After a very long time, I read a book which was able to reset my thinking. This is important stuff. Similar to most of us, I struggle to optimize the utilization of my time. Time management, Productivity hacks, Mastering time – all these phrases resonate with me. And in the quest of becoming better at these, I picked up the book – Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. The title of the book attracted me. I think in terms of weeks as well (haven’t reached the stage where I optimize my day or hour completely, must’ve tried and given up). So when I saw a book called four thousand weeks, I thought now it’ll help me reinforce that we have limited time available to do it all and there will be advice on how to get all this done.

Burkeman is one level beyond me, I believe he tried to optimize the week and then gave up on that as well. The book is completely different from what I expected and that is a good thing. It added a perspective which was sorely lacking in my world view. The central thesis is – assuming you are going to live till eighty years, you roughly have four thousand weeks to live (much less if you start counting now, as in my case). This is too less a time to get everything done, so start with the acceptance that you can not do it all. Once you accept this, then you are free to choose what exactly do you want to do.

It is a mindset shift. When we think of optimizing time through planning and routines, we treat time as a resource. How to utilize it fully to achieve whatever we want to achieve. But the resource view of time in itself is tricky. Time is limited and continuous at the same time. The limit is your lifetime, and while you are alive it is continuous. You will always have this moment till the time you are able to recognize this moment. And then you are no longer here, so you won’t have this moment. In the quest to optimize this moment fully, you need to stand apart from the moment and use it. And according to Burkeman, this is not the way to live. The way to live is to be in the moment.

It sounds a bit complicated so an example – let’s say you are playing with your kid, and you have scheduled thirty minutes for the activity (I know, but productivity chasers with a to-do list do schedule things), by the time half of the time is gone you will start becoming conscious of how much time is left and then rather than playing for last ten minutes, you will start working on disengaging with the activity. I know, I have been there. But your kid doesn’t have the same concept of time and for him/her if the play is fun then time is immaterial. He/she is in the moment, while you are outside trying to control the moment. Even when the time is planned and optimized, the time is not necessarily useful.

The perspective shift is simply that you, yourself are time. The time is continuous, me and you are a block out of that continuous time. We are not separate from time. This shift, while difficult, allows you to stop seeing time as a resource. The time means the life you are living, and the question becomes how will you like to live. This question is not new, we all have this question somewhere. There are variations to this in quite a few books of the self-help genre. The questions like – if you had all the money in the world, what will you do? If you were out of the rat race, what will you do? If you were following your passion what will you do? And more variations. The central theme in all these questions is simply this – “how will you like to live?”.

How long can you postpone your life? We have an inkling of how will we like to live. And the future tense in this sentence is the key, its almost always the future self’s life. Right now I’m too busy creating conditions to make my future self live that way. But then, the life is four thousand weeks only, and the more you postpone the less is left. Why not start living now?

In the era, when even hobbies are sacrificed on the altar of side-hustle this book helps to bring back the focus on life itself. I used to read for the love of reading. And through that love of reading, I have read variety of books. I buy whatever book catches my fancy at the moment, and I used to pick up any book from my shelf using a randomizer. But over the past year and a half, my reading became intentional. It became geared towards maximizing the value of my reading time. I started reading towards a goal and the books which I bought with a sense of delight were probably destined to be picked up “someday”.

That is an immediate change that I’m bringing back to my life. I now read because I like to read and the randomizer comes in to play again. If this idea of time appeals to you, Four Thousand Weeks is time well spent.