Book Review: Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman

Posted on: 30 January 2023

I found this book to be so relatable and ridiculously readable. The very definition of a page-turner. I finished it in 13 days, reading most evenings, a considerably quicker pace than is typical for me. In this review are a few of my highlights from the book, with some of my commentary alongside.

On experiencing life’s moments

In “The Watermelon Problem”, Burkeman describes the meaning of Persuasive Design as "an armoury of psychological techniques borrowed directly from the designers of casino slot machines".

Scarily, for the “express purpose of encouraging compulsive behaviour”. The perils of persuasive design and the “attention economy” are plain to see, and Burkeman recounts a vivid memory where he experienced a disturbing side effect of persuasive design:

I vividly recall walking alone along a windswept Scottish beach, as dusk began to fall, when I experienced one particularly disturbing side effect of ‘persuasive design’, which is the twitchiness you start to feel when the activity in which you’re engaged hasn’t been crafted by a team of professional psychologists hell-bent on ensuring that your attention never wavers.

I love windswept Scottish beaches at dusk more passionately than anything I can ever remember encountering on social media. But only the latter is engineered to constantly adapt to my interests and push my psychological buttons, so as to keep my attention captive. No wonder the rest of reality sometimes seems unable to compete.

This is a scary thought I hadn’t considered before, but found instantly relatable. Things we used to find interesting haven’t got less interesting, but the bar for what we find immersive and engaging has been artificially bumped up to max by a team of professional psychologists.

On distractions and our relationship with time

But Silicon Valley is not the only player in this game, and not where the blame solely lies.

Consider the case of being lured from your work by social media: it’s not usually that you’re sitting there, concentrating rapturously, when your attention is dragged away against your will. In truth, you’re eager for the slightest excuse to turn away from what you’re doing, in order to escape how disagreeable it feels to be doing it; you slide away to the Twitter pile-on or the celebrity gossip site with a feeling not of reluctance but of relief.

We’re told that there’s a ‘war for our attention’, with Silicon Valley as the invading force. But if that’s true, our role on the battlefield is often that of collaborators with the enemy.

This rang so true. We’re quick to blame carefully crafted distractions as the cause for not concentrating on what we value, when in reality, we’re looking for a reason to relieve the discomfort. And our phones are the perfect companion.

Mary Oliver calls this inner urge towards distraction ‘the intimate interrupter’ - ‘that whistles and pounds upon the door panels’, promising an easier life if only you’d redirect your attention away from the meaningful but challenging task at hand

Why are we rendered so uncomfortable by concentrating on things that matter - the things we thought we wanted to do with our lives - that we’d rather flee into distractions?

The more common issue is one of boredom, which often arises without explanation. Suddenly, the thing you’d resolved to do, because it mattered to you to do it, feels so staggeringly tedious that you can’t bear to focus on it for one moment more.

When you try to focus on something you deem important, you’re forced to face your limits, an experience that feels especially uncomfortable precisely because the task at hand is one you value so much

We’re attempting to flee a painful encounter with our finitude - with the human predicament of having limited time.

This is the crux of Four Thousand Weeks. Our relationship with the finitude of time. Engaging in something where this fact is laid bare - the reality that we must choose our limited time wisely - can be very uncomfortable.

No wonder we seek out distractions online, which it feels as though no limits apply - where you can update yourself instantaneously on events taking place a continent away, present yourself however you like, and keep scrolling forever through infinite newsfeeds, drifting through ‘a realm in which space doesn’t matter and time spreads out into an endless present’

…It doesn’t need to feel fun. In order to dull the pain of finitude, it just needs to make you feel unconstrained.

This was a revelation to me. The fact that online distractions feels so cathartic is because by their very nature they are infinite. We’ve all experienced time appearing to stand still while we’re consuming content, only to snap out of the trance and realise your evening has disappeared. That feeling is like a drug because it offered an escape from the feeling of finitude.

When do you feel you most need a fix? For me it’s after a particularly draining mental or physical exercise - an engaging activity with my children, for example. That exhaustion is a reminder we are brittle and our time is finite, and what better way to escape than to an infinite online world?

On Reading

Reading is an activity I’ve attempted to improve my relationship with over the years. I enjoy it, I have the capacity to become immersed in it. Yet, a good or a bad reading experience is so variable based on my mood. Sometimes I just can’t connect and give in to the activity. Burkeman offers amazing insight into this.

People complain that they no longer have ‘time to read’, but the reality, as the novelist Tim Parks has pointed out, is rarely that they literally can’t locate an empty half-hour in the course of the day. What they mean is that when they do find a morsel of time, and use it to try to read, they find they’re too impatient to give themselves over to the task.

It’s not so much that we’re too busy, or too distractible, but that we’re unwilling to accept the truth that reading is the sort of activity that largely operates according to its own schedule. You can’t hurry it very much before the experience begins to lose its meaning.

It refuses to consent to our desire to exert control over how our time unfolds. … Reading something properly just takes the time it takes

I love this. I feel in almost everything we do we try to become the master of it. So we feel in control of it, and we can bend it to our will.

Our decreasing tolerance for delay is reflected in statistics on everything from road rage and the length of politicians’ sound bites to the number of seconds the average web user is prepared to wait for a slow-loading page.

Burkeman remarks on the fact that, unsurprisingly, as technology has improved and things have got quicker, our patience has lessened. We expect things in record time, often instantaneously. Reading bucks that trend. We cannot (properly) read a book any faster than our ancestors could (perhaps slower, even). Which is why “over the last decade or so, more and more people have begun to report an overpowering feeling whenever they pick up a book”.

On patience and productivity

One of the three principals of patience is “to embrace radical incrementalism”. A mantra that supposedly the most productive and successful academics made writing a smaller part of their daily routine than others, favouring staying power over a long period. The action being:

Be willing to stop when your daily time is up, even when you’re bursting with energy and feel as though you could get much more done. If you’ve decided to work on a given project for fifty minutes, then once fifty minutes have elapsed, get up and walk away from it.

The urge to push onward beyond that point ‘includes a big component of impatience about not being finished, about not being productive enough, about never again finding such an ideal time’ for work.

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.

This is something I struggle with, particularly with creative tasks like writing. But we can think of tasks like this as a muscle that should be regularly but not over worked. Trying to harness all the creative energy you have in a moment for fear of not being able to get it back as a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Giving yourself a pat on the back

This next set of quotes comes in the “Ten tools for embracing your finitude” chapter. To-do lists are an essential part of most people’s lives now, and as useful as they no doubt are, they can leave void of that feeling of satisfaction.

When we’re faced with a task, we strive for the feeling of satisfaction upon completing it. But no sooner this moment arrives, we’re onto the next one, rarely appreciating the accomplishment.

Since the quest to get everything done is indeterminable by definition, it’s easy to grow despondent and self-reproachful: you can’t feel good about yourself until it’s all finished - but it’s never finished, so you never get to feel good about yourself.

You begin each morning in a sort of ‘productivity debt’, which you must struggle to pay off through hard work, in the hope that you might reach a zero balance by the evening.

Burkeman suggests:

Keep a ‘done list’, which starts empty first thing in the morning, and which you then gradually fill with whatever you accomplish through the day.

Each entry is another cheering reminder that you could have spent the day doing nothing remotely constructive.

In conclusion

This is a wonderfully engrossing book, full of insight, and one that makes you take a step back and really observe your own life. Oliver Burkeman gets you to reelevuate your relationship with time and how you use it.