Yesterday morning a pastor friend messaged me to ask if I had followed up on a brother who had gone through very difficult and complex relational problems. I had walked with that brother for a while and wanted to follow up with him. I’m sure I told him that I would. More than a year has passed and I still had not met up with him. The query from my pastor friend was a sharp reminder that I had failed to do what I said I would. It then dawned on me that there were many others whom I had planned to follow up on and had not. I was just swamped with many things to do and didn’t have the bandwidth to do all I wanted to. I had to come to terms, again, that I couldn’t do everything I wanted to.
Recently I picked up a book entitled Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman. It was the subtitle that caught my eye. Burkeman writes:
In practical terms, a limit-embracing attitude to time means organising your days with the understanding that you definitely won't have time for everything you want to do, or that other people want you to do — and so, at the very least, you can stop beating yourself up for failing. Since hard choices are unavoidable, what matters is learning to make them consciously, deciding what to focus on and what to neglect, rather by letting them get made by default — or deceiving yourself that, with enough hard work and the right time management tricks, you might not have to make them at all. [1]
Burkeman’s basic thesis is that we all live with limited time. If we live till 80, we have four thousand weeks of life, hence the title of his book. If I lived till 85, I would have about 730 weeks of life left on this earth. Clearly, I cannot do all that I want to both in the long run and in the short run. Realising this is an “Icy Blast of Reality” (Burkeman, 32). He points out that a lot of time-management approaches are aimed at helping us squeeze even more things to do from the limited time that we have. We may end up doing more but we will never ever get the sense that we are on top of things and have done everything we wanted to do.
We are obsessed with our overfilled inboxes and lengthening to-do list, haunted by the guilty feeling that we ought to be getting more done, or different things done, or both. . . . Surveys reliably show that we feel more pressed for time than ever before. (Burkeman, 5–6)
Interestingly, in 1981 Henry Nouwen had made a similar observation. He wrote:
One of the most obvious characteristics of our daily lives is that we are busy. We experience our days as filled with things to do, people to meet, projects to finish, letters to write, calls to make, and appointments to keep. Our lives often seem like overpacked suitcases bursting at the seams. In fact, we are almost always aware of being behind schedule. There is a nagging sense that there are unfinished tasks, unfulfilled promises, unrealized proposals. There is always something else that we should have remembered, done, or said. There are always people we did not speak to, write to, or visit. Thus, although we are very busy, we also have a lingering feeling of never really fulfilling our obligations. [2]
And Nouwen made his observation before computers became ubiquitous!
So what can we do? I am still working through the book and rereading Nouwen’s. I am reflecting on Scripture, and on my life. Whatever is involved, it means I must grow in my ability and courage to say “yes” and “no” to the many demands of life. To say “yes” to something is de facto to say no to other things, since we all have limited time, energy, and attention. Therefore we must be realistic and intentional in the choices we make as to how we are to spend the currency that is life.
Jesus died in His early thirties. This is so much shorter than 80 or 85. Yet He could say to the Father: “I have brought you glory on earth by finishing the work you gave me to do” (John 17:4 NIV). We have a clue as to how He managed to do this. He only did what the Father told Him to do (John 5:19; 8:28). Jesus was busy but never rushed. He lived His life with divinely directed intentionality. We appreciate Burkeman for his “icy blast of reality”. That may be the essential first step. But we need to go beyond that. In the increasingly noisy world we live in, we really need to say “no” to all sorts of things so that we can say “yes” to listening to His voice.
[1] Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (London: Penguin Random House, 2021), 32.
[2] Henri Nouwen, Making All Things New, (New York, NY: Harper One, 1981), 23–24.