Neglecting the Right Things

Dear Saint Mary’s Friends,

Those of us in academic life—whether students, faculty, or staff—often find ourselves measuring our time in weeks. Fifteen-week semesters, one-week semester breaks, midterm weeks, final exam weeks, Christmas holiday weeks. And the weeks fly by like landscapes we are driving through, too fast.

I reflected on this recently when I read a fascinating book by Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. Burkeman’s title is deceptive. This is not really a self-help book; it’s more of a philosophical meditation on our relationship with time and our obsession with getting our arms around it, harnessing it, controlling it. Burkeman observes the ultimate futility of these approaches, reminding us that humans get only, on average, a life of about four thousand weeks (80 years). And not one of us is guaranteed to have even the week ahead of us. The sooner we acknowledge that we are never going to be perfectly on top of the messy busyness of our lives, the sooner we can fall back into actually living the life we have.

Though he offers “permission” to stop trying to “clear the decks” through extreme productivity and perfectionism, Burkeman also offers a number of time-management principles that I think are worth considering, whether you are a student returning from fall break and contemplating the remaining weeks of the semester, a parent hoping to cheer your student on, or a “grown up” still trying (as I always am!) to avoid procrastination and create the right priorities. We can’t control time, but we can try to control our own attention, the ultimate gift we bring to family, to relationships, and of course, to our work. If we can’t do everything we want to do, our choices express what we value. As Burkeman puts it, “the real measure of any time management technique is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things.”

His first principle is borrowed from financial management. Many of us may recall the advice we got with our first real paycheck: “pay yourself first.” Personal Finance 101 says we should save or invest some portion of our regular pay before we set off on our monthly discretionary spending. Burkeman suggests the same approach to our time. If there is a project that excites and animates you, actually schedule some time in your day for it—maybe even at the start of your day! So often we think we’ll get to those projects when we’ve crossed other things off our list. But our lists are too long, and there are too many worthy competitors for our attention and time. Which ones mean most to us? If we want to have spent some part of our four thousand weeks doing what we care most about, we must start consciously making those choices, whether that involves playing a musical instrument, writing to friends, kindling our spirits, getting out in nature, volunteering, spending time with our children, keeping a journal, or any other goal. 

A second principle is that we should limit the number of items we consider as “work in progress.” Rather than maintaining a lengthy inventory of what you hope to get to, create a closed list with just your most important items—no more than 10. Then keep everything else separate in a comprehensive open to-do list. Only when you complete one goal on the closed list can you move one over. One benefit of a system like this is that you will soon recognize that you need to right-size your projects if you hope to complete any of them. For example, you may be writing a book, but you should identify a smaller goal—like writing a chapter—to move that big project forward if you ever hope to free up that space for a new item. A second benefit is that this system makes visible—and acceptable!—that we are “always neglecting most things.”

This “limiting” exercise is related to a third principle Burkeman proposes: to “resist the lure of middling priorities.” Scaling up from daily tasks to life goals, Burkeman suggests that if we make a list of our top 25 priorities in life, we can probably focus on only five or six. These choices may feel hard and exclusionary, but we can decide what they are, and our decision gives them meaning. Then, instead of thinking of what remains as secondary priorities we should try to get to, we should actually avoid them assiduously—because they are just interesting enough to distract us from our most important goals. He quotes author Elizabeth Gilman, who says that most of us think “learning to say no” is about declining to do things that we feel pressured to do but don’t really want to do. She writes, “It’s much harder than that. You need to learn to start saying no to things you do want to do, with the recognition that you have only one life.”

Four Thousand Weeks is an unusual time management book in that it offers more than tactics for increasing productivity. It also challenges the reader to consider, as we look through the windshields of our days, what we would hope to see in the rear-view mirrors of our lives: what, given the “limits of your moment in history, and your finite time and talents, you actually got around to doing—and made the world more luminous for the rest of us by doing.” 

Thanks for using a small portion of your time to read this letter!

Warm regards,

Katie Conboy, Ph.D.
President

October 31, 2024