4,000 Weeks

“We’ve been granted the mental capacities to make almost infinitely ambitious plans, yet practically no time at all to put them into action.”

I recently finished the audiobook “4,000 Weeks” by Oliver Burkeman, and it may be one of the most upsetting books in my recent memory. Actually, the book is wonderful from start to finish; it’s full of thorough tips and strategies for managing one’s time in a realistic fashion.

What is upsetting is the implication in the title “4,000 Weeks”. That is, roughly, the amount of weeks the average human lives. Assuming an average human life expectancy of 72.9 years, multiplied by 52 weeks a year and out pops 3,775 weeks. That number screams to be approximated and since human lifespans are pretty variable, rounding up to 4,000 is much cleaner. Even if you manage to live to 100, which happens to be my dad’s life goal, you only get 5,200 weeks.

This is deeply unsettling. I love the mental exercise that asks what you would do if someone gave you $86,400 dollars one day and then someone stole $10. Would you be grateful for the remaining $86,390 or would you lament the missing $10? When you realize that every human being gets 86,400 seconds in a single day you understand the point of the exercise. All of these seconds to do what we wish, but more often than not, we squander the time on unsatisfying work, ungrateful people, and unfulfilling leisure.

The reason Mr. Burkeman’s book rocked me is because I only ever heard about seconds refreshing and not weeks expiring. It’s a sobering realization, but a critical one because once you realize that life will end you can evaluate whether or not you wish to spend your dwindling weeks on what truly matters to you. The author writes:

“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 optimized 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.”

The three strategies that stood out most to me are summarized below. After the last, I have an image linking to one of my favorite podcasts: “The One You Feed”, which features an episode that pairs nicely with this book — “Strategies for When You’re Overwhelmed”.

Impossible actually means impossible

“Reach for the moon, for even if you fail you will land amongst the stars” is a quaint and softly inspiring quote that adorns many elementary and middle school hallways. I prefer, “reach for the moon, but if you do not have a spaceship the vacuum of space will rupture every blood vessel in your body.” Admittedly, mine is a tad too graphic for young kids trying to learn. Yet the lesson is more applicable to life than the fluffy, inspiration of the first quote. Sure, go to the moon, but do all the work it takes to get there safely. I entered college as a pre-med student playing collegiate lacrosse in a different state and expected to excel in all my classes while earning a large chunk of playing time. Looking back, I might as well have tried to catapult myself from Earth to the moon. I burned myself up and fell down hard. I did not have realistic goals, and even if they were more realistic, I did not have the means with which to actually achieve them. I followed the advice of doing the impossible without respect for the necessary groundwork that has always preceded reaching new realms.

Strategic underachievement

Easily my favorite subsection in the entire book. “Strategic underachievement” is intentionally lowering the bar for some task. Leave work aside for a moment and consider your leisure. Is your enjoyment of a leisurely activity based on some performance metric that you long-ago decided made it worthwhile to do whatever it is you’re doing? Thereby granting permission for yourself to do something you enjoyed because it had value? I used to be upset when I didn’t finish several chapters in a book. Didn’t matter if the characters were unique or the writing was compelling. My leisure was measured in how many chapters I finished. Since making that realization I gave myself permission to stop at any point, and when I had that permission I could read more to my heart’s content. Eliminating the fraudulent metric from my leisure time allowed me to enjoy my leisure time more fully.

The unrealistic, “rocks in a jar” exercise

Oh do I hate this, but I didn’t realize why I hated this until reading “4,000 Weeks”. The author makes two exceptional points. One, that the exercise is necessarily patronizing. A professor asks students to fill a jar with sand, pebbles, and rocks so that all the sand, pebbles, and rocks fit. Most start with the sand because that is the easiest to fill, but they soon realize that a jar full of sand has no room for larger stones. While pulling out a new jar, the professor sagely explains that, in life, one must first put the large rocks in the jar, followed by pebbles, and then the sand fills in the cracks between.

The students ooh and ahh with clear understanding that life is about focusing first on the most important aspects, then the second most, and so on. The second point made is obvious only in hindsight: the exercise only works because the professor has carefully calibrated the amount of rocks in the jar. She knows in advance that it is possible to make it all fit, but that is not how life works. We are constantly determining what is most important, what our time will go toward, and if the jar is life then our jar gets smaller the closer we get to the end of our 4,000 weeks. It’s not about filling the jar, but choosing to fill it with the rocks that mean something.