1600 Weeks: Time Management for Faculty Writers
With a new year upon us, I’ve noticed a lot of articles promising to teach us how to be more efficient with our time and get more done in 2024. I find these articles very stressful! This may be why I really enjoyed Oliver Burkeman’s book on productivity, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. One thing I love about this book is that Burkeman’s approach is the very opposite of what I imagined it would be. Rather than listing tips to help us jam more and more activities into each day, he argues that what we really need to do is to embrace our own finitude. We (if we are lucky) probably live for about 4,000 weeks. This means that it is impossible to get everything done that we might want to do, so Burkeman encourages us to accept that there are many things we cannot accomplish and/or that we cannot do as well as we might hope.
Burkeman argues that once we really embrace the finitude of our existence, it becomes necessary to confront our limited time and to think through what we want to do with it. He recommends that we try and identify the things we most want to do with our lives and then prioritize them. It’s not so much a sense of making time for them, but rather centering them in our lives and allowing the other things to become more secondary or even fall off of our to do lists altogether. (If you want to hear directly from Burkeman, you can listen to this podcast.)
This argument resonated with me, particularly because I work with academic writers (as a developmental editor and coach), many of whom feel overwhelmed by the multitude of tasks their jobs demand of them (without even mentioning the demands of the rest of their lives). As a former faculty member, I sympathize. The constant pressure to be an excellent teacher (at a liberal arts school, anyway), manage a multitude of administrative tasks, and produce publishable research can be overwhelming.
Most of my clients enjoy writing and see it as central to their work, but feel like it is often something they push aside due to other demands. But if we take Burkeman’s calculations seriously and assume our academic careers are roughly 30 years long, we may only have about 1,600 weeks to write. This increases the urgency of figuring out how to prioritize writing. What do we do if we want to make the most of our 1,600 writing weeks? Here is some practical advice that he offers that can help:
Accept that you can’t do everything. Burkeman urges us to organize our days around the idea that we won’t have time for everything we want to do (or feel we should do) and to learn how to make hard choices based upon this. This may mean accepting that there are some things we cannot do as well as we might like or even do at all. This can be really difficult to accept, perhaps especially as perfectionists (which I imagine some of you are, dear readers!). But he argues that if we don’t accept this fact, we risk spending our short lives on projects that aren’t very important to us and that our lives will be less satisfying and meaningful as a result. Accepting that we can’t do everything might mean turning down a prestigious administrative appointment if we feel it will take us away from writing. Or not revising a class even though we know the revision would make it better. And since we all have aspects of our jobs that we have to do no matter what, it likely means accepting that we have to do some parts less well than we actually could in order to prioritize and make time for the things that really matter.
Become a strategic underachiever: Decide what you want to fail at and be ok with failing. Of course work to fail at things that don’t coincide with your own priorities. Choosing to not do some things well or not do them at all makes more time for areas you care about. Burkeman does recognize that there are many areas of life that we can’t consistently fail in (like if you want to keep your job!), so he suggests that failing on a cyclical basis can be useful. For example, you might decide you are going to neglect your research for two months to pay more attention to your teaching as you develop new courses and then pick up your research again once your teaching feels more solid. Consciously choosing to neglect certain areas can help you avoid the guilt that can come when you feel you are not accomplishing things and thus acn lead to increased happiness.
Avoid the efficiency trap: Burkeman argues that the more efficient you are, the bigger the demands people will place on you. I witnessed this at my former institution where the most efficient, competent people got asked again and again to do more work because, well, they were fast and good at it! He urges us that if we can accept that we can’t cram everything in, it will become easier to make difficult choices about what to do with our time. This means learning to live with the discomforting fact that some things won’t get done at all and that we have to let go of being as “efficient” as we could be at particular sorts of tasks if we want to make time for the ones that matter.
Get better at procrastinating: Burkeman also suggests that procrastination can be a useful tool for making space for our priorities. He urges us to neglect the “right” things, by which he means the demands that are less meaningful for us. This allows us to have more time and energy for the things we really do care about. I would also argue that the person who responds to the email first (especially group emails) often does more work (even just in continuing the conversation in that email itself). Maybe try responding later instead of immediately.
Develop patience: Accept that things take the time they do and that working faster doesn’t quiet anxieties. Instead, it means that we just continue to cram more and more things into our lives, leaving us exhausted and without time for our priorities. Being more patient about the amount of time tasks can take also helps you slow down and enjoy them more because you can really be present in them as you do them, rather than rushing to finish.
Do the thing you care about now: If writing is something you want to do, do it now! Burkeman would suggest setting time aside for writing no matter what each day (or each day you hope to write) and making that happen. This might mean making writing the first thing you do as part of your workday. That ensures that what you care about gets done and that you allocate the time you need for it. Or it might mean blocking off an hour on your calendar for writing four days a week and treating it like an important meeting that you would never miss.
Do things for your own sake: Explore and cultivate hobbies and rest. This not only helps your own well-being, but helps you have the energy you need to do the things you want to do.
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It is true that Burkeman doesn’t focus much on structural issues in this book that place people in positions where they feel overwhelmed. Similarly, he does not spend much time addressing the different demands placed on people (certainly faculty members) based upon gender, race, age, and so on. Still, I think his major point that we have limited time and that we have more power to consciously choose what we do with it than perhaps we think is useful.
Of course, writing might not be one of the things that you truly care about, but his advice is helpful for figuring out how to make time for whatever does matter to you, be it spending time with your kids, training for a marathon, or working as a supportive mentor to students. Burkeman challenges us to cut through the noise of life and center the things that matter most to us.
Burkeman’s message has helped me to reflect on why I started my own business. There were many reasons, but a key one was so that I could maintain a healthy life-work balance. But as my business has grown, I’ve found that I have been taking on more and more clients and billing more and more hours. In some ways this is good, but I’ve realized that I’ve been gauging success by capitalistic measures, rather than reflecting on whether I’m truly achieving what is important to me, which includes having more time for life outside of work. So, as inspired by Burkeman, I’ve been booking less work and accepting that I can’t take on all the projects I’d like to. This hasn’t been easy, but I’m feeling happier and like I have more energy and attention for the work I do have. And I went to the movies in the middle of the day recently! :)
So happy writing and thinking and working to make time for the things that really matter to you! If you have other strategies that help you make time for writing, I’d love to hear about them in the comments!
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