you that you had ‘too much to do’, that you needed to hurry, or that life was moving too fast, let alone that you’d got your work–life balance wrong. By the same token, on quieter days, you would never have felt bored. And though death was a constant presence, with lives cut short far more frequently than they are today, time wouldn’t have felt in limited supply. You wouldn’t have felt any pressure to find ways to ‘save’ it. Nor would you have felt guilty for wasting it: if you took an afternoon break from threshing grain to watch a cockfight on the village green, it wouldn’t have felt like you were shirking during ‘work time’. And none of this was simply because things moved more slowly back then, or because medieval peasants were more relaxed or more resigned to their fate. It was because, so far as we can tell, they generally didn’t experience time as an abstract entity – as a thing – at all.

If that sounds confusing, it’s because our modern way of thinking about time is so deeply entrenched that we forget it even is a way of thinking; we’re like the proverbial fish who have no idea what water is, because it surrounds them completely. Get a little mental distance on it, though, and our perspective starts to look rather peculiar. We imagine time to be something separate from us and from the world around us, ‘an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences’, in the words of the American cultural critic Lewis Mumford.2 To see what he means, consider some time-related question – how you plan to spend tomorrow afternoon, say, or what you’ve accomplished over the last year – and without being fully conscious of it at first, you’ll probably find yourself visualising a calendar, a yardstick, a tape measure, the numbers on a clock face, or some hazier kind of abstract timeline. You’ll then proceed to measure and judge your real life against this imaginary gauge, lining up your activities against the timeline in your head. Edward Hall was making the same point with his image of time as a conveyor belt that’s constantly passing us by. Each hour or week or year is like a container being carried on the belt, which we must fill as it passes, if we’re to feel that we’re making good use of our time. When there are too many activities to fit comfortably into the containers, we feel unpleasantly busy; when there are too few, we feel bored. If we keep pace with the passing containers, we congratulate ourselves for ‘staying on top of things’ and feel like we’re justifying our existence; if we let too many pass by unfilled, we feel we’ve wasted them. If we use containers labelled ‘work time’ for the purposes of leisure, our employer may grow irritated. (He paid for those containers; they belong to him!)

The medieval farmer simply had no reason to adopt such a bizarre idea in the first place. Workers got up with the sun and slept at dusk, the lengths of their days varying with the seasons. There was no need to think of time as something abstract and separate from life: you milked the cows when they needed milking and harvested the crops when it was harvest time, and anybody who tried to impose an external schedule on any of that – for example, by doing a month’s milking in a single day to get it out of the way, or by trying to make the harvest come sooner – would rightly have been considered a lunatic. There was no anxious pressure to ‘get everything done’, either, because a farmer’s work is infinite: there will always be another milking and another harvest, forever, so there’s no sense in racing towards some hypothetical moment of completion. Historians call this way of living ‘task orientation’, because the rhythms of life emerge organically from the tasks themselves, rather than from being lined up against an abstract timeline, the approach that has become second nature for us today. (It’s tempting to think of medieval life as moving slowly, but it’s more accurate to say that the concept of life ‘moving slowly’ would have struck most people as meaningless. Slowly as compared with what?) In those days before clocks, when you did need to explain how long something might take, your only option was to compare it with some other concrete activity. Medieval people might speak of a task lasting a ‘Miserere whyle’ – the approximate time it took to recite Psalm 50, known as the Miserere, from the Bible – or alternatively a ‘pissing whyle’, which should require no explanation.3

Living this way, one can imagine that experience would have felt expansive and fluid, suffused with something it might not be an exaggeration to call a kind of magic. Notwithstanding the many real privations of his existence, our peasant farmer might have sensed a luminous, awe-inspiring dimension to the world around him. Untroubled by any notion of time ‘ticking away’, he might have experienced a heightened awareness of the vividness of things, the feeling of timelessness that Richard Rohr, a contemporary Franciscan priest and author, calls ‘living in deep time’.4 At dusk, the medieval country-dweller might have sensed spirits whispering in the forest, along with the bears and wolves; ploughing the fields, he might have felt himself one tiny part of a vast sweep of history, in which his distant ancestors were almost as alive to him as his own children. We can assert all this with some confidence because we still occasionally encounter islands of deep time today – in those moments when, to quote the writer Gary Eberle, we slip ‘into a realm where there is enough of everything, where we are not trying to fill a void in ourselves or the world’.5 The boundary separating the self from the rest of reality grows blurry, and time stands still. ‘The clock does not stop, of course,’ Eberle writes, ‘but we do not hear it ticking.’6

This happens for some people in prayer, or in meditation, or in magnificent landscapes; I’m pretty sure my toddler son spent the whole of his infancy in such a state and is only now beginning to leave it. (Until we get them onto schedules, babies are the ultimate ‘task-orientated’ beings, which, along with sleep deprivation, may explain the other-worldliness of those first few months with a newborn: you’re dragged from clock time into deep time, whether you like it or not.) The Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, visiting Kenya in 1925, was setting out on a hike in the first glow of dawn when he, too, was suddenly plunged into timelessness:

From a low hill in this broad savanna, a magnificent prospect opened out to us.7 To the very brink of the horizon we saw gigantic herds of animals: gazelle, antelope, gnu, zebra, warthog, and so on. Grazing heads nodding, the herds moved forward like slow rivers. There was scarcely any sound save the melancholy cry of a bird of prey. This was the stillness of the eternal beginning, the world as it had always been, in the state of non-being … I walked away from my companions until I had put them out of sight, and savoured the feeling of being entirely alone.

The End of Eternity

There’s one huge drawback in giving so little thought to the abstract idea of time, though, which is that it severely limits what you can accomplish. You can be a small-scale farmer, relying on the seasons for your schedule, but you can’t be much other than a small-scale farmer (or a baby). As soon as you want to coordinate the actions of more than a handful of people, you need a reliable, agreed-upon method of measuring time. This is widely held to be how the first mechanical clocks came to be invented, by medieval monks, who had to begin their morning prayers while it was still dark, and needed some way of ensuring that the whole monastery woke up at the required point. (Their earlier strategies included deputising one monk to stay awake all night, watching the movements of the stars – a system that worked only when it wasn’t cloudy, and the night-shift monk didn’t fall asleep.) Making time standardised and visible in this fashion inevitably encourages people to think of it as an abstract thing with an independent existence, distinct from the specific activities on which one might spend it; ‘time’ is what ticks away as the hands move round the clock face. The Industrial Revolution is usually attributed to the invention of the steam engine; but as Mumford shows in his 1934 magnum opus, Technics and Civilization, it also probably couldn’t have happened without the clock. By the late 1700s, rural peasants were streaming into English cities, taking jobs in mills and factories, each of which required the coordination of hundreds of people, working fixed hours, often six days a week, to keep the machines running.

From thinking about time in the abstract, it’s natural to start treating it as a resource, something to be bought and sold and used as efficiently as possible, like coal or iron or any other raw material. Previously, labourers had been paid for a vaguely defined ‘day’s work’, or on a piecework basis, receiving a given sum per bale of hay or per slaughtered pig. But gradually it became more common to be paid by the hour – and the factory owner who used his workers’ hours efficiently, squeezing as much labour as possible from each employee, stood to make a bigger profit than one who didn’t. Indeed, some cantankerous industrialists came to feel that workers who didn’t drive themselves hard enough were literally guilty of stealing something. ‘I have by sundry people [been] horribly cheated,’ fumed the iron magnate Ambrose Crowley, from County Durham, in a memo from the 1790s, announcing his new policy of deducting pay for time spent ‘smoking, singing, reading of news history, contention, disputes, anything foreign to my business [or] in any way loitering’.8 The way Crowley saw it, his lackadaisical employees were thieves, illegitimately helping themselves to containers from the conveyor belt of time.