I felt for so long that if I just had enough time that I would finally arrive at a sense of meaning and calm I had been lacking. My fundamental problem was having too many things to do; when all of the tasks were gone I thought I’d suddenly feel a sense of clarity. Now that I have oodles of free time, it turns out it’s about so much more. I’m starting out 2023 in the spirit of Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman’s 2021 exploration of how to find meaning in our extremely limited time on Earth. I’ve re-read this book three times during my break from full-time work – it articulates so much of what I’ve struggled with the last few years, so many things for which I could not find adequate words.

While the subtitle reads like a standard time management book, its central premise is that time actually isn’t something to be budgeted and hoarded. We have attempted to wrestle control of time, evading the reality that our time is finite and that we have far less control than we want to admit. As such, we are not fully experiencing our lives. Instead, we are looking ahead to a future when we’ll finally get around to being happy and doing the important things. It’s not entirely our fault that we look at time in an instrumental and future-focused way – our economic system demands it. But in looking ahead constantly we often do not get around to doing the right things now, for example cultivating deep relationships. Further, as technology has allowed us to free up more hours, instead of feeling more expansive and leisurely we have grown more impatient (Burkeman, 2021). Our obsession with productivity perpetuates our avoidance of how limited we truly are.

There are three core messages that have stuck with me these last six months. Here they are, along with three behavior changes I am working on this new year:

ONE: You will never clear the decks. Say it louder for the folks in the back! I had to read this section 10x over to get it into my stubborn (Taurus) head. “But clearing the decks will be the key to my ultimate happiness, I will feel better!” Yet even as I come close to clearing the decks, any feelings of accomplishment or calm are temporary, and my experience hasn’t suddenly felt more meaningful.

Why? If you keep believing that finding time for everything is possible – you keep packing your schedule and piling up efficiency techniques – you won’t ask yourself whether an activity is worth a portion of your time (Burkeman, 2021). When everything is important, nothing is important. Adding so many things to my plate was my way of not having to choose, of not addressing the underlying feeling of misalignment and meaninglessness. I told myself that if I could just fit in another thing I would finally feel right about what I was doing. Sadly this race to finish everything just made each day feel like something to “get through,” and I was no closer to making the decisions that would clarify my priorities. If I make a choice to spend my time on a person, experience, or thing, above all of the other things vying for my attention, it bestows meaning on that person, experience, or thing (Burkeman, 2021; for more on this check out chapter three). There is not going to be a magical day when life opens up and feels expansive enough to do what’s meaningful – it has to be prioritized now. And that means that some things have to be left behind, the decks never fully cleared. 

My first behavioral change is, as Burkeman (2021) says, to pay myself first when it comes to time. Many days I wake up and want to get through my “errands” first – run to the store, go through my email and mail, clean the bathroom (the worst)… I feel as if just getting these little things out of the way first will make me feel the ease necessary to write. But most of the time all those little things take far more time than I want them to (my urge was to say more time than they SHOULD, but another lesson I’m learning is that things will just take the time that they take… a concept Burkeman (2021) discussed called “eigenzeit”, translated as “the time inherent to a process itself”). Day after day I don’t get to the things I say are most important: writing, chatting with a friend, and getting active and outside. So, at some point I need to let the bathroom be dirty, go to the store later, and just wake up and do the most important thing first. So, I’ve used trusty time blocking to make sure I have time scheduled each afternoon to get to the little errands, so that I can sit back and dig into the important stuff when my mind is fresh in the morning. And I have limited my Todoist and Asana (yes, I use two different project management tools for home and work… reflection for another post) to just 1-2 items a day that are connected to my highest priorities. 

TWO: Trying to take full control of our time cuts off opportunities for real connection and communing with others. Relationships are “inconvenient” if you only look at them through the lens of an individualist culture. As Burkeman (2021) notes, “the more individual sovereignty you achieve over your time, the lonelier you get” (p. 31). Our individualist ethos is making our time less and less coordinated with that of other folks. As we grasp at greater control of our time we miss out on chances to deepen our relationships. I often missed opportunities for connection at work, even those happening right outside my office door, because there were too many things to get done. A million meetings made my time feel out of control most of my days – I didn’t want to give up the only time I controlled for some seemingly trivial optional activity. But those activities are NOT trivial. And wrenching control over my time became habitual – every missed social connection reinforced that I would not join the next time, creating greater relational distance between me and my colleagues. 

The pandemic exacerbated my habit of time sovereignty. The meetings on my computer screen often felt like make believe. They were easily rescheduled, and started and ended in a flash without the usual interaction and fun of easing into and out of a physical space. I became used to near total control over my time, other than these occasional incursions from the computer screen. And as the pandemic and remote work dragged on, I forgot about the beauty and benefit of being tied up with other folks’ schedules. Even as we returned to in-person work, the habitual isolation continued as did my frustrations with anything that made my schedule more complicated.

As I left full-time work, I was most excited about finally having complete control over my time. Because I truly was too busy for too long, Dixon and I yearned for the time when there’d be no meetings on the schedule and we’d have totally clear weekends. But we’ve swung too far the other way – “obligations” are meaningful opportunities to build connection and be our fuller selves, even if they make our schedules more complicated. Now that I have recovered from the complete overwhelm of the last few years and my days are generally solitary, I absolutely yearn for those days full of social connections, as hectic as they were.

Instead of treating our time as something to hoard, Burkeman (2021) suggests approaching it as something to share. He talks about time as a “network good,” something that is most valuable to us only when others also have it and can coordinate their time with our own. Burkeman (2021) suggests we make the types of commitments that remove flexibility in exchange for the rewards of community – the example closest to my heart is community theater (which any enthusiast will tell you removes a LOT of flexibility from your schedule, especially during tech week!). It goes further than time – we have to give ourselves to the emotional uncertainty of relationships, acknowledge that we don’t have full control and don’t know how they will work out. This relates to our finitude again, more on that in a bit.

This isn’t just about nurturing or creating deep ties. A lot of what is inconvenient about life nurtures our “weak ties”. For example, through the pandemic, connecting with the folks at my local coffee shop was often the highlight of my day. I could have easily made coffee at home or submitted my order online, but the interaction was extremely valuable to me even if perceived as less convenient.

So, the behavior change here is to join and schedule things again! There are two ways I am doing so in January:

1. I am psyched to have three trips planned to visit friends just in the month of January. Yes, it means that I may not make it to my favorite yoga class, or I may need to write in smaller chunks while I’m on trains and planes. But it means time with my best friends and their children, who are certainly not going to be small again – what’s more important in life than that?
2. Scheduling lots of networking meetings with folks! This was a goal for the second half of 2022, but I hesitated to schedule too many meetings in a day given how scarred I was from my schedule the last few years. So let’s connect! I want to hear about your year, your family, your work, what questions are inspiring you and what things keep you up at night! You can schedule with me at https://calendly.com/lizsutton.

THREE: Joy and relief lie in recognizing our finitude. Acknowledging all the things that I have not done and will not do in the future does not have to be demoralizing – it can actually inspire and bring clarity. I likely will never be famous, I will not perform on Broadway. I will likely not get a doctoral degree (although this one is still quite possible, won’t count it totally out!). I hope I have another 40 years, but there are only so many places I can go and live in that time. There are books that will go unwritten, tagged emails that will sit forever.

As noted previously, I have often struggled with just focusing on one project. If I can prove that I can do all of these things, even if one of them doesn’t work out I will have lots of other meaningful accomplishments! Relatedly, I have been in a lifelong fight with procrastination, which is at heart a strategy of emotional avoidance. For me, it’s being paralyzed by the thought of confronting imperfection. And Burkeman (2021) shares that while we often complain that distractions are coming for us, they’re actually something we’re looking for, something we turn to to get relief from having to confront our limitations. So here I have been beating myself up about not feeling totally energized when working on things that I have declared important to me – but when I realized that I am attempting to “flee a painful encounter with my finitude,” as Burkeman (2021, p. 105) writes, my challenges with focus made so much more sense.

As Ron Swanson says, we should not half-ass two things –  we need to whole-ass one thing. Or, as Burkeman (2021) expresses (with less swearing), we should accept the unpleasantness that comes along with being a finite human who has made a commitment to the sort of demanding and valuable tasks that force us to confront our limited control. Making a commitment means no longer being able to turn back, which we might assume will lead to fear but in reality alleviates our anxiety. As Burkeman (2021) notes, we can finally travel in one direction and go forward into the consequences of our choices.

The behavior I am working to change for number three is sitting with the discomfort of my finitude. In other words, pushing aside all of the things that likely won’t happen to step into a future that actually will. To be less afraid of making choices and excluding possibilities. Specifically, when I find myself frozen at the computer, wishing I had done something differently at work or in life, I am working to step out of rumination and into just doing the small next thing. Mindfulness helps me with this – not just daily 5-10 minutes but in-the-moment deep breaths to help me identify where resistance is coming from.

HERE’S TO 2023. Do the important things first (and let other things slide.) Prioritize connection over time sovereignty. Acknowledge finitude and step forward into your choices. All far harder to practice than to write. But these concepts are setting the stage for 2023 for me. I have been waiting for some epiphany the last six months, thinking that a bit of time and space were all I needed. But there’s a lot more than tasks and calendar events I’m learning to let go of.

I’ve been frustrated as these six months have felt less transformational and important than I had imagined. But I am inspired by Burkeman’s (2021) quote:

You’re freed, too, to consider the possibility that many of the things you’re already doing with it are more meaningful than you’d supposed – and that until now, you’d subconsciously been devaluing them, on the grounds that they weren’t significant enough. (p. 212)

Every sunlit walk in FDR park, every snuggle with my cat Minnie, every leisurely chat with a dear friend, every yoga class, every moment of feeling unsure and inadequate, every moment of pure stillness – this makes me reconsider them. They were not instrumental moments – they existed for the pure joy and importance of those moments. Moments like these make up the fabric of our lives. If this is what the last six months have looked like they have been quite meaningful indeed.

I’ll leave you with Burkeman’s (2021) idea that if we step more fully into being a limited human, we might actually get around to doing the “magnificent task or weird little thing” (p. 227) that we came here for, and in doing so make life more luminous for the rest of us. So that’s what I’m getting up to in 2023!  

What’s inspiring me: Beyond this book, 4000 Mondays! In a similar vein (with a similar title) fellow MAPP alum and hilarious rockstar Jodi Wellman is putting out some fabulous and funny content that you all should check out. Here’s her website (the blog is particularly fantastic), her Instagram, and her TED talk!