Four Thousand Weeks

A meditation on mortality, and what to do about it.

Recently, I enjoyed eight consecutive weeks of paternity leave, spending it entirely with my slowly growing family. We wandered around Southern Italy, splashed on the Amalfi Coast, worked through big emotions post-Adoption, said goodbye to a reunified foster child, and spent some conversation and quiet thinking time coming up with new structures and practices that can help us all thrive.

While many things have come out of that thinking, a few of the key insights came from a delightful book by Oliver Burkeman, entitled Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. Much of the book is devoted to walking the reader through a variety of historical and religious ways of understanding time and mortality, but the final two chapters take this context and distill a set of five questions to ask yourself on a regular basis and ten actions that I found useful in wisely managing our most precious resource.

The Five Questions:

1. Where in your life or your work are you currently pursuing comfort when what’s called for is a little discomfort?

2. Are you holding yourself to, and judging yourself by, standards of productivity or performance that are impossible to meet?

3. In what ways have you yet to accept the fact that you are who you are, not the person you think you ought to be?

4. In which areas of life are you still holding back until you feel like you know what you’re doing?

5. How would you spend your days differently if you didn’t care so much about seeing your actions reach fruition?

Not unlike the Examine, I intend on using these five questions at the end of each week as a way of surfacing and understanding my emotions about the life and work endeavors in which I'm engaged.

At the end of this book, Burkeman includes Ten Tools for Embracing Your Finitude:

1. Adopt a “fixed volume” approach to productivity. By this is meant “you only have so much time, be ruthless in what you spend your time and attention on.” As part of this, over the course of paternity leave, I slowly closed out a series of open contracts I had with one of my side hustles Fizzy Inc and will be shuttering that agency this year. Additionally, I’ve been clarifying the thesis and dealflow methodology for my side Angel fund Fizzy Ventures to reduce the number of entrepreneurs I meet with to just those for whom I’m likely to provide the greatest value add. A few more extraneous side endeavors to go, but those were the big ones.

2. Serialize, serialize, serialize. This one is a hard one in both my day job and in life. Pomodoro has worked very well for me in the past, so perhaps I’ll experiment with that method. I think too, I’m going to rework the time blocking on my work calendar.

3. Decide in advance what to fail at. I’m a pro at this one, just ask my trail running buddies ;) But in seriousness, I’ve started using the terminology of “experiment” to those projects and tasks I can take on that are outside of my area of expertise, or outside of my honest scope of control. It’s both enriching and freeing.

4. Focus on what you’ve already completed, not just on what’s left to complete. Oh, I’m terrible at this one. I hope with a weekly focus on the five questions above, a gratitude moment during our weekly date night, and a refocus on serotonin activities will help this inveterate dopamine junkie on this vital piece of life.

5. Consolidate your caring. For better or worse, I tend to care about things over which I have some sort of agency. Abstract caring about things in general I’ll do in a meditative sense, but rarely devote much thought energy to. I think that counts for this one? I’m certainly still chewing on it.

6. Embrace boring and single-purpose technology. I hate my phone. I’ve had intermittent success deleting apps, setting timers, grayscaling, etc. but it always taps its little grubby finger on the back of my cerebellum. The best path I’ve found is to tether it to its charging cord and forget about it all day. I’ll get a dumb phone eventually, I think.

7. Seek out novelty in the mundane. I’ve decided to walk more and read more poetry as a way of enriching my attention to those small delights that happen all around us. I’m reminded both of this incredible essay on Humility and, oddly enough, the character of Griffin in Men in Black 3 who is a 5th dimensional being and sees all possible timelines and as a result notices all the infinitesimal details that nudge reality into what we experience.

8. Be a “researcher” in relationships. There have been times in my life when I had a complete command of names and details about most people I met, I’ve been slacking off, honestly. I’ll think about what I’m going to say next and miss that bit they are telling me about themselves. I think I’ll rework my practice with a monthly review of my personal CRM to recall whom I’ve meet, revisit those I’ve lost touch with, and cultivate intention and recall in conversations.

9. Cultivate instantaneous generosity. The place where this has piqued my conscience is when my seven-year-old asks to give something to the person with the sign at the freeway entrance. I tell her we donate to local homeless causes, but it doesn’t practically mean anything to her. Time to craft some bundles ourselves and have something to hand out that’s intentional and meaningful to her and them.

10. Practice doing nothing. I’ve long practiced Hesychasm, but it’s certainly time for a renewal of my practice.