How to change your relationship with time
How to change your relationship with time
Rethink Book Club: Oliver Burkeman's book Four Thousand Weeks
The end of January can be a challenging time of year. It's dark, cold, and wet and spring feels just out of reach. Often our plans to follow a perfect morning routine and to exercise/meditate/eat well every single day of this year have crashed and burned by now. And if you're the kind of person (like me) who thinks a lot about making the best use of your time, it can be easy to be hard on yourself.
Let's call them collapsed (rather than failed) goals that create this nagging void between who we want to be (calm, focused, healthy) and who we imagine we really are (frazzled, distracted, tired).
Why I picked up the book:
That's why instead of reading more about productivity and goal setting, I've decided to take a different approach in 2023 – to cut myself some slack from my internal taskmaster. It's why I picked up a copy of Oliver Burkeman's book Four Thousand Weeks; I want to rethink how I think about time and the concept of fitting everything in.
What this book made me rethink:
Plans and 'to-do lists' are just thoughts; they help us feel in control over our time. (Confession: I'm an obsessive planner, so the idea that planning is a deep controlling need for the world to turn out the way we want it to is tough to accept.)
After reading Burkeman's book, you'll notice how everything from 'life hacks' to even how we frame holidays or meditation to "recharge our batteries" reinforces this notion that we exist to be productive. Capitalism is wired on a Ponzi scheme of time, constantly nudging us to increase productivity.
"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…" Oliver Burkeman
One powerful idea I'll take with me:
The idea of 'strategic underachievement'. Actively deciding which areas of your life don't expect to achieve anything great allows you to give things up. I now think of this as ‘DELIBERATE IMPERFECTION’. For example, it's okay for the house to be messy or for nothing to get ironed to focus on finishing something important or spend more time with the kids.
Side note: after reading the book, I looked up the etymology of "decide" – it comes from the Latin "to cut off." Love that!
Three words that sum up this book:
Sobering. Provocative. Freeing.
Why I'm recommending this book:
Four Thousand Weeks is a counterintuitive antidote to the constant barrage of time management tools that can easily become counterproductive and create more stress. Choosing what not to do is a powerful sieve to make better choices with our brief allotment of life.
You'll enjoy this book if you also enjoyed:
Greg McKeown's Essentialism
"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… and when the fully optimized person you've become can turn, at long last, to the things life is really supposed to be about." Oliver Burkeman
Further recommendations about rethinking our 'use' of time:
Listen: To Burkeman on one of my favourite podcasts, Ctrl Alt Delete, share his thinking on embracing your limits.
Read: Willa Cather on productivity vs creativity or a fascinating blog post on 'Rest in Motion' by Nate Soars.
Note: I’ll be starting a Rethink Book Club discussion thread on Wednesday so we can chat about the themes that come out of this week’s recommendation.
Warmly,
