While reading Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman, I dog-eared many pages and found a number of essential reminders for the writer’s life.

Writing Lessons from Four Thousand Weeks

Fair warning: if you’re not in a grounded state of mind to read about a somewhat existential topic, save it for another day. (Four thousand weeks is the number of weeks we all have on average to live, assuming we live to age eighty.) 

Lesson 1: Working with a constant form of imbalance 

One suggestion for making the most of your time is the idea of “failing on a cyclical level,” meaning you simply accept that some seasons you’ll be working on your manuscript while getting behind on work or household tasks, and another season you’ll be leading a work project while giving up on your workout routine. It’s not quite that simple in practice, and everyone will have a much more nuanced approach, but there’s something to be said for accepting that we can’t do all the things all the time. 

Lesson 2: The next most necessary thing 

This phrase comes from a letter written by Carl Jung in 1933 to answer common questions on the proper conduct of life. Jung wrote: “The individual path is the way you make for yourself, which is never prescribed, which you do not know in advance and which simply comes into being itself when you put one foot in front of the other.” His advice for walking this path was simply to “quietly do the next and most necessary thing.” Lovely.

Lesson 3: Watching and waiting 

Perhaps one of the more difficult tasks in the writer’s life is “enduring the discomfort of not knowing.” Though Oliver is quick to point out that it’s often in this moment that a solution will present itself: “We’re made so uneasy by the experience of allowing reality to unfold at its own speed that when we’re faced with a problem, it feels better to race toward a resolution—any resolution, really…”  This only gives us a false sense of control. Being a writer means learning to recognize this—to pause when we need to rest, to set work aside when it needs to sit, to go about our day and our week and let the knot unravel on its own. In my experience, it almost always does. The only thing I don’t know is when the answer will arrive. 

Lesson 4: Things take as long as they take 

Without saying it directly, the book very much suggests that accepting things take the time they take is an essential part of living. I’ve softened into this over the years, but didn’t begin my writing career with this ethos. I remember before I started to write Eat This Poem, I was so frustrated by the fact that other food bloggers were announcing cookbook deals while I was still waiting. My five-year journey to publication was mine alone, and was exactly what I needed. (It’s not always easy to remember this in the moment, of course!)

Lesson 5: The discomfort of what matters 

I’m still chewing on this one. Mary Oliver calls the inner urge to distract “the intimate interrupter,” or an inner self that promises things will be easier if you direct yourself away from discomfort. In our case, the manuscript. The book also makes the case that using social media to distract us isn’t about limiting the act itself, but about getting to the root cause. If we force ourselves off of social media, we’ll find another way to distract ourselves from doing what really matters (or what we think matters). How many times have you walked away from your notebook because the laundry needed doing that minute? What we think of as distractions aren’t the ultimate cause of our being distracted. “They’re just the places we go to seek relief from the discomfort of confronting limitation.” Oh, how very true this feels.