Four Thousand Weeks 🕰️: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman

personal impact: 4/5 ★★★★☆

I really enjoyed this book as it gave me a lot of key insights 👆 in regard to how I settle for things in life and manage my time during a crucial junction when I was deciding how much I should study for my step one exam. I think high praise for this book is that I have never highlighted 🖋️ more passages from any book before while I've been reading it in kindle. Below are some of my Readwise.io highlights I found interesting!

The world is bursting with wonder, and yet it’s the rare productivity guru who seems to have considered the possibility that the ultimate point of all our frenetic doing might be to experience more of that wonder. (Location 55)

the essayist Marilynne Robinson, who observes that many of us spend our lives “preparing ourselves and our children to be means to inscrutable ends that are utterly not our own.” (Location 155)

he might have felt himself one tiny part of a vast sweep of history, in which his distant ancestors were almost as alive to him as his own children. We can assert all this with some confidence because we still occasionally encounter islands of deep time today—in those moments when, to quote the writer Gary Eberle, we slip “into a realm where there is enough of everything, where we are not trying to fill a void in ourselves or the world.” (Location 230)

Instead of simply living our lives as they unfold in time—instead of just being time, you might say—it becomes difficult not to value each moment primarily according to its usefulness for some future goal, or for some future oasis of relaxation you hope to reach once your tasks are finally “out of the way.” Superficially, (Location 283)

If I could get enough work done, my subconscious had apparently concluded, I wouldn’t need to ask if it was all that healthy to be deriving so much of my sense of self-worth from work in the first place. (Location 323)

Note: I have totally experienced this hidden correlation before

This struggle against the distressing constraints of reality is what some old-school psychoanalysts call “neurosis,” and it takes countless forms, from workaholism and commitment-phobia to codependency and chronic shyness. (Location 340)

Moreover, most of us seek a specifically individualistic kind of mastery over time—our culture’s ideal is that you alone should control your schedule, doing whatever you prefer, whenever you want—because it’s scary to confront the truth that almost everything worth doing, from marriage and parenting to business or politics, depends on cooperating with others, and therefore on exposing yourself to the emotional uncertainties of relationships. (Location 354)

Once you truly understand that you’re guaranteed to miss out on almost every experience the world has to offer, the fact that there are so many you still haven’t experienced stops feeling like a problem. Instead, you get to focus on fully enjoying the tiny slice of experiences you actually do have time for—and the freer you are to choose, in each moment, what counts the most. (Location 589)

For instance, it’s precisely the fact that getting married forecloses the possibility of meeting someone else—someone who might genuinely have been a better marriage partner; who could ever say?—that makes marriage meaningful. (Location 817)

Procrastination of some kind is inevitable: indeed, at any given moment, you’ll be procrastinating on almost everything, and by the end of your life, you’ll have gotten around to doing virtually none of the things you theoretically could have done. So the point isn’t to eradicate procrastination, but to choose more wisely what you’re going to procrastinate on, in order to focus on what matters most. (Location 834)

Dispiriting as this might sound at first, it contains a liberating message: if you’re procrastinating on something because you’re worried you won’t do a good enough job, you can relax—because judged by the flawless standards of your imagination, you definitely won’t do a good enough job. So you might as well make a start. (Location 939)

Or to be more precise, you don’t have a choice. You will settle—and this fact ought to please you. (Location 997)

Everyone seems to agree that if you embark on a relationship when you secretly suspect you could find someone better, you’re guilty of settling, because you’re opting to use up a portion of your life with a less-than-ideal partner. But since time is finite, the decision to refuse to settle—to spend a decade restlessly scouring online dating networks for the perfect person—is also a case of settling, because you’re opting to use up a decade of your limited time in a different sort of less-than-ideal situation. (Location 999)

Once, in an experiment, the Harvard University social psychologist Daniel Gilbert and a colleague gave hundreds of people the opportunity to pick a free poster from a selection of art prints. Then he divided the participants into two groups. The first group was told that they had a month in which they could exchange their poster for any other one; the second group was told that the decision they’d already made had been final. In follow-up surveys, it was the latter group—those who were stuck with their decision, and who thus weren’t distracted by the thought that it might still be possible to make a better choice—who showed by far the greater appreciation for the work of art they’d selected. (Location 1032)

Note: This relates to my medical school choosing where I was relieved somewhat to only have one choice-wsu.

The obsessive planner, essentially, is demanding certain reassurances from the future—but the future isn’t the sort of thing that can ever provide the reassurance he craves, for the obvious reason that it’s still in the future. (Location 1330)

But all a plan is—all it could ever possibly be—is a present-moment statement of intent. It’s an expression of your current thoughts about how you’d ideally like to deploy your modest influence over the future. The future, of course, is under no obligation to comply. (Location 1432)

life and be the master of her time. Yet in fact the way she’s attempting to achieve that sense of security means she’ll never feel fulfilled, because she’s treating the present solely as a path to some superior future state—and so the present moment won’t ever feel satisfying in itself. (Location 1457)

there’s something odder about the ambitious and well-paid architect, employed in the profession she always longed to join, who nonetheless finds herself treating every moment of her experience as worthwhile only in terms of bringing her closer to the completion of a project, so that she can move on to the next one, or move up the ranks, or move toward retirement. To live like this is arguably insane— (Location 1464)

Why, its members wanted to know, should vacations by the ocean, or meals with friends, or lazy mornings in bed need defending in terms of improved performance at work? (Location 1648)

The truth, then, 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—to be truly at leisure, rather than covertly engaged in future-focused self-improvement. (Location 1720)

This also helps explain why it’s far less embarrassing (indeed, positively fashionable) to have a “side hustle,” a hobbylike activity explicitly pursued with profit in mind. (Location 1870)

But that might be part of why he enjoys it so much: to pursue an activity in which you have no hope of becoming exceptional is to put aside, for a while, the anxious need to “use time well,” (Location 1883)

Psychotherapists call it a “second-order change,” meaning that it’s not an incremental improvement but a change in perspective that reframes everything. (Location 2016)

If you’ve decided to work on a given project for fifty minutes, then once fifty minutes have elapsed, get up and walk away from it. Why? Because as Boice explained, the urge to push onward beyond that point “includes a big component of impatience about not being finished, about not being productive enough, about never again finding such an ideal time” for work. Stopping helps strengthen the muscle of patience that will permit you to return to the project again and again, and thus to sustain your productivity over an entire career. (Location 2140)

Note: This relates to anki, also when I read this it resonated with me because I was editing the synapticlink cards at that time

All this comes with political implications, too, because grassroots politics—the world of meetings, rallies, protests, and get-out-the-vote operations—are among the most important coordinated activities that a desynchronized population finds it difficult to get around to doing. The result is a vacuum of collective action, which gets filled by autocratic leaders, who thrive on the mass support of people who are otherwise disconnected—alienated from one another, stuck at home on the couch, a captive audience for televised propaganda. (Location 2359)