I recently rediscovered the wonderful blog Brain Pickings, only to discover that it had been renamed The Marginalian. One of this week’s posts was about a book, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, by Oliver Burkman that looks to be a very good one for reflecting on our desires to be more efficient and productive with our time, in order to…. This is one of the problems: what are we aiming to do with the time that we “save”?
I just want to leave a couple of quotes Maria Popova cited in her post about the book, but you can follow the links to read her very worthwhile post in its entirety and maybe even add the book to your reading list for the new year (if you have the time…).
Productivity is a trap. Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster. Nobody in the history of humanity has ever achieved “work-life balance,” whatever that might be, and you certainly won’t get there by copying the “six things successful people do before 7:00 a.m.” The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control — when the flood of emails has been contained; when your to-do lists have stopped getting longer; when you’re meeting all your obligations at work and in your home life; when nobody’s angry with you for missing a deadline or dropping the ball; and when the fully optimized person you’ve become can turn, at long last, to the things life is really supposed to be about.
From an everyday standpoint, the fact that life is finite feels like a terrible insult… There you were, planning to live on forever… but now here comes mortality, to steal away the life that was rightfully yours.
Yet, on reflection, there’s something very entitled about this attitude. 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? Surely only somebody who’d failed to notice how remarkable it is that anything is, in the first place, would take their own being as such a given — as if it were something they had every right to have conferred upon them, and never to have taken away. So maybe it’s not that you’ve been cheated out of an unlimited supply of time; maybe it’s almost incomprehensibly miraculous to have been granted any time at all.
Best wishes to all for a new year, new week, new day, lived fully.