Time Management Tuesday: Recalling "Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals" Brings Back the Good Old Days

Recently--Sunday, in fact--author Ryan T. Pozzi suggested on BlueSky that people read Chapter 13 of Oliver Burkeman's Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. I have that book! And it was Sunday, when I feel as if I should be able to go off on deep tangents with my reading. (I often go off on tangents with my reading, they're just not deep as a general rule.) And Chapter 13 isn't that long. So, I did, indeed, read it.

Back in 2021, I did a seven-part arc on Four Thousand Weeks, a blog-while-you-read thing. I found the book to be much more about time philosophy than time management, and Chapter 13 is very representative of that. Burkeman seems more concerned with how we should live than he is with finding ways for us to manage our time so we can live as we want to live. That is not a criticism. We're just talking two different ways of thinking about and talking about time. 

For those of us who are intent on trying to manage our time so we can live as we want to, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals doesn't seem to have a lot to offer. However, rereading Chapter 13 led me to skim my Four Thousand Weeks blog posts. I was reminded of some philosophical points I want to try to keep in mind.

Chapter 13 Cosmic Insignificance Therapy

Chapter 13 deals with the idea that individually we're not all that important in the grand scheme of things. And this is good for us. We can lower the bar and use our time to enjoy the small moments of life, knowing that we are not expected to struggle to use our lives to accomplish something big and profound. Enjoy your time in your pollinator garden, Gail, without worrying that it doesn't attract much in the way of bees, which is what you're supposed to be doing with it. It's okay to admire the spring ephemerals you planted, even though you know they don't do much except please you.

This knowledge can be a relief, as Burkeman says, though, personally, I've known people who would take a we're-not-that-important-in-the-grand-scheme-of-things philosophy to mean that there's no reason for them to make an effort with, say, environmentalism or voting. One person doesn't make a difference, after all. I feel this attitude carries a bit of risk. 

But it's good for me, since it's pollinator garden time!

We Pay for What We Do with Hours of Our Lives

In another portion of the book, Burkeman writes that when we become distracted with something like social media, we pay for the time we spend on the distraction with hours of our lives, the hours we could have been using to do something we value more. He didn't elaborate on this point, but it was meaningful to me, because it was similar to something I'd read about minimalism. When you buy something, you really pay for it with the hours of your life it took to make the money you exchanged for it. 

I'd forgotten about Burkeman's view of social media, though I have been applying something like it, nonetheless, to my on-line reading in general. Do I need to read any more about the man formerly known as Prince Andrew? Do I need to read about this week's best memes? If I could stop doing that, wouldn't I have more time for reading the New Yorker and all the links to journal articles I keep saving? It's a possibility, at least. 

Procrastination is a Solution to a Problem

Time management writers usually deal with procrastination as a problem to be solved. Burkeman has a fascinating spin on it. He sees procrastination as a solution to a problem we may not even know we have. The real problem is that the work we're doing is hard. Or it's boring. Or we know it's going to get us nowhere. We may not even be aware that we're trying to escape it when we rush off to Facebook or BlueSky, where we can find something easy and interesting to do and quickly. We just think we're procrastinating. 

Figuring out what problem we're trying to escape and trying to deal with it might be a better use of time than heading to social media. Maybe it could make some kind of change in our lives.

I Need to Do More with Time Management 

I haven't been reading or writing much about time management the last few years, because I've seen so many people on-line writing about the subject who clearly have no background to be doing so. They've just read a book or even some on-line material about it. Which sounds a lot like me. I'd rather not be that person.

But while I haven't been reading or writing about time management, my ability to manage my own time has been spiraling. Going over my Four Thousand Weeks blog posts brought back the days when I was hungry for ways to get things done and sometimes even finding a few. I'm going to go back to some time management writing because it makes me feel good, which I think Oliver Burkeman would appreciate.

One thing I've done to manage time recently is revise blog posts for essays that I could submit to publications on the Medium platform. As luck would have it, one of the first essays I wrote in this way was We Are All Going to Die, In Case You Weren't Feeling Enough Time Pressure, which was published back in 2022. It's a review of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals.