The first thing I’ll say is that the 250-odd paged book is actually a 250-odd paged book. It isn’t an over-elaborated blog post, or a single idea reiterated. I can’t tell you what the “core idea” of this book is. The book is the length it is because it needs to be. Ironically, most productivity books are longer than they need to be, and repeat their core theories over and over. In any case, this isn’t a typical productivity book – it doesn’t have tools to manage to-do-lists, or hacks to drive efficiency metrics.

Four Thousand Weeks. Four Thousand Weeks is the average human lifespan. It’s the same as 75 years, or 28,000 days – and yet, it means something subtly different. 4000 weeks feels smaller than 75 years – we know a year is a long time. It also feels shorter than 28,000 days. 28,000 is too large a number for me to comprehend. A week flies past though, and imagining 4000 of them flying past is easy. And therein, terrifying.

It’s hard to distill this book down to some key learnings – it was a fluid read, with each chapter bringing up concepts that may resonate with the readers in a different way. So instead of trying to boil down the book, I’ll leave some notes that stood out for me. And I’ll hope that it encourages you to pick up this book.

Why You Should Stop Clearing the Decks

…Despite my thinking of myself as the kind of person who got things done, it grew painfully clear that the things I got done most diligently were the unimportant ones, while the important ones got postponed — either forever or until an imminent deadline forced me to complete the, to a mediocre standard and in a stressful rush. The email from my newspaper’s IT department about the importance of regularly changing my password would provoke me to speedy action, though I could have ignored it entirely. Meanwhile, the long message from an old friend now living in New Delhi and research for the major article I’d been planning for months would get ignored, because I told myself that such tasks needed my full focus, which meant waiting until I had a good chunk of free time and fewer small-but-urgent tasks tugging at my attention. And so, instead, like the dutiful and efficient worker I was, I’d put my energy into clearing the decks, cranking through the smaller stuff to get it out of the way–only to discover that doing so took the whole day, the decks filled up again overnight anyway, and that the moment for responding to the New Delhi email or for researching the milestone article never arrived. One can waste years this way, systematically postponing precisely the things one cares about the most.

The Pitfalls of Convenience

Convenience, in other words, makes things easy, but without regard to whether easiness is truly what’s most valuable in any given context. Take those services–on which I’ve relied too much in recent years–that let you design and then remotely mail a birthday card, so you never see or touch the physical item yourself. Better than nothing, perhaps. But sender and recipient both know that it’s a poor substitute for purchasing a card in a shop, writing on it by hand, and then walking to a mailbox to mail it, because contrary to the cliche, it isn’t really the thought that counts, but the effort–which is to say, the inconvenience. When you make the process more convenient, you drain it of its meaning.

Rediscovering Rest

Taking a walk in the countryside, like listening to a favorite song or meeting friends for an evening of conversation, is thus a good example of what the philosopher Kieran Setiya calls an “atelic activity”, meaning that its value isn’t derived from its telos, or ultimate aim. You shouldn’t be aiming to get a walk “done”; nor are you likely to reach a point in life when you’ve accomplished all the walking you were aiming to do. “You can stop doing these things, and you eventually will, but you cannot complete them,” Setiya explains. They have no “outcome whose achievement exhausts them and therefore brings them to an end”.

The Last Time

Sam Harris makes the disturbing observation that our life is a succession of transient experiences, valuable in themselves, which you’ll miss if you’re completely focused on the destination. This applies to everything: our lives, thanks to their finitude, are inevitably full of activities that we’re doing for the very last time. Just as there will be a final occasion on which I pick up my son, there will be a last time that you visit your childhood home, or swim in the ocean or make love, or have a deep conversation with a certain close friend. Yet usually, there’ll be no way to know, in the moment itself, that you’re doing it for the last time. Harris’s point is that we should therefore try to treat every such experience with the reverence we’d show if it were the final instance of it. And indeed there’s a sense in which every moment of life is a “last time”.

So here’s to seeking out atelic activities, relishing in valuable inconveniences, being less hungry to see the bottom of your to-do-list, and cherishing each experience like it could be the last time.