Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
Author: Oliver Burkeman
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Goodreads | The StoryGraph
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Cover Description
The average human lifespan is absurdly, insultingly brief. Assuming you live to be eighty, you have just over four thousand weeks.
Nobody needs telling there isn’t enough time. We’re obsessed with our lengthening to-do lists, our overfilled inboxes, work-life balance, and the ceaseless battle against distraction; and we’re deluged with advice on becoming more productive and efficient, and “life hacks” to optimize our days. But such techniques often end up making things worse. The sense of anxious hurry grows more intense, and still the most meaningful parts of life seem to lie just beyond the horizon. Still, we rarely make the connection between our daily struggles with time and the ultimate time management problem: the challenge of how best to use our four thousand weeks.
Drawing on the insights of both ancient and contemporary philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual teachers, Oliver Burkeman delivers an entertaining, humorous, practical, and ultimately profound guide to time and time management. Rejecting the futile modern fixation on “getting everything done,” Four Thousand Weeks introduces readers to tools for constructing a meaningful life by embracing finitude, showing how many of the unhelpful ways we’ve come to think about time aren’t inescapable, unchanging truths, but choices we’ve made as individuals and as a society—and that we could do things differently.
TL;DR Review
For me, personally, the arrival of Four Thousand Weeks in my lap felt life-changing. I’m going to be recommending it to my fellow burned-out, anxious millennials for a long time.
For you if: You are searching for the feeling of being on top of absolutely everything so that you can finally relax — but you can never find it.
Full Review
To make a long story short, this book cracked open my world, and I think it’s going to change my life. It may or may not be as impactful for you — I happen to have read at a time when I not only needed it, but was ready to hear the things it says.
The book is for people who find themselves stretched thin, not by an inability to say no to others but by an inability to say no to themselves. People who are hungry to squeeze as much into their days and to-do lists and calendars as possible. People who are searching for the feeling of being on top of absolutely everything so they can finally relax. (People like me.) The three quotes below explain it better than I could, so I’ll let you read them for more on what the book’s about.
In Four Thousand Weeks, Burkeman is saying something that feels necessary and different. I listened to the first few chapters on audio, and then I went back to my print copy with a highlighter and read them over again to make sure that I’d really absorbed it. I’m probably going to re-read it. And I’m definitely going to be recommending it to my fellow stressed, anxious, burned-out millennials for a long time.
“The problem with trying to make time for everything that feels important—or just for enough of what feels important—is that you definitely never will. The reason isn’t that you haven’t yet discovered the right time management tricks or supplied sufficient effort, or that you need to start getting up earlier, or that you’re generally useless. It’s that the underlying assumption is unwarranted: there’s no reason to believe you’ll ever feel ‘on top of things,’ or make time for everything that matters, simply by getting more done.”
“Rendering yourself more efficient—either by implementing various productivity techniques or by driving yourself harder—won’t generally result in the feeling of having ‘enough time,’ because, all else being equal, the demands will increase to offset any benefits. Far from getting things done, you’ll be creating new things to do.”
“The harder you struggle to fit everything in, the more of your time you’ll find yourself spending on the least meaningful things. … The reason for this effect is straightforward: the more firmly you believe it ought to be possible to find time for everything, the less pressure you’ll feel to ask whether any given activity is the best use for a portion of your time. Whenever you encounter some potential new item for your to-do list or your social calendar, you’ll be strongly biased in favor of accepting it, because you’ll assume you needn’t sacrifice any other tasks or opportunities in order to make space for it … If you never stop to ask yourself if the sacrifice is worth it, your days will automatically begin to fill not just with more things, but with more trivial or tedious things, because they’ve never had to clear the hurdle of being judged more important than something else.”