Four Thousand Weeks

by Lionesses of Africa Operations Department

“I have become to myself a land of trouble and inordinate sweat.” 

St Augustine in his confessions (here) wrote: “Assuredly I labour here and I labour within myself; I have become to myself a land of trouble and inordinate sweat.”

I labour within myself.

We’ve all seen them - the surveys that ask just how busy we are, how much time we have for a walk in the Park or a chat with our neighbour. The results are all depressingly similar - as the years move on so we become busier and busier. Running at full speed is never enough and as we fall exhausted into bed after yet another day spent at 100mph we have that nagging thought that perhaps we just didn’t achieve all we set out to do when we bounded out of bed that morning.

Sadly, as pointed out in a wonderful book ‘Four Thousand Weeks’ by Oliver Burkeman (here), it is a depressing fact that actually these surveys significantly underestimate by some distance the busy-ness of our current lives, because those of us who are really, truly busy, simply do not have the time to answer such surveys! Bit obvious if we think about it, nobody needs telling us that there isn't enough time in a day. We see it the whole time. 

We ‘joke’ about Lionesses working 36 hours each day as they run and grow their businesses, bootstrapping their way to a point at which financiers can no longer ignore. (seriously - do you really want us to show the statistics again?) But it is a fact within our short lives that our inboxes are like weeds on speed, growing and multiplying like crazy! Then there is Social Media with its magical ability to suck us in when we are least expecting it, as suddenly a quick look at Instagram becomes a 3 hours lost! All of that way before we look into our cluttered brain for those things we should be doing alongside those we want to be doing - you know, those kind of commitments or tasks that are hanging around in our lives, but haven’t yet properly dealt with. The productivity guru David Allen - writer of the bestseller Getting Things Done (here) calls them an ‘open loop’ - that just seems to become fatter as more gets stuffed in, but never ends.

All of this brings Constant Distraction. Our brains are working overtime whilst our attention span shrinks - a horrendous combination if you actually had time to think about it!

Luckily we as Lionesses can multitask - but even that is under attack as a recent study has shown (here): “"People can't multitask very well, and when people say they can, they're deluding themselves," said neuroscientist Earl Miller…“The brain is very good at deluding itself."

Miller, a Picower professor of neuroscience at MIT, says that for the most part, we simply can't focus on more than one thing at a time (…and yes they didn’t just test this on men, before anyone asks!)…What we can do, he said, is shift our focus from one thing to the next with astonishing speed.””

Still, we digress…

The title of Oliver Burkeman’s book seems a little strange at first look, but all is quickly explained. If you live to 80, you have a little over 4,000 weeks on this earth. 4,000 weeks! And that’s if you are lucky enough to live to 80 of course.

4,000 weeks…Hmmm, well if we were to follow Mr.Gladwell’s well thumbed book on what it takes to truly master anything (10,000 hours) that’s 59.5 weeks and given that the first 521 weeks (10 years) of our lives is spent potty training and learning to walk, talk and read, we are already eating into this strange and frighteningly small number with some speed.

So what is the point other than making us all so fearful of missing out on the next week, day, hour, minute even second of our lives that our brains go into overdrive and we just succumb to the nearest chair and start to aimlessly flounder and dribble from the corner of our mouths? It would appear that sub-consciously we know that we have this small window of opportunity to do EVERYTHING. This finite amount of time creates an almost panic in our minds that rather than start on all that we know we have to do, which by now has become frightening because we have so little time in which to do it, we allow ourselves to wallow in the warm comfort blanket of distraction. 

Far better (our brain tells us) is to hide from the fear of failure, than to face it head on…and that is the issue. We truly fear that if we face all that we must do, all that we can do and want to do, then we shall be so overwhelmed that we shall become like headless chickens running around the yard - and what a waste of one of our precious weeks that would be!

But what can we do? The world for centuries has been filled with aids for our procrastination and emails and Social Media just took it to a whole new level. But Mr. Burkeman gives us some hope. Procrastination is unavoidable, though we can get better at ignoring the right things. He points out that ‘FOMO’ – ‘Fear Of Missing Out’ for example, is “only debilitating if you fail to realise that missing out is basically guaranteed in life”, the inevitable consequence of one path chosen over another (here). If we take FOMO into our businesses, this can often cause serious problems. ‘I manufacture pink widgets’…and the first customer into my shop asks for a blue one - “Of course we can make those”, the next customer a Red Widget and so on until your shop is full of all the colours, yet only one sale in each! FOMO is like a dog chasing its tail!

This FOMO coupled with Social Media (that feeds our fears on a daily basis) means that (as Mr. Burkeman continues), “once the attention economy (basically Social Media) has rendered you sufficiently distracted, or annoyed, or on edge, it becomes easy to assume that this is just what life these days feels like. In TS Eliot’s words, we are “distracted from distraction by distraction””. Yet it is the pain we feel knowing that we have so little time, in fact is the aspect that simply makes it worse - or multiplies exponentially the effect within us.

The main point he makes is that what we think of as distractions aren’t actually the ultimate cause of our being distracted. They’re just “the places we go to seek relief from the discomfort of confronting limitation”. The limitation of time.

…so embrace this limitation. Life is what it is, we have constant demands on our time. He adds: “…the most effective way to sap distraction of its power is to stop expecting things to be otherwise…”.

As an example, in learning to meditate, one immediately is confronted by the incredible power of the mind, how it flits from one thought to another, from one distraction to the other and how difficult it is to control this. This is why it is so difficult for so many to do. To fight it simply does not work - to yell ‘Concentrate!’ Creates the opposite effect! In fact it is only when one relaxes, turns to a mantra and the mind starts to drift with the melodic sound, that suddenly the mind clears. Much like a sportswoman ‘in the zone’, the mind is clear and focus appears, so it is with meditation. 

“Some Zen Buddhists hold that the entirety of human suffering can be boiled down to this effort to resist paying full attention to the way things are going, because we wish they were going differently (“This shouldn’t be happening!”), or because we wish we felt more in control of the process. There is a very down-to-earth kind of liberation in grasping that there are certain truths about being a limited human from which you’ll never be liberated. You don’t get to dictate the course of events. And the paradoxical reward for accepting reality’s constraints is that they no longer feel so constraining.” OB.

We cannot control everything in our own and in our business lives, we cannot stop the magnetic pull towards procrastination, towards distraction, the flight from the fear of finite time, but recognizing this is a start. A start to finding Focus, to finding the Zone. Not easy, after all we are only human, but even that admittance is in itself a start.

Stay safe.