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The Read Well Podcast
5 Lessons I Learned Reading Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals | EP 80
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Eddie Hood
Hey, friends, welcome back to the channel. Today I'm giving a review on 4000 time management for mortals. It's not really a review, actually. I've already reviewed this book. It's fantastic. What I do want to do is share the five biggest takeaways I got from the book. Five huge lessons that have impacted how I think about my time, and I hope they'll help you as well. Now, this is not meant to replace your reading of this book. I want to inspire you to pick it up and go read it, because there are hundreds of lessons in this book. It's worth your time to read. But. But we got to see if you're going to like it first. So let's dig in and see what you think. Welcome to this week's episode of the Read well podcast. My name is Eddie Hood and I'm your host, where I believe it's more important to read well than to be well read. So grab your favorite book, open up your notes, and let's get ready to learn something fascinating. Hey, friends, welcome back to the Read well podcast. My name is Eddie Hood, and today we're talking about one of my favorite books from 2024. Well, I read it in 2024. It's 4000 time management for mortals by Oliver Berkman. It's got this really great sort of obnoxiously yellow cover, which I love. And then it's got these, like, highlighter marks over the top of it, which reminds me of taking notes when I read books. When I first saw that, I thought, ah, this is speaking to my heart. It's like speaking out to note takers. So this is really great. But listen, there are hundreds of lessons in this book, and I'm not trying to be hyperbolic here. There really are a lot of things to learn here. But I've tried to condense the biggest ones down to five major points. And if you stick with me through the end, I'll share with you my favorite quote in the book at the very end, which I just think is hilarious and all too human. All right, I hope the coffee's good. Let's get started. By the way, if you're interested, this morning, I am drinking anthology. Anthology is the coffee that I make at Edgewater Bookstore. It's just a really good cup of coffee. If you're looking for black coffee that just wakes you up in the morning, this is not my espresso coffee. This is just that good sort of stable cup. All right, lesson number one is on page 45. This took me kind of took my breath away, actually, because I feel this every day. He talks about having existential overwhelm. Now, what in the heck does that mean? Well, I'm going to read the passage to you and then we'll talk about it. So on page 45 it says, think of it as 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 actually do. So here's the problem. We have a new challenge as people in this beautiful little world of ours where we're trying to manage time. But the issue is there are so many things we can do now. You know, I don't know. Great Grandpa Joe perhaps had a different problem. His problem was to go out and take care of the farm. He worked very hard physically, and at the end of the day was exhausted and had dinner and sort of passed out, right? He didn't have to think about other things because there were no other things. But now you can choose to watch Netflix. You can choose to go to a sandwich shop at 2 in the morning. You can choose to read a book, you can choose to go catch Pokemon on your phone. You can do a billion things. And that is causing a problem. I have this issue all the time when I finally, at the end of a long day, get some free time to myself and I think, okay, here we go. That's me rubbing my hands together. If you're listening to the podcast, here we go. What am I going to do with all my free time of it, all these things I want to do? And that excitement actually causes a problem. And I stand there and I panic because I don't know where to start. Should I make a sandwich? Should I read a book? Should I write a book? Should I go take a college course? What should I do? And so I start to have issues. And then because that choice feels a little too big or too options too varied, I often just like, it's easy to just sit down and watch Netflix and be like, ah, I'm tired, whatever. So the first problem we have, and the first takeaway from 4,000 weeks is that we have a very real problem called existential overwhelm. And I think we need to acknowledge that, right? We need to see it and go, yeah, that's a real thing. And if what I'm doing to try and deal with that. And we'll talk about this in another tip, but I'm trying to identify the big projects in my life I'm genuinely, truly excited about. One of those, for example, is starting a bookstore. For me, that is something that is being done in the after hours, late at night, but it's a passion project and it's something that I really enjoy doing. Having a big project like that has helped me defeat existential overwhelm because I don't have to think, oh, what should I do? All of these options now when I finally get some free time. We're working on the bookstore, baby. Yeah. This tip here, this is the second tip that just sort of made me laugh. And it's very true. And it's something I have to deal with because my story. So I actually own an accounting firm. By day I feel like Clark Kenton. At night I read books. But in reality, being an accountant and having clients all over the country means that I get a lot of emails and phone calls and I have employees and staff that need things from me. And so it's very challenging to sort of manage that and do all of this well. So thank you for being here, by the way. Back to this tip number two. It's talking about efficient people and how the more efficient you get, the more problematic life gets. Actually, we're programmed to think that if we can get more efficient, if we can add life hacks, if we can get technology to do things, things for us, then maybe our lives will become some sort of balanced semblance of normalcy. But we know that the better we get at answering email, the only thing that will come from that is that people will go, huh, that Eddie guy, he's really good at answering email. I'm going to send him more emails. That's all that happens. The world just gives you more work to do because you're one of the few that can actually solve all of the data problems. So let's read tip number two on page 41. I titled it Efficient People Are Just Given More Work. It says the reason isn't you haven't yet discovered the right time management tricks or applied sufficient effort, or that you need to start getting up earlier, or that you're generally useless. It's that the underlying assumption is unwarranted. There's no reason to believe you'll ever feel on top of things or make time for everything that matters simply by getting more done. For a start, what matters is subjective. So you've no grounds for assuming that there will be more time for everything that you or your employer or your culture happens to deem important. But the other exasperating issue is that if you succeed in fitting more in, you'll find the goal posts start to shift. More things will begin to seem important, meaningful, or obligatory. Acquire a reputation for doing your work at amazing speed and you'll be given more of it. There it is. Tip number two. So, look, I'm actually giving you the concept or the permission or the allowance to be not lazy, but to be purposefully hard to reach. So there's this really great quote in a book called Deep Work by Cal Newport where he's talking about great thinkers in life like Carl Jung and a whole bunch of other people and how they made themselves purposefully hard to reach because they realized that if everybody was knocking on their door, sending them mail, or in Today's time, email, WhatsApp, text messages, social media, pings, whatever, if you make yourself completely available to people, they will ping you. They will get you. They will suck you down. I learned a long time ago that if I don't choose how my time is going to be spent, if I don't wake up in the morning and define my day, those people will define my day for me. And that is not okay. So, yeah, I, I've talked about this on my show before. I love this little system. It's like a daily planning thing. It's made by uggmonk. I actually sell it in my bookstore. You don't need it. I'm not trying to sell you something. I want to share the concept with you though, because you can do this on a notebook if you choose. But each day there are three different types of cards that come in this system. And you can, you can set up a notebook to, to do something similar here. I've only got two with me, but these are the two I wanted to talk to you about today. There's the Today card, which just sort of lays out the. The things that you absolutely care about that you want to. Right. I start every morning with one card. I put the date at the top and I list out the things that I care about. This is not a to do list. I don't put on there, buy milk and whatever. I'm talking about major projects. I want to put my time towards now. The card I actually care about that I want to share with you today, that comes in this system. Again, you can do this in your own notebook. Please don't feel like you got to buy this stuff. But there's a card that says someday. So on the top of your notebook or your calendar or your whiteboard or whatever you use to Plan your life. Write someday. Okay? Now, as you're living your day and you think, you know what, man, I would really love to be able to write a novel or learn to speak French, or go back to college and take a course in Shakespeare, or learn to cook the perfect Sunday roast, whatever it is. But then you, you sort of add the qualifier, but I don't have time to do that right now. And then you get sort of angry and frustrated because your life is just overly complicated. That's okay. Let's just acknowledge the fact that there are things that you're passionate about that you want to do. Write those down in the someday category. Now here's why we do that. Because at the end of the day, when you work really, really hard, right? You've done your job, you've put eight hours in or whatever, you've made dinner, all of the kids are taken care of, and you finally sit down with a glass of wine and you have a big like a sigh and you think to yourself, okay, Eddie, I've worked really hard to get to this moment. I finally have an hour to myself. What should I do now? Because of tip number one, that existential overwhelm, your brain goes into overload about all of the things you could do. You also sort of get teamed up with guilt about all of the things you probably should do, like I gotta do the laundry and the kitchen over there is a little messy and so on. And yes, you often, if you're like me, I often feel my hard earned free time with nitpicky sort of not super valuable stuff. That's when we turn to our Someday card or our Someday list on the wall, wherever you're putting it, and just look through those and think about how you could start, just start learning how to speak French, or how you could write your first paragraph of your novel. Or you could maybe spend the evening researching a character that you want to write. Or perhaps you want to get on the, the website of your local university and find some, some courses in Shakespeare. You get the idea. If you have this Someday list written out, when it comes time to make important decisions about your life, you can focus on the stuff that will really bring you joy and fulfillment. Okay, that's tip number two. To combine existential overwhelm to sort of deal with that and to know that, that the more efficient you get, the more the world is just going to give you efficiency. So let's make ourselves a little harder to reach. Let's be good at our job. But then let's make sure we know what we really want to work on as we get our free time. Ooh, I love tip number three. It's on page 33. All right, the coffee is kicking in, people. I'm starting to feel a little excited here. I mean, I was excited to talk to you at the beginning of the video, but now, now I'm really happy to be here on page 33. This is great. Meaningful productivity often comes not from hurrying things up, but from letting them take the time they take, surrendering to what in German has been called eigenseit, or the time inherent to process itself. I probably pronounced that German word wrong, but the concept is this. Everything in life has time baked into it. We're so busy trying to look on YouTube for hacks to speed things up. Right? Five hacks to learn how to speak the French language faster. Let's talk about that. Actually, let's say you want to learn French. I'm using this example because I'm currently learning French, and I'm having a blast with it. I absolutely love the French language, but I started off that little trip doing what we all do. I got onto YouTube and I tried to find all of these YouTube teachers that could help me figure out the French language quickly. Like, what do I got to do? How do I do this? Are there tips? Are there tricks? Are there hacks? How are these people learning languages? And you want to know what I found out? The only way to learn a language is to simply put in the time, the reps, and the effort it takes to learn a language, which, by the way, is a lot of time. I tried to do duolingo, right? The little green bird. And I thought, oh, this is going to be great. I'll learn how to speak French by playing this little game for 20 minutes each day. Fail. That's not enough not to become fluent in a language. I learned a couple words in French, but I have no idea how to speak French after doing that for months. Right. I'm not anywhere closer to my goal. So what I did instead is I turned to my little someday card, and on here, there is a dot that says, do a Lingoda course. Now, this is not a. I'm not sponsoring Lingoda at all. It's. This is just a. This is a course you can do online where they take you through a whole series to try and get you to a specific level of fluency. But the magic is that you're meeting face to face with somebody who is French, and that French person is speaking to you, and it was terrifying. It's still terrifying every time I get on the video with them because they only speak in French. And so I'm like, what the heck is she saying? And I'm sweating and I'm panicking. But the beautiful thing is, is it becomes a crucible. I have to think, I have to get my crap together in order to get through this lesson that I paid for. So it has made me study harder, it has made me think more clear. And when I'm talking with a real French person, it's training my ear, and I am really digging in, trying to pay attention to what on earth she is saying. They laugh at me, they make jokes at me. It's incredibly embarrassing, you guys, but it works. It is working. And I am learning to speak French and it is just. It is awesome. So much fun. So that's what I want to tell you. Tip number three here. What Oliver is telling us is that whatever you want to do, learn to speak French, write a novel, go take a course. Those things take time. There is no hurrying of the process. It's going to require that you show up, get to your desk, put the reps in every day. You cannot fast forward. Not if you want to actually get good at something. Okay, let's go to tip number four. This one was particularly written for me. As I just mentioned, I like to do lots of things, and that can be a downfall at times. I've got a few really beautiful people in my book club who have mentioned that they can't figure out what to read next because they want to read all of the things, right? They can't say no to a book. When they go into a bookstore, they buy this and that, this and that, come home with 20 new books. They add that to their TBR list, their to be read list, which is already a thousand books long, and then they stand back in complete overwhelm, not knowing where to start because there are too many books they want to read, and so they don't read any of them. This is a real problem. And this is the concept of learning how to say no to things. Now, a lot of people might think that I have too much on my plate, and in fact, I do. I will admit that. I will admit that I am doing too much, but I'm actively pairing that list down. And I've got to tell you, that feels good. Tip number four here is about looking at all of the things that you're trying to do in life. All of the passion projects, all of the interests, all of the hobbies you have, and According to Oliver, it's going to be beneficial if you can turn some of those hobbies off. Even if you want to do them, you have to make a real decision here about what actually matters, because you don't have time to do them all. If we go back to the last tip, where learning French simply takes the time it takes, that means I have to put a lot of time into French, ergo, I don't have enough time to do other things if I want to speak French. Well. Now, side note, why on earth am I learning to speak French? I'll tell you, it's because I am getting a degree in philosophy. Again, doing too many things. I'm absolutely as guilty of these tips as maybe you are. But I have gone back to school to get a degree in philosophy, and I love the French philosophers. Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, these people. And I really thought, how, how cool would it be to read their philosophy in their native language instead of reading all these translations. Plus, I went to Paris with my wife last year and it just completely ruined my brain and now I want to live there forever. So, yeah, we're learning, we're learning French, but to learn French, I had to turn off a few other hobbies in my life. Let's read tip number four and then we'll talk about that. Apart from anything else, they make it clear that the core challenge of managing our limited time isn't how to get everything done that's never gonna happen, but how to decide most wisely what not to do and how to feel at peace about not doing it. As the American author Greg Krek puts it, we need to learn to get better at procrastinating. I mean, if I could. Like, that was my bomb explosion sound. Whatever. Here's the problem. I want to do everything. I am a very curious, very interested person and maybe you can relate to that. So I. Look, here's my list of hobbies I've had in the past. Okay? In high school, I played guitar. I was a jazz guitarist. And in fact, I had gone to university to play jazz guitar. I had a scholarship playing the instrument and so on. I was going to write music for movies. I love film photography. I actually built a dark room in my house. I used to be a close up magician. People, can you imagine? I actually stood on stage and I was hired out. I did close up magic and the whole thing. My goodness, my life has been all over the place. I'm actually a little embarrassed to share that one. I don't Know why I love magic? Magic's really good. But I've had a lot of interest and a few let me keep going. Actually, I have a wood shop in my house where I make handmade furniture. Do you see the problem? Do you see the problem? If you add on to this the fact that I own an accounting firm, I have a bookstore that I'm running, a podcast, a YouTube channel, I'm learning French, I am guilty of this sin. And Oliver Berkman is staring down at me from the heavens of time management, and he is yelling at me right now, sending me to time management hell. If I don't get my life put together, it's a real problem. And if you can identify this, leave me a comment down below. Make it a confessional. Please be honest and tell me what your list of obsessions are and how you're managing them. Well, I had to do an audit. I got out my little journal and I wrote down all of the things that I do, and I had to purposefully turn things off. And like it says in that, that tip, we have to be comfortable at saying no to things, right? To turning things off. And it's. It's really difficult to be comfortable with that. I had to say no to playing guitar. My wife, I love her, is constantly saying, you should go get that guitar. I really like it when you play guitar. I have to say no, because I know that although it will make her happy, I have to put a lot of time in to be a good guitar player. Now I've got an hour a day of practice, at least. I got to be running scales, and I've got to be sort of. There's just a lot to that. I want that hour back. Right. I. I turned off film photography, which is very difficult for me because I love walking around with a film camera and, and sitting. Spending time in a dark room is the most gorgeous, beautiful experience ever. But I turned that one off for a couple reasons, because it's not as important to me as what I'm doing now. I turned off all of those hobbies and left one in place, which is my books reading, because I want to be a great writer and I want to be a thinker and I want to have time for bigger ideas, which is why I'm going to university. And the reason why I went to university is so that I can spend time getting feedback on my writing and I can have some directed readings and. And so on, so I'm not just randomly reading everything. Okay, My list is still too long. I fully admit That I need to pare it down. But we're working on it. Life is a an exercise in self improvement. And I am definitely not perfect. I've got space to improve. Okay. Ooh, this is a good one. This is the fifth tip. And then I will share with you the. The quote that I absolutely love in this book, which just made me laugh audibly. We're going to go to page 48 today, kids. Page 48 here talks about, okay, I titled it Doing other People's Work. Have you ever done this? Have you ever spent your life doing your boss's work, your spouse's work, your friend's work, whatever, and never doing your work, the work that makes you happy? Yeah, it's frustrating, okay? It says if you never stop to ask yourself if the sacrifice is worth it, your days will automatically begin to fill, not just with more things, but with more trivial or tedious things, because they've never had to clear the hurdle of being judged more important than something else. Commonly, these will be things that other people will want you to do to make their lives easier and which you didn't think to try to resist. The more efficient you get, the more you become a limitless reservoir for other people's expectations, in the words of the management expert Jim Benson. Ha. There you go. All right, so look, if you don't get serious about your Sunday card, the things that you really care about, if you don't make and keep that list and you don't actively work on that list, then you're always just going to be standing there like a drone, waiting for instructions from everybody around you. They're going to fly you this way, then they're going to fly you that way and what have you. And you're not going to think anything about it because you haven't taken the time to think about what's important to you. So he made the comment in there that because you haven't sat down to judge for yourself which tasks matter and which tasks don't, you have no idea. Therefore, you just take what's handed to you. Now, if you feel like you're being used and you feel like people keep putting meetings on your calendar and you feel like people keep emailing you and absconding with your time, it's simply because you haven't gotten purposeful with your time yet. That's the fifth lesson. Sit down, write out all the things that you're doing and say no to most of it. Figure out what actually matters. Until you do that, you're just somebody else's Puppet. Okay. This is a good book, people. There are so many highlights in here. I can't handle it. It's just. I loved this book. Now let's get into this quote that made me laugh, and then we'll wrap up for the week and wish you a happy whatever day you're watching this. Maybe it's Friday. Happy Friday. Or maybe it's Monday. Have a good Monday. I don't know. Okay. Can you tell the coffee is working? I'm really excited about life right now. All right, this quote's on page 98, and it says it's a quote of a quote. He's talking about T.S. eliot, the poet who said, we are distracted from distraction by distraction. I'm gonna read that again to you. We are distracted from distraction by. By distraction. Now, Berkman goes on to say, the unsettling possibility is that if you're convinced that none of this is a problem for you, the social media hasn't turned you into angrier, less empathetic, more anxious, or more numbed up version of yourself. That might be because it has. Your finite time has been appropriated without your realizing anything's amiss. There you go. Now, here's the ironic thing. You're listening to my podcast or you're watching me on YouTube. Ergo, I have absconded with your time. And first of all, thank you for being with me because it supports the channel. Like, subscribe, do all of the wonderful things. I'm really trying to grow the community. But now I'm going to give you a call to action. Two things to do. First of all, I would love for you to get out a piece of paper and work with me. I want you to sit down and write out your Someday list. We're going to make this time you just spent on YouTube or the podcast valuable, not passive. Please don't just go and watch other videos or like, I don't know, don't do that. Let's actually do something together as a team right now. Grab a piece of paper, write Someday at the top. Grab a pen, and for 10 minutes, I want you to put on some music. Now I'm going to give you a link because I created a reading playlist for the Read well podcast. It's got all of this great instrumental music that I like to play in the background that helps me think clearly. I just absolutely love it. So turn the playlist on right now if you can, and begin to write out the things that are important to you. Now, once you've done that, we're Going to talk about what to do next. All right. Have you done it? Did you actually do the work and write out your list? I'm going to read my list to you and you can, you know, consider it what, what it is. So first of all, I've got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 things on my someday list, and they're all related to my ultimate goal of being a better reader and a better WR writer. Let me read them to you. Now. First of all, do Lingoda course again. That's that reading French thing. I am learning French because I want to read philosophy in the native language. I feel like that will help me connect more with it and it's just absolutely fun. I know that one's a little bit of a stretch. It's not really reading and writing, but I am having a hard time saying no to that. My second one on here is I want to make a video for the community just to provide some sort of master class on what it's like to read slowly, take notes and apply the ideas. Because I do all of these, these short, 20, 30 minute videos. I want to do a really long class online. Somehow I don't know how to do that, but that's on here. Number three, I want to write an essay on school reading. I have a sort of a beef right now with my kid who's 10 years old and he's in elementary school, and they're pushing him to read faster and faster and faster and faster because in their minds, that's what a good reader is. And me, of course, dad is just chomping at the bit to say, no, no, no. A good reader is one who understands what he reads and he needs to, like, slow down and enjoy the book. He's starting to not like reading anymore because they're pushing him to read at ridiculous rates. Fourth, I want to write a book. I want to be a great writer one day. I'm not sure if I want to write fiction or nonfiction, but I definitely want to write a book that's a big project that will come down the road. And number five, here, I ultimately one day want to get a physical location for my bookstore, Edgewater Bookstore. Right now, it's just an online place, which has been super fun, but my ultimate dream is one day to be a little old man sort of tottering around the bookstore, helping the community fall in love with books. Yeah, that's, that's my someday list. Now leave me a comment down below. Let me know some of the things on your Sunday list because that would be fun. To read. And here's your assignment for today, kids. I want you to pick one of the things on that list and just write out a sentence of what the first step would be. What's the very first action you need need to take to get that Someday item started? Write that down now and next time you have a moment of free time in your life where you're not crazy doing projects for your boss. You're not running around fixing the roof that's leaking or whatever after a long hard day of work and you have to decide what should I do with my free time? I want you to go and do the first step of that Someday project. Hey everyone, I hope you enjoyed this week's episode of the Readable Podcast. I thoroughly enjoyed talking to you about Oliver Berkman's book 4000 Time Management for Mortals. It's an absolutely lovely book. I highly encourage you reading it. If you want to pick it up, you can get it at my bookstore, edgewaterbookstore.com and let me know what you think about it in the comments. All right, thank you so much for listening to this week's show. And until next week, as always, remember to read slowly, take notes, and apply the ideas. I'll see you next time. If you'd like to take your reading to the next level, then head on over to thereadwellpodcast.com there you'll find daily posts on how to read well. You'll also get access to all of my book notes and tools for becoming a better reader. And as always, don't forget to read slowly, take notes, and apply the ideas. Thank you for listening to the Read well Podcast.