I've enjoyed reading Four Thousand Weeks recently. It's brought a bit of peace to my life. At its core it's an anti-productivity book, going against most other productivity books like Getting Things Done and arguing that we live such short lives (four thousand weeks) that no amount of prioritization and task management system will ever let us achieve all of our goals, and that the sooner we get comfortable with the finitude of life, the more fulfilled we'll be.
The myth of an empty todo list
One piece the book hammers home is the illusion of an empty todo list, how we can never get to done. Here's just two reasons.
1. When technology is introduced to save time, our standards change:
"when housewives first got access to "labor 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."
The same with meal prep kits like Hello Fresh. Now that you can prepare dinner in 15 minutes each night, your expectations for what can be achieved each evening after work increases.
2. And when technology saves us time, it also introduces new ways to expand our world and fill our time and possibilities.
"The technologies we use try to "get on top of everything" always fail us, in the end, because they increase the size of "everything" on which we're trying to get on top."
Take YouTube, which you can use to quickly learn how to complete a task but can also teach you about thousands of things you'd like to learn about but you could never possibly watch, Hinge, which can help you efficiently find people to date but also reminds you of all the other potentially alluring people you could be dating instead, and cheap international flights, where there's always more countries to tick or and cities to say you've "done".
Being productive doesn't mean being comfortable
One of the counter-intuitive learnings from the book is that being productive is about being comfortable letting many things slip by. We don't have time for everything, and making time for what's important necessitates being comfortable letting unimportant tasks slide unstarted.
"In my days as a paid-up productivity geek, it grew painfully clear that the things I got done most diligently were the unimportant ones. The email from my newspaper’s IT department about the importance of regularly changing my password would provoke me to speedy action, Meanwhile, the long message from an old friend now living in New Delhi and research for the major article I’d been planning for months would get ignored, because I told myself that such tasks needed my full focus, which meant waiting until I had a good chunk of free time and fewer small-but-urgent tasks tugging at my attention.
What’s needed instead in such situations, I gradually came to understand, is a kind of anti-skill: not the counter-productive strategy of trying to make yourself more efficient, but rather a willingness to resist such urges—to learn to stay with the anxiety of feeling overwhelmed, of not being on top of everything, without automatically responding by trying to fit more in. To approach your days in this fashion means, instead of clearing the decks, declining to clear the decks, focusing instead on what’s truly of greatest consequence while tolerating the discomfort of knowing that, as you do so, the decks will be filling up further, with emails and errands and other to-dos, many of which you may never get around to at all. 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.
Three principles for time management
Given the finitude of our lives but our endless appetite for more, Four Thousand Weeks imparts three principles for how to make the most of your time on this earth.
- Pay yourself first when it comes to time.
"If you don't save a bit of your time for you, now, out of every week, there's is no moment in the future when you'll magically be done with everything and have loads of free time"
- Given this, make sure you set aside time for your own relaxation.
- Limit your work in progress.
- Personal Kanban explores having no more than three items that you allow yourself to work on at any one time, holding on all incoming demands until one of the three items has been completed and a spot has been freed up.
- This is all about recognizing our limits of what we can achieve, and also gets you to break down tasks into very small chunks, so that a task like "change job" doesn't dominate one of your three task slots for months on end.
- Resist the allure of middling priorities.
There is a story attributed to Warren Buffet, in which the famously shrewd investor is asked by his personal pilot about how to set priorities. [...] He tells the man to make a list of the top twenty-five things he wants out of life and then to arrange them in order, from the most important to the least. The top five, Buffett says, should be those around which he organizes his time. But contrary to what the pilot might have been expecting to hear, the remaining twenty, Buffett allegedly explains, aren’t the second-tier priorities to which he should turn when he gets the chance. Far from it. In fact, they’re the ones he should actively avoid at all costs—because they’re the ambitions insufficiently important to him to form the core of his life yet seductive enough to distract him from the ones that matter most.
- A pretty brutal lesson, but one to embrace if you want to see impact in things you care about, drop the less important things. Personally I'll be continuing to do lower priorities for balance and general well-being, I'm a generalist, not a specialist, but it's an interesting point.