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You get about 4,000 weeks
Four Thousand Weeks
With luck, a person gets about four thousand weeks on earth. That count turns out to be freeing, because it ends the habit of keeping impossible lists of the novels to write, the skills to master, the countries to visit, and the languages to learn.
There is an infinite number of things worth wanting and a finite life to spend on them, so the sensible response is to make deliberate choices. The alternative is to fritter away time as though life never ends, and then run into the painful realization that it does.
General Magic's Crunch
General Magic hit that realization when its alliance partners lost patience and demanded a product urgently. Engineers built bunk beds in the office to work around the clock, and everyone was exhausted. The product was still late, with too many coin flips and walking lemons and too few streamlined, responsive, useful apps.
Why count a life in weeks?
Oliver Burkeman used the figure as the title of his 2021 book Four Thousand Weeks. Writer Tim Urban published a 2014 chart called Your Life in Weeks that drew a lifetime as a grid of boxes, one for each week. A week is the unit most people use to plan work, which makes it a practical scale. Eighty years contains about 4,160 weeks.
Why does overtime stop adding output?
Stanford economist John Pencavel studied British munitions workers from World War I and found that output rose with hours up to a point and then flattened. His 2014 paper reported that workers on 70 hours produced almost nothing more than workers on 56 hours. Output per hour fell steadily as the week grew longer.
Why do unfinished tasks nag at us?
Psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik reported in 1927 that people remember interrupted tasks better than completed ones. The effect is called the Zeigarnik effect. In 2011, researchers E. J. Masicampo and Roy Baumeister found that making a specific plan for an unfinished goal reduced intrusive thoughts about it.
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