Hello I'm Oliver Burkeman and I'm the author of the book Four Thousand Weeks.
One of the arguments I try to make in the book is that a big reason so many of us struggle with time
and specifically with this feeling that we're never quite getting around to the things that
matter the most to us it's because we spend our lives chasing this feeling of mastery or control
over our time. But in fact we're never going to achieve. So we want to become the kind of people
who can stay on top of everything who can handle any obligation that might be thrown at us,
who have all sorts of time in the day to pursue other ambitions or to, you know,
implement great morning routines or habits that we think will make us into better people.
Or we want a certain kind of confidence and control about the future. We want to know that
like, okay, we know how things are headed here and we're in control of how things are going to unfold
But the truth is that we are finite humans with incredibly limited time in a world of infinite
inputs, infinite possibilities. There'll always be another email, there'll always be another
obligation. And similarly we can't actually have any idea what's going to happen next week,
next month, really even next minute, however much we wish we had that feeling of control.
So I argue that if we sort of acknowledge this and face our finitude and drop back down into reality,
it's not a council of despair, you know, it's not a reason for thinking that you can never do
anything good in life. Actually it's the opposite. It's exactly how to start doing some good and
meaningful things in life because you get to put aside this impossible quest to get your life in
working order with regard to time and just focus instead on doing a few things, not everything,
but a few things that really count. Okay so how could you implement this in your day-to-day life?
Three suggestions: one of them is to give up this futile quest to clear the decks. I know
a lot of us and me for many years, you know we spend our working day, we come in, we think i'll
just get all these emails and all these little annoying things that are tugging at my attention,
we'll just get them out of the way first and then there'll be this beautiful expanse of time
and focus to really get stuck into what counts the most. It never happens, again because the
decks will never be clear and actually it's worse than that. As I talk about in the book, the act of
trying to clear the decks makes them fill up again faster. So the only way to handle the situation
is to surrender. To say, I'm not going to try to clear the decks before I get stuck in to something
important. I'm going to start the day with an hour, two hours, three hours, doesn't need to be
vast but first focusing on something that I know really matters to me and will really sort of
move the needle as they say. And then later in the day, sure, I'm going to nominate a fixed
amount of time, maybe it's an hour, maybe it's two hours, when I'm going to turn to all those other
debt clearing things, only I'm not going to think that I'm going to get to the end of them, I'm not
going to actually try to clear the decks. I'm just going to work on them for a while. In other words,
it's less like trying to climb up to the summit of a mountain and then you're like I've done it all.
It's much more like gardening, right, where you water the plants every day and you sort of turn,
keep the soil turned over, but you don't imagine that you're ever going to finish it, you just
maintain it, you just make sure you pay attention to it for a small amount of time on a regular
basis. Second idea is to think of your life in terms of domains, right, maybe there's work,
home, maybe fitness and exercise and health, whatever, and then pick only one big goal in each
domain at a time that you're gonna focus on and that you won't move on to others until that one
is complete. So say you've got like four big home improvement projects that you think are all really
important. You're going to make much more progress on them if you completely give up hope of making
any progress on three of them for now while you focus on one and see it through to completion and
then move on to another. We don't like thinking in this way right because it feels uncomfortable
neglecting stuff feels uncomfortable because when we can tell ourselves that we've got a finger in
every pie we're taking care of business it's all ticking over it feels like we're achieving
this control, this mastery over our time. But it doesn't work. What actually happens is you sort of
dissipate your energy over all the projects and you make less progress.
And then finally, third tip I would say is to embrace what I and other people have called the
joy of missing out. We hear all the time these days about the fear of missing out which is
this idea that thanks partly to technology we're always aware of and tormented by all the events
we could be at, instead of the one that we're at. All the people we could be dating, all the
jobs we could be working in and so we never get to really wholeheartedly commit and enjoy what
we're doing because of all these other tormenting possibilities. But the implication in the idea of
the fear of missing out is that you might be able to somehow get over it and not miss out on things,
whereas what I want to say is that missing out is completely unavoidably inevitable. You don't need
to fear it because it's guaranteed. If you're a finite human in an effectively infinite world
every decision to do anything with an hour of your day is automatically a decision to miss out on a
million other things. And if you can glimpse this fact a little bit more, if you can fall into this
way of thinking it's incredibly liberating and energising. Because you come to see that when you
decide to do something consciously with an hour of your life or a day of your life knowing that
you're inevitably neglecting all sorts of other things many of which might be really important,
it's kind of like an affirmation you're sort of saying, you know what, I choose to spend
the afternoon taking my kid to the playground or I choose to spend this evening reading this
novel that I really want to read and I'm very deliberately saying you know I'm a finite human,
I can only do so much and it actually lends more meaning to the experience that you put a stake in
the ground and say I can't do more than one thing with this time and this is the thing I choose to
do. So anyway, there's much more in the book of course and I really hope you enjoy reading it.