Take your time to make the time

Have just finished a great book – Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals – that is a great collection of perspectives on time and how we really don’t have a lot of it, but many of us seem to waste, even from the small scale to the large scale.

In the book are quite a few examples that you will no doubt relate to and maybe even already practice to alleviate some of the current age’s more anxiety- and impatience-inducing approaches to apparently being efficient, in control and productive; in some way, the good and bad examples may awaken something in you and even help you to help pass on the more balanced and effective suggestions to owning your four thousand weeks with compassion, insight and humility, even helping others that may be in need of some calming perspectives too; or, just recommend the book, even if many see that kind of process as taken too long!

Anyway, some decent words from some slightly longer, but no less meaningful, passages are quoted below that may help you be compelled to read the book but at least assist you in taking stock of the chasing you may be doing . . .

Perhaps it seems melodramatic to compare ‘addiction to speed’, as [Stephanie] Brown [a psychotherapist] calls our modern disease of accelerated living, to a condition as serious as alcoholism. Some people definitely get offended when she does so. But her point isn’t that compulsive hurry is as physically destructive as an excess of alcohol. It’s that the basic mechanism is the same. As the world gets faster and faster, we come to believe that our happiness, or our financial survival, depends on our being able to work and move and make things happen at superhuman speed. We grow anxious about not keeping up – so to quell the anxiety, to try to achieve the feeling that our lives are under control, we move faster. But this only generates an addictive spiral. We push ourselves harder to get rid of anxiety, but the result is actually more anxiety, because the faster we go, the clearer it becomes that we’ll never succeed in getting ourselves or the rest of the world to move as fast as we feel is necessary. (Meanwhile, we suffer the other effects of moving too fast: poor work output, a worse diet, damaged relationships.) Yet the only thing that feels feasible, as a way of managing all this additional anxiety, is to move faster still. You know you must stop accelerating, yet it also feels as though you can't.

This way of life isn’t wholly unpleasant: just as alcohol gives the alcoholic a buzz, there’s an intoxicating thrill to living at warp speed. (As the science writer James Gleick points out, it’s no coincidence that another meaning of the word ‘rush’ is ‘a feeling of exhilaration’.⁶) But as a way of achieving peace of mind, it’s doomed to fail. And whereas if you find yourself sliding into alcoholism, compassionate friends may try to intervene, to help steer you in the direction of a healthier life, speed addiction tends to be socially celebrated. Your friends are more likely to praise you for being ‘driven’.

The futility of this situation – in which the addict’s efforts to regain control send him spiralling further out of control – is the basis of the paradoxical-sounding insight for which Alcoholics Anonymous has become famous: that you can’t truly hope to beat alcohol until you give up all hope of beating alcohol. This necessary shift in outlook generally happens as a result of ‘hitting rock bottom’, which is AA-speak for when things get so bad that you’re no longer able to fool yourself. At that point, it becomes impossible for the alcoholic to avoid surrendering to the unpalatable truth of his limitations – to see that he simply doesn’t have the ability to use alcohol as a strategic tool to suppress his most difficult emotions. (‘We admitted,’ reads the first of the Twelve Steps, [that] ‘we were powerless over alcohol – that our lives had become unmanageable.’⁷) Only then, having abandoned the destructive attempt to achieve the impossible, can he get to work on what actually is possible: facing reality – above all, the reality that, in his case, there’s no level of moderate drinking that’s compatible with living a functioning life – then working, slowly and soberly, to fashion a more productive and fulfilling existence.

Likewise, Brown argues, we speed addicts must crash to earth. We have to give up. You surrender to the reality that things just take the time they take, and that you can’t quiet your anxieties by working faster, because it isn’t within your power to force reality’s pace as much as you feel you need to, and because the faster you go, the faster you’ll feel you need to go. If you can let those fantasies crumble, Brown’s clients discovered, something unexpected happens, analogous to the alcoholic giving up his unrealistic craving for control in exchange for the gritty, down-to-earth, reality-confronting experience of recovery. Psychotherapists call it a ‘second-order change’, meaning that it’s not an incremental improvement but a change in perspective that reframes everything. When you finally face the truth that you can’t dictate how fast things go, you stop trying to outrun your anxiety, and your anxiety is transformed. Digging in to a challenging work project that can’t be hurried becomes not a trigger for stressful emotions but a bracing act of choice; giving a difficult novel the time it demands becomes a source of relish. ‘You cultivate an appreciation for endurance, hanging in, and putting the next foot forward,’ Brown explains. You give up ‘demanding instant resolution, instant relief from discomfort and pain, and magical fixes’. You breathe a sigh of relief, and as you dive into life as it really is, in clear-eyed awareness of your limitations, you begin to acquire what has become the least fashionable but perhaps most consequential of superpowers: patience.

Oliver Burkeman Four Thousand Weeks

Salient and insightful words that should strike some relevancy to you, even help to provide a little of that taking stock of your own time and use of it.

Here’s a shorter quoted passage from the book to lighten your reading load, for a bit:

Stopping helps strengthen the muscle of patience that will permit you to return to the project again and again, and thus to sustain your productivity over an entire career.

It is a good book and one worth your reading time (if you haven’t already read it!) and for me it was also affirming to see lots of interconnectedness of the title’s threads and ideas raised in other books referenced throughout, to help context and point, that I had already read and enjoyed.

Here is another passage quoted to help confirm and bring to an end this article; oh, and the current form of capitalism is clearly making many a current societal problem more difficult, if not just creating problems so as to sell another ‘solution’, or two, to a society that seems less collaborative and community-minded, as the economy and growth seem more important (and that exceptionally stupid third runway at Heathrow) than living fairly and without rampant growth, competition and status to fuel the near-endless profitable and quantifiable obsession with everything.

[...] We live less and less of our lives in the same temporal grooves as one another. The unbridled reign of this individualist ethos, fuelled by the demands of the market economy, has overwhelmed our traditional ways of organising time, meaning that the hours in which we rest, work and socialise are becoming ever more uncoordinated. It’s harder than ever to find time for a leisurely family dinner, a spontaneous visit to friends, or any collective project – nurturing a community garden, playing in an amateur rock band – that takes place in a setting other than the workplace.

For the least privileged, the dominance of this kind of freedom translates into no freedom at all: it means unpredictable gig-economy jobs and ‘on-demand scheduling’, in which the giant retailer you work for might call you into work at any moment, its labour needs calculated algorithmically from hour to hour based on sales volume – making it all but impossible to plan childcare or essential visits to the doctor, let alone a night out with friends. But even for those of us who genuinely do have much more personal control over when we work than previous generations ever did, the result is that work seeps through life like water, filling every cranny with more to-dos, a phenomenon that seemed to only intensify during the coronavirus lockdown. It starts to feel as though you, your spouse and your closest friends have all been assigned to different colour-coded Soviet work groups. The reason it’s so hard for my wife and me to find an hour in the week for a serious conversation, or for me and my three closest friends to meet for a beer, isn’t usually that we ‘don’t have the time’, in the strict sense of that phrase, though that’s what we may tell ourselves. It’s that we do have the time – but that there’s almost no likelihood of it being the same portion of time for everyone involved. Free to pursue our own entirely personal schedules, yet still yoked to our jobs, we’ve constructed lives that can’t be made to mesh. All this comes with political implications, too, because grassroots politics – the world of meetings, rallies, protests and canvassing – are among the most important coordinated activities that a desynchronised population finds it difficult to get round to doing.

The result is a vacuum of collective action, which gets filled by autocratic leaders, who thrive on the mass support of people who are otherwise disconnected – alienated from one another, stuck at home on the couch, a captive audience for televised propaganda. ‘Totalitarian movements are mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals,’ wrote Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism.¹⁴ It’s in the interests of an autocrat that the only real bond among his supporters should be their support for him. On those occasions when synchronised action does pierce through the isolation, as during the worldwide demonstrations that followed the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in 2020, it’s not unusual to hear protesters describe experiences that call to mind William McNeill’s ‘strange sense of personal enlargement’ – a feeling of time thickening and intensifying, tinged with a kind of ecstasy.

Like our other troubles with time, our loss of synchrony obviously can’t be solved exclusively at the level of the individual or the family. (Good luck persuading everyone in your neighbourhood to take the same day off work each week.) But we do each get to decide whether to collaborate with the ethos of individual time sovereignty or to resist it. You can push your life a little further in the direction of the second, communal sort of freedom. For one thing, you can make the kinds of commitments that remove flexibility from your schedule in exchange for the rewards of community, by joining amateur choirs or sports teams, campaign groups or religious organisations. You can prioritise activities in the physical world over those in the digital one, where even collaborative activity ends up feeling curiously isolating. And if, like me, you possess the productivity geek’s natural inclination towards control-freakery when it comes to your time, you can experiment with what it feels like to not try to exert an iron grip on your timetable: to sometimes let the rhythms of family life and friendships and collective action take precedence over your perfect morning routine or your system for scheduling your week. You can grasp the truth that power over your time isn’t something best hoarded entirely for yourself: that your time can be too much your own.

Oliver Burkeman Four Thousand Weeks