Making Time
On making the most of the holiday season — and the rest of the year
Happy holidays! Thank you, Dear Reader, for taking this journey with me! I appreciate your putting up with my tendency to flit from topic to topic like an unsatisfied butterfly who can’t get enough of all the different varieties of pollen in the world. Or something like that. Thank you for being here! Without you, this newsletter would be nothing.
I don’t love the short, cold days of winter — I mean, it’s getting down into the mid-40s at night here in Northern California! So cold! But I always enjoy the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day. Life slows down to what feels like its natural pace. We spend more time seeing friends and family. The cats are inside more and snuggle on our laps and even, sometimes, with each other. It somehow feels more acceptable to stay in and — dare I say it — do nothing. Or at least, nothing productive.
At the same time, I get a bit stressed about spending that precious time in the best way possible. Clean out all my files, closets, kitchen drawers! Gather with visiting friends! Go on hikes! Tackle my long to-do list!
Time shouldn’t feel like such a scarce commodity. Or like a commodity at all. But that’s how we treat it.
The pressure is intense to spend our limited time in the best way possible — not just during this week but also during every one of the 4,000 weeks each of us is allotted in our lifetime. If we live to be about 80, that is.
Till I read the book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, I wasn’t aware of this figure. It didn’t freak me out as much as it did the author, Oliver Burkeman; maybe that’s because at 14 years older than him, I’m more aware of how limited my remaining time is. Still, the figure serves as a reminder that our residence in this mortal coil is very brief indeed.
What do we do with that awareness? We can become devoted productivity geeks, like Burkeman once was, doing our utmost to optimize every day, every hour, every moment. But no matter how hard we try, it turns out, our efforts will be in vain.
Four Thousand Weeks, despite its subtitle, is actually an anti-time-management polemic. In an ironic twist, the book shows us that the best way to manage our time is not to manage it. That’s because time can’t be managed. Our to-do lists will never go away. A woman’s work is never done. There is no way that any of us mere mortals can accomplish, in one lifetime, all that we want to accomplish, or experience all that we want to experience.
It’s hard to accept that. But accepting our time limitation is key if we want to avoid the treadmill of constant action and dissatisfaction.
Most time management advice is about helping us achieve our goals. If we optimize our time, the thinking goes, we will be more productive and get more done. We’ll get through our to-do list, clear out our email inbox, and fulfill our ambitions.
But most of us are never satisfied. Our to-do list makes way for more to-dos; the emails keep coming in, and the more efficient we are at answering them, the more emails we get from people who see how good we are at responding; when one goal is achieved, that becomes insufficient and a new one takes its place. Most of us keep looking forward to a future time when all will be well, or even perfect — but that time never comes.
Trying to optimize our time, it turns out, is about much more than just time. It’s about control. We want to control the future so that we get what we want and bad things don’t happen to us: we don’t lose our job, loved ones don’t leave us or die, we don’t get sick. The list is endless, and the task is futile.
Faced with this reality, the best thing we can do is surrender. There’s an immense freedom in realizing that we will never have enough time and never get everything done. That means we don’t have to get everything done. We can’t. Ideally, knowing that — really knowing it — can free us to relax, live in the present moment, and avoid worrying about using every minute in the best way possible.
I say all this without having come anywhere close to achieving this nirvana myself. My brain’s tendency, for whatever reason, is to worry. Like most people, I want to avoid suffering, and like most people, my misguided idea about how to do that is to try to control everything and thereby avoid any bad things happening.
So Four Thousand Weeks, far more profound than any time-management guide, serves as a reminder to try to stop doing that. I’m sure it’s a reminder I’ll need to come back to often.
This particular holiday season, I’m not getting as much of my usual break. For one thing, I no longer work in tech, where everyone had that whole week off. As Burkeman points out in his book, it’s far easier to relax when everyone else is on the same relaxation schedule. For another, we just moved my parents into assisted living last week — a crazy, herculean effort that keeps on giving with numerous tasks and visits. I started this “winter break” week already behind on my to-do list for both work and home.
That’s my reality this year. It’s hard to let go of that one precious week of universal slowdown — a week when you can really take time off because everyone else is, too. Not to mention that it comes at the perfect slowing-down time, so near the solstice. But I have no choice.
I can stew about that, or I can take this as a lesson. Maybe it’s time to stop relying so heavily on this one week. Maybe I can find ways to make the most of my time all the other weeks of the year — for my remaining 900 or so weeks, give or take.
Where to start? For Burkeman, it begins with realizing we can’t get everything done in our limited time; we must neglect some, maybe most, of the things we’d like to do and the things we’re expected to do. The key is learning how to neglect the right things, “how to decide most wisely what not to do.”
As I’ve grown older, I’ve become more clear about what’s important to me: building community, spending time in nature, writing. When I decided in my forties to search for a more meaningful career, I narrowed my focus to climate action, even though there are so many other deserving causes. It’s not really that hard to figure out which priorities deserve my time. But I haven’t always honored those priorities.
Four Thousand Weeks could be the wakeup call I need to change my relationship with time and live more fully in the moment. I just won’t put that on my to-do list!
What’s your relationship with time? Do you spend time trying to optimize your time? Let me know in the comments!
“ There'll be better times but I'm getting by with these”. — Kids These Days, by Tom Rush.
That’s one way to sum it up.
I love reading, but when I look around my bookshelves and book piles, I sometimes feel a little anxious because there are so many books I want to get to, and it takes me awhile to get through one. Interesting thing is when I go camping and have just one book and one magazine with me, it feels so much more relaxing and stress-free. There's no pile of books staring at me, no ipad, no internet, just a relaxed focus on fewer choices, thus, no time pressure; there's plenty of time because there are fewer books and distractions. There's got to be some way to replicate that feeling at home.