Four Thousand Weeks - And the Anti-Skill you Need to Make the Most of Them

At first the title is curious. Once understood it’s terrifying. Four thousand weeks is all we have in this life if we are lucky enough to live to our average age. What’s more terrifying is doing the math at aged 62. 

Oliver Burkeman’s best seller, ‘Four Thousand Weeks’ (Vintage 2021), is subtitled ‘Time Management for Mortals’. It caught my attention as I’ve been focused on helping our clients win the strata management email wars. 

I’ve made some exciting progress. I’ve learnt about platforms that make one to one communication become one to many, and technology that can triage emails into manageable bundles that are sorted for different people on the team to handle. If properly instructed, the technology I’m exploring will reply intelligently and advance the enquiry rather than offering a mere acknowledgement and setting expectations about a realistic response time. But Burkeman says while all that’s very good, I’ve missed the point and just become another ‘productivity geek’.

A productivity geek is one who is constantly trying to make oneself (or one’s clients) more productive. Burkeman argues what’s needed instead is a kind of ‘anti-skill’: rather than developing skills to be one more productive we need to develop skills to resist such temptations. He says we must learn to decline to clear the decks and focus instead on what is of the greatest consequence in that moment while tolerating the discomfort of knowing that therefore, the inbox might never be emptied, and the to-do list never completely checked. 

This book is full of uplifting and useful strategies about finding peace of mind and unlocking a more meaningful life. I think the strata world needs a bit of this right now.