Book Review-Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals By Oliver Burkeman

I happened onto this book after watching YouTube videos made by Vashik Armenikus (https://www.youtube.com/c/VashikArmenikus/videos). This book by Oliver Burkeman was one of the many books recommended in one of the videos.

The title refers to the duration of human life in weeks if we lived to the ripe old age of 80 years old. 4000 weeks is all we get. I am not unfamiliar with Mr. Burkeman's work. I thoroughly enjoyed his earlier book:  The Antidote (https://polymathtobe.blogspot.com/2018/08/book-review-antidote-by-oliver-burkeman.html). It was a revelatory read on the subject of happiness: why we chase the elusive goal of being happy and why we have a hard time defining that very happiness that we are chasing. How we are fooled by our own biases and how society has sold us on how to become happy, which of course assumes that we are all unhappy to start, at least in the way that the happiness industry defines happiness. It was both entertaining and enlightening. I am naturally biased towards Mr. Burkeman’s writing, and I expected the same incisive observational scalpel taken to the topic of time management.

This book is about our obsession with managing our time.  The author points out that this culture wide obsession came as a result of the industrial revolution. When we were agrarians, we had all the time in the world. We did not need to manage our time because we had time to do what we wanted after we planted the crops. We sat and waited, did our work when needed, the timing was dependent on nature, and we were along for the ride. It wasn't until after we industrialized, and the factory owners needed workers to work together and at the same time. Which, interestingly, he also addresses in the book, the synchrony effect. This is when time becomes a commodity in everyone’s minds. The industrial revolution made most of the population surrender the choice of how we spend our time to the employers; and anything that was left over would be euphemistically called leisure time. The price we pay in exchange for higher wages and perhaps more economic security.  

Burkeman is a fantastic writer. He is droll in how he presents his case, and he has a writing style that is pleasing to read. I don't know if anyone else reads him as I do, but knowing that he's British, I read the book in my own pseudo-British accent and I try to emulate the dry sense of humor that I have come to associate with Monty Python. I am more than sure that Mr. Burkeman possesses that uniquely British sense of irony. It works well with this book as a matter of fact, with me at least.

The book is structured into two parts and fourteen chapters, each chapter has associated with it a mixture of questions and answers: Why we treat time the way we treat time; why we are so impatient with time; why our society is such a large part of why we are what we are when it comes to the way we view and treat time.

There is a lot to digest.

There is quite a bit of information that is presented, much of the material, as is the case with most of these kinds of books, comes with a significant amount of research, copious amount of anecdotal evidence, and cites numerous studies. The differentiator is Burkeman's particular take on all the information which draws the reader in and keeps us interested, the same perspective that kept me in his thrall when I read The Antidote..

Burkeman is blunt in his assessment of our foibles when it comes to the subject time and how we struggle to “control” time.  He points out the brutal truth that we flatter ourselves in believing that we can harness and use time as a commodity. He exposes our egocentric bias that we can own, control,  and manipulate time in service to our needs and requirements. In chapter after chapter, he bursts conceptual bubble after bubble.

The most brutal takedown is that our most human problems are that we are fear driven, ego dominated, control chasing, care more about how others feel about us than how we feel about ourselves, and we fear disappointing others. These traits all thwart us from seeing through our impossible relationship with time.

One critical factor that Burkeman points out is our steadfast belief that we can save time, to save and preserve time when we speak of time. This implicit belief pre-supposes that the continuous concatenation of preserved time can continue ad infinitum, that this time storage can last into infinite time. We are, assuming that infinitude, rather than admitting to the finitude of our existence; we are denying the reality of our existence.

Burkeman examines the reason why we have the relationship that we have with time. Our impatience, our belief that time can be lengthened and shortened according to our whims. He dives into the idea that time is communal, and the idea of synchrony is critical to our satisfaction in life. This was one of the most exciting chapters in the book.

He proposes solutions in each of the chapters, dealing with each of the topics individually, quite unlike the time management solutions proffered in the business press pap that the typical time management experts spews forth. He poses solutions that are quite difficult to accept, it would take a complete change in outlook, beliefs, and preferences to understand the why, which would lead to the how. But once the perspective is turned around, it was a head slapping moment for me, as in: why didn’t I think of that?

The last chapter, the Afterward, is where  Burkeman pulls it all together. He does not try to tie it up into a nice pretty box tied with a pretty bow. What does is encapsulates the key points he made while addressing the foibles in our modern-day thinking, and here are the acts that we must take on  to overcome this crippling mental crutch that we all believe implicitly: that we must all be impatient with ourselves, that we can postpone the present to the future so that we can be better prepared to enjoy all that preserved time.  The last chapter is a gut check. It is difficult to aggregate into our minds because it is so contrary to the way our society has evolved and how we, as members of society, have created this particular ethos.

Burkeman has also helpfully added an appendix with ten hints that help us realize the finitude of our existence. Foremost amongst his advice is to realize that time is finite, to live in the moment, to stop putting faith on the impossible, to embrace life’s limits, to give up on overcoming the unknown, to realize that this life is not a dress rehearsal, and to just do.

Unfortunately, I don’t think most people hot on the trail of the next time management elixir would stop long enough to even consider the subtlety and nuance that populates Burkeman’s book, let alone accede to his proposed remedies. Even though the book is interesting to read, and the ideas are refreshing. People would rather chase after the snake oil salesmen who are paddling the miracle cure for all our time management problems. If only we had more sense of urgency, discipline, and an ability to multitask. People would rather let their biases and foibles guide them to the open arms of the time management charlatans, even though the emperor has no clothes.