This book, subtitled Time Management for Mortals, and published in 2021, is by Oliver Burkeman. (Actually, I read the Spanish version, because I'm aiming to read more Spanish, and non-fiction is a good way of doing that. Ana Camallonga Claveria's translation, entitled Cuatro mil semanas: Gestion del tiempo para mortales, came out earlier this year.)

Burkeman's central point is that life is astonishingly short... Four thousand weeks, if we're lucky. This brevity is the challenge that defines our entire existence, because we have the mental capacity to aspire to carry out any number of elaborate and ambitious plans, whereas we have the time to actualize only a fraction of them.

In response, conventional time-management experts have come up with volumes and volumes of advice on how to optimize your time so that you can fit more into your day. Yet, says Burkeman, however organized you are, you will never end up at a point where you feel you're sorted, you're on top of everything, you can do it all. Instead, not only do ever more demands roll in, but also ever more desires manifest themselves, wanting to be fulfilled. The more you try to dominate time, and adapt it to your wishes and circumstances, the more it escapes you, with the result that we're always finding ourselves living in the future -- always looking forward to the day when there will finally be time, and kicking ourselves in the meantime for not being able to keep up.

Burkeman's advice is simple: Accept the reality both of the limited nature of the time you have at your disposal, and of the limited nature of your control over that time. That is helpful, he says, not only because it's generally better to confront life as it is rather than as you'd like it to be, but also because it's empowering -- fully facing the unvarnished reality will paradoxically mean that your existence is more productive, meaningful, and satisfying.

Given that you will never be able to do all that you want to do, and will always have to make choices, says Burkeman, it's better to make those choices consciously, actively deciding what you want to focus on and what you want to leave aside, rather than letting things decide themselves by default, or deceiving yourself into thinking that you don't HAVE to decide because if you're just a bit more organized, you can do everything...

Accept it: You will have to make difficult compromises... There is no point in being driven by FOMO (Fear of Missing Out), because -- given the reality of our short existences -- you WILL miss out on almost everything... It's the time equivalent of opportunity cost. Choosing to do one thing automatically means waving goodbye to other (probably very good) possibilities.





I was drawn to this book because it appeared to respond to a problem I was experiencing more and more strongly. Having "retired" partly because work was taking up too much of my time, and I wasn't able to do all the other things I aspired to, I soon found that what I wanted to do STILL wouldn't fit into the available time, and I STILL never felt on top of my email inbox and my various to-do lists. And that's been the case even though most of my "retirement" has up to now unfolded during plague times, with all the consequent restrictions on what we actually CAN do.

Of course, I recognize that this is in some ways a good thing. Many people have the opposite problem, and find time hanging heavy on their hands. I'm happy not to be in that position. Even so, it's not optimal to be constantly stressing about how behind you are with everything, and how much you're not getting done... That's too "worky" by far.

That being the case, Burkeman's book was undoubtedly an interesting read. He examines the genesis of our problem (increasingly complex societies moved us ever further from task-oriented to time-oriented lifestyles, a development made more palpable by the Industrial Revolution, which turned time into a resource -- something that you used, bought, and sold). He dissects the "efficiency trap" (time-saving tricks and devices just mean that more tasks are added to our day). He introduces us to some time philosophers (including Heidegger -- yes, Heidegger... -- who argued that our existence as humans is inextricably linked to our limited time, which is not just ONE of the things that we have to grapple with, but is what defines us as humans before we have to deal with anything else).

Burkeman's central contention is very apt, I think. Even if there is "life beyond death" -- and I really think there is -- its calibre will likely be entirely different. This little passage I get to do on earth, as "me", with all that that involves, is unique. I'm only given one shot at it. And that shot measures only 4,000 weeks (or thereabouts).

By just twisting the lens slightly, Burkeman allows us to see that "having to decide" is not a tragedy or a burden, but a gift and a privilege. Each decision, he says, is an opportunity to choose from a menu of possibilities; every such occasion is not a defeat but an affirmation, because it's precisely the fact that you could have chosen a different, perhaps equally valuable, way to spend any given segment of your time that gives meaning to the choice you actually made.





Overall, there's lots of practical advice.

In terms of deciding what not to do, and how to feel at peace about not doing it, he offers three principles: 1. Pay yourself first when it comes to time; 2. Set a limit to the number of projects you have on the go (maybe no more than three at any given time); 3. Resist the idea of intermediate priorities (figure out the five most important things you want from life, and organize your time around those, discarding all the other desirable things you might have added to your list if you'd been allowed to make it five times longer...). As a retiree, I'm in a good position to pay myself first (something I found really hard when I was working). I like the idea of limiting current projects. I would find it hard to get my organizational principles down to just five, but I see the point of trying to do so.

I also like the idea that what you pay attention to, moment by moment, is ultimately what defines your life. I appreciate the reminder that it's possible to be so focussed on making the most of your time, in the service of some future aspiration, that you don't enjoy the life you're living at present... "De-instrumentalizing" is the way to go: Life, says Burkeman, is a series of transitory experiences, valuable in themselves, which you are going to lose out on if you focus your attention only on the destiny to which you expect them to take you...

Similarly, it's true that we need to rediscover rest. "Wasting" at least part of our leisure time by focusing solely on the pleasure of the experience at hand is actually the only way to not waste it...

The antidote to an over-instrumentalized life, he suggests, is to incorporate into our daily lives things that interest us purely for themselves, rather than for what we can get out of them. (Languages, for me, for example... I don't need them for work. At the moment, I don't even need them for travel. I'm not planning to do any exams. And it doesn't matter one jot if I make little progress. I like studying languages just because I like studying languages...)

As an inveterately impatient person, I also appreciate his three principles for cultivating patience: 1. Learn to "enjoy" having problems; 2. Take on board the idea of radical incrementalism (people who write just a little each day, for example, end up writing more than the people who work in bursts and then stop); 3. Be ready to be unoriginal as you work your way towards originality.



There are aspects of the book that I find less convincing, however.

I don't really concur with his ideas about the "convenience trap", for example. True, you can't eliminate all the "friction" in your life, and it can be valuable. But personally I see nothing wrong with card-sending services... Or ride-hailing apps. Or meal-delivery apps. I don't think that just because something has been made easier, then it's less significant. Just because we can't do everything in life doesn't mean we have to make a big meal out of every task...

Likewise, I'm not quite so averse to social media as he is, but then I really only do Facebook...

I also don't totally follow his "social regulation of time" idea... I have experienced that there is something rewarding (as well as frustrating) about having your time dictated by a collective that is bigger than just our immediate partnership. But definitely not all of us would gain from the experience of marching with other soldiers... Sometimes I wonder whether there's just a little touch of the Puritan in Burkeman...



My biggest criticism, though, is that he tries to make too many things fit into his central thesis, with the result that the book has a tendency to morph from a lean, mean examination of time and how we regard it into a more general "self-help" treatise.

Is boredom, for example, and our consequent search for distraction, really an intense reaction to the discomfort of confronting the limited nature of our capacity to control things? Or do we yield to distraction simply because we need a break from an onerous task? Is the effort to control the future (by building in extra time, or by forward-planning) really an example of the way in which we refuse to recognize our intrinsic time limitations? Or is it just a self-protective mechanism to minimize avoidable inconvenience and expense?

And although it's true that our individual life doesn't matter that much, and the universe doesn't really care a hoot about what we do with our limited time, it's surely better not to spend it as Hitler did...

Which leads me to a feeling that grew as I read: namely, that the author himself didn't quite know what message to leave us with.

Towards the end of the book, Burkeman offers us five quite useful questions that encourage self-reflection:

1. In what situation of your life or your work are you currently looking for comfort, when what is needed is a bit of discomfort? (The pandemic has made us very risk-averse, so it's interesting to be encouraged to choose the discomfort that makes us bigger over the comfort that makes us smaller...)

2. Are you behaving, and judging yourself, according to standards of productivity or performance that are impossible? (I did this all the time in my working life, and I think I've not lost the habit...)

3. In what sense have you still not accepted that you are who you are, and not the person you think you ought to be? It is from the position of not feeling as though you have to earn your weeks on the planet that you manage to make the best use of them... (Hmmm, the feeling of unworthiness is a long-standing life-habit of mine that age has not necessarily corrected...)

4. To what areas of your life are you applying the brakes because you're waiting to have the feeling that you know what you are doing? Remember: Hardly anyone really knows what s/he is doing... Everyone is improvising... (I wish I'd taken this on board during my working life...)

5. How would your days be different if you weren't so worried about your actions coming to fruition? Our goal, he says, should be to resemble the medieval masons, who carried on adding their few bricks to a cathedral that they knew they would never see finished in their lifetime... In other words, Burkeman urges us, just put one foot in front of the other, and focus on doing "the next and most necessary thing"... Then the life we see cumulatively taking shape in the rear-view mirror will be one that fulfils the only criterion that counts when the time comes to measure whether you have used your weeks well, which is not how many people we have helped or how much we have done, but whether, starting from the limits of our moment in history and the time we have been given and our talents, we have managed to really do -- while brightening the lives of others by doing it -- whatever we came here to do, be it magnificent or tiny.

And that would have been a good point to finish on. But it is as though Burkeman couldn't bring himself to end so positively and reassuringly...

So we have an epilogue explaining how hope is a really bad thing.

And then we have "ten tools for accepting our finitude". These are not unhelpful, but their generality reinforces my feeling that Burkeman is trying to cover way too much ground, and is effectively attempting to turn his cardinal point -- about the need to embrace our human time limitations -- into a panacea for every psychological challenge.



These criticisms notwithstanding, I found this a thought-provoking book. To some extent, I had already begun to come to terms with many of its tenets. I've long thought bucket lists were a stupid idea; I've long considered gratitude an important habit to cultivate (even if I often fail to implement that notion); I've long faced the fact that there will be many places in the world that I won't get to, and learned to not worry about that too much; and we might have kicked and screamed our way through it, but the pandemic certainly made us see the small, the everyday, and the low-key in a new light, and by taking away our ability to plan anything, forced us to focus on the present moment.



But there are plenty of other ideas that I want to try out or work on further. Undertaking a mass "unsubscribe" so that my email inbox gets less unruly, for example; limiting the number of undertakings that I'm working on at any given point; actually launching myself into a long-deferred project, without worrying too much about whether it will "bear fruit"; continuing my attempt to focus more on the present; practising doing nothing; figuring out how to act on the insight that we have to think of our time not as something we have to collect, but as something we have to share, even though that means partly renouncing the power to decide exactly what to do with it and when; and coming to terms with the reality that the reward for accepting the restrictions that human life imposes is that they stop appearing so restrictive...

Plenty of food for thought...