How Oliver Burkeman, author of Four Thousand Weeks, Helped Me Escape the Efficiency Trap
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a proud “Inbox Zero” girl. Every email I receive either gets trashed, filed, or replied to—until there is nothing left in my inbox at the end of the night. While most of my friends can’t believe this little habit of mine, it’s par for my particular brand of productivity: I tend to value efficiency above all else, and I’ve implemented systems to help me get the most done in the quickest way possible.
Or so I thought, until I read Oliver Burkeman’s new book, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals.
I cozied up with the book confident that I wouldn’t learn a whole lot. After all, wasn’t my Inbox Zero proof enough that I had time management nailed? But when Burkeman wrote about his own Inbox Zero ways, I gulped.
“I soon discovered that when you get tremendously efficient at answering email, all that happens is that you get much more email,” says Burkeman. “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.”
I started thinking about my go-to mode: hustle. Sure, it scores me kudos from co-workers, but it’s also why I feel like I’m staring down a never-ending mountain of work. If I only get roughly four thousand weeks on Earth—Burkeman’s premise for his new time management tome—was I spending that time wisely? By trying to squeeze the most of that time with what Burkeman calls “pathological productivity,” was I actually falling into an efficiency trap that would leave me less happy (and ironically, less productive) in the long run?
Burkeman says the answer is clear. “Efficiency has become the guiding value to approaching work and life, and while it’s not wrong to be efficient in certain ways, making it the driving goal empties life of meaning,” he tells me. “It also has all of these pervasive effects, like making you feel busier and prompting you to attract more and more work. You end up more rushed, more stressed, and working on things you care less about.”
So, how’s a productivity geek like myself supposed to find saner, more sustainable ways of relating to time? Here’s Burkeman’s best advice:
No. 1: Stop thinking you can get a handle on everything. Here’s the truth, says Burkeman: 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. “None of this is ever going to happen, but you know what? That’s excellent news,” says Burkeman. If you know it’s impossible to get to everything, it means you can’t chalk up not getting to everything to not applying yourself enough, or not having enough stamina. “It’s always liberating to realize that something you were trying to do is completely impossible for humans to do,” says Burkeman with a chuckle. “You can stop beating yourself up then.”
No. 2: Stand firm in the face of FOMO. Trying to jam everything into your schedule because you don’t want to miss out on anything? Now hear this: Missing out is what makes our choices meaningful in the first place, says Burkeman. “Every decision to use a portion of time on anything represents the sacrifice of all the other ways in which you could have spent that time but didn’t,” he says. “If you see that the structure of our situation—the reality of being human—is that you’re definitely going to be missing out on things, it becomes less of a worry.” And when that happens, you can focus on making the best decisions about what to miss out on, turning FOMO into a sort of affirmation, Burkeman explains. “When you realize you have to miss out on doing many other things in order to do the thing you’re choosing to do, it becomes a choice.”
No. 3: Learn how to stay with the anxiety of not clearing the decks. I’ve started to let the emails pile up in my inbox and if I’m honest, it makes me downright nervous and fidgety. What if I miss something? What if I’m not the first to reply to something important? Burkeman gets it—and he urges me to stay close to this discomfort. “It’s important to learn to stay with the anxiety of feeling overwhelmed—of not being on top of everything—without automatically responding by trying to fit more in,” he says. “When you can focus on what’s truly of greatest consequence while tolerating the discomfort of knowing that, as you do so, the decks will be filling up further with emails and errands and other to-dos, you’ll re-train yourself so that squeeze-more-in-mode isn’t your default.”
No. 4: Become a better procrastinator. The core challenge of managing our limited time isn’t about how to get everything done. (That’s never going to happen!) Rather, it’s about how to decide most wisely what not to do, and how to feel at peace about it. “The good procrastinator accepts the fact that she can’t get everything done, then decides as wisely as possible what tasks to focus on and what to neglect,” says Burkeman. “By contrast, the bad procrastinator finds himself paralyzed precisely because he can’t bear the thought of confronting his limitations.”
No. 5: Pay yourself first (in time, that is). That great financial advice about paying yourself first applies to time as well, says Burkeman: If you try to find time for your most valued activities by first dealing with all the other important demands in the hope that there’ll be some leftover at the end, there’s a good chance you’ll be disappointed. “So, if a certain activity really matters to you, the only way to be sure it will happen is to do some of it today, no matter how little, and no matter how many other genuinely big to-dos may be begging for your attention,” he says.
No. 6: Rediscover the art of rest. In our always-on-the-go culture, where we’re praised for hustle and our technology helps us work and live at warp speed, it can be easy to think of rest as something we do to be more productive. How often do you think about spending your time off “well,” whether that means reading a book that’ll help you get ahead in your career or feeling rejuvenated after a weekend so you can hit your to-do list for the upcoming week even harder? Burkeman says that learning to learn to enjoy rest for itself alone—without any regard for potential productivity benefits—is one of the keys to enjoying our four thousand-ish weeks on Earth even more. And he admits this is one he still struggles with. “This idea of using time for future benefits is so strong and so culturally reinforced, but it’s ironic because if there’s anything that shouldn’t be used for the future it’s being present, at rest,” he says. “We tend to define anything that isn’t useful enough for future purposes as wasteful. But the truth is that spending at least some of your leisure time ‘wastefully,’ focused solely on the pleasure of the experience, is the only way not to waste it.”
No. 7: Embrace your cosmic insignificance. In the grand scheme of life, we don’t get much time here and we’re not as important as we often believe ourselves to be. This isn’t to say each of us isn’t special. We are! But when we’re able to face the truth about our irrelevance and embrace it, to whatever extent we can, Burkeman says it can help us do justice to the astonishing gift of the time we do get in our lifetimes. “It isn’t a matter of resolving to do something remarkable with your four thousand weeks,” says Burkeman. “In fact, making the most of your time entails precisely the opposite: refusing to hold those four thousand weeks to an abstract and overdemanding standard of remarkableness, against which they can only ever be found wanting. Instead, take them on their own terms, dropping back down from godlike fantasies of cosmic significance into the experience of life as it concretely, finitely—and often enough, marvelously—really is.”
To learn more about Oliver Burkeman, visit oliverburkeman.com. And order his new book, Four Thousand Weeks, here.
