Four Thousand Weeks – 10 Practical Tools to Help Embrace Your Finitude

In the Appendix to the book Four Thousand Weeks, Burkeman sets out 10 practical tools that will help you embrace your finitude.

Click here for my full summary of Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman

Those 10 tools are:

• Adopt a ‘fixed volume’ approach to productivity.
  • Accept you’ll never do everything and limit your work in progress.
  • One way to do this is to keep two to-do lists: one “open” and one “closed”. The closed list should have no more than 10 things on it. As you finish things on the closed list, you can add stuff from the open list to it.
  • Another strategy is to fix time limits for your daily work in advance. Ensure that you don’t work beyond those limits.
• Serialise, serialise, serialise.
  • Focus on one big project at a time (or, at most, one work project and non-work project). Don’t move on until you’ve finished that project.
  • Train yourself to tolerate the anxiety of having too many things on by postponing everything you can except the one project you have on.
• Decide in advance what to fail at.
  • Instead of seeking a work-life balance, focus on what matters to you and live with a conscious imbalance. For example, if you’ve decided that keeping your lawn neat is not a priority, you won’t beat yourself up for having an overgrown lawn.
  • You can also decide to fail at things for fixed periods – e.g. do the bare minimum at work while focusing on your children, or put fitness goals on the backburner while tackling a big work project.
• Focus on what you’ve already completed, not just on what’s left to complete.
  • Keep a “done” list that you fill up with accomplishments throughout the day, no matter how small. There is good evidence that small wins can be motivating.
• Consolidate your caring.
  • There are infinite problems in the world but we each have a finite capacity for caring.
  • Campaigners tend to promote their cause as being uniquely pressing, to motivate us to act.
  • You have to pick your battles in charity, activism and politics. Not because you don’t care about other causes; it’s just recognising that, to make a difference, you have to focus your energies.
• Embrace boring and single-purpose technology.
  • Remove social media apps and switch your screen to grayscale. (In many phones, you can do this in the Accessibility Settings by looking for Colour Filters or Colour Adjustment).
  • Where possible, choose devices – like e-readers – that have only one function, making it easier not to get distracted.
• Seek out novelty in the mundane.
  • Time seems to go faster as we get older. Evidence suggests this is because we don’t encode as many memories when we’re older because routine fills up more of our lives.
  • Seeking novelty and new experiences is one way to counter this. But that can be impractical for many people, and can trigger existential overwhelm.
  • Instead, you can try to find novelty in relatively mundane things. Suggestions include: going on an unplanned walk, taking a different route to work, taking up photography, birdwatching or nature drawing, keeping a journal, and playing “I Spy” with a child.
• Be a ‘researcher’ in relationships.
  • When you’re faced with a challenging or boring moment, be curious. Rather than trying to achieve a particular outcome, try to figure out who the other person is.
  • You can take this attitude to everything and embrace the uncertainty in life. [Mark Manson has similarly talked about how uncertainty is a good value to have.]
• Cultivate instantaneous generosity.
  • When you feel an impulse to be generous – giving a compliment, making a donation – act on it.
  • Sure, your impulsive act might not be as good as if you’d done it later after more consideration. But it’s better than not being generous at all, which is most likely to happen if you put it off. [Not sure about this. What if you have a good track record for getting around to such things later?]
• Practise doing nothing.
  • If you can’t bear the discomfort of not acting, you’re more likely to make poor choices simply to feel like you’re doing something.
  • Train yourself to let the things around you – your experience, and the people and things in the world – be as they are.
  • Shinzen Young teaches a “Do Nothing” meditation where you set a timer (for only 5-10 minutes initially), sit down, and stop trying to do anything. This means not focusing on your breathing, not thinking, and not criticising yourself for doing things.