500 Words a Week - Productivity, More Harm than Good?

I recently started reading “Four Thousand Weeks” by Oliver Burkeman, and it makes some compelling arguments for how we view and use our time. Unlike what you would expect from a time management book, it begins with the premise that the majority of productivity hacks usually end up making things worse. Burkeman discusses how Edward Hall pointed out that “time feels like an unstoppable conveyor belt, bringing us new tasks just as fast as we can dispatch the old ones; and becoming more productive just seems to cause the belt to speed up”. So our means and methods to make us more productive and at ease, have only made us busier and restless. Potentially leading us to breaking down and burnout. Something that is becoming increasingly more common.

Burkeman states that we must accept the fact that our time is finite. “There’ll always be too much to do”.

I’ve mentioned in the past how I used to set myself reading tasks to try and develop my S&C knowledge. This worked for a period of time, but I started to wrap my identity too much with the process of trying to improve my S&C knowledge. If I didn’t get my reading done, or do something to try and improve my S&C knowledge, I would feel like I failed or I had wasted a day. Burkeman states that our sense of self-worth can get completely bound up with how we use our time, “it stops being the water in which you swim and turns into something you feel you need to dominate or control, if you’re to avoid feeling guilty, panicked or overwhelmed”. The process above of always trying to do something to improve myself, was ultimately a rigged game as “it’s impossible to ever feel that you’re doing enough”. It’s this feeling of never doing enough that brings up feelings of guilt. We must start to switch to understanding that there will always be too much to do. If we do something to try improve ourselves, that’s great, but if not we mustn’t fret.

We can become entrapped in a state of “joyless urgency”, always moving onto the next thing, always having more to do and accomplish, without enjoying the moment. “Rather than taking ownership of our lifes, we seek out distractions, or lose ourselves in busyness and the daily grind, so as to try and forget our real predicament.” That time is always running out. “And so it’s not merely a matter of spending each day ‘as if’ it were your last, as the cliché has it. The point is that it always might actually be.”

The talk about how finite our time is, can be hard hitting. Burkeman shows us a different way of looking at it:

“So maybe it’s not that you have been cheated out of an unlimited supply of time; maybe it’s almost incomprehensibly miraculous to have been granted any time at all.”

I’ve underlined that last part with the hope that myself and whoever is reading this will heed it’s message.