Four Thousand Weeks: Embrace your limits. Change your life. Make your four thousand weeks count. (English Edition)

Principle number one is to pay yourself first when it comes to time. I’m borrowing this phrasing from the graphic novelist and creativity coach Jessica Abel, who borrowed it in turn from the world of personal finance, where it’s long been an article of faith because it works.3 If you take a portion of your pay cheque the day you receive it and squirrel it away into savings or investments, or use it for paying off debts, you’ll probably never feel the absence of that cash; you’ll go about your business – buying your groceries, paying your bills – precisely as if you’d never had that portion of money to begin with. (There are limits, of course: this plan won’t work if you literally earn only enough to survive.) But if, like most people, you ‘pay yourself last’ instead – buying what you need and hoping there’ll be some money remaining at the end to put into savings – you’ll usually find that there isn’t any.

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The most effective way to sap distraction of its power is just to stop expecting things to be otherwise – to accept that this unpleasantness is simply what it feels like for finite humans to commit ourselves to the kinds of demanding and valuable tasks that force us to confront our limited control over how our lives unfold. Yet there’s a sense in which accepting this lack of any solution is the solution.

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The overarching point is that what we think of as ‘distractions’ aren’t the ultimate cause of our being distracted. They’re just the places we go to seek relief from the discomfort of confronting limitation. The reason it’s hard to focus on a conversation with your spouse isn’t that you’re surreptitiously checking your phone beneath the dinner table. On the contrary, ‘surreptitiously checking your phone beneath the dinner table’ is what you do because it’s hard to focus on the conversation – because listening takes effort and patience and a spirit of surrender, and because what you hear might upset you, so checking your phone is naturally more pleasant.

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The second principle is to limit your work in progress. Perhaps the most appealing way to resist the truth about your finite time is to initiate a large number of projects at once; that way, you get to feel as though you’re keeping plenty of irons in the fire and making progress on all fronts. Instead, what usually ends up happening is that you make progress on no fronts – because each time a project starts to feel difficult, or frightening, or boring, you can bounce off to a different one instead.

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The third principle is to resist the allure of middling priorities. There is a story attributed to Warren Buffett – although probably only in the apocryphal way in which wise insights get attributed to Albert Einstein or the Buddha, regardless of their real source – in which the famously shrewd investor is asked by his personal pilot about how to set priorities.5 I’d be tempted to respond, ‘Just focus on flying the plane!’ But apparently this didn’t take place mid-flight, because Buffett’s advice is different: 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 organises 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.

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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.

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The real measure of any time management technique is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things.

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In their book Personal Kanban, which explores this strategy in detail, the management experts Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry suggest no more than three items.4 Once you’ve selected those tasks, all other incoming demands on your time must wait until one of the three items has been completed, thereby freeing up a slot. (It’s also permissible to free up a slot by abandoning a project altogether if it isn’t working out. The point isn’t to force yourself to finish absolutely everything you start, but rather to banish the bad habit of keeping an ever-proliferating number of half-finished projects on the back burner.)

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When you try to focus on something you deem important, you’re forced to face your limits, an experience that feels especially uncomfortable precisely because the task at hand is one you value so much. Unlike the architect from Shiraz, who refused to bring his ideal mosque into the world of time and imperfection, you’re obliged to give up your godlike fantasies and to experience your lack of power over things you care about.

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The exhilaration that sometimes arises when you grasp this truth about finitude has been called the ‘joy of missing out’, by way of a deliberate contrast with the idea of the ‘fear of missing out’. It is the thrilling recognition that you wouldn’t even really want to be able to do everything, since if you didn’t have to decide what to miss out on, your choices couldn’t truly mean anything. In this state of mind, you can embrace the fact that you’re forgoing certain pleasures, or neglecting certain obligations, because whatever you’ve decided to do instead – earn money to support your family, write your novel, bath the toddler, pause on a hiking trail to watch a pale winter sun sink below the horizon at dusk – is how you’ve chosen to spend a portion of time that you never had any right to expect.

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