This Book Changed my Relationship with Time

right so the average human in a developed country lives to be around 80 years old which is roughly 4 000 weeks now this poster shows every single week of an average life as one square on this and then the black ones are the weeks that we have already lived now youtube very conveniently tells me how old you are likely to be on average if you watch my channel if you're in the six percent of my audience that's 13 to 17 years old this is about how many weeks you've used up if you're in the 39 that's 18 to 24 you're about here and if you're in the 34 that is 25 to 35 you are here and if you're only 1.1 that's over 65 then you are around here now if you're anything like me this illustration hopefully makes you think damn i want to make the best use of this time especially because the full 4 thousand weeks is definitely not guaranteed and this is exactly what oliver berkman analyzes in his book 4 000 weeks time and how to use it the struggle that we all have with this feeling of really limited time now this book has a pretty interesting kind of philosophical approach to productivity and time management which is why it is the book that we are discussing in today's episode of book club the ongoing series where we distill and discuss highlights from some of my popular most favorite books so almost everything about a relationship with time comes from every day being exactly quantified down to the second by clocks this mechanical time makes us act a bit obsessively counting minutes and hours comparing everything that we've done to the amount of time that it took to do and rewarding or punishing ourselves based on what we did with that time and the more we chop our day up into these perfectly measurable blocks the more time starts to feel like this conveyor belt of jars and boxes that we need to fill up efficiently and productively so that we allegedly make the most of our life now if you're like me you've probably got a pretty secure existence with enough food and shelter and most of your problems are probably time related problems the feeling that you are not optimally filling these jars as they roll past now here are three big examples of time problems that we all face first there is online distraction now being distracted by photos and memes and sometimes pointless stuff on instagram feels really bad because it's time that we could have spent on something more meaningful secondly if we feel like we're not particularly fulfilled in our lives we also feel that's a time problem because it feels like the time that we have to fulfill our hopes and dreams and aspirations is all kind of draining away in the background and the final example is decision paralysis we get paralyzed when it comes to big decisions for example who to marry or what to study at university or what work to do because we know that choosing one option often closes the door on a bunch of other options that we'll never have the time to revisit now none of this would be a problem if we had an endless supply of mornings to scroll through cat videos on instagram or if we could spend decades trying out every career path but we don't have a limited time the conveyor belt is always moving and this fear about whether or not we are optimally loading the conveyor belt of stuff is why millions of people buy time management books like this one and watch productivity nerds like me giving advice here on youtube and what most time management gurus say that in theory it is in fact possible to fit everything in provided you have the perfect time management system but when i read 4000 weeks and i spoke to oliver on my deep dive podcast he had big problems with this whole line of thinking well the most the most stereotypical book is going to imply that you can get everything done that is important to you whether it's ambitions and goals or sort of obligations and demands all of it provided that you render yourself sufficiently optimized and efficient and so that you can sort of pack in more and more and more into the same amount of time that you won't need to make tough choices with what you do about your time and that if and that you can sort of achieve a kind of control over your day that is basically absolute and i kind of want to say no you don't even have time for all the things that matter and that's the truth here and what we discovered in a rock experiment that we genuinely don't have time for all of the important things that matter to us but most of us find this kind of hard to accept and we tell ourselves that we can cram everything in probably at some point in the future the philosopher henri bergson summed it up like this the future appeals more to us than the present moment because it appears to us in a multitude of pleasant forms all at the same time basically it's easier to stay in a fantasy world believing that all of our dreams could hypothetically come true in the future than it is to make hard decisions about which goals to invest in and which ones to ignore given that we actually can't get everything done this was my rationale when i decided to go for medicine as a university degree rather than computer science i had all these tech and entrepreneurial aspirations but i didn't want to close the door on those and i also liked the idea of being a doctor and i don't want to close the door on that so i thought oh if i do medicine it keeps my options open i'll be able to do all of the things which is a decision that did end up working but it really feeds into this whole narrative that we have as a society that we should be doing lots and lots of things with our time now let's take a closer look at exactly how we go into denial about what we can actually get done given that we have limited time and we use two main coping mechanisms to keep ourselves living in the present moment uh clearing the decks and submitting to distraction let's talk about clearing the decks first now this is when we put off big tasks that are important to us like getting ripped or learning a language or writing a book and we instead try to clear the decks of all of these small but urgent tasks that we just need to get out of the way first because we think the big stuff needs our full focus but the thing is that those annoying little tasks never actually go away the more mindless work that we get through the more mindless work ends up back on our desks and months can go by with us answering thousands and thousands of emails and bashing through these little work tasks but making no real progress on our big scary goals because quote the time isn't quite right this is basically procrastination it's this huge scale version of telling ourselves that we will get to work but only once we've cleaned our desk we do it so that we don't have to face up to the fact that a we don't have time to do all of the things that actually matter and b that we might fail at or be disappointed in those things that we choose to do and to be honest sometimes work actually is that distraction from what really matters like when we're worried about not getting everything done our second big coping mechanism is submitting to distraction now people discuss online distraction quite a lot and yes algorithms and stuff are pretty good at getting you hooked on things like youtube and instagram and twitter but the truth is that most of us are actually willing accomplices in our own distraction and in the moment we are very very happy to be distracted even if we know we're gonna feel bad about it later and this is how oliver puts it in four thousand weeks he writes that distractions are not the ultimate cause of our distraction although well-engineered they are ultimately just the place we go to to seek relief from the discomfort of facing our limitations distractions don't have to just be clickbait like with clearing the decks your whole job can be a distraction or anything else like maybe a relationship or life obligations that you sort of half enjoy but you don't really see as truly meaningful and in those cases what we're running from is the discomfort of what really matters and we're afraid of those big goals that we might not have the time for or the ones that we might actually fail to achieve so what is the solution according to oliver well he reckons that when we embrace our limits uh we stop endless procrastination and we really start living in the real world and it all comes down to this thing embracing your limits and conveniently he recommends three main steps for this the first step to embracing our limits is to accept defeat basically we should embrace the fact that we can't get everything done and that there's absolutely no cure for this and this is really the big insight that can set us free like once we realize that we're actually setting the bar way too high and that we are expecting to get everything done and it's actually not possible to do that we can let then all of our superman ambitions and all that stuff crash to the ground and then we can actually start doing the things that matter right so the second way we can embrace our limits is by rediscovering wonder i feel like most of us have this low level annoyance that our life is so short compared to infinity it's like we feel weirdly entitled to live forever at least that's how we act but instead of trying to cram absolutely everything into our 4000 weeks and resenting the fact that we don't live longer or resenting the fact that we don't have so much time it makes more sense to kind of reset and compare the time that we do have to the more likely scenario of just not existing at all now oliver's got a story of this chap whose friend david suddenly died unexpectedly that man was used to getting annoyed when he was stuck in traffic or queueing in the supermarket but after his friend sadly tragically passed away instead he found himself wondering what would david have given to be caught in this traffic jam and then feeling weirdly calm he shifted his focus from what he was actually doing and started appreciating the fact that he actually got to do anything in the first place now oliver says that once we rediscover this kind of wonder about life we start to see just existing itself as this like incredible coincidence that we get to enjoy instead of it being this tiny amount of time that never feels like it's enough and then the third way of embracing our limits is to find meaning infinitude arguably things get their meaning from the fact that we have limited time here on earth and if we did apparently have an infinite life then there wouldn't be any reason to do anything we could just always just do it later and nothing would really matter at the end of the day university for example probably wouldn't feel special if you knew that you could stay for an extra 50 years and we probably wouldn't care as much about events like christmas or birthdays or families or whatever if we knew that we could always just do that a little bit later so once we've shifted our perspective a bit and embraced our limits we can move on to the six practical steps for being more intentional with our time the first action point is to practice doing nothing this is something i'm very bad the idea is that we should sit down set a timer and literally just practice doing nothing and whenever you find yourself thinking and like focusing on your breathing and all these other techniques then you try and stop and return to a feeling of neutrality this means we want to resist the urge to manipulate our experience or the people around us and practice just kind of letting things be oliver says that if you can't bear doing nothing for more than a few minutes you are likely to make very poor choices with your time and rush into commitments just to feel busy i think this is something that i definitely struggle with and i'm definitely going to try and work on this year now point two is to rediscover rest basically we should stop treating leisure time as if it's a means to an end like it's just a way to relax before work or a way to recharge our batteries for work and we should even try and stop seeing our leisure time as time that we can cram in loads of side hustles and stuff ideally we want to try and enjoy our down time as an end in itself we want to do stuff that we enjoy that has no clear end goal or future purpose some of the time maybe going for a slow walk or even playing video games but as genuine hobbies not just as a distraction from reality and this is why i'm kind of getting back into playing playstation 5 and why i've downloaded elden ring because i'm trying to be more intentional about enjoying a sort of leisure that doesn't really have a future i don't know economic payoff which is the thing that i personally struggle with sometimes this is a bit like mindfulness to be honest like letting ourselves feel fulfilled in the moment instead of constantly putting off just being content one thing you can do maybe is choose a hobby that doesn't have that much social status attached to it like playing video games or building model railways or whatever it is that people do or even doing something that we enjoy like for me it's playing guitar or playing piano even though i'm not very good at it and even though there's no way in hell i'm ever going to be world class at the thing because then you kind of know that you're strictly doing it for your own enjoyment rather than as extrinsically motivated to do it as a means to an end now the third action step that you can do is pay yourself first most of us try to fit in our own stuff at the end of the day once all of our other work and family and other commitments are out of the way but as we know there are way too many important things that are always going to end up draining our time and we need to learn to pay ourselves first with our own time now a simple way of doing this is to do our most important activity the thing that we're doing for ourselves rather than for our work doing that is the first thing in the morning like working on writing a book or going to the gym or having quality family time this is why i've just introduced a new rule in the business that every employee every person in our 20 man team has to spend the first hour of every single day working on their own personal project and we as a business pay them to spend that first hour of their working day on a personal project something that advances their own personal goals because like you actually probably don't want to give the best hour of your day to your employer even if you really enjoy your work and i hope everyone here does fingers crossed but you probably want to give that best hour to your own personal projects and if you're interested we are actually hiring a bunch of people for the team link down below to our jobs page if you happen to be based in london so yeah you know as oliver says we need to remember that we do need to make tough decisions about spending our time instead of indefinitely putting our life on hold in the hope that at some point in the future time will be free up now overall this is sort of a productivity book it's in the productivity sort of self-help genre and actually a lot of the ideas in this book really resonated with me and vibe with a lot of the stuff that i have talked about in some of my online classes about productivity which you can find over at skillshare who are very kindly sponsoring this video if you haven't heard by now you must have heard by now skillshare is an incredible platform with thousands and thousands of classes from all sorts of things from like productivity to youtube to video editing to cooking to graphic design to interior design all sorts of really cool stuff you can learn on skillshare and if you sign up to skillshare you can actually access all of the 12 i think online classes that i have on skillshare three of them i themed around productivity and how to get more done while being kind of it being sustainable and being fun and not being too burnt out uh so you might like to check those out i also have a whole class about youtube for beginners if you're interested in what it takes to make video videos just like this one this class will take you through the entire process of like starting a channel from scratch and like making your first video and all that kind of stuff and loads of people have found that really helpful as a way of getting started with youtube if any of that sounds up your street or you want to check out more of my stuff on skillshare or all of their other stuff on skillshare then head over to the link in the video description and the first 1 000 people to hit that link will get a free one month trial of skillshare and then during that month you can access all of these classes to your heart's content so click the link in the video description and thank you so much skillshare for being an incredible sponsor be an incredible platform c continuing to support this channel and d being the biggest platform that i host like loads and loads and loads of my own online courses on so thank you skillshare for sponsoring this video now the fourth action step is pretty closely linked to paying yourselves first and that is deciding when to fail oliver says that we need to realize that we are going to fail about some things that genuinely matter to us and we should do this intentionally and fully accept the consequences firstly we should identify all the stuff that we have to do like paying our bills and paying our taxes and our mortgages and all that stuff picking up the kills kids from school cooking food all that kind of stuff the stuff that we have to do and we separate that out from the rest of the stuff and we know that no matter what this stuff needs to absolutely has to get done secondly we want to accept that all of the other niggly little urgent tasks like cleaning the house or doing the laundry or answering emails replying to people on whatsapp all of that stuff will always be there and we want to decide where we where we want to just do the bare minimum maybe you can do what i do and decide that you're going to forget about cooking and just get takeaway every night and occasionally try to cook when you have the time or you can again do what i do and just accept that i'm really really bad at replying to emails and whatsapp messages and like this is a failure that i'm happy to accept because it means that i don't live my whole life kind of in constant anxiety that i've got these 18 people that i need to reply to what's up thirdly we can realize that there are an infinite number of things that we actually could care about charities people hobbies causes work sometimes you will just have to say no to cool stuff because it's going to distract you from your highest priorities and once you realize that actually a lot of the tasks on your play are actually pretty optional then you might just feel a massive sense of release and relief that you don't have all this weight of all these rocks and stuff on your shoulders so more of the story is that if you are feeling stressed find something to fail at intentionally the next point we're nearly done is to limit our work in progress we need to stop trying to get everything done at once and instead limit our work in progress and the best way of doing this is operating a two-column open and closed to-do list at least that's what oliver talks about in the book and i've actually started experimenting with this and actually works really well so the open list is for all of our possible tasks and to-do's and projects we want to write down absolutely everything and it's going to be ridiculously long but then what we do is that we feed our most important tasks into the closed list where crucially we're only allowed to have a maximum of 10 things on that closed list and the main thing is that we want to try and focus on what is the actually important stuff in our life knowing all the rest is just going to be there somewhere on the open list and then crucially we are only allowed to move something up into the closed list when we have gotten rid of something or we have completed something from the list itself so the list is only ever allowed to have a certain number of items oliver suggests 10 items which works kind of nicely and really the point of this two-prong system is that we can accept that when it comes to stuff on the open list we might just not do it or we might fail at it and that is totally point the whole point is about prioritizing and then the final action point that oliver recommends is serialized serialized serialized even once you've got your closed list try to serialize your work by focusing on one big project at a time until you complete it or choosing one work project and one personal project it doesn't really matter the whole idea of this is that like if we actually are choosing the thing that's highest priority and just focusing on that we don't need to do 18 things at once because only one of those is going to be really the highest priority thing so if we just focus on that one thing and do it one at a time rather than having all these projects in parallel then hopefully our life will become a lot less stressed out overall so those were six of the interesting action points from this book four thousand weeks but the overall message of the book is which i think is really important and really nice is that it's okay to really embrace our limits and like once we realize that we actually cannot do everything then hopefully we can start living a calmer slightly more intentional life and focusing on the handful of things that genuinely truly make us happy and make us fulfilled if you liked this episode of book club then eight you should check out the book but also you should totally listen to my full like two hour long interview with the author of oliver burkman on my deep dive podcast that'll be linked right over here thank you so much for watching and we'll see you in the next video

Channel: Ali Abdaal

Views: 354,797

Keywords: Ali Abdaal, Ali abdal, ali abdaal books, book club, oliver burkeman, 4000 weeks, 4000 weeks book, 4000 weeks book summary, book, summary, book summary, ali abdaal productivity, book recommendations, best books, life changing books, 4000 weeks oliver burkeman

Id: WqBkyS83b44

Length: 15min 49sec (949 seconds)

Published: Wed May 18 2022