Your life in weeks.
On 4 thousand weeks
Ever wondered about how many days/week/month a human being generally lives? Let me tell you.
Assuming you live to be eighty, you’ll have had about four thousand weeks.
Did the number mentioned here make you feel “queasy”. Is 4 thousand weeks small or large enough?
We have a “Finite” life. Even though we never stop and think about it. We are so busy with our daily chores, productivity, social media, and work-life.
We are living over small dopamine hits, to-do lists, gurus, and mantras to get things done.
Instead, one should embrace the fact that we are finite in nature and not everything is possible to get done. We should not be beating ourselves up for not being productive enough. Productivity is a trap, the more you try to get over things, the quick todos pile up.
Here are ten nuggets from the book “4 thousand weeks” that will help you re-wire the whole process:
1. Adopt a ‘fixed volume’ approach to productivity:
Please understand the fact that you’ll do what you can, you won’t do what you can’t, and the tyrannical inner voice insisting that you must do everything is simply mistaken.
Stop trying to be all productive and fit everything in a 24 hours schedule instead adopt a “fixed volume” approach.
Just keep two to-do lists.
1. Open list: For everything on your plate
2. Closed list: Feed this from the open list
3. Or, hold list: Everything that is dependent and on hold.
Rule: You can’t add a new task until the one on the open list is done.
A complementary strategy: Have a predetermined strategy for your daily work. Always decide in advance how much time you’ll dedicate to a particular work.
2. Serialise, serialise, serialise
Focus on one big project at a time or at most, one work project and one non-work project, and see it to completion before moving to the next.
3. Decide in advance what to fail at
You need not succeed in everything you do. You can either nominate yourself in advance that you won’t expect excellence from certain areas of life or you choose to switch the spotlight from time to time.
If you are to earn a living, be a good partner, stay healthy and study. You can’t afford to bomb(fail) on any of this essential domain of life. So there is a scope to fail on a cyclical basis.
Eg: Aim to do the bare minimum at work while you focus on your children, or let your fitness goals take a back seat while you appear for an exam.
4. Focus on what you have already completed, not just on what’s left to complete.
We have this thing “we simply can’t feel good about ourselves until we have finished all our tasks- but in reality, the tasks/ works are never finished, so we never get to feel good about ourselves.”
Counter strategy: Keep a done list.
Every morning start with an empty sheet and keep filling it throughout the day with whatever you have accomplished. Each entry is another reminder that you could, after all, have spent the day doing nothing remotely constructive- and look at what you did instead!
Heads up: If you are in a serious psychological rut, lower the bar for what gets to count as an accomplishment. Add “brushed teeth” or “got up 20-mins early” (It is your list and no one needs to know about it)
5. Consolidate your caring
Social media is a giant machine that dictates your time caring about the wrong things or caring about too many things, even if they are worthless. Consciously pick what you want to care about and spare your time for.
6. Embrace boring and single-purpose technology.
Make your devices as boring as possible if you want an escape from them (this is what I have been following ever since I got a smartphone).
What do I mean by boring? Uninstall the updates-> change the screen color to greyscale-> keep lesser apps.
Also, choose devices with only one purpose, such as Kindle e-reader, on which it is tedious and awkward to do anything but reading.
7. Seek out novelty in the mundane.
It is not possible to have exotic travel every time things become mundane. What you can do is to pay more attention to every moment, however mundane i.e, to find novelty not by doing radically different things but by plunging more deeply into the life you already have.
eg: Taking unplanned walks to see where they lead you, using a different route to work, keeping a journal, stargazing, playing I spy.
8. Be a “Researcher” in a relationship
Adopt an attitude of curiosity, in which your goal isn’t to achieve any particular outcome. Curiosity is a stance well suited for the unpredictability of life with others- whereas the stance of demanding certain results is frustrated each time things fail to go your way.
9. Cultivate instantaneous generosity
Whenever a generous impulse arises in your mind-to give money, check on a friend, send a praising mail- act on the impulses right away rather than putting it off until later.
10. Practice doing nothing
We are under constant pressure to make the right use of our 4 thousand weeks. We even rest, so that we can work better. Our every activity has a self-motive. Start doing 5-minute nothing meditation.
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Thank you for reading and hope it made you curious enough to read the book.
And please reach out to me on Twitter DM.
Check out the book here: Four Thousand Weeks
