4,000 Ideas: Chapters 5 and 6 of Four Thousand Weeks

How to deal with distractions and interruptions

Welcome back to 4,000 Ideas, the Oliver Burkeman Book Club for Creatives! If you missed any of the earlier posts, you can catch up here. This is a book club where you don’t have to read the book to follow along. You just need a curious spirit and an open mind. The comments are juicy and the people are friendly. I hope you’ll join us!

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In my eight years as a mom, I’ve had anywhere between 12 and 40 hours of childcare each week. That’s not counting 18 long months during the pandemic when we were glued together without a break in sight. There have also been too many sick days to count, summer “vacations,” and Wednesdays when school gets out at 12:50, plus some big surprises that felt more like earthquakes than interruptions.

Some days I feel like I might get everything done if everything goes according to plan. Other days I can feel time closing in, and if someone looks like they want to chat or just move a little slower, I’m ready to yelp. I feel time on a visceral level, and it is TIGHT.

I don’t think there’s any way to talk yourself into pretending these distractions don’t matter. The truth is having a three-hour block of time to work doesn’t feel the same as an eight-hour block. Writing in pockets of time isn’t as satisfying as devoting a week to revising my book. It’s harder to think when you’re constantly being interrupted and expected to roll with constant disruptions to your schedule.

Distractions and interruptions can take so many forms. My son is singing his own lyrics to Danny Go as I write this post. 😳 If you’re like me, you might be juggling client work, caring for your family, creative projects, community responsibilities, and your health. So much goes into running a functional household, and there are so many demands on our time. Plus there’s so much good TV! And when are we going to market our creative work??? 🤹‍♀️

Infinite Interruptions

To some degree, humans have been struggling with distractions for hundreds if not thousands of years. But modern life also includes what Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky call “infinity pools,” which are apps and other sources of endlessly replenishing content. (Think Instagram, YouTube, and Pinterest.) We all know the experience of scrolling for an hour, only to look up and realize you’ve been doing it way too long, barely remember what you experienced, and feel vaguely icky. In Chapter 5 of Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman says the damage goes beyond the wasted hour, “because the attention economy is designed to prioritize whatever’s most compelling—instead of whatever’s most true or most useful—it systematically distorts the picture of the world we carry in our heads at all times. It influences our sense of what matters, what kind of threats we face, how venal our political opponents are, and thousands of other things—and all these distorted judgments than influence how we allocate our offline time as well.”

This is not a unique take on modern life. Agreeing with many others, Burkeman notes that capitalism and social media have conspired to pull our attention away from our own interests and toward whatever makes someone else more money. But he also believes we are complicit to some degree, because we tend to welcome anything that distracts us from the central truth of Four Thousand Weeks: We will all die, and it will most likely happen sooner than we want it to.

Existential Distractions

Burkeman’s deeper point is there are external and internal distractions, and they’re all jumbled up in a nasty feedback loop. He argues that when we get distracted, we’re often already resisting reality. (If I really wanted to focus on writing this post, I wouldn’t have let my son watch Danny Go or I would go in the other room.) Burkeman believes it’s the things that matter most to us that tend to feel especially tedious or boring in the moment, so we unconsciously seek out distractions or find ourselves more easily distracted. When we turn to those tasks, we must resign ourselves to knowing “this is it.” Each time we pick up our sketchbook or have an idea for a poem, we are confronted with our limits.

ARGH!

Sometimes it feels like we humans are just angsty balls of goo.

Burkeman says, “achieving total sovereignty over your attention is almost certainly impossible.” But he also says, “Your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention.”

No pressure.

I would also venture to say that when you’re doing creative work, what you pay attention to shapes your point of view and personal aesthetic in powerful ways.

So how do we stay focused on what matters?

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