As an electronic piano and punchy saxophone deliver late 1990s corporate enthusiasm, the narrator invites listeners to wonder how some people seem to get so much done yet have so little stress. What makes them different? The narrator delivers the answer, “They’ve probably been introduced to David Allen.”
Both the style and substance of “Getting Things Done … Fast” are artifacts of the exuberant optimism concerning human potential that marked the transition from the 20th to the 21st century. And the fact that I have a bootlegged copy of that extremely rare eight-disc recording of an early David Allen seminar is evidence of just how deeply I once dove into the productivity system that would later drop the word Fast to be known simply as, “Getting Things Done.”
Oliver Burkeman’s book, “Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals,” arrived at a different time, one marked not by the optimism of a new millennium but by the hard realization that the first two decades of the new century have not exactly lived up to the hype. Indeed, Burkeman’s work is part of a resulting trend toward the resurgence of realism, if not literal Stoicism. Burkeman writes as one who seeks to reconcile the promise of unlimited potential he heard in his twenties with the reality of life in the 2020s.
Burkeman thinks we have all been deceived. His claim in Four Thousand Weeks is that “we’ve unwittingly inherited, and feel pressured to live by, a troublesome set of ideas about how to use our limited time, all of which are pretty much guaranteed to make things worse” (17). That troublesome set of ideas is united by one major theme: the refusal to accept and live within our finitude. According to Burkeman, such refusal warps our understanding and experience of time, traps us in a hopeless quest for increased efficiency, makes us more susceptible to distraction, results in more anxiety and less peace, and, in an ironic twist, hinders us from actually getting things done.
With skill, tact, and humor Burkeman carefully connects the modern malaise of heart and mind to the loss of longstanding insights concerning human nature. Four Thousand Weeks is modern wisdom literature that examines the situation, diagnoses the malady, and offers refreshing alternatives that resonate deeply with the contemporary reader. I have found Burkeman’s work to be honest, accurate, and worth heeding. Four Thousand Weeks is simply refreshing.
Burkeman documents how our instincts on the subject of what to do with our time have been warped. For example, he notes how automatically we assume that, when faced with too many demands, the answer must be to somehow do it all by improving our time management. A different reaction to such a state of affairs might be to examine whether the demands on our time are actually reasonable or not, but such an approach is largely unavailable in a work culture that parrots phrases like “unleash your limitless creativity” and “realize your infinite potential.”
That Christians couch these subjects in theological terms like stewardship doesn’t make the situation any better. On the contrary, the idea that I must assiduously maximize the potential of my every moment lest I be some kind of spiritual failure is a real burden on weary consciences. If anything, theology can be a tool to put divine weight behind the already extant pressure to be something we are not. Christians can somehow be more miserable than their unbelieving counterparts in the workplace.
Indeed, I was startled to discover that Burkeman, who is not a theologian, applies some crucial aspects of Christian theology better than I typically have. I know that there is a distinction between the Creator and his Creation and that the First Commandment teaches the folly of idolatry, yet I have often approached my time and effort as if I am not distinct from God. I confess in the Athanasian Creed that there are not three but one who is infinite and almighty, yet I have planned my weeks and managed my to-do list as if there are at least two who are infinite and almighty — God and I.
Thus, when Burkeman urges readers to accept, understand, and even embrace their finitude he is onto a deep truth. In fact, I suspect the wisdom he offers is so refreshing precisely because it is more closely aligned with the nature of reality as God has created it than much popular secular and Christian commentary on the subject is.
But precisely where Burkeman is onto something is also where his thinking is most in need of nuanced correction. While Burkeman understands that we are not divine or eternal, his analysis proceeds without a proper understanding of how the divine and the eternal relate to this temporal life. Two examples come to mind.
The first example comes in Burkeman’s endorsement of the claims of Swedish philosopher Martin Hägglund, who says that any concept of eternity is going to render this temporal life meaningless and purposeless. The thinking goes that if eternity promises endless tomorrows, then there will never be any pressure to get things done today. In other words, heaven is a procrastinator’s dream—you can get to everything later. He concludes therefore that “eternity would be deathly dull, because whenever you found yourself wondering whether or not to do any given thing, on any given day, the answer would always be: Who cares?” (60)
Second is the bizarre way Burkeman offers a kind of motivation at the end of the book. He makes the wild claim that hope is a curse because it means you “place your faith in something outside yourself, and outside the current moment—the government, for example, or God, or the next generation of activists, or just ‘the future’—to make things right in the end” (229).
To be sure, we can agree with Burkeman that sometimes we really are called to take action in a particular moment and that it is tempting to use government, God, or the next generation as ways to excuse the failure to act appropriately within our vocations. That God will one day make a new heaven and a new earth is not a valid reason to treat Creation with contempt or disregard. But Burkeman’s overall conclusion is still tragic and Christians who confess belief in the life of the world to come must understand the mistake embedded in the thinking he is endorsing.
Burkeman substitutes the abstract concept of being finite with what Christians more accurately and helpfully call being a creature. In Burkeman’s thinking there is no personal being to which his life can relate, only a mind-boggling mathematical concept called infinity. In the same way, he is limited in his understanding of the human person and of human purpose by thinking too much in terms of finite and infinite and not enough in the metaphysical concept of creature. In other words, what Burkeman’s approach lacks is the sense that all of this talk of finitude and infinitude is meant, in God’s world, to be personal, that is, relating to persons with identities and wills as opposed to concepts and constructs of pure formality.
For Christians what is infinite is primarily personal and eternal life is not just endless time in the abstract but a new quality of life in which we still remain creatures. Again, I see idolatry at play. If Burkeman is onto something that we are not God in this life, it helps to remember we will also not be God in the life to come. This means that, happily, we will never actually find eternity to be deathly dull. On the contrary, our claim is that this life and the life to come can only have meaning and purpose if a personal God is endowing it with the same. This is why it matters to say we say we believe in God, not that we believe in infinity.
These criticisms notwithstanding, I strongly recommend the book, especially to ministers who not only shape the thinking of a congregation but who are themselves often burdened by guilt in their personal and official vocations. Of particular ministerial relevance is Burkeman’s call to rediscover what it means to have sabbath. Church culture could benefit from a renewal of this biblical practice. Interestingly, this is precisely what the narrator said twenty years ago on disc one, track one of “Getting Things Done … Fast,” that “David Allen’s premise is simple: our ability to be productive is directly proportional to our ability to relax.”
I have also recommended this book to parishioners who find themselves caught up in career pressure, and they have found the book beneficial. The book is a natural bridge between conversations about the common insights available to human reason and the uncommon insights revealed in the Scriptures. And if you have been, like me, up to your eyeballs in productivity culture for so many years, then Four Thousand Weeks is not just worth reading, but re-reading several times.