4000 Weeks Book Summary

1.) You do not use time:

• Burkeman argues, the problem begins when we view time as ‘something to use’.
• Viewing time in this way creates a joyless urgency because…

• The fundamental problem is that this attitude towards time sets up a rigged game in which it’s impossible ever to feel as though you’re doing well enough. Instead of simply living our lives as they unfold in time – instead of just being time, you might say – it becomes difficult not to value each moment primarily according to its usefulness for some future goal, or for some future oasis of relaxation you hope to reach once your tasks are finally ‘out of the way’.

• I love this point because it taps into the backwards law of life
• In a paradoxical way, the more we try to control and manage time the less in control we feel of it
• But the more we embrace finitude & the idea that time isn’t something to be controlled, the more liberated and at ease we feel
• So when you adopt a limit-embracing attitude, you stop beating yourself up for not fitting 20 things into one day
• Thought experiment:
• Let’s say FOMO, (the fear of missing out), didn’t exist and we actually had infinite time to do everything we wanted
• You might think brilliant! But actually nothing would feel meaningful

• It’s through missing out on things that the choices we’ve made become meaningful- Once you truly understand that you’re guaranteed to miss out on almost every experience the world has to offer, the fact that there are so many you still haven’t experienced stops feeling like a problem.

• The problem with productivity gurusMost productivity experts act merely as enablers of our time troubles, by offering ways to keep on believing it might be possible to get everything done.

• The New Yorker & The Mexican...the old parable about a vacationing New York businessman who gets talking to a Mexican fisherman, who tells him that he works only a few hours per day and spends most of his time drinking wine in the sun and playing music with his friends. Appalled at the fisherman’s approach to time management, the businessman offers him an unsolicited piece of advice: if the fisherman worked harder, he explains, he could invest the profits in a bigger fleet of boats, pay others to do the fishing, make millions, then retire early. ‘And what would I do then?’ the fisherman asks. ‘Ah, well, then,’ the businessman replies, ‘you could spend your days drinking wine in the sun and playing music with your friends.’

• Lastly, refrain from filling every spare moment for self-growth (it leads to misery, trust me :))

2.) Allow it to take the time it takes (Eigenzeit)

• Instead of you using time, let time use you
• A book takes as long as it does to read
• Let me repeat that, a book takes as long as it does to read
• Stop rushing through things just to get onto the next thing!
• “Things take a lot longer than you think, even when you take that into account.”
• Your anxiety of controlling time will fall away when you embrace infinite games vs finite games
• You’ll rush reading if you play the finite game of “reading 10 books in this month”
• You’ll appreciate the process if you play the infinite game of “being a deep student & a lover of wisdom” (which is the true definition of a philosopher btw ;))

3.) The efficiency trap

• The goal posts move when efficiency increases
• For example:
• when housewives first got access to ‘labour-saving’ devices like washing machines and vacuum cleaners, no time was saved at all, because society’s standards of cleanliness simply rose to offset the benefits; now that you could return each of your husband’s shirts to a spotless condition after a single wearing, it began to feel like you should, to show how much you loved him.
• It’s the same with ourselves, the more efficient we become, the more time we have = a nagging urge to fill that time with “productive tasks”!
• To combat this; think of the top 20 things you want to do
• And just pick the top 5, forget about everything else
• You have to choose a few things, sacrifice everything else, and deal with the inevitable sense of loss that results. The undodgeable reality of a finite human life is that you are going to have to choose.
• “To forget the bigger picture look at everything close up.”
• E.g. (that’s how I chose to work on this video instead of the 50 other deep work tasks I could’ve chosen!)Don't tell yourself you'll find a way to do more, admit defeat
• When faced with conflicting commitments,
• Instead of admitting defeat (acknowledging that we can’t do everything), we try to make ourselves busier
• But we need to admit defeat (are you starting to realise our denial of finitude is at the core of every problem?)
• E.g. having a full time job & a side hustle = accepting you’ll see less of your kids
• E.g. Working 12 hour days on your passion = the house will likely be less tidy than usual
• Accept it!You will never feel on top of things:- The reason isn’t that you haven’t yet discovered the right time management tricks or applied sufficient effort, or that you need to start getting up earlier, or that you’re generally useless. It’s that the underlying assumption is unwarranted: 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. For a start, what ‘matters’ is subjective, so you’ve no grounds for assuming that there will be time for everything that you, or your employer, or your culture happens to deem important.
• Rediscover your patience:

• Working too hastily means you’ll make more errors, which you’ll then be obliged to go back to correct; hurrying a toddler to get dressed, in order to leave the house, is all but guaranteed to make the process last much longer.
• Stopping helps strengthen the muscle of patience that will permit you to return to the project again and again, and thus to sustain your productivity over an entire career.

4.) Becoming a better procrastinator

• The bad procrastinator = avoids tasks because they don’t want to feel the psychological unease of accepting their limitations
• The good procrastinator = adopts a limit-embracing nature & chooses to focus on a few tasks well rather than loadsProcrastination & perfectionism:
• Sometimes we procrastinate because:
• We can never live up to the performance of our perfectionistic standards in our heads
• But…

• 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.

• Consciously choose your procrastination:
• You have to actively choose what to procrastinate on
• The measure of a good time management technique is whether it helps us say no to things that don’t matter

5.) The joy of commitment

• When I was 18 I travelled around Europe alone
• I visited 10 different countries all within the space of a month.
• Then a year later I moved to Lisbon for around three months, and after that I lived in Poland for a year and a half
• And what I realised through my experience is that there are only certain joys you can experience through committing to one place for a prolonged period of time
• I can tour you around the streets of Krakow (where I lived for almost 2 years) and show you the best pubs and restaurants to go to & even introduce you to some of my friends
• But I couldn’t give you many recommendations for the 10 different countries I went to across Europe
• My experience in Poland was deeper, because I committed to it for a longer period of time
• The same can be said about relationships

• Commitment liberates. Fantasy diminishes and deludes. By not choosing, you bask in the fantasy. But it is a fantasy. By choosing, you limit your choices; and this is the whole point. You are finitude, not something merely in finitude. So when you choose; you limit. And within doing so, you expand.
• The received wisdom, articulated in a thousand magazine articles and inspirational Instagram memes, is that it’s always a crime to settle. But the received wisdom is wrong. You should definitely settle. Or to be more precise, you don’t have a choice. You will settle – and this fact ought to please you.

• You can’t become a successful lawyer without settling on law. Nor can you experience the joys of being in a relationships without settling, at least for a while, on one romantic partner at the expense of all the other people in the world you could possibly date.

• 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.

• Not only should you settle, but you should settle in a way that makes it harder to back out (marriage, children etc.)

• ‘Do not rule over imaginary kingdoms of endlessly proliferating possibilities.’

6.) You get to have this experience:- One incredible thing I learned from this book which changed my life:

• What would someone who died early give to have this experience?
• Ask yourself this the next time you’re experiencing something “annoying”
• At the end of our lives, we remember what we paid attention to
• So the next time you’re trying to fit something in that you don’t especially value
• You are literally paying with your life
• Reframe “there’s not enough time” to “It’s miraculous I have any time at all”

• So maybe it’s not that you’ve been cheated out of an unlimited supply of time; maybe it’s almost incomprehensibly miraculous to have been granted any time at all.

• There will be a last time for everything
• There will be a last time you kiss your mother, there will be a last time you have a beautiful interaction with a stranger, there will be a last time you talk to this friend. So treat every experience as if it will be your last time. Speak to people in a way that if they died tomorrow, you’d be content with what you last said to them.
• Because to do the opposite and…

• To treat all 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.

7.) The Convenience Trap

• A lot of convenience zaps the meaning of things
• Uber removes the need to call your local taxi firm
• Apple Pay removes the need to reach into your wallet
• Self-service removes the need to speak to another human being

• It’s true that everything runs more smoothly this way. But smoothness, it turns out, is a dubious virtue, since it’s often the unsmoothed textures of life that make it liveable, helping nurture the relationships that are crucial for mental and physical health, and for the resilience of our communities. Your loyalty to your local taxi firm is one of those delicate social threads that, multiplied thousands of times, bind a neighbourhood together; your interactions with the woman who runs the nearby Chinese takeaway might feel insignificant, but they help make yours the kind of area where people still talk to one another, where tech-induced loneliness doesn’t yet reign supreme.

8.) Beyond control:

• Boredom & why social media blockers don’t work:
• Boredom forces us to confront our limited control over time & our sheer finitude
• Hence we want to escape boredom at every single opportunity
• Social media blockers don’t work:
• Because the core issue hasn’t been addressed
• Blocking instagram or YouTube during the day results in you frantically searching for an activity to replace this time, so you clean your desk, take a nap, bite your nails
• Instead you must embrace boredom and your inner desire to use every single moment productively
• The things we term “distractions” are actually just ways for us to run away from the reality of finitude
• The less attention you give to avoiding what’s happening, the more attention you can give to what’s actually happening
• The key to embracing boredom is presence & acceptance of the discomfort (backwards law)

• it’s only unbearable for as long as you’re under the impression that there might be a cure.

• Khrishnamurti, giving a talk, expressed to the audience that he’d tell them his biggest secret. They all peered round to each other and instantly leant in, wondering at this marvellous secret. Khrisnamurti leant in and said… “I don’t mind what happens.”

• Once you give up on the unattainable goal of eradicating all your problems, it becomes possible to develop an appreciation for the fact that life just is a process of engaging with problem after problem, giving each one the time it requires – that the presence of problems in your life, in other words, isn’t an impediment to a meaningful existence but the very substance of one.

9.) Cosmic insignificance therapy

• ...what you do with your life doesn’t matter all that much – and when it comes to how you’re using your finite time, the universe absolutely could not care less.

• As Alex Hormozi says, do you know that if you zoom out far enough you can’t see earth?

10.) How to love yourself (The chair and the tea cup)

• You don’t hate a chair for not being able to pour hot water for a nice cuppa
• And when do you ever look into the sky & berate a cloud for how it’s shaped?
• And if you do, here’s a list for some therapists
• So it could be with yourself
• Don’t bemoan yourself for not being able to control time
• It’s not a quality you possesConclusion (the book in a nutshell):

• The book in a nutshell:It means giving up hope of ever feeling totally in control, or certain that acutely painful experiences aren’t coming your way. And it means giving up, as far as possible, the master hope that lurks beneath all this, the hope that somehow this isn’t really it – that this is just a dress rehearsal, and that one day you’ll feel truly confident that you have what it takes.
• Once you no longer need to convince yourself that the world isn’t filled with uncertainty and tragedy, you’re free to focus on doing what you can to help. And once you no longer need to convince yourself that you’ll do everything that needs doing, you’re free to focus on doing a few things that count.

Tools & questions:- 1. Where in your life or your work are you currently pursuing comfort, when what’s called for is a little discomfort?

• 2. ‘Does this choice diminish me, or enlarge me?’ (Choose uncomfortable enlargement over comfortable diminishment whenever you can.)
• 3. Are you holding yourself to, and judging yourself by, standards of productivity or performance that are impossible to meet? (Let your impossible standards crash to the ground. Then pick a few meaningful tasks from the rubble and get started on them today.)
• 4. In what ways have you yet to accept the fact that you are who you are, not the person you think you ought to be?

• Once you no longer feel the stifling pressure to become a particular kind of person, you can confront the personality, the strengths and weaknesses, the talents and enthusiasms you find yourself with, here and now, and follow where they lead.

• 5. In which areas of life are you still holding back until you feel like you know what you’re doing?

• Everyone is winging it, all the time
• So wing it as well

• 6. How would you spend your days differently if you didn’t care so much about seeing your actions reach fruition?
• ...what actions – what acts of generosity or care for the world, what ambitious schemes or investments in the distant future – might it be meaningful to undertake today, if you could come to terms with never seeing the results?
• 7.  Decide in advance what to fail at / Or admit youll dp the bare minimum
• 8. Focus on what you’ve already completed, not just on what’s left to complete. (celebrate small wins)
• 9. Find novelty in the mundane: ...pay more attention to every moment, however mundane: to find novelty not by doing radically different things but by plunging more deeply into the life you already have.
• 10. Be a ‘researcher’ in relationships.
• 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 fearing it might not) whenever you can.
• 11. Cultivate instantaneous generosity.
• ...whenever a generous impulse arises in your mind – to give money, check in on a friend, send an email praising someone’s work – act on the impulse right away, rather than putting it off until later.
• ...the only donations that count are the ones you actually get round to making.
• 12. Practice doing nothing
• Do nothing meditation
• 13. Have a Atelic hobby

• - atelic = without telos (meaning/logos)
• e.g. kendama, knitting,
• Something you don’t care about being good at

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