Ambition – A Critical Take on Productivity

How many weeks do you reckon you have left to live? Try to think of an estimate: 5,000? 10,000? Or a courageous guess of 100,000? Well, a person who lives until 80 possesses roughly 4,000 weeks in their lifespan, from the moment they are born to the day they pass away. If you are older than 20, you are well over a quarter of the way through life: well done! 

When I read that we only have 4,000 weeks in our average lifespan in the book ‘‘Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals’’ by Oliver Burkeman, I immediately had two thoughts in my mind: a) life is shorter than we think, and b) I lost a lot of time over roughly the thousand weeks I have lived. My immediate response was to think of myself critically; about how much time I wasted scrolling social media, about how I wished I grew older faster, and about how I was just not focused enough.

A practical response I made, and a quite popular one nowadays, was to turn to methods to make myself more productive. I was making extensive to-do lists, installing the most popular productivity apps, setting some challenging goals for myself, and dividing my entire day into 25-minute chunks. These methods are all backed up by scientific research too: making plans can reduce the executive burden of thinking about unfinished tasks (Schrager & Sadowski, 2016) and chunking up study sessions into 25 minutes of active work with 5 minutes of break in between, as per the Pomodoro Technique, shows to reduce academic procrastination in thesis writing students (Fauzan, 2024). I noticed those changes too; I felt that I was in better control of my life and I was procrastinating a bit less. However, over time, I started to lose control in another way: I was starting to punish myself when I couldn’t fulfill my desired quota of Pomodoro’s a day, or when I was not able to cross out everything in my to-do list, or when I was being distracted by the continuous alerts I kept getting on my phone. I was fueled with the feeling that I was missing out on everything, and seeing how other people were still being productive also made me feel more anxious about my performance. No matter what I did, it did not feel enough. 

This is what Burkeman points out as well, as a ‘‘productivity guru’’ he mentions his experiences with different approaches to productivity and with facing the feeling of being inadequate. In a reflection, he points out that we will never be enough by our standards, because the more we save time by optimizing tasks, the more we feel that we need to fill that time up as well. And when that optimization does not give the results we want, we end up blaming ourselves. We continue to move the goalpost farther each time, even to impossible levels, and compare ourselves against them. He essentially implies that this is a problem of control that we face, in our ambitions in life. 

Studies also show that ambitious individuals are more likely to make sacrifices in family, friendship, and health over their work (Ng. et al, 2007) and are overall less satisfied in their interpersonal relationships (Burke, 1999). Moreover, being fueled by the need to gain the recognition of others, ambitious individuals can be driven to perform extreme behaviors (Resta et al., 2022). Resta et al. (2022) found that, in both Italian and American samples, individuals who scored higher on obsessive passion, where individuals are more likely to abandon needs that conflict with their desire of significance, are more likely to resort to extreme measures to fulfill their goals. 

The studies above do support the claim that ambitious individuals are very goal-driven and that they are willing to make crucial sacrifices to attain their goals. However, there are no implications on how this reflects on their goal-setting behavior. It could be that these individuals set impossible or vague goals for themselves and deprecate when they feel like they have not reached the goal yet. From this, it can also follow that they are more vulnerable to the feeling of never being enough, given that not being able to meet their goals consistently can fuel the thought that perhaps they are the problem. It could be a possible area of interest to see the differences in how ambitious individuals set goals for themselves and how that compares to less ambitious individuals. 

Coming back to Burkeman, he encourages us to think on how we end up setting goals that are vague and hardly attainable is the root cause of our problems and strongly encourages us to think about two alternatives that we can adopt. He encourages his readers to pay themselves first, common in the finance literature, in terms of setting aside time for your personal goals, as “if you plan to spend some of your four thousand weeks doing what matters most to you, then at some point you’re just going to have to start doing it.” Another key advice he gives is to limit your work in progress. He stresses the point that most of us have a lot of items that we deem as equally as important as others. However, we do not have the time or the attentional capacity to focus on every single goal at the same time, and this ends up costing us more than we think. His advice on this matter is to only focus on three clearly defined tasks every day, in order to not make overly ambitious decisions. 

We only have so much time to live. Realizing that it was a miracle to be born, in this day and age, where life on Earth is pretty much a miracle itself, we must cherish all the time we have. Or as Burkeman puts it, ‘‘Why treat four thousand weeks as a very small number, because it’s so tiny compared with infinity, rather than treating it as a huge number, because it’s so many more weeks than if you had never been born?”