One of the most impactful books I’ve read in the last 5 years is Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. You can download some tidbits from it here. He says we will never get through everything we or others want us to do. Therefore, there’s great freedom in closing down our options and embracing finitude “since every real-world choice about how to live entails the loss of countless alternative ways of living.”
On the myth of “clearing the decks,” he says,
The harder you struggle to fit everything in, the more of your time you’ll find yourself spending on the least meaningful things…Commonly, these will be the things that other people want you to do, to make their lives easier, and which you didn’t think to try to resist. The more efficient you get, the more you become a “limitless reservoir” for other people’s expectations, in the words of management expert Jim Benson.
…What’s needed is to learn to stay with the anxiety of feeling overwhelmed, of not being on top of everything, without automatically responding by trying to fit in more. To approach your days in this fashion means, instead of clearing the decks, declining to clear the decks, focusing instead of what’s truly of greatest consequence while tolerating the discomfort of knowing that as you do so, the decks will be filling up further.
…Once you understand that you’re guaranteed to miss out on almost every experience the world has to offer, the fact there are so many you still haven’t experienced stops feeling like a problem. Instead, you get to focus on fully enjoying the tiny slice of experiences you actually do have time for—and the freer you are to choose, in each moment, what counts the most.
Especially as we bump up against midlife and later, we realize certain pathways or accomplishments just aren’t possible anymore. The shadows are lengthening. So, it becomes especially important that we not waste our finite energies on other people’s priorities. Or reacting to the small things that seem doable without paying attention to the larger dramas of our lives.
I went to a memorial service recently. It was an untimely death of despair, and it’s had the effect of reordering my thoughts and priorities. Burkeman says it’s impossible to live our lives in a “permanent state of unflinching acceptance of our mortality,” but “If you can hold your attention, however briefly or occasionally, on the sheer astonishingness of being, and on what a small amount of that being you get—you may experience a palpable shift in how it feels to be here, right now, alive in the flow of time.” And in that light, even the smallest things are worthy of our attention—mowing the lawn, slowing down to say hello to the neighbor kids, writing a poem, taking a bike ride, calling a friend, maybe even playing hooky from the deluge of to-do’s that don’t bring us closer to the things most important to us.
What do you want to pay attention to this summer? How do you want to resist “clearing the decks”? I’m getting ready to take my customary August break. I’ve got a stack of books forming. I want to do some writing, see some friends I haven’t seen in a long time, deep-clean my pantry. Every year, I have to fight really hard to clear this space and have now come to completely depend on what it does for me. Jeff Warren, in one of my favorite meditations from 10% Happier, encourages us to open up “like a pleasure-seeking hippie truant at an Allman Brothers concert.” Roger that. I had 4000 weeks to start with (if I’m lucky) and only 1400 left. Time to get un-busy!