Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
You might have thought of your life in 5 years from now, retirement or some before-after of a great event like marriage, kids or life in weeks if you read the waitbutwhy article.
If you zoom out and think for the civilization - "a fairly modest six-figure number of weeks—310,000—is the approximate duration of all human civilization".
Now zoom out to Andrew Alden's paraphrasing of John McPhee's Deep time as "unimaginably greater than the time scale of human lives and human plans". This Deep time stands in contrast with Deep work where you are probably in flow and lose touch of time. In Deep time, the human's activities eg different ages like the stone Age are a blip on the radar.
We wonder about origins of where things came from but it is harder to think of where it is going. We look back deep in time, but not front deep in time. At the beginning and end of time, you only have myths and afterlife as the bookends. It takes a power of 10 exercise to go from weekends to the bookends of life.
"Eigenzeit, or the time inherent to a process itself". This reminds me of the time it takes to fall asleep or how you lose time, by thinking of why you cant go sleep. Eigenzeit probably calls for patience in terms of the time that it takes to lose weight, or overcoming grief or loss. You cant rush those things. It might be harder to understand when there's alternatives. Eg. slow cooking. Its somehow supposed to taste different but what if you don't mind quick, not bad tasting food. Baking stuff from scratch. Sometimes when kids say fritters at home are better than the ones from the restaurant - they are better eaten, hot off the stove. When the author refers to how he couldn't enjoy the Northern Lights because it looked like the wall papers - I understand that feeling when I look at some pictures of water falls and cascaded which look like the picturesque ones - Its like having your favorite food at an unfavorable temperature which takes away some of the joy because it doesn't hit the right tone and still its your favorite and you are supposed to love it.
"Philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome. They understood limitlessness to be the sole preserve of the gods"
How can we be wholeheartedly human? To Err is Human.. sounds so liberating.
Charles Garfield Lott Du Cann wrote a short book, Teach yourself to Live which asks you to know your limitations, to be happier i.e find your limit-embracing life.
How to Live on 24 Hours a Day.
"More Work for Mother, the historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan shows that when housewives first got access to “labor-saving” devices like washing machines and vacuum cleaners, no time was saved at all, because society’s standards of cleanliness simply rose to offset the benefits. " in the vein of Instant pots Will Not Solve All of Life’s Problems
Imagine work and time as seperate fabrics, one trying to fit the other. Parkinsons Law. The opposite of it is the Hofstadter's Law like the objects in rear view are closer than they appear or gravity. Acceleration and Momentum effects.
"German sociologist Hartmut Rosa explains, premodern people weren’t much troubled by such thoughts, partly because they believed in an afterlife: there was no particular pressure to “get the most out of” their limited time". Beliefs about afterlife affect sustainability practices. Lakota seven generations decision making.
Rosa’s book Social Acceleration, Jonathan Trejo-Mathys introduction.
“don’t even realize something is broken until someone else shows us a better way.” - Alexis Ohanian
"As convenience colonizes everyday life, activities gradually sort themselves into two types: the kind that are now far more convenient, but that feel empty or out of sync with our true preferences; and the kind that now seem intensely annoying, because of how inconvenient they remain."
“a world is worlding all around us,” - Heidegger
“the brute reality on which all of us ought to be constantly stubbing our toes,” - Sarah Bakewell.
Latin word for “decide,” decidere, means “to cut off,”
The Iceberg, the British sculptor Marion Coutts was taking her two-year-old son to his first day with a new caregiver when her husband, the art critic Tom Lubbock, came to find her to tell - “bright sadness” (as does the priest and author Richard Rohr), “stubborn gladness” (the poet Jack Gilbert), or “sober joy” (the Heidegger scholar Bruce Ballard).
"As the American author and teacher Gregg Krech puts it, we need to learn to get better at procrastinating."
"The real measure of any time management technique is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things."
Three Principles
- Principle number one is to pay yourself first when it comes to time.
- The second principle is to limit your work in progress. In their book Personal Kanban, which explores this strategy in detail, the management experts Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry suggest no more than three items.
- The third principle is to resist the allure of middling priorities
"the bad kind of procrastination, which prevents us from making progress on the work that matters to us—is usually the result of trying to avoid that truth."
Dying for Ideas: The Dangerous Lives of the Philosophers by Costica Bradatan. Shiraz who burnt his blueprints
Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness
by French philosopher Henri Bergson. Why Kafka couldnt settle?
Robert Goodin On Settling.
"Philosophers have been worrying about distraction at least since the time of the ancient Greeks, who saw it less as a matter of external interruptions and more as a question of character—a systematic inner failure to use one’s time on what one claimed to value the most". Sounds similar to procrastination. A kind of resistance.
"whatever compelled your attention from moment to moment is simply what your life will have been."
"The job itself could be a distraction—that is, an investment of a portion of your attention, and therefore of your life, in something less meaningful than other options that might have been available to you."
"It’s that the distracted person isn’t really choosing at all. Their attention has been commandeered by forces that don’t have their highest interests at heart."
The proper response to this situation, we’re often told today, is to render ourselves indistractible in the face of interruptions: to learn the secrets of “relentless focus”—usually involving meditation, web-blocking apps, expensive noise-canceling headphones, and more meditation—so as to win the attentional struggle once and for all. But this is a trap.
human limitation, which is that achieving total sovereignty over your attention is almost certainly impossible.
Neuroscientists call this “bottom-up” or involuntary attention, and we’d struggle to stay alive without it.
the “top-down” or voluntary kind—
Austrian psychotherapist Viktor Frankl, author of Man’s Search for Meaning, who was able to fend off despair as a prisoner in Auschwitz because he retained the ability to direct a portion of his attention toward the only domain the camp guards couldn’t violate:
“Attention is the beginning of devotion” - Mary Oliver,
drag-down-to-refresh gesture, which keeps people scrolling by exploiting a phenomenon known as “variable rewards”
So it’s not simply that our devices distract us from more important matters. It’s that they change how we’re defining “important matters” in the first place. In the words of the philosopher Harry Frankfurt, they sabotage our capacity to “want what we want to want.”
In T. S. Eliot’s words, we are “distracted from distraction by distraction.”
His name was Steve Young, and he was training to become a monk in the Shingon branch of Buddhism
he concentrated on the sensations of intense cold, giving his attention over to them as completely as he could, the less agonizing he found them—whereas once his “attention wandered, the suffering became unbearable.”
Young—who is now a meditation teacher better known as Shinzen Young, his new first name having been bestowed on him by the abbot at Mount Koya—found that his powers of concentration had been transformed.
ice-water ritual more tolerable, it made less unpleasant undertakings—daily chores that might previously have been a source not of agony but of boredom or annoyance—positively engrossing.
his internal resistance to experiencing it.
“Hofstadter’s law,” which states that any task you’re planning to tackle will always take longer than you expect, “even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.”
while it may occasionally prevent a catastrophe, the rest of the time it tends to exacerbate the very anxiety it was supposed to allay.
The obsessive planner,
Note:like not being able to fall asleep thinking of when the alarm might go in the morning
no matter how many spare hours you build in. Or rather you can be certain—but only once you’ve arrived and you’re cooling your heels in the terminal,
Worry, at its core, is the repetitious experience of a mind attempting to generate a feeling of security about the future, failing, then trying again and again and again—as if the very effort of worrying might somehow help forestall disaster.
David Cain points out, we never have time in the same sense that we have the cash in our wallets or the shoes on our feet.
When we claim that we have time, what we really mean is that we expect it.
You only ever get to feel certain about the future once it’s already turned into the past.
autobiography All Said and Done, Simone de Beauvoir marvels at the mind-boggling number of things, all utterly beyond her control, that had to happen in order to make her her:
American meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein, “a plan is just a thought.”
you don’t boil the kettle out of a love of boiling kettles, or
Back to Sanity, the psychologist Steve Taylor recalls watching tourists at the British Museum in London who weren’t really looking at the Rosetta Stone, the ancient Egyptian artifact on display in front of them,
preparing to look at it later, by recording images and videos of it on their phones.
Note: similar point in Peak Mind by Amishi Jha, how this mindset is detrimental for understanding and learning.
as valuable only insofar as it lays the groundwork for something else.
“spiritual entertainer” and New Age philosopher Alan Watts explained with characteristic vigor:
Take education.
They are never here. They never get there. They are never alive.
In his play The Coast of Utopia, Tom Stoppard puts an intensified version of this sentiment into the mouth of the nineteenth-century Russian philosopher Alexander Herzen,
Nature doesn’t disdain what only lives for a day. It pours the whole of itself into each moment …
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig describes
unreal and that the quality of the lake is smothered by the fact that it’s so pointed to.”
Oh, I found myself thinking, they look like one of those screen savers.
Jay Jennifer Matthews puts it in her excellently titled short book Radically Condensed Instructions for Being Just as You Are, “We cannot get anything out of life. There is no outside where we could take this thing to. There is no little pocket, situated outside of life, [to which
Walter Kerr noticed back in 1962, in his book The Decline of Pleasure: “We are all of us compelled,” Kerr wrote, “to read for profit, party for contacts … gamble for charity, go out in the evening for the greater glory of the municipality, and stay home for the weekend to rebuild the house.”
business, negotium, translates literally as “not-leisure,”
maverick Marxist Paul Lafargue would later call, in the title of his best-known pamphlet, The Right To Be Lazy
call this inability to rest “idleness aversion,”
Kieran Setiya calls an “atelic activity,” meaning that its value isn’t derived from its telos, or ultimate aim. You shouldn’t be aiming to get a walk “done”;
Schopenhauer puts it in his masterwork, The World as Will and Idea, it’s therefore inherently painful for humans to have “objects of willing”—things you want to do, or to have, in life—because not yet
We might seek to incorporate into our daily lives more things we do for their own sake alone—to spend some of our time, that is, on activities in which the only thing we’re trying to get from them is the doing itself.
Jennifer Roberts, who teaches art history at Harvard University.
choose a painting or sculpture in a local museum, then go and look at it for three hours straight. No checking email or social media; no quick runs to Starbucks.
Boy with a Squirrel, by the American artist John Singleton Copley. (It shows a boy with a squirrel.) “It took me nine minutes to notice that the shape of the boy’s ear precisely echoes that of the ruff along the squirrel’s belly,”
philosopher Robert Grudin means when he describes the experience of patience as “tangible, almost edible,” as if it gives
The Road Less Traveled, the psychotherapist M. Scott Peck recounts a transformative experience of surrendering to the speed of reality—
[the] car. Then I took the time to make myself comfortable. Once I was comfortable, I then took the time to look at the situation … At first all I saw was a confusing jumble of wires and tubes and rods, whose meaning I did not know. But gradually, in no hurry, I was able to focus my sight on the brake apparatus and trace its course. And then it became
Or we abandon difficult creative projects, or nascent romantic relationships, because there’s less uncertainty in just calling things off than in waiting to see how they might develop.
Three Principles
- The first is to develop a taste for having problems.
- The second principle is to embrace radical incrementalism. The psychology professor Robert Boice spent his career studying the writing habits of his fellow academics, reaching the conclusion that the most productive and successful among them wrote everyday.
- The final principle is that, more often than not, originality lies on the far side of unoriginality. The Finnish American photographer Arno Minkkinen dramatizes this deep truth about the power of patience with a parable about Helsinki’s main bus station.
Minkkinen says. “Stay on the bus. Stay on the fucking bus.”
time is also a “network good,”
“the social regulation of time”
Keeping Together in Time.
writer of the book of Ecclesiastes, among many others, would instantly have recognized the suffering of Hollis’s patient: “Then I considered all that my hands had done, and the toil I had spent in doing it, and behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun.”
A New York writer and director named Julio Vincent Gambuto captured this sense of what I found myself starting to think of as “possibility shock”—the startling understanding that things could be different, on a grand scale, if only we collectively wanted that enough. “What the trauma has shown us,” Gambuto wrote,
British philosopher Bryan Magee
As Magee observed, the number of lives you’d need in order to span the whole of civilization, sixty, was “the number of friends I squeeze into my living room when I have a drinks party.”
We do not disapprove of a chair because it cannot be used to boil water for a nice cup of tea,” Landau points out: a chair just isn’t the kind of thing that ought to have the capacity to boil water, so it isn’t a problem that it doesn’t. And it is likewise “implausible, for almost all people, to demand of themselves that they be a Michelangelo, a Mozart, or an Einstein …
a dent in the universe. Indeed, depending on the stringency of your criteria, even Steve Jobs, who coined that phrase, failed to leave such a dent.
Master Your Time, Master Your Life, by the time management guru Brian Tracy.
Heidegger’s mysterious suggestion that we don’t get or have time at all—that instead we are time.
There’s no scrambling up to the safety of the riverbank when the river is you.
Writing in 1970, Marie-Louise von Franz, the Swiss psychologist and scholar of fairy tales, captured the otherworldly atmosphere of such an existence:
“Entering space and time completely”
Zen teacher Charlotte Joko Beck puts it, it’s only unbearable for as long as you’re under the impression that there might be a cure.
French poet Christian Bobin, he recalls, at a similarly mundane moment: “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.”
Rainer Maria Rilke’s famous phrase, is to “live the questions.”
James Hollis recommends asking of every significant decision in life: “Does this choice diminish me, or enlarge me?”
But “at a certain age,” writes the psychotherapist Stephen Cope, “it finally dawns on us that, shockingly, no one really cares what we’re doing with our life.
It follows naturally enough from this outlook that you should focus your time on those activities for which you expect to be around to see the results. But in his documentary A Life’s Work, the director David Licata profiles people who took another path, dedicating their lives to projects that almost certainly won’t be completed within their lifetimes—like the father-and-son team attempting to catalog every tree in the world’s remaining ancient forests, and the astronomer scouring radio waves for signs of extraterrestrial life from her desk at the SETI Institute in California.
Carl Jung wrote a reply to a correspondent, Frau V., - "One lives as one can."
such a path was to “quietly do the next and most necessary thing.
not how many people you helped, or how much you got done; but that working within the limits of your moment in history, and your finite time and talents, you actually got around to doing—and made life more luminous for the rest of us by doing—whatever magnificent task or weird little thing it was that you came here for.
choose devices with only one purpose, such as the Kindle ereader,
An alternative, Shinzen Young explains, is to pay more attention to every moment, however mundane: to find novelty not by doing radically different things but by plunging more deeply into the life you already have.
Experience life with twice the usual intensity, and “your experience of life would be twice as full as it currently is”
Susan Jeffers suggests in her book Embracing Uncertainty. Not knowing what’s coming next—which is the situation you’re always in, with regard to the future—presents an ideal opportunity for choosing curiosity
Vital Few
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