Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

“I was peeling a red apple from the garden when I suddenly understood that life would only ever give me a series of wonderfully insoluble problems. With that thought an ocean of profound peace entered my heart.”

The great irony of all our efforts to avoid facing finitude—to carry on believing that it might be possible not to have to choose between mutually exclusive options—is that when people finally do choose, in a relatively irreversible way, they’re usually much happier as a result. We’ll do almost anything to avoid burning our bridges, to keep alive t... See more

What does it mean for a human being to be? (I realize this is starting to sound like a bad comedy sketch about philosophers lost in wild abstractions. I’m afraid that’s going to get worse for another couple of paragraphs before it gets better.) His answer is that our being is totally, utterly bound up with our finite time. So bound up, in fact, tha... See more

I’m embarrassed to admit what an outsize negative effect such minor frustrations have had on my happiness over the years. Fairly often, they still do; but the effect was worst at the height of my productivity geekhood, because when you’re trying to Master Your Time, few things are more infuriating than a task or delay that’s foisted upon you agains... See more

“in the process of trying to attain a few moments of bliss,” Rinaldi explains, “I experience something else: patience and humility, definitely, but also freedom. Freedom to pursue the futile. And the freedom to suck without caring is revelatory.” Results aren’t everything. Indeed, they’d better not be, because results always come later—and later is... See more

our lives, thanks to their finitude, are inevitably full of activities that we’re doing for the very last time. Just as there will be a final occasion on which I pick up my son—a thought that appalls me, but one that’s hard to deny, since I surely won’t be doing it when he’s thirty—there will be a last time that you visit your childhood home, or sw... See more

Except that this now began to seem to me like an astoundingly perverse way to approach spending time with a newborn, not to mention an unnecessarily exhausting thing to have to think about when life was already exhausting enough. Obviously, it mattered to keep half an eye on the future—there would be vaccinations to be administered, preschools to a... See more

So when you pay attention to something you don’t especially value, it’s not an exaggeration to say that you’re paying with your life. Seen this way, “distraction” needn’t refer only to momentary lapses in focus, as when you’re distracted from performing your work duties by the ping of an incoming text message, or a compellingly terrible news story.... See more

Why assume that an infinite supply of time is the default, and mortality the outrageous violation? Or to put it another way, why treat four thousand weeks as a very small number, because it’s so tiny compared with infinity, rather than treating it as a huge number, because it’s so many more weeks than if you had never been born?