Four Thousand Weeks: A Review and a Reset

In my post about my goals for this week, I blogged about a book I was reading at the time, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals.

Well, I finally finished the book, and I have lots of thoughts.

The book has had an immediate impact on how I view my time and my to-do list.  On Monday when I planned out my week, I took a bunch of unimportant tasks off my calendar, where they'd been languishing for weeks and sometimes months, rolled over from week to week as they remained unfinished.  It felt good to recognize that I probably would never get to them, and that that was okay, because they weren't all that important to do.

Perversely, I got a ton done on Monday, probably at least partly because I was feeling energized by this new way of looking at things.  There were also a lot of things I had to get done, after 10 days of house sitting and 4 days of Fan Expo.  Basically, I'd had two weeks' worth of stuff to put away and two weeks' worth of basic tasks to catch up on.

Today, I'm finding that my desire for productivity is shot, perhaps because Four Thousand Weeks has given me permission to focus on what matters to me.  Turns out that eliminates quite a few things from my task list, and all I want to do now is read, write, and do doll stuff.

I suppose the fact that writing makes the short list should tell me something, though.

As I mentioned in Monday's post, the message of Four Thousand Weeks is that we have a limited amount of time, and there is no possible way we can ever hope to accomplish everything.  Rather than how the productivity self-help industry has focused on finding ways for us to get progressively more and more done, Four Thousand Weeks coaches you to forget about trying to do everything, and instead focus on doing what matters most to us.

In other words, quit trying to fit it all in and feeling guilty when we can't.  Instead, give ourselves permission to not accomplish everything.

One of the things the book talks about is the idea of limiting yourself to only three to-do items at a time.  I've always thought that was ridiculous because who has only three items on their list?!  Of course, as someone who is self-employed, I have work items on my list, whereas someone with a traditional job probably wouldn't.  But still!

The way the book discusses it, though, I started thinking: how about only having three active projects on my list at a time?  I've definitely noticed that I do better if I keep my weekly goals to just three, when I write that post every week.  So maybe limiting my big projects to three would be helpful.

But then in the appendix, the author suggests keeping two to-do lists: one with active items that you limit to only ten, and another with all the things you hope to do, with the understanding that you will not get through all of those.  And every time you accomplish one of the ten things, you can cross that off and move something else over.

He also suggested keeping a third list, a "Done" list, which I like for the purpose of reminding myself that I have been doing things.  Too often I look at the things I didn't accomplish and feel like a failure, no matter how much I actually did accomplish.

A final note: One of the things the book addresses quite a bit is distractions that keep us from doing things we need to do, or rather, that enable us to procrastinate on things we should be doing.  Social media is, of course, at the top of that list.  While there's no way I can eliminate social media from my life entirely, as it does serve some very real purposes for me, I definitely should look at how to limit its ability to distract me when I'm doing something important.

After pondering Four Thousand Weeks and the meaning of life all week, I feel like I'm even more lost as ever, although maybe that's just my new hierarchy of priorities taking shape.  Or, perhaps, it's me trying to figure out what I actually need to do (clearing the clutter in the kitchen, for instance), and how to balance those with the things that matter to me (just reading, writing, and dolls, really).

In any case, I'll accept my current feeling of aimlessness as growing pangs and part of the process of resetting my priorities, if it will eventually lead to more satisfaction with what I do and less guilt over what I don't.