Four thousand weeks. That’s roughly how long we get to live, assuming we survive for about 80 years; although life expectancy of Indians is much lower, about 70 years that roughly gets to 3600 weeks. I recently finished my 35 years of existence and said goodbye to 1800 weeks of those. So roughly, I have 50% left, optimistically speaking (best case) or 0 (the worst case).

I just finished reading the book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman. I initially thought it would be another book on productivity, teaching me how to manage my time better, become more efficient, and perhaps get a few extra things done every day. Well, I was wrong. I found the book to be almost the opposite of what I imagined. Ok; let me give you a brief summary of what I got from it (I am not asking you to not read the book; in fact, you must; this is just for me to keep it here so that I can keep coming back and I know I will). I will not keep it boring chapter-wise summary and rather talk about as a whole.

I never thought of life in terms of weeks (of course, more than one time in my life I used to think life as one-more-day-to-live, this was when my life was in a downward spiral pushing me to think the saddest extremum). We usually count our lives in years, celebrate birthdays, make five-year plans, and occasionally worry about getting old. Seventy/Eighty years sounds like a reasonably long time. Isn’t it! This book changed my perspective and mind. But four thousand weeks? Damn! That sounds terribly short – especially, when actually think back and see that how easily or rather carelessly you spent last 4 weeks of your life.

Now, coming back to the book: It asks us to a very fundamental aspect of life that almost all of us tend to forget or avoid: we will never have enough time to do everything we want to do. And perhaps that’s perfectly okay.

The never-ending to-do list

I work in academia, I am a husband and I am a father of a 16 months old daughter “Mahi” (a very good one I believe; Mahi can say more). Like most academics, my days are filled with things to do, both professional and personal. There are research papers to write or wrap up, more experiments to run, students to supervise, lectures to prepare, emails to answer, and sometimes deadlines to meet. Then there are other things that keep me sane. Books I want to read or finish reading, places I want to visit, people I want to meet, and countless other things that I keep postponing. I often tell myself that once I finish a few pending tasks, I will have some free time. But does that ever happen? Not really.

The moment I finish one thing, another appears and sometimes more.

In his book, Burkeman calls this the efficiency trap. The more efficient we become, the more things we find ourselves doing. Productivity does not necessarily make us less busy. It can make us even busier; something like a vicious circle. Let’s think about the emails; I believe it has happened to many who have moderate OCD like me. Technology has made communication incredibly fast. Something that once took days now takes seconds. Wonderful, isn’t it? But has it reduced our workload? It is counterintuitive – something that was built to make our lives easier and efficient has made our our lives heavy and filled with more emails to clear. We now receive far more emails than anyone could have imagined a few decades ago. And somehow, everyone expects an equally fast response. We have become faster at doing things, but we have also become better at creating more things to do; a annoyingly strange problem indeed!

The problem with wanting everything

One idea from the book that will stay with me as a central thought is that we cannot have everything. This sounds obvious. Almost trivial. Something that I never accepted but this book is forcing me to. Yet, we live as though it isn’t true. I want to be a good researcher and become somewhat known in India and abroad. I also want to be a good teacher that students remember me for a long time in in their lives. I want to spend quality time with my family, read many many books, travel at least 50 countries (so far only 4 done, excluding India), swim often in the sea, play tennis weekly at least thrice, taste espresso from every coffee country in the world, learn new things, and enjoy doing absolutely nothing sometimes.

All reasonable wishes, I suppose. But there is a catch. Every time I choose to spend an hour doing something, I am also choosing not to spend that hour doing something else. I am thinking what I am not doing now and doing this instead. In a way, I am not in the moment (most of the time), except when I am playing with Mahi – a time that I will never get back.

I have come to realise time is not like money, an idea that was sold to us when we were growing up: Time is money. Bloody hell, it is NOT. I can lose money and perhaps earn it again and I am pretty sure I can. But the hour I spent yesterday is gone. Forever. I won’t be 35 years and 5 days old again.

The book argues that meaningful choices necessarily involve giving up other possibilities. You cannot get it all. Perhaps this is what we find so difficult to accept; at least I myself. We keep our options open, hoping that someday we will manage to do everything. But in trying to keep every possibility alive, we sometimes fail to commit ourselves completely to anything and then feel anxious about it.

The book tells that maybe the solution is not to learn how to do more, but probably it it is to become comfortable with doing less. Not because we are lazy, but because we have consciously decided what matters.

What are we waiting for?

Another interesting idea is our tendency to postpone living. We keep telling ourselves: Once I finish my PhD, life will be better. Once I get a good job, I will relax. Once I get tenured or promoted, I will have more time. Once I finish this project, I will finally enjoy myself. And then? Another milestone appears (akin to our email example earlier). I have personally experienced several transitions in my academic career, and I can absolutely relate to this. There is always something next. Another paper, another research idea, another responsibility.

There is nothing wrong with ambition. I love doing research. I love the excitement of understanding something new, particularly when an experiment finally works after several failures. But I wonder whether we sometimes turn life into a long waiting queue. We work towards a future in which everything will finally be settled. But does it ever arrive?

Burkeman reminds us that life is not something that begins once our pending work is complete.

This is life. Right now. Even with the unfinished work. Even with all the imperfectness we have. Life is in this total chaos and this absolutely beautiful absurdity.

I couldn’t believe this at first and had to reread a few times accept that this thought is both uncomfortable and strangely comforting.

Sometimes, doing nothing is perfectly fine

I had forgotten the word “leisure” and this book asked me to revisit my memory. Do you know what it is? We have somehow managed to make even our free time productive. Look at this: I am in Rome for a conference. Time is 10.27 AM, 8th November 2026 and a Sunday. I should be outside doing touristic sightseeing. Am I? No. Writing something stupid for one or two people to read something or the AI companies to train their model on (LoL!).

We exercise to stay healthy, read books to become knowledgeable, travel to collect experiences, and meditate to improve concentration. Read this again: It looks like a mathematical function that takes in an argument (input) and spits out an objective (output); f(exercise) = healthy; f(read_books) = gain_knowledge; f(meditate) = become_focused; f(use_social_media) = connect_with_people. Funny?

Why can’t I simply take a walk because I enjoy walking? Why must I count my steps with my stupidly (un)smartwatch? Why can’t I read a book without worrying about how many books I will finish this year or that how much I will learn from each book? Why can’t I just sit somewhere, have a sip of espresso, and watch the world go by? Though I must say I have done it sometimes in my life, but, that hasn’t lasted long. Point is not whether I am wise or have done it or not or whatever; the point is why can’t that be life? Why the hell everything has to be measured through attaining objectives – Something our Bhagavad Gita always told us NOT TO DO. It constantly tells us:

“Your right is only to work, but not to its results; do not let the results of action be your motive, nor let your attachment be to inaction.” (Gita 2.47)

This is exactly what Burkeman offers in his perspective (I think he may have read the Gita or related writings from the Indian mythology). I remember writing something similar in an earlier blog post, One day we all will die! Perhaps I was already thinking about some of these questions without having a proper framework for them. Probably I have now. I am yet to see, of course, how many of my remaining (unknown) weeks I spend with this uncomfortable truth.

Some things are worth doing simply because we enjoy doing them and we must accept that and live on.

Learning to be patient

I also liked the book’s discussion on patience. This is probably one of the best idea for a very impatient human like me. I am incredibly impatient about anything; except when I have to wait in a stupid government office for an officer to return to his work from tea with his colleagues to issue a bloody form for my vehicle. We live in an increasingly impatient world. We want everything quickly. Faster computers, faster deliveries, faster responses, and faster results. Thanks to social media, AI and the world of “shorts”.

As a computer scientist, I find this particularly amusing. We spend a considerable amount of time making machines faster, yet somehow we never seem to have enough time ourselves. It takes me to a scene in the movie “3 idiots”, where Aamir Khan (Rancho) explains about “machines”: something that reduces human effort.

Academic (or industrial) research, however, regularly teaches us a different lesson. Some problems take months or years to solve. Most of the times an idea doesn’t work, no matter how much effort we put into it. Sometimes it is best to leave a problem as it is and come to it with more energy and fresh mind. Theoretical computer scientists or pure mathematicians often face these often than AI researchers like me and perhaps they are the ones with absolutely higher patience than me. But you get the general idea here. I think a good research problem has its necessary ingredient that it must be difficult and that it takes long to get solved.

The book sells the above idea quite well and forces that certain things (in work and in life) simply take time and we cannot force everything to happen according to our schedules. In fact, forcing something to happen too much can actually break it. I have firsthand experience of this in my personal life; but that is for another day, not to be written here.

We are not that important. And that’s good!

One of my favourite ideas from the book is what Burkeman calls cosmic insignificance therapy. Here is how he explains it: The universe is billions of years old. Our planet is a tiny part of it. Human civilisation occupies only a tiny(-iest) fraction of its history. And, yet, here I am worrying about an email that I must have answered a day ago but couldn’t. One would argue here that maybe that email was more important for you to answer. Yes, that is true; of course, our lives matter to us and to the people around us. But most of the things we worry about today will have very little importance in the larger scheme of things. It doesn’t say that we stop caring about our work or our responsibilities. Rather, it means we can perhaps stop treating every small failure as a catastrophe or it is better to own up to a mistake than breaking ourselves over it. A rejected paper is disappointing, an unsuccessful experiment that falsifies an idea we loved dearly is a frustrating event, and a broken relationship hurts. But at the end of the day life goes on OR rather it must go on.

An idea that this book validates for me is something many mid-life individuals face at least once in their life: “what is the purpose of my life?” I think the book answers this very well and that is we shouldn’t be chasing extraordinary achievements to justify our existence. Maybe being a good human being who cares for his loved ones, helping a few people is enough.

Overall, what do I take from this book?

Did the book make me a very productive person in a week or two of reading it? Did it make me wiser? I don’t know and I think I am more inclined to say “No, it did not”. In fact, I think the purpose of the book was never to achieve that objective. What the book has actually done to me is that I am starting to understand or question what productivity actually means. When I am looking at a busy traffic, I am starting (at least minimally now) to become little more patient; when I am taking a walk, I am just taking a walk without looking at my phone. I think my ambition of becoming a well-known researcher will not vanish anytime soon and it must not. The only thing that I will work towards changing is that “I will enjoy my life after I get that paper out or I get that grant”-approach. The book has left me with a few simple thoughts, which I assign a personal qualitative rating based on its difficulty of implementation in life (easy 1 – hard 5):

  • Choose a few important things and give them proper attention. (4)
  • Accept that many things will remain undone and not everything one plans can be achievable. (3)
  • Don’t postpone meaningful experiences indefinitely. (3)
  • Learn to enjoy activities that have no measurable outcome. (4)
  • Be patient with things that take time. (5)
  • It is okay to do absolutely nothing sometimes. (5)
  • Spend time with people who matter. (3)

Of course, writing these things is far easier than practising them. I might very well return to my endless to-do list tomorrow morning and forget half of what I just wrote. Well, old habits die hard! But I hope to remind myself occasionally that time is not a problem to be solved. It is simply a (human-created) condition under which we live. And perhaps the purpose of our brief existence is not to squeeze the maximum number of accomplishments into it. Perhaps it is to actually experience it, moment by moment.

With this I wish you a very happy Diwali – the Indian festival of lights.

Ciao,

TD
Rome, Italy