Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

I heard Oliver Burkeman on a podcast talking about this book. (Turns out he's been on many!) The message resonates with me so deeply - that there's only so much time in our lives. There's an opportunity to be more willing to be pro-active AND let go of perfectionism. There are things I will get done and there are things I won't get done. The more willing I am to surrender to that fact, perhaps, the easier my life will go / feel. Every "system" of getting things done seems to suggest that we can do it all, when we can't. I'm working on acceptance of that. And this book is a profound help. Now I'm on Burkeman's newsletter and really soaking in his reflections about life and death and limitations. I want to live fully in the time I have. This book is a meditation on that.

To every person terrified of wasting time; to every person who could no longer enjoy the pleasures of life; to every person who forgot how to rest; to every person who forgot the meaning of leisure; to every person feeling the need to justify and earn their existence - this is the book for you.

I listened to the audio book and immediately bought the book for my gf to read. Loved it.

I've just finished and I'm itching to start the second read through - this book is an easy read but holds so many difficult and wonderful ideas

Interesting in so many ways. I found myself often pausing just to digest the implications. Well researched and put together.

In a world saturated with endless self-help books, Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks is not your average self-help book. There are no lists to make or color code; there are no empty platitudes about finding the strength to be your best self, productive, accomplished and in control of your time and life. No, Burkeman tells us that we are only here for 4,000 weeks if we’re lucky enough, so we better stop trying to strive to be this idealized version of ourselves who is on top of everything. It’s impossible. We need to get over it.What I enjoyed about this book was the blunt manner in which I was told to relinquish the unending desire to master my time. Life is unpredictable. There will never be enough time to do everything and if we keep thinking that once we get our act together and get organized, things will finally be fine. This mindset takes us away from the beauty of life’s spontaneity, the joy of relationships, and keeps us in a perpetual state of reaching toward an elusive goal that never gets accomplished. The bottom line is that life is unpredictable, we’re not alive for very long, and we need to get used to the reality that we need to live in the present and stop planning for this future, perfect , smooth sailing life we’re at which we’re trying to arrive.

Excellent read. Every chapter is interesting and rolls into the next while at the same time stacking on top of one another in a profound way. How to form a meaningful life by not forming a meaningful life is the message I took. Maybe it won’t have the same effect on you and it shouldn’t or doesn’t have to but for me, it gave me more clarity than I have ever received in my life so far. Thank you for sharing Mr. Burkeman.

To start, this is a new-age philosophy book. This isn't about tips and tricks to manage your time but our beliefs around time and how those beliefs shape the quality and productivity of our lives. Like many said, most of the ideas are not original and the book is well written.After reading this book, I was in a bit of a slump for a week and a half. I figured, I'm going to die. I'm not going to accomplish the things I want to accomplish. Apparently hope is meaningless (which is my biggest problem with this book). In a sense, I believe this is what the author was looking to accomplish and shock us by giving the reader a "reality check".So why 3 stars? Hope. Yes, there are people that "only hope" and don't get around to actually doing anything. These are your "thoughts and prayers" folk that pop up in the news who pretend they care to make themselves look good or feel better for just a moment. But just because some misuse hope doesn't make it useless or harmful. Sometimes all you have is hope and faith. There is no logical reason for you to believe you can succeed, yet you believe anyways. "Hope is independent of the apparatus of logic." The refugee in a war torn country trying to survive and give their child a better life, what reason do they have to hope? Yet they hope anyways and that's what leads them to take action. As humans, we need that emotional and illogical reason to keep going.Some other things I question... Often we CAN accomplish much more than we believe. Yes, obviously I can't accomplish everything in the world and my time is finite. Obviously I shouldn't be constantly living and planning for the future and not living in the moment. Yet, look at how far humanity has come. Go tell people 5000 years ago that we will have airplanes and the internet.I don't write a ton of reviews but felt compelled to write this. My point is that there is a balance. One can be too hopeful and optimistic but also stray too far to the other side. Your goals can be too lofty and grandiose but you can also limit yourself and never set out to reach your highest potential. The author paints his ideas as black and white, right and wrong.That's not to say there isn't a lot of great information in this book. In particular, the idea that if we do everything right and push ourselves, there will be a time in the future where all our problems and stress will go away. So constantly waiting for this moment or turning point where we can start truly living our lives. This is a fantasy that I think most can relate to on some level.So again, not a bad book. Many refreshing but unoriginal ideas packed into one neat book. But: "Hope is a good thing, may be the best of the things. And a good thing never dies."

The ideas in this book are floating around in the ether at the moment. It's the antidote to the productivity, work smart, squeeze every moment philosophy that's been around for 20 or 30 years. There's books about rest, 4 day week initiatives and a growing realisation that trying to be more productive is only making us more stressed. So I think it's fair to say that Burkeman won't be the only person to write this book, but I do think he will have written the best and most thoughtful iteration of it.A self proclaimed productivity geek, Burkeman has come to a lot of the same conclusions that have started to bug me over the last few years. Time is finite. No matter how efficient we get we'll never do everything we feel we're supposed to do. The answer he says is to acknowledge our limitations and be honest with ourselves that the life we're living right now is what we have.By stopping struggling against the limits of time we can enjoy what we're doing right now, and really invest and commit to it. Instead of believing we're capable of engaging with every opportunity the modern world presents to us, we have to make hard choices about what we really want to do. What if you weren't trying to get somewhere? What if you accepted that you're already as here as you're ever going to be, what would you do then? He highlights the peril the instrumentalisation of time, always doing something for what might happen in the future. Taking a picture of fireworks so you can enjoy it later instead of enjoying the moment.It's not necessarily an easy thing to do. Because the theme that runs through the book is that you genuinely can't do everything you want to do, and not doing some things means giving up on some of your dreams. But it is liberating to realise that actually, it doesn't matter in the end, you can let go and really focus on what you're doing. It means trading in a flawless fantasy where you do everything perfectly for the messy reality where you do a handful of things in ways you might fail at. It means giving up certainty to some extent, since committing to something means taking a path without knowing exactly where you're going. But the alternative is to go nowhere.It's a level headed read that takes in a wide range of influences from philosophy and other writers, to great effect as the wisdom of the book is much deeper than you would expect from what is technically a tome about time management. I've highlighted all the way through and I'll definitely be returning to it to absorb it more fully.There aren't really any tricks or frameworks to subscribe to. A while ago I read books on techniques on how to make better choices, how I could weigh up each option and make the "right" choice. It's more like a guide to confronting reality, accepting that you will fail and you will make the wrong choices sometimes. But that's ok, and it's a lot less stressful than trying to maintain the impossible standard of always choosing right, always filling your time in the right way.

All my life I’ve struggled with time guilt - whatever I was doing I felt guilty that I should be doing something else. When my children were little I felt I should be doing chores when I was with them & vice versus. I’ve corrected that over the years and know what is important to me & spend more time on the things I love. But still felt pressured to do more with my life - always striving for something in the future - this book addresses all that & I had more than 1 “ oh my god” moments when it seemed like it was reading my mind. It is uncanny! Here’s the thing - you CANT do everything & achieve everything. I still have plans but this book has taken a weight off my mind & given me permission to enjoy the moment I’m in & life I’m living now!! Highly recommend - I read it cover to cover in 1 day!!

For the last 40 years I have been trying to perfect my time management skills, optimise all aspects of my life and have suffered anxiety over my ever increasing lists of things to do. This book has rescued me from this trap. In recent years I had been developing a sense of somehow being conned by so many lifestyle tips that treat people as a machine and the author here has articulated that problem really well. I am utterly utterly grateful to him for revealing so many hidden truths. I have never read anything as useful to somebody as obsessive as me to turn around my thinking.

The book has some very good passages and I highlighted quite a few in the first part of the book. However, there are very few paragraph breaks and one observation/insight flows continually into the next. This makes it hard to digest and really quite tiring. I feel that the author could really use a good editor to sort things out a bit better and provide a better journey through the book.In regards of the content, the book is really quite philosophical and is valuable for getting you to stand back and look at your life, your attention and quality of life. Despite the continual torrent of sentences, it is a worthwhile read.

Four Thousand Weeks is a good book with lots of ideas for wanting to get oneself organised and focused on relevant, big things, rather than the small, less significant things in life that can get in the way and bog down more important projects. As I read the book, I felt that much of what Burkeman advocates chimes very much with my own ideas about productivity.Burkeman outlines his thesis at the very start, writing:“The real problem isn’t our limited time. The real problem – or so I hope to convince you – is that we’ve unwittingly inherited, and feel pressured to live by, a troublesome set of ideas about how to use our limited time, all of which are pretty much guaranteed to make things worse.”There is little to disagree with in Four Thousand Weeks. Most of the advice is useful and evidenced based as Burkeman guides his readers through a labyrinth of self-help, organisational and productivity tips, some of which are very good and worth taking on board. Others, put to the test, fall to the wayside.His own ideas, which amount to using one’s time well by focusing mainly on a few key projects, only adding new projects when initial key ones are completed, is a fairly loose way of putting it, for there is more detail and nuance in Burkeman’s approach.For example, when referring to Stephen Covey’s parable of the rocks in the jar, he writes: “The critical question isn’t how to differentiate between activities that matter and those that don’t, but what to do when far too many things feel at least somewhat important, and therefore arguably qualify as big rocks.”In addition, Burkeman writes particularly well. There is the occasional flourish into the long, abstract sentence; though this is the exception rather than the rule. For most part, ideas were expressed clearly throughout the book and generally easy to comprehend. And there are some great stories along the way, such as the one about Franz Kafka being torn between his work and love for Felice Bauer.The book is also full of quotable passages. Here are three, though I could have picked many more.“Productivity is a trap. Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster.”“The technologies we use to try to ‘get on top of everything’ always fail us, in the end, because they increase the size of the ’everything’ of which we’re trying to get on top.”“One can waste years this way, systematically postponing precisely the things one cares about the most.”All in all, I would recommend Four Thousand Weeks for it has much to offer, whether you agree with Burkeman’s ideas or not.I hope you find my review helpful.