Time Management Tuesday: The "Four Thousand Weeks" Conclusion

After a month and a half, I am concluding my arc on Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman.

In an earlier post, I said that Four Thousand Weeks may not be a time management book at all, but a time philosophy book. After finishing it, I think that is the case. It really isn't for people who are looking to manage their time so that they can reach a particular goal. It's for people who are looking to change themselves and how they think about life. 

That is not a bad thing. It's not a good thing. It's just the focus of this particular book. 

As I was reading Four Thousand Weeks, I sometimes made comparisons between what Burkeman was writing about and what I've read about minimalism. (Which has been on my mind recently, anyway.)

Burkeman's Time And Minimalism

• Burkeman says that many time management programs don't work, because they set users up to believe that using them will mean that at some point they will have time to do what they want. But that will never happen, because our personal and work obligations are infinite. There will always be more of them. A minimalist writer (I apologize for not recalling which one) claimed that organization programs for material things don't change the amount of time you have to commit to your material things. Instead of dealing with material things piled up around you, you're dealing with organizing them. Everything is still there, you've just shifted how you spend your time dealing with it.
• Burkeman says we'll be better off if we accept that we can't do everything, or maybe we can't do everything now. With minimalism, we believe we'll be better off if we accept that we can't have every material thing.
• At one point in Four Thousand Weeks, Burkeman writes that when we become distracted with something like social media, we pay for that time with hours of our life, the hours we could have been using to do something we value more. It was sort of a throwaway line. He didn't elaborate. I picked up on it in a big way, though, because one of the minimalist writers I've read says we pay for any material thing we purchase with hours of our lives, the hours it took to make the money to pay for the thing. That minimalist thought has kept beaucoup de crap from coming into my house. I have used Burkeman's thought about paying with hours of my life for social media to keep me off it during the workday. 

Your "Four Thousand Weeks" Roundup

Here are the links to the Original Content posts on Four Thousand Weeks: 

• I'm Starting A Book Arc! Oh, And Also, We're All Going To Die.
• The "Four Thousand Weeks" Read Part 2: Some history and, uh, brain science?
• The "Four Thousand Weeks" Read Part 3: Positive procrastination
• The "Four Thousand Weeks" Read Part 4: Procrastination is the solution to a problem
  
• The "Four Thousand Weeks" Read Part 5: Living in the moment
  
•  The "Four Thousand Weeks" Read Part 6: Slowing down  

Time Management Tuesday: The "Four Thousand Weeks" Read Part 6

At one point in Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman discusses rushing, speed, and impatience. A major point in his book is that constantly structuring time for something that’s going to happen/be completed in the future has a negative impact on our present. He’s very much about quality of life..

Here at Original Content, I've been interested in whether or not slowing down might actually make it possible for us to do more writing in our present. I want to do more with less effort and angst.

Some Speed Issues Unique To Writing

Writing isn't the day job for many writers. We're working writing around a regular income-producing job or family care or both. The desire to rush and get more done in whatever writing time we have is less about impatience and more about necessity.

In addition, two other situations encourage speed for writers.

Traditional Writers. Somewhere around the turn of the century, series became very popular in traditional writing, particularly in fantasy. I can't speak so much to adult series, but for children's and YA, many of these series were actually serials, meaning Book A didn't have an ending, readers had to wait until Book B. Book B might not have an ending, either, you had to go on to Book C.

To keep readers, writers and publishers had to crank out the next book as quickly as possible. Everyone had to work fast. A book a year or even every year and a half or two years is pressure in the traditional publishing world. 

Additionally, even a buzz-worthy book may not generate a lot of buyers, whether it's part of a serial or a stand-alone. In children's publishing, it's not unusual for books not to make back their advances. So writers hoping to make a living or even just create and maintain some kind of career feel a need to rush the next project along.

Self-Published Writers. In the past, at least, self-published writers often didn't get large numbers of readers per book, since distribution was such a problem for them. To make up for that, they had to produce a larger number of books. Smallish number of readers per book + more books = more income. For them we might be talking a book every couple of months or less.

In the early days, self-published writers could produce books that fast, because they didn't have to deal with editors and layout and design people. More recently, the more successful self-published writers are hiring editors and design people to better compete with traditional professionally published books. But, keep in mind, publishing companies provide all those services. Self-published writers have to seek all that out and pay for it, themselves, which means more work, which means more rush.

 

Income generating self-publishing exists now for short-form work, too. Sites like Medium are self-publishing platforms. People who are able to generate income on Medium generate it by the reader, and it's a very small sum. The way for writers to try to produce more income there is to produce more writing. They do that by writing a lot, which means speed.

Methods For Slowing Down 

 

Burkeman suggests accepting that a project is going to take the amount of time it's going to take as a method for slowing down. While that sounds promising, it won't be very helpful for writers who have contractual deadlines or need to generate income sooner rather than later. 

Some other options:

• Create writing goals and objectives for a specific period of time, be it a year, a quarter, a month, or whatever you want. Goals are what you plan to do, objectives are the steps you are going to take to meet the goals. Try to stick to these goals and objectives. If something new comes up that can be an objective for one of your goals, go ahead and do it. If not,  try to set it aside for another planning period.
  
• Take your to-do list seriously. It should be focused on your goals and objectives.
  
• Work with multipliers, one task that addresses multiple goals, instead of multi-tasking, which can't be done, anyway. This blog post is an example of a multiplier, since I will publish a version of it it at Medium. It meets both my community building/branding goal and my short-form writing goal.
  
• Create concentrated blocks of time during which you work on one project. This could be a weekend, a week, a month, a retreat or anything you want. For instance, National Novel Writing Month is an example of a concentrated block of time. School breaks for teaching writers could be examples of concentrated blocks of time. Days children are at school could be examples of concentrated blocks of time for parent writers. 

The idea is to try to slow down without cutting output. That could improve the quality of life Burkeman is interested in in Four Thousand Weeks.

Time Management Tuesday: Enjoy Your Thanksgiving Week

Some Positive Procrastination During Thanksgiving Week

In his book Four Thousand Weeks author Oliver Burkeman writes about how there are so many, many things we want to do in life, and we should learn to procrastinate on some of them so that we can concentrate on others. That doesn't mean we'll never get to do them. But during this year, quarter, month, week, weekend, what-have-you, we are putting something off so we can concentrate on something else.

This week I'm concentrating on finishing a chapter in another one of those never-ending book-length manuscripts you hear me talking about here and getting ready to host Thanksgiving for the first time in years. Original Content will be back after the holiday weekend.

Time Management Tuesday: The "Four Thousand Weeks" Read Part 5

The Writing Life And Those Present Moments

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote that in Four Thousand Weeks Oliver Burkeman deals with time in general and not with something specific in mind that readers want to do with their time, the way I write about dealing with time management specifically in order to write. In some ways I think one could argue that Four Thousand Weeks isn't a time management book at all, but a time philosophy book. Burkeman's major point with this book is that when you are always using your time, your present moments, for something that's coming up in the future--promotions at work, training for an athletic event, getting into graduate school, planning a wedding, writing a book--your present moments have little value for themselves. You're not enjoying your present moments. 

I found this to be a little bit judgy, as in it may be wrong to spend your present time working toward completing something in the future. Or, what's more, to spend your present time managing your present time so you can complete something in your future. 

In writing world, we have a saying: "Nobody wants to write a book. Everyone wants to have written one." Writing is difficult and sometimes boring, as I was just saying last week. The people who are able to continue doing it, particularly when traditional payoffs such as publication and money come rarely for most of us, are those who do enjoy spending their present moments sitting in front of a computer or old typewriter or journal and generating paragraphs or pages on one project or another, picking up where they left off a few days or weeks or months ago, or doing research, scrapping it all and beginning again. 

It's called The Writing Life for a reason, and maybe there is a philosophy of time involved with it, too. 

Reading this section of Four Thousand Weeks, which, as I said, I found a bit judgy, reminded me of the ending of Cheaper By the Dozen in which Ernestine Gilbert Carey and Frank B. Gilbreth, Jr. say of their father, Frank B. Gilbreth, an early advocate of time-and-motion studies:

“Someone once asked Dad: “But what do you want to save time for? What are you going to do with it?” “For work, if you love that best,” said Dad. “For education, for beauty, for art, for pleasure.” He looked over the top of his pince-nez. “For mumblety-peg, if that's where your heart lies.”

I guess I'm concerned less about what people do with their time, in the present moment or the future, than I am that they have that time to do it.

 

Time Management Tuesday: The "Four Thousand Weeks" Read Part 4

Turns Out There's Bad Procrastination, Too. We Did Know That.

So last week as part of my read of Oliver Burkeman's Four Thousand Weeks, I wrote about what Brukeman describes as good procrastination. That would be accepting that we can't do all of the marvelous things we want to do and making a conscious decision to put some of them off so we can concentrate on a few things we definitely want to get done. You know, write.

Bad procrastination is the kind we hear about more often, the kind that takes us away from those few things we want to concentrate on. 

Procrastination Is Not New

Nowadays, we seem to feel that procrastination is a new thing, a new problem of our era brought about in large part by the distractions that the Internet and social media provide. But Burkeman claims that ancient Greek philosophers wrote about distraction, long, long before Facebook and Twitter existed. I find knowing that a negative behavior has existed for generations oddly comforting. Burkeman also says that distractability has an evolutionary benefit. Those hunter-gatherers who were more easily distracted by the approach of a danger were more likely to survive it. I've recently read something similar about anxiety--anxious early people who worried about what that noise was or whether or not all berries were safe to eat were more likely to live long enough to reproduce and get their genes into the gene pool.

Earlier in Four Thousand Weeks, Burkeman wrote that humans have only been imposing the concept of time onto their lives for the last couple of centuries. And now he says that distractability had a benefit for early humans, one that they may have passed on to us? Once again, when we try to manage time, are we working against nature?  Depressing much?

Procrastination/Distractability Is Not A Problem--It Is A Solution To A Problem

So here's an interesting spin Burkeman puts on the whole procrastination issue: Procrastination is not a problem. It's a solution to a problem we don't recognize or at least do nothing about. 

The real problem is that a lot of what we do in life, even when we want to do it, is boring. Or difficult. Making transitions in writing, getting characters and a story from one place to another is difficult for me. Generating new material for gaps in stories is very, very difficult for me. The solution for dealing with those real problems is to flee to something else, say, Facebook or checking the news or almost anything else I can easily get to on-line. 

A very easy, nonwriting illustration of what I'm talking about, is young parents and cellphones. You often see them on their phones while in the company of small children. How awful, right? The phones, and what's on them, are stealing valuable time from those families. Boo-hoo. No, the phones are a solution to a problem the parents are dealing with. A lot of childcare is boring as hell. Or it's difficult. Or it's heartbreaking. Or it's disappointing. Or it's exhausting. Escaping to the Internet provides a temporary relief from those problems.

So procrastination doesn't cause problems for us. It is a solution/cure for living/work problems.

So How Do We Deal With The Real Problems?

Suck It Up, Buttercup. Burkeman suggests dealing with the original problems by accepting that there are no solutions for many of them. We should give up expecting our lives or work situations to be easier than they are. This isn't unreasonable. Here at Original Content, we've discussed trying to develop distress tolerance, developing a tolerance for the stress/distress involved with our work. Pursuing goals (you have to have them in order to do that, people), planning what you'll do in specific distress situations, and making commitments can all help to increase our tolerance for the distress we would otherwise try to escape with procrastination.

Productive Procrastination. Or, we might say, planned procrastination. Some people procrastinate, not with checking out what's happening on the COVID front or looking to see what's going to be on HBO soon, but with more work. When the stress of dealing with figuring out what's going to happen next to the characters in a big project becomes just too much, they escape to another project. A blog post, for instance. Finishing a humor piece that is almost ready to submit. Researching markets. The main project may have hit a wall for this hour or even the rest of this day, but they're still cranking out work. 

So our two options at this point are to accept or to plan more work.

Time Management Tuesday: The "Four Thousand Weeks" Read Part 3

Turns Out There Is Good Procrastination. Who Knew?

Unlike most time management books, Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman is about thinking about/dealing with time in general and not with something specific in mind that we want to do with our time. Here at Original Content, it's important to remember that with Time Management Tuesday we do know what we want to do with our time. We're all about writing. We're all about protecting time for writing. When Burkeman writes about the issue of having too many things we want to do in life, we writers think, Too many things we want to do in addition to writing. 

Many time management programs, Burkeman says, lead us to believe that if we just organized our time differently, we could do more of all those things we want to do, when, in reality, we really ought to let some things go so that we're doing less. Less of what is not our focus. Remember, our focus here is...writing.

According to Burkeman, we should procrastinate on some of these other things--creating wall hangings, attending virtual art programs, subscribing to and reading multiple magazines, volunteering for everything, for example (I'm speaking for a friend)--to focus on what we've decided matters. Writing.

That is where good procrastination comes in. You choose what you're going to procrastinate on, so you can stick to what you want to do. Write.

I have to say, in my experience, this has been the case. The magazine subscriptions have had to go. The volunteering had to go. The virtual art programs never got started. Those things went, in the belief that I might get to them sometime in the future, so I could write now. Those things may never come in the future, but it's better to procrastinate on those items so I can write, than to procrastinate on writing so I can do all these other things.

Temporal Landmarks: A Humble Suggestion For Positive Procrastination

There are many things we can't, or maybe just don't want to, procrastinate on indefinitely. Using temporal landmarks--special occasions and calendar events that mark the passage of time and create new opportunities to begin new cycles--could help us to procrastinate productively on important things.

• This past year I read about a writer who is also a college teacher. She limits herself to writing during one part of the year and submitting during another. She could be described as procrastinating on each task so that she can concentrate on it fully later.   
• I frequently mention National Novel Writing Month here in relation to temporal landmarks. Many writers use that block of time to draft new work. Over the course of the year, they procrastinate getting started on a new project until November, a time when starting will work best for them.
• Writers who have to work around school calendars either because they teach or have children at home often do one type of work when school is in session and another type when it's not. They are, arguably, procrastinating so that they use the type of time they have in the best way possible.
  

You can create your own temporal landmarks around anything--holiday months when you want to work less intently so you put off lighter work for that time; a day job's calendar when you can predict that work will be more demanding or less; travel time when you might be able to do more reading and research. Then you can plan what you're going to do (writing or even something else) during those times and put if off--procrastinate with that particular activity--the rest of the year.

However you do it, you're controlling the procrastination.

Time Management Tuesday: The "Four Thousand Weeks" Read Part 2

You Know I Love A Little History

Back in Medieval times, and presumably before, people did not think about time, Oliver Burkeman tells us in his book Four Thousand Weeks. They got up when they got up, presumably with the sun, and worked with the light at tasks related to the seasons. Time as something people thought about as a separate thing that you imposed on your life didn't exist. I have actually read this before, which suggests this is a generally held belief about how people lived in the past.

Keeping track of time didn't become necessary until you were dealing with multiple people. You wanted more than one person to arrive at a certain point at a more specific time than, say, 'when the sun is at its highest point.' The arrival of the Industrial Revolution meant a lot of people were wanted in mills and factories at specific times for the purpose of doing specific things for which they were paid specific amounts. People began being paid for their time, not for piece work completed. By the way, the Industrial Revolution is responsible for a lot of change in human existence. This is not to say the Industrial Revolution was a bad thing. I am not one of those people who wishes she could shear her own sheep and weave  her own cloth. But it is to say that the Industrial Revolution is very important historically. Pay attention when you see or hear it being mentioned.

What About Our Brains?

If time was something humans weren't working with as recently as the Middle Ages, which is recent historically speaking, and didn't become part of our daily lives until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, is it possible our brains didn't evolve to struggle with completing tasks within time frames? If we weren't doing it while we were evolving, way back when we were evolving, are we mentally just not wired for applying time to everything we now need to do in our lives?

Yikes. 

I don't have an answer for that, by the way. I'm just saying that last week I wondered if the knowledge that death, the ultimate time killer, is coming up in our future may be why we try so desperately to manage our time so we can do more while we're not dead. And now I'm wondering if the reason managing time is so difficult for so many of us is that we don't have the physical/anatomical ability to do it.

I am hoping for more positive time management thoughts next week.

Time Management Tuesday: I'm Starting A Book Arc! Oh, And Also, We're All Going To Die.

It's been a while since I've read a time management book and blogged about the experience here, so I am quite psyched to get started with a new one. A very new one.Last week I saw author Oliver Burkeman being interviewed by Roxanne Cody about his new book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals and now have my own copy.

During the interview, Burkeman said that while various time management techniques are presented to us as making it possible to reach some point at which we will have the time we're looking for, that can never happen. We will always have more to do, because we have an infinite number of obligations, professional and personal.

I have to say that, after spending, I think, nearly ten years writing here about time management for writers, that most definitely seems to be my impression. There's never an end to the things that eat away at time.  If you're a goal-driven person, you'd be wise not to make achieving some kind of time nirvana a goal, because it is not attainable. You'll go out of your mind.

Another impression I've come away with from my years of time management study is that a lot of writers on the subject have nothing new to say. They're just rewording the same thoughts, sometimes even renaming ideas that already exist. Four Thousand Weeks might actually be new and different, because it begins with the interesting premise that time management doesn't actually work.

We Don't Have Forever

In his introduction, Burkeman explains that his book is called Four Thousand Weeks, because that's the number of weeks in an eighty-year-old's life span. Usually with time management we think of time being limited because there are only seven days in a week, and, sadly, we need to spend a certain amount of that time sleeping. We don't think, Damn, there are a limited number of weeks, too.

But once Burkeman brought it up, I began to wonder if we don't all have that unspoken knowledge in the back of our minds when we try so desperately to manage our time, so we can produce and create and be dream parents or have some other really great relationships and maybe get in a little exercise and travel, too. We have to get control of our time now so we can do all these things, because there's not going to be any time to control in our future.

I will leave you with that uplifting thought. Part Two of my Four Thousand Weeks read will come next week.