Four Thousand Weeks - Time Management for Mortals

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WAYNE RIVERS: Hi everyone. This is Wayne Rivers at Performance Construction Advisors where We Build Better Contractors.

This week I want to talk about a book called Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. It's by Oliver Burkeman, and he wrote the book in 2021. I'm not sure what took me so long to get my hands on it, but it was a New York Times bestseller and I like it and recommend it. Now, what about this is important to you? What's Four Thousand Weeks? Let me jump right in. The trouble with attempting to master your time, it turns out, is that time ends up mastering you. He talks about, "I've squandered countless hours and a fair amount of money, spent mainly on fancy notebooks and felt tip pens, in service to the belief that I could only find the right time management system, build the right habits, and apply sufficient self-discipline. I might actually be able to win the struggle with time once and for all."

That is the mindset of so many of our members. They've got so much to do. They only have 168 hours a week. They know they have to sleep some. They have to eat, they have to take care of other things. So how much time does that leave them to work? Well, in the case of many of our contractors, it's still 80 hours a week or more in some cases. So they're always on the lookout for the next best time management system so they can finally, once and for all, wrestle this time management thing to the ground and get everything done that they need to get done in that busy, busy, busy, 168 hour work week. Now, what's 4,000 weeks? 4,000 weeks is your time and life broken down up until age 80. He just arbitrarily picked age 80 and said, "Okay, if you live to age 80, you're going to live approximately 4,000 weeks during the course of your lifetime. And your time is your life, whether you measure it by the minute, the hour, the week, whatever, your time is your life."

I would describe this in a sense as an anti-time management book. And why do I say that? Well, you'll get to it, but basically there is no way to master all of the things that you need and want to do. This book is almost a relief as I read it because he acknowledges plainly there is no way. There is no system. There is absolutely no possible way you can get to all the things that you need and want to do in life. And so part of this book, a good part of it in fact, is coming to terms with the fact that you're never going to catch up. The brevity of life is the defining problem of human existence. We've been granted the mental capacities to make almost infinitely ambitious plans, but practically no time to put them into action.

Arguably, time management is all life is, yet the modern discipline known as time management, like its hipper cousin productivity, is a depressingly narrow-minded affair focused on how to crank through as many work tasks as possible, on devising the perfect morning routine, on cooking all your dinners in one big batch on Sunday night. These things matter, but they're hardly all that matters. Good luck finding a time management system that makes any room for engaging productively with your fellow citizens. This book is an attempt to help redress the balance. John Maynard Keynes, the famous economist, said in 1930, "In the future, no one will have to work more than about 15 hours a week." And this was the advent of all the labor saving devices, the vacuum cleaner, the washer and dryer, the dishwasher, all those things.

What happened though with all these labor saving, time saving devices is they allowed more things to come into our lives that we have to do. So yeah, the dishwasher's running on remote, so I can now go do three other things while the dishwasher is taking care of my dishes. Busyness is viewed as virtuous. I can remember being in a peer group meeting where the leaders were more or less bragging about how long they worked. One guy would say 60, one guy would say 70, one guy said 90 hours a week as if it was a badge of honor. Now, if you work 90 hours a week, what are you ignoring in your family with respect to your spirituality, your personal health, et cetera, et cetera? Working 90 hours one week a year when it's really, really, really crunch time, okay, that's one thing.

These guys were bragging about working 90 hours every week and it just staggered me. And by the way, by the time I withdrew from that peer group, they weren't talking that way anymore. They were talking about vacations and family time and things like that. So we were able to move the needle for them, but they were really bragging about the incredibly long work hours, which are the norm, not the exception in construction as you know. He writes that time management as we know it has failed miserably and we need to stop pretending otherwise. So the real problem isn't our limited time. The real problem or so I hope to convince you is that we've unwittingly inherited and feel pressured to live by a troublesome set of ideas about how to use our limited time. Ancient people had a different orientation to time. When the sun rose in the morning, they got up and the sun began to set in the evening, they stopped their labors and they did whatever they did.

It was only with the advent of clocks. Now why were clocks invented? Clocks were invented by monks and monasteries because they had to coordinate the efforts of large groups of people. It wasn't just one person living a monastic life. They lived with other people and they needed to do certain things at certain times like meals and morning prayers and things and worship services. So they invented clocks. And then not long after that, the industrial revolution came along and workplaces had to be organized for large amounts of people. So there had to be a beginning time, there had to be a break time and a lunchtime, and there had to be a closing time or a shift change time. So clocks dramatically changed how we orient ourselves to the world. I'm not saying we should go back, certainly not, but it did change the human being orientation towards the day.

Doug McWright says, "There's always trade-offs." And this is referred to as the paradox of limitation, which runs through everything that follows. The more you try to manage your time with the goal of achieving a feeling of total control and freedom from the inevitable constraints of being human, the more stressful, empty, and frustrating life gets. But the more you confront the facts of finitude instead and work within them rather than against them, the more productive, meaningful and joyful life becomes. I think that's probably true. Doug again says, "There's always trade-offs." And Burkeman asks, "Which balls do you let drop?" That's the question that you have to answer for yourself because you're never going to manage all the tasks, all the things. Which balls do you let drop? Is it the family ball? Is it the self ball? Is it spirituality? Is it letting down someone at work because you can't be on yet another committee or go to yet another meeting?

Which ball do you let drop? That's the question that you really have to answer. Nobody wants to disappoint other people. No one wants to say no because it just feels bad to say no, but you've got to do it or you'll never get ahold of your life. What's needed instead in such situations is a kind of anti-skill, a willingness to resist such urges, to learn to stay with the anxiety of feeling overwhelmed, not being on top of everything. Instead of clearing the decks, decline to clear the decks, focus instead on what's truly of greatest consequence while tolerating the discomfort of knowing that as you do, the decks will be filling up further. So again, it's an anti-time management book. It's coming to grips with the fact that you're never going to manage all the things that you'd like to do.

He asked a question, "If you were to be supplied with an infinity of summer vacations, the value of vacation would diminish to nothing. If all of your time was free time, leisure time, the value of your time would diminish to nothing." So he's not saying, "Don't work, don't strive, don't be ambitious." He's saying you've just got to get your mind around the difference between rest and relaxation and work. Why assume that an infinite supply of time is the default and mortality, the outrageous violation? Why treat 4,000 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 you ever had before. So flipping on its head, the 4,000 weeks sounds incredibly limiting, but it's not because when it comes to us as human beings, it's virtually infinite.

He's got several ideas about how to maximize what you do and what balls you decide to let drop. Number one, with respect to time, he says pay yourself first. When I was in Strategic Coach back in the day, we would plan out our next 90 days, our next 90 days. Clearly we met four times a year. And the first thing we did was we mapped out what was called our free days. So that was time that you would spend exercising with family, going on trips, et cetera, et cetera. So you plan that vacation, you take that week off, you take the weekend off, whatever, but you plan your free days first. And that flipped everything on its head because most of the time we're saying, "Someday I'll do this. Someday I'll do that. Right now work is too pressing, but someday I'm going to take that vacation. I'm going to go to Europe. I'm going to do X, Y, or Z." And some days somehow never quite comes around.

That's why Dan Sullivan was a genius. He said, "Go ahead and plan your off time first. There's plenty of work to fill in the rest, but plan your free time first." The second thing, limit your work in process. Have your top priority, ideally one, two, maybe three on the outside, but understand what your priorities are. Where are you making the biggest impact in your organization and schedule your time so that you are making that impact and you are working on your three top priorities. Is there time for other stuff? Sure, you'll find time for meetings and other things in there, but make sure as you allocate your time, you start to say no so that you can focus more on what's truly important in your job, in your life, in your organization.

And the third thing he says is resist the allure of middling priorities. So there's a story about Warren Buffett and he's talking to his pilot and his pilot says, "Gosh, Mr. Buffett, how do I get everything done that I want?" And Warren Buffet said, "Okay, list your top 25 priorities." And so the pilot did that and he came back to Mr. Buffett and he said, "Okay, here are my top 25." Buffett said, "Get rid of number six through 25. Draw a line through them and never ever look back because they are the middling priorities and they will steal time away from your main priorities." So that's what we're getting at. Two and three kind of run together a bit. Limit your work in process, say no, focus on your priorities and get rid of... Buffet said five top priorities. I'm saying one to three. That would be better.

Okay. The time paradox, it arrives, you'll never get it again. And once it's passed, your remaining supply of moments will be one smaller than before. That is an absolutely true statement. I heard Mitch Hedberg say, a friend showed him a picture and he says, "This is me back in the day." And Mitch Hedberg said, "Well, every picture of you is from back in the day." Absolutely true, the paradox of time. And then finally, we talked about, well, this is kind of a long story, but he talked about collective rituals. And what they found in the days of ancient Rome as well as in the cavalry days of the American army was that people get energy and sustenance from other people. So marching together, what the Romans found was that collective marching allowed soldiers to go much farther together than they would as individuals. That's the value of marching.

Two other things also inspire somehow humans to go beyond their norm means. One is collective singing. I'm a terrible singer, but you think about singing, bringing people together and chanting as monks do. Those three collective things tend to envelop groups of people and allow them to experience emotions and capabilities they didn't know they had before. So really the whole book is fascinating.

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Wayne holds up a piece of paper with a grid chart graphic colored partially red, white and blue.

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Now one thing they talk about in the book, and this comes from a website, Bryan Braun, Bryan with a Y, braun.com. And this is an interactive graphic that you can do. You put in your birthdate up here and this is your life in weeks. So Bryan Braun's granddad lived to 88, so he made this graph go out to age 88. When you fill in your birthdate, it will automatically fill in red the weeks that you've used up in your life. I went in and highlighted, okay, let's say I work until I'm 70 years old and I put that in blue down here. This is the rest of my work life. This little tiny white sliver down here, that's how much time I have left to make an impact on you and the people in our peer groups and our employees here at PCA. That's not much time. So I showed this to some people in the office and they say, "That's terribly depressing," and I don't think it is. I think it shows you the importance of setting those priorities and working on those priorities first and foremost and letting everything else, all those middling priorities slide away. What do you think? Email me at [email protected].

This is Wayne Rivers at PCA where We Build Better Contractors.

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