Finitude and Me
I have often written about those individuals whose lives and philosophies have influenced my life from afar. Basketball coaching legend John Wooden, General Colin Powell, and CEO Charles Knight of Emerson Electric are among those whose writings and sayings I have highlighted in this weekly attempt to entertain, educate, and enlighten.
I am going to add the name of Oliver Burkeman to this list.
One of the first things Oliver Burkeman does in his book 4,000 Weeks – Time Management for Mortals is to remind us that one of these days, he will join Wooden, Powell, and Knight on “the other side,” to borrow a phrase from the musical “Hamilton.” Central to Burkeman’s views on time management is that life is very short and that I am going to die.
Being a person of growing faith and an accelerating rate of inquiry, I am hopeful that I will be able to join my friends and family in Heaven. I mean, I was in Houston this past Monday, and it was 103 degrees, and I was miserable, thus I don’t think I could tolerate hell’s inferno. But that is a topic for another day.
I picked up Burkeman’s book, expecting the usual and customary time management prescriptions about personal productivity. You see, I have been seeking the “magic bullet” of time management since I was a junior in college, when I was first overwhelmed with the crush of academics and athletics, not to mention my desire to drink deeply of the great malt beverages of the day.
Burkeman’s book is less a time management tutorial than a framework for a personal philosophy about time. He doesn’t try to get prescriptive until the book’s appendix, when he lists ten ways to manage one’s time better and perhaps be more productive, and none of what he writes about there is novel or epiphanous.
But the philosophies and frameworks that Burkeman weaves throughout 4,000 Weeks truly make you think. Among those that stuck with me are these:
The first thing that one has to do is to come to grips with the fact that you have a finite amount of time on earth; for the average human, that is 4,000 weeks. Once you grasp the “finitude” of life as an immutable fact, you will find yourself getting on with things that are most important. This life is not a dress rehearsal.
You cannot really create more time. In a way – you and I are time. Our actions are time. And trying to go through a massive to-do list at warp speed is going to do you no good whatsoever except to free up some capacity that you will then use to try to address more tasks that may or may not be important. Pick your spots.
He draws from Warren Buffett’s way of prioritizing goals and aspirations, which is as follows:
List your top 25 life goals.
Put your top 25 life goals in priority order, from those most important to you, to those least important to you but are still worthy of “the long list”...
Then cross off the bottom 20…
You can’t do everything, and the bottom 20, if you try to do them, will take away from your ability to achieve the five that are most important to you. Forget about the bottom 20 until some other time when you have satisfied one of the top five goals. (The sound you just heard was “Have a golf handicap below 10,” hitting my mental waste basket.)
Embrace the choices that you do make. You can’t do everything – so celebrate the choices you have made. Instead of “FOMO” (i.e., Fear of Missing Out), experience “JOMO” – The Joy of Missing Out!
Multitasking is a wonderful technique for getting mediocre results on two or more trivial tasks at the same time.
You’re never going to get everything done, and there is not some magical nirvana awaiting you for finishing everything in life. There is not some perfect state of bliss out there when you do achieve the goal. In a way, Burkeman argues for a variation on John Wooden’s definition of success: “Success is the peace of mind that comes from the satisfaction in knowing you did your best to become the best you are capable of becoming.”
There is a lot more that is worthwhile in 4,000 Weeks than I can do justice in my weekly 800 words to you. So instead of me investing more time in the pursuit of the perfect “Thoughts for the Week” email that will be completely inconsequential and immaterial to your well-being – I will wrap this up, as I am getting closer and closer to the end of my 4,000 weeks!
As a bonus – here is something Oliver Burkeman wrote that appeared last week in the New York Times: Stop Multitasking. No, Really — Just Stop It.
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