57 pages • 1 hour read
Oliver BurkemanFour Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 10-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: Beyond Control
Part 2, Chapter 10 Summary: “The Impatience Spiral”
Ironically, while modern technology has reduced wait-times, we are more impatient than ever, frustrated about our inability to make arduous or manual tasks be completed in the time that we would wish. Burkeman speculates that we experience such frustration because each timesaving advancement “seems to bring us closer to the point of transcending our limits” and that we might have more control over our time (163). However, with this increased efficiency, the fact that we do not have complete control becomes even more unpleasant.
It is not just individuals who have grown more impatient, but society as a whole, meaning that expectations of efficiency in fields such as work have gone up, putting pressure on employees. This is even when we know that impatience and rushing often mean that the satisfactory completion of a task takes longer, as we make more errors when we hurry and may have to repeat our work.
Reading, a formerly favored pastime, is an area that has suffered due to modern impatience. Although people complain that they do not have time to read, often the problem is that they grow frustrated that the text dictates a timespan of its own and that to fully grasp it, we have to surrender our own unrealistic expectations of instant satisfaction.
In the late 1990s, American psychotherapist Stephanie Brown, who worked in Menlo Park near Silicon Valley, found that many of her patients were suffering from an addiction to speed (as in moving fast, not the drug). Just as an alcoholic might use alcohol to numb difficult feelings, speed addicts aimed to stave off emotional pain with a rush of varying activities. Speed addiction is so common in our world because as the pace of life increases, we get anxious about keeping up. To manage this unpleasant feeling, we seek to take back control by cramming our lives with even more activities. However, this generates an addictive spiral and can have a negative toll on our relationships and health. Speed addiction can be especially difficult to recover from, because unlike alcoholism, it is socially sanctioned. True recovery will only arrive when you accept the truth that tasks take as long as they do, and that a lot of timing is out of your control and “the faster you go, the faster you’ll feel you need to go” (170). When you enter this state of acceptance, you no longer try to outrun your anxiety and you embrace time-consuming tasks for the process they entail, rather than because you can get to the end more quickly. You begin to acquire the unfashionable superpower of patience.
Part 2, Chapter 11 Summary: “Staying on the Bus”
Patience is an underrated quality in Western society, because it seems to imply passivity rather than proactiveness. Nevertheless, as things speed up, “patience becomes a form of power” (173). Those who take the time they need to do meaningful work achieve satisfaction in the process as well as in the future outcome of a project.
Harvard art history professor Jennifer Roberts assigns her students the arduous task of looking at the same painting for three hours straight. She does this as a counter to the pressures on her students to move fast and accomplish things quickly. Rather than being passive and pointless, this task encourages people to really look at the painting and become steeped in its atmosphere. They will inevitably notice things about the scene and the artist’s process that would have eluded them had they given the painting the customary quick glance. Burkeman tried this exercise himself, and while he at first found it excruciating, he ultimately experienced the reward of truly engaging with life as it was, as opposed to entertaining the fantasy that he could control the pace of life.
The psychotherapist M. Scott Peck, author of The Road Less Travelled (1978), observes our human discomfort with waiting. Peck argues that “we’re made so uneasy by the experience of allowing reality to unfold at its own speed that when we’re faced with a problem, it feels better to race towards a resolution – any resolution, really, so long as we can tell ourselves we’re ‘dealing with’ the situation, thereby maintaining the feeling of being in control” (179). One of the solutions to such impatience and the hasty often damaging decisions that result from it, is to, in Burkeman’s words, “develop a taste for having problems” (180). Rather than pushing to eliminate problems so we might find our way to some sort of conflict-free nirvana, we would do better to accept that having pains and puzzles to solve is an important part of the human condition. Life thereby becomes the process of tackling our problems at the pace that they require. We can also adopt an attitude of “radical incrementalism” where we tackle difficult projects piecemeal, doing a bit every day, and thereby honoring the time it takes for the creative process to work (181). This helps to avoid burnout and giving up prematurely. Finally, we can follow the Finnish American photographer Arno Minkkinen’s principle to stay on the bus and thereby stick with a particular strand of action rather than chopping and changing when things get difficult. In the sphere of creative work, staying on the bus means accepting the period when our output will be mediocre and derivative and working through this to a point of originality. Ultimately, patience means embracing where you are on a journey rather than hoping reality will speed up and grant you your wishes sooner.
Part 2, Chapter 12 Summary: “The Loneliness of the Digital Nomad”
This chapter is about the freedom we find in accepting some temporal constraints so that we can better live our lives in sync with other people’s. Current productivity advice spins the illusion that the most satisfying lives are the ones where individuals get to make up their own schedules and are beholden to no one’s impositions on our time. Burkeman is clear that the price we pay for this is loneliness.
He argues that some of the most important things we do, such as socializing, bringing up children, launching business or joining political movements, require synchronizing our time with other people’s. While in premodern societies the greatest punishment was ostracization—being forced to spend the remainder of one’s days remote from the rhythms of everyday society, the modern world celebrates the state of temporal apartness that today’s online employments permit and the figure of the digital nomad, who can theoretically dictate their schedule according to their whims and work from anywhere in the world.
Burkeman points out that the term “digital nomad” is misleading, as the original nomads were not solitary but group wanderers. While freelancing and flexible work schedules are not inherently bad, they make it difficult to coordinate our schedules with other people’s. We may find that professional and personal relationships suffer as a result of a lack of the “shared rhythms” that are essential for depth (189). Numerous studies have shown that people experience a boost to their well-being when their leisure time is coordinated with that of other people’s. Swedish researcher Terry Hartig’s 2013 study shows that contrary to what the productivity gurus think, people’s happiness is aided more by “the social regulation of time” or prescribed work and rest periods, rather than flexibility over their schedule (191). Socially prescribed rest periods are essential for allowing people to more easily coordinate their leisure times with those of their loved ones. This boosts personal relationships, which are conducive to happiness.
There is also the added benefit of time feeling more real, and experiences more vivid when you are synchronized with others. This occurs in spheres as diverse as the military to music and dance. We are wired to benefit from experiences that impart a shared purpose to our time and activities.
Ultimately, we must question the type of freedom we value most when it comes to time. Do we want to be free from others’ impositions on our limited lifespan, or do we want to be free to engage in rewarding collaborations that require us to relinquish some autonomy over our schedules? While the productivity gurus celebrate the former, the desynchronization of society due to flexible work-schedules, or at worst unregulated work schedules where labor creeps into every free moment of the day, is leaving us lonelier and less collaborative than ever. We also find it hard to make meaningful social and political change as revolutionary grassroots movements begin with people being able to sync their schedules.
As individuals, while we may not be able to control whether everyone we love has the same leisure time, we have the power to push our lives in the direction of the communal type of freedom, which sacrifices a portion of personal freedom for the sake of collaboration.
Part 2, Chapters 10-12 Analysis
The theme of Acceptance of Limitations continues in this section but focuses on the timescale of worthwhile projects, both individual and collective. On an individual level, owing to our impatience and addiction to speed, whereby we always feel that life should be getting progressively faster, many of us are implementing measures that stave off happiness and creative excellence. Our inability to tolerate frustration or the time needed for ideas to properly germinate, sees us switching projects to get a sense of momentum. This means that our life becomes a trajectory of half-done projects that lack depth and originality. Minkinnen’s metaphor of staying on the bus through all its tedious stops of derivative and shoddy work before getting to the promised land of original work is apt, as it evokes the anxiety of being stuck on a bus route for a seemingly interminable period before reaching our destination. While we would wish to bypass the frustrating part, Minkinnen and Burkeman show how embracing it is essential to getting to the stage where our work becomes interesting. Patience, that most unfashionable quality, is set to become a superpower in the future, as it is those who can withstand boredom and frustration, the feelings that arise from our personal limitations, who will be able to transcend them and eventually make worthwhile progress.
The theme of Individual and Social Uses of Time comes to prominence in Chapter 12. Burkeman shows how surrendering control of one’s personal schedule in favor of working with others is an antidote to speed addiction. He cites numerous case studies ranging from more socially minded contemporary Sweden to the 20th-century Soviet Union to demonstrate how people’s propensity for happiness and fulfilment depends more upon being with others than on freedom itself. This evidence runs counter to the productivity gurus’ celebration of the digital nomad’s ability to dictate their schedule. Burkeman argues that the ability to determine when you do things is overrated if you have no one to do them with. Here Burkeman suggests that control has become a virtue for its own sake and offers the Scrooge-like image of “hoarding time, […] when it’s better approached as something to share, even if it means surrendering some of your power to decide exactly what to do with it and when” (188). The idea that our flexibility ought to be aimed at incorporating other people as opposed to deciding when to do what in the day, encourages us to re-evaluate what constitutes a successful use of time. We might find that productivity ought to play second fiddle to collaboration.
