Latest news with #FourThousandWeeks


The Spinoff
5 days ago
- Lifestyle
- The Spinoff
Help Me Hera: There aren't enough hours in the day
There's so much I want to do before I die, and nowhere near enough time to do it. Want Hera's help? Email your problem to helpme@ Hi Hera, I've recently gotten into consistently going to the gym, and rowing, this year. Over 100 workouts, and consistent rowing trainings per week. I'm stoked! I made a tough decision to stop boxing during lunch, in order to focus on rowing and gym. I'm pretty stoked about my lifestyle, but… There are dozens of unread books on my to-be-read list. There are unwritten poems and short stories. There are un-made DJ sets I'd like to spend hours working away on. There are also volunteering commitments I'd like to get involved in. Please, how do I manage the mental process of opportunity costs? I wish I had more hours in the day… if only the earth rotated slower (with all respect to natural physics)! Sincerely, Temporally Challenged Dear Temporally Challenged, Not only is the earth not rotating slower, it's actually rotating faster than usual for complicated gravitational factors relating to the proximity of the moon, costing us valuable milliseconds that could otherwise be spent pumping iron and reading Dostoevsky. Even the solar system isn't exempt from shrinkflation. Thanks for your question. I don't know what sort of disease you have which makes you want to spend your lunchtimes exercising instead of mindlessly scrolling your newsfeed, but good for you. It's nice to get a problem where someone's so enthusiastic about the abundance of opportunities this world has to offer they're having to earnestly reckon with the fact of their own mortality. The bad news is that you are going to die. Not only will you die, but you'll die without experiencing more than a fraction of the world's bounty, and no amount of pomodoro timers or productivity hacks will make this any less devastating. So how do you make the most of the time that you have? There are two ways to think about this.. The first is by accepting that life is scandalously brief, there's a limit to what one person can meaningfully accomplish, and you need to prioritise the things that matter most before you're dead. The second is accepting that life is meant to be lived, not ergonomically optimised for maximum efficiency. Let's start with the big picture. Your question is probably beyond the scope of a single advice column, but I do have a book recommendation for you. Oliver Burkeman's Four Thousand Weeks is an excellent book about deciding how to allocate your time. He makes a good case that choosing the areas of your life in which you want to excel also means choosing the areas of your life which will suffer. As Burkeman points out, if you really want to write that novel or build that canoe, the only way to get it done is to prioritise it at the expense of your never-ending list of chores and responsibilities. That doesn't mean you can get away with ignoring the dishes in your singleminded pursuit of greatness. But you need to be intentional about the amount of time you devote to this stuff, because you are what you do, and what you don't want to be is 'someone who is really fast at replying to emails.' However, there's such a thing as being too optimised. Time isn't a currency to be invested, or a resource to be exploited. Time is first and foremost, our home. In the words of Larkin: Days are where we live. They come, they wake us Time and time over. They are to be happy in: Where can we live but days? It would be a shame, I think, to be so clinical about your ambitions, that you don't leave any time for laying around on your ass ' totally watching television.' In general, I think it's empowering to make a few big decisions about how you want to spend your life, and quietly work towards them. But accidents and failures often pave the way for big revelations which change our lives in ways we can't anticipate. We're only just beginning to grapple with the consequences of living in a world in which it's possible to completely eradicate boredom, and I worry about what this means for our attention spans. Failure can lead to profound emotional discoveries. Boredom engenders creativity. Childhood is precious, precisely because it's wasted. All of which is to say, things will go wrong with your plans, and that's fine. There's no shame in abandoning a dream which no longer suits you. The big thing is to have a dream. I think there's also a good case to be made for delaying a few pleasures. Don't trudge your way through the entire canon of Russian literature at age 16, just because it's on your list. There's always the risk you die young without ever having read Crime and Punishment. But life isn't to be gotten out of the way early. It's fine to save a few aspirations for the correct psychological moment. Maybe that solo trip to Nicaragua hits harder at 40 than it does at 19. My one boring time management tip is to get into audiobooks. In my opinion, there are very few activities in life (cooking, cleaning, gardening, exercising) that can't be improved by a dramatic retelling of The Count of Monte Cristo. So next time you hop on the rowing machine, cue up Four Thousand Weeks and give it a try.


Scroll.in
14-07-2025
- General
- Scroll.in
Lack of punctuality, traffic jams, and related problems are draining your energy, says this book
Indians have a very complicated relationship with time. We are rarely on it. Be it the slumbering small towns of rural India or the bustling metropolis of Mumbai or Delhi, we always complain of having no time to explain our perpetual lateness. A casual attitude towards time seems to be deeply ingrained in our culture. Remember, all our home clocks used to be some minutes ahead on purpose. We have grown up always discounting five to ten minutes of whatever the clock is showing. One might even say we take comfort in mentally calculating the correct time by making clock adjustments rather than knowing the exact time. The clock shows 8 am, so don't worry; there are still five minutes, as the clock is ahead. It gives us a false sense of having more time. As a culture, we are more collectivist than individualist. For us, the group is always bigger than the individual. Community and family take precedence over an individual. When coordinating large numbers of people in the community, with their different priorities, rigidity with timelines doesn't work. Deadlines must be flexible, and adjusting to other people's time must be allowed. One may even say that Indian time is event-oriented and not necessarily clock-oriented. We are more focused on ensuring the event for which time has been blocked takes place smoothly rather than fussing too much about whether it began or ended at the predetermined time. We don't like the certainty and finality that being on time and matching the rhythms to a clock gives, preferring to let things happen at their own pace. Adjusting expectations to a super consciousness of an abstract time horizon gives a broader error margin than a ruthless clock. For us, being fashionably late to events is considered normal, even expected. If you arrive at the party venue at the time mentioned on the invite, you might find people roaming around in their pajamas, preparing for the party that will actually start at least an hour later. If we want guests to arrive at 8 pm, our invite will say 7 pm, knowing the first guest will come only after 7.30 or 8. This wide margin of error won't be possible if our society starts sticking to being punctual. It will take away the notional extra 30 to 60 minutes from organisers and the invitees, a loss we just cannot accept. This loss aversion of the notional extra time to do things drives all our behaviours. In his seminal book Four Thousand Weeks, Daniel Burkeman says that time, unlike money, is a network good. He means that time has value only as a shared resource of the people within a network. One person coming on time won't make any difference to society's rhythms because everyone else is not following the same one. Life in the cities adds multiple complications to this already strained relationship. Millions of people need to travel long distances every day from their homes to offices and back. A study by the Asian Development Bank on Mumbai's suburban rail network highlighted some interesting data. Every day, 7.5 million passengers travel on Mumbai's 400-kilometre-long suburban railway network. Everyone is always in a mad rush. People who travel by road in cars or buses have it even worse. People in Mumbai can finish watching the entire series of Friends and Modern Family combined for the time they are stuck in traffic on average in a year. People in Bangalore have it far worse. Bangalore traffic jams are so hurtful that, as per a report from Business Today, the city loses $25 billion in GDP just because people are stuck on the roads listening to RJs going on about traffic problems. With this long and arduous commute, the quality of life in cities is taking a definite nosedive. The number of hours in a day starts counting for less, and everyone feels that they are constantly running with no end in sight. This daily routine leads to an overall decrease in Bright Energy and a corresponding increase in Dark Energy in our lives. Add to this the work norms in Indian offices. We strongly subscribe to the old-school idea of 'seeing is believing' – if a person stays longer in office, they must be working harder. Long work hours are equated with sincerity, ownership and drive. They are celebrated, rewarded and expected. We love to use sarcasm, and I believe every single one of us, at some time or the other in our careers, would have heard a colleague or manager shout, 'Half-day today!' when attempting to leave the office at 6 in the evening. These cultural norms force people to sit longer and longer hours in the office, not necessarily being productive. Another typical scene at the office is people being late to the meetings. It is almost a given that any meeting, however early you plan it, will begin later than the scheduled time because someone will come late. Most of the time, people don't even apologise, as a five- to ten-minute delay is routine. We are always expected to 'adjust, please'. This 'chalta hai', casual approach towards the clock is so deeply ingrained in us that we don't even stop to think if this is disrespectful to those who come on time. Since no disrespect is perceived, no apology is sought, and there are no negative consequences. In fact, people who arrive on time experience the punishment as they have to wait for everyone to join. This social reward of negative behaviour and punishment for positive behaviour drives a mass shift towards the former. Why should people come on time and be punished, to wait, while others join late? A better idea would be to join five minutes later. This routine is how the super-conscious clock of Indian society is ticking. Be late, because others will definitely be. A typical day in city life starts early at 7 am, and if you have kids, maybe even earlier at 5.30–6 am, and ends by 8 or even 9 pm before a person gets time to retire and relax at home. Where can one find time in this personification of hustle-bustle? The commute saps energy, and long, unproductive work hours leave employees crying for the ever-elusive work–life balance. It is important to understand and reflect on these cultural expectations and harsh realities of Indian city life. With such a cultural context, making any change to our lives and reclaiming more time for ourselves seems like a tall task. But that is where the opportunity lies. Even if we make some incremental changes in our work day, manage our habits and, more importantly, our Bright Energy, we can shine at the workplace. I won't be able to help you influence the rest of your teammates or your manager to start valuing your time, but with the experiments we will discuss ahead, you might be able to derive more out of the time you get.