(00:03):
This is Five-Minute Friday on the book “Four Thousand Weeks”.
(00:19):
Assuming you live to be 80 years old, your lifespan will consist of a little over four thousand weeks. If you’re anything like me, feeling as though the weeks seem to fly by in minutes, that means we have startlingly little precious time, startlingly few weeks in our remarkably short lives.
(00:39):
Frequent listeners of the show will be aware of my fondness for efficiency and effectiveness approaches such as habit tracking, which I cover in Episode #538, the pomodoro technique, which I cover in Episode #456, and “atomic habits” in general, which I first talked about in Episode #442. My focus on these approaches to productivity and success in recent years accelerated into obsession as I took on the responsibility of hosting two episodes per week of this SuperDataScience Podcast on top of my full-time role as chief data scientist at a machine learning company. Having mastered these productivity approaches and remained committed to them, I’ve now achieved more than I had hoped to in my career just a few years ago and so I should be satisfied, right?
(01:25):
The catch is that while being productive has the allure — perhaps we could call it the illusion — of a fantastical future in which we could get to the end of our to-do list and finally relax, the sad irony is that paradoxically the leading productivity approaches of today can actually result in less time being available for you to enjoy than ever. As examples to illustrate this, if you master responding to emails efficiently and so answer more than ever, you will discover that you receive more than ever emails in return. If you perform exceptionally efficiently in your role relative to your colleagues, your manager will of course notice this and give you more work to do than your peers.
(02:06):
In the past few months, as I struggled to find any time at all in some weeks to enjoy time with friends, pursue a romantic relationship, or even simply read for leisure, I hoped that I would find an antidote to this ironic productivity conundrum that I encountered. While relaying my sense of dis-ease with my unbearably productive lifestyle to my dear friend Kirill Eremenko — you may know him as the founder of the SuperDataScience Podcast and host of the program from Episode One through to Episode #431 — Kirill tipped me off to the book Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman.
(02:44):
Four Thousand Weeks is exactly what I was looking for. With countless examples sampled from history and the great philosophers, writers, and other thinkers of modern times, Oliver magnificently illustrates the productivity trap I’d been lured into as well as its associated, inevitable misery, all the while managing to make me giggle with his clever quips and turns of phrase. Mercifully, Oliver also provides many practical strategies and new mindsets that you can adopt to begin to relieve yourself of some of your productivity-induced misery.
(03:18):
As a simple example that I’ve found remarkably effective, Oliver introduced me to the idea of “JOMO” — the joy of missing out. So, many people have heard of the more renowned FOMO – fear of missing out. Well, the idea behind JOMO is that since you’ve chosen to do be doing whatever it is you’re doing at this very moment, you should delight in that fact because that is how you’ve decided to enjoy this fleeting moment of your life and you chose what you are doing right now from amongst the effectively infinite number of activities that you could be undertaking right now.
(04:00):
Another recurring example from the book is coming to grips with the reality that life will never feel under control, that you will never achieve everything you’d like to in your life. Coming to terms with what Oliver describes as your finitude — the fact that you will certainly die and probably much sooner than you’d like to — this finitude, if you embrace it it sharpens your capacity to enjoy any given moment, whether it’s time with a loved one, enjoying a cherished hobby, or even undertaking work that you find meaningful. Through this lens of finitude, you might find yourself procrastinating less, being more judicious about spending your time in a manner that feels meaningful to you, and making more moments to be present and enjoy that mind-bogglingly remarkable fact that you are alive — that at this very moment at least, you can breathe, be conscious, and feel. This moment is beautiful, it is fragile, and it is the only remaining moment in your life you can be absolutely certain you’ll get to have. So, savor it.
(05:05):
All right, listener, so if the concept of this 4000 Weeks book has piqued your interest, I do highly recommend checking it out. And I should also say that I have not been paid in any way to suggest that, this is just an organig suggestion that I found super valuable and I think you might too. We’ve included a link conveniently for you in the show notes, if you’d like to check it out. And, given that you enjoy listening to this podcast, there’s a good chance that you’re also into audiobooks. If so, I highly recommend checking out the audiobook version of “4000 Weeks” because the book’s author Oliver Burkeman reads it himself and his charming English accent allows his dry humor to shine through particularly amusingly.
(05:46):
All right, that’s it for today’s episode. Keep on rockin’ it out there, folks, and I’m looking forward to enjoying another round of the SuperDataScience podcast with you very soon.
