Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

One of Burkeman’s most important points is that our contemporary view of time as an abstract entity is a relatively recent phenomenon, dating to the advent of the Industrial Revolution, about 200 years ago. Prior to this, Western civilization was organized in agrarian societies in which time was regarded as the period needed to complete certain tasks. People rose and went to bed with sun, meaning that their days were longer in summer and shorter in winter, and accounted for periods of time according to how long it took to complete certain tasks. For example, in medieval England people referred to a “Miserere whyle” for the time it took to recite Psalm 50, or a “pissing whyle” for the time it took to urinate (20). As their daily tasks, which involved engaging with organic matter such as land and animals, simply took as long as they needed, they had no concept of the relative passage of time, for example, whether it was going quickly or slowly.

Although clocks were invented and put to use in medieval monasteries, they did not dictate the rhythms of society as a whole until the Industrial Revolution. It was the opening of factories and the speeding up of life that held people accountable to the abstract minutes and hours of clock time. Once workers were subjected to the clock, their performance could be measured against that of their peers, and they could be promoted or demoted accordingly. While this led to an element of meritocracy, this new time-consciousness also created great anxiety about time being used well, as workers aped their capitalist employers’ view of themselves as a resource. As early as the first decade of the 20th century, the consciousness that there was not enough time to work and live up to one’s personal expectations was manifest. This feeling has only increased in the past century, paving the way for a plethora of productivity strategies and the invention of timesaving devices.  

While in 1930, the British economist John Maynard Keynes conceived that modern technology would mean that workers would not have to work more than 15 hours a week and would have ample leisure time, Burkeman points out the falseness of this prediction as when people manage to meet their basic needs “they just find new things to need and new lifestyles to aspire to” (11). This is also evident in people’s ingratitude and impatience around timesaving devices like the microwave because “once you can heat your dinner in the microwave in sixty seconds, it begins to seem genuinely realistic that you might be able to do so instantaneously, in zero seconds – and thus all the more maddeningly frustrating that you still have to wait an entire minute instead” (164). He thus makes a convincing argument that the advantage of being able to accelerate manual processes fosters the illusion that they should go so fast that they should not inconvenience us at all. While in the 21st century we have found ways to make life efficient on an unprecedented level, Burkeman points out that this is not conducive to happiness. In a world where more of us are working from home than ever, such efficiency not only depletes our sense of community but deprives us of the vital daily interactions that boost our humanity and mental health. On a further level, while there is much contemporary anxiety about human jobs being replaced by artificial intelligence, our obsession with making life as efficient as possible has already nurtured a state of depersonalization that has taken us halfway there.

Finally, Burkeman shows how that other modern predicament of blaming the inventions of Silicon Valley for distracting us from the optimal use of our time, is only partially legitimate. While apps and social media channels are designed to hook us in and devote more time than we originally intended on them, we are willing co-conspirators in being distracted from what we have declared to be our most important work. This work, much like reading a book, a pastime that now frustrates people because it cannot be accelerated, can be taxing because it dictates its own time scale and skill requirements. Thus, our fear of temporal or personal limitation in relation to a certain goal is such that we will become bored and search for anyway to escape the feeling of entrapment. The Internet with its seeming infinity of possibilities thus seems the opposite of personal limitation and so becomes easily co-opted in our escape mission.