#6: This book changed the way I think about time
A reflection on time, productivity, and making peace with the endless January
As we all know, January is an endless Monday. The month that refuses to end.
On February 1st, I was more than relieved - not only because Jan was finally over, but also because I got paid again lol.
We’re one month closer to spring, to longer days, to warmer nights. And while I feel a little guilty for wishing time away, I can’t help but feel lighter. But the truth is, time has felt very strange lately.
The days feel long, but the years fly by, a saying often used for children growing up, but lately, it seems to apply to everything. Since COVID, it feels like we’ve all been living in a strange time warp, where weeks blur into months and years disappear faster than ever. Maybe it’s the pandemic’s aftermath or just life accelerating with age (30s here I come).
Either way, time doesn’t seem to move the way it used to.
I’ve been thinking a lot about time, not just how quickly it passes, but how we experience it. And I keep coming back to Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman, a book that reframed everything I thought I knew about time.
Four thousand weeks, that’s roughly the time we get if we live to 80. It’s a number both shockingly small and strangely liberating. Because if time is finite, then maybe the real question isn’t how to manage it better, but how to live it better.
Most books on time management promise efficiency, productivity, and control. They tell you to wake up earlier, hustle harder, and optimise every second. But as Burkeman writes, “Productivity is a trap. Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster.”
Instead of endlessly chasing control, Burkeman argues that we should embrace the chaos, the uncertainty, the limits. Because “mortality makes it impossible to ignore the absurdity of living solely for the future.” We spend so much of our lives postponing the things that matter, waiting for the perfect moment, the right conditions, the day when we’ll finally feel ready. But as he reminds us, “One can waste years this way, systematically postponing precisely the things one cares about the most.”
What if, instead of trying to master time, we learned to live alongside it? To stop treating it as something to be optimised and instead embrace it as something to be experienced?
“The real problem isn’t planning,” Burkeman writes. “It’s that we take our plans to be something they aren’t… We treat our plans as though they are a lasso, thrown from the present around the future, in order to bring it under our command.” But the future isn’t ours to control. It never was. And once we accept that, we can finally start paying attention to the present. Because “attention, on the other hand, just is life: your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention.”
As I sit here at the start of February, I’m trying to hold onto that lesson.
To stop wishing time away and start living it more intentionally. I’m not saying it’s easy, especially after a month like January, when all I wanted was for the calendar to hurry up. But now that we’re on the other side of it, I feel a quiet gratitude.
The best way to approach time isn’t to race against it, but to learn to walk with it. To take each day as it comes and try, as best we can, to make it the best day yet.
Going forward, I’m restructuring my newsletter a little. I’ll continue writing these weekly essay pieces about things on my mind, but I won’t include recommendations in them anymore. Instead, every other Thursday, I’ll send out a 20 things I’ve consumed newsletter (inspired by Haley Nahman) sharing books, articles, podcasts, movies, TV shows, products, and anything else I’ve enjoyed and want to shout about!
Thank you for your support, and thank you for reading my newsletter 🥹💛
I won't lie that number: four thousand weeks, really dented something in me.
Recently, I have been living with my grannies. After not finding a job, I thought it would be a lovely way to reset the ending of 2024 and begin the year in their presence. Unfortunately, I see things differently than the words spoken in the book, I imagine.
Living the retired life I wish my grannies had hustled some, to know a life beyond the one they saw their fathers live through. Maybe that no longer holds valid for us, as we're exposed to so much more via the internet that we strive to be different. But, in my opinion I think striving for something is what gives us purpose, some direction and that comes with 'hustling'; to work towards making 'something'. To simply exist in today's world is rich and sure you can do that from time to time, but to do so infinity you'll lose the beauty of it.
As they say you only miss something once you don't have it.
Thanks for writing this! I'm definitely going through a period where I'm intentionally questioning how I see time and how I use it. Will definitely add this to my TBR!
Also love your vlogs <3 Can't wait to see what you create next.