By: Michael Beiter

I finished my first book of the year, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, by Oliver Burkeman. I know it's early, but this might be BOTY for me because it captures what I believe and the philosophy I teach through my work. 

The number one objection in fitness and nutrition work is "I don't have time." Part of being mentally fit is managing your time well, but we are getting worse and worse at it. I will use this book as a teaching device and recommendation to everyone I work with who runs into time constraints. 

After a close family loss and grieving, I had to face my beliefs about mortality head-on. Once I accepted that I had roughly four thousand weeks to live and was about a third of the way through, I started paying attention more closely. Coming to terms with your mortality is difficult and uncomfortable, but like Burkeman says, "Once you accept the limits of your finite existence, you can forget the impossible demands you held yourself to and work on the few things that bring you joy." 

As I confront my time daily by looking at a bubble sheet full of 4,000 weeks and crossing one off each time seven days go by, I get crystal clear on what is important and worth giving energy to and what is not. 

Clients squirm when I talk about this and explain my practice. We have an aversion to the facts in the west that are seriously hindering our lives. 

I wrote over five pages of notes as I read through Four Thousand Weeks for the first time. There is something in every chapter that was helpful to me and that I can't wait to share with clients. Rather than chop out sections of the book and paste them here, I chose two ideas I found beneficial, shared them, and ended with a quote. 

Existential overwhelm: the modern world provides an inexhaustible supply of things that seem worth doing, and so there arises an inevitable and unbridgeable gap between what you'd ideally like to do and what you can actually do. What is required is the will to resist the urge to consume more and more experiences since that strategy can only lead to the feeling of having more experiences left to consume. Once you truly understand that you're guaranteed to miss out on almost every experience the world offers, the fact that there are so many you still haven't experienced stops feeling like a problem. Instead, you get to focus on thoroughly enjoying the tiny slice of experiences you actually do have time for - and the freer you are to choose, in each moment, what 

counts the most. 

Cosmic Insignificance Therapy: The universe is indifferent to us and everything that we experience in our lives. I went to a Neil DeGrasse Tyson show called Cosmic Perspectives and returned feeling uneasy. He exposed me to this perspective, but in a negative way that was more defeating than uplifting. Fortunately, thinking about my insignificance became more manageable once I explored more perspectives. Burkeman lays it out beautifully: "When things all seem too much, what better solace than a reminder that they are, provided you're willing to zoom out a bit, indistinguishable from nothing at all? The anxieties that clutter the average life - relationship troubles, status rivalries, money worries - shrink instantly down to irrelevance. So do pandemics and presidencies, for that matter: the cosmos carries on regardless, calm and undisturbed. To remember how little you matter, on a cosmic timescale, can feel like putting down a heavy burden that most of us didn't realize we were carrying in the first place."

From a new perspective of insignificance, it's possible to see that making nutritious meals for your kids might matter as much as winning a cooking award; or that your novel is worth writing if it moves or entertains a handful of your contemporaries, even though you're no Tolstoy. Or that virtually any career might be a worthwhile way to spend a working life if it makes things slightly better for those it serves.

Cosmic insignificance therapy is an invitation to face the truth about your irrelevance in the grand scheme of things. To embrace it, to whatever extent you can. Truly doing justice to the astonishing gift of a few thousand weeks isn't a matter of resolving to "do something remarkable" with them. In fact, it entails precisely the opposite: refusing to hold them to an abstract and overdemanding standard of remarkableness, against which they can only ever be found wanting, and taking them instead on their own terms, dropping back from the godlike fantasies of cosmic significance into the experience of life as it is correctly, finitely - and often enough, marvelously - really is. 

And now, a direct quote from the author:

"You could think of this book as an extended argument for the empowering potential of giving up hope. Embracing your limits means giving up hope that, with the right technique and a bit more effort, you'd be able to meet other people's limitless demands, realize your every ambition, excel in every role, or give every good cause or humanitarian crisis the attention it seems like it deserves. It means giving up hope of ever feeling totally in control, or certain that acutely painful experiences aren't coming your way. And it means giving up, as far as possible, the master hope that lurks beneath all this, the hope that somehow this isn't really "it" - that this is just a dress rehearsal, and that one day you'll feel truly confident that you have what it takes. 

The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short. But that isn't a reason for unremitting despair, or for living in an anxiety-fueled panic about making the most of your limited time. It's a cause for relief. You get to give up on something that was always impossible - the quest to become the optimized, infinitely capable, emotionally invincible, fully independent person you're officially supposed to be. Then you get to roll up your sleeves and start work on what's gloriously possible instead."

Burkeman concludes the book with ten strategies, one of which is 'predetermine boundaries for daily life.' I teach people to set boundaries on how much they sleep, exercise, and eat. Once they get good at practicing those behaviors, I start zooming out and suggest they apply the exact boundaries to their time management. 

Pessimistically, four thousand weeks is nothing, and we are insignificant in the grand scheme of the cosmos. Optimistically, four thousand weeks is the longest life expectancy humans have ever mustered. It allows us ample time to enjoy life without arbitrary expectations for what we should do with our time.