FOUR THOUSAND WEEKS: TIME MANAGEMENT FOR MORTALS
By Oliver Burkeman
“What would you do differently with your time, today, if you knew in your bones that salvation was never coming, that your standards had been unreachable all along, and that you’ll never manage to make time for all you hoped you might?”
This is a book about time…
The premise of this brilliant book by Oliver Burkeman is that the average human lifespan is ‘absurdly, insultingly brief. Assuming you live to be eighty, you have just over four thousand weeks.’
And we ‘spend’ so much of the time we do have obsessing about our to-do lists and inboxes, getting distracted by - well, everything. We desperately try to make our lives more productive and efficient with life hacks that can often work against us and a misguided focus on ‘getting the wrong things done’ . But time, Burkeman argues, is like an ‘obstreperous toddler: the more you struggle to control it, to make it conform to your agenda, the further it slips from your control.’
This is a fascinating and enlightening book stuffed full of wisdom from ancient and contemporary philosophers, psychologists and spiritual teachers. In it, Burkeman creates a new approach to time management centred on the premise that if we only have four thousand weeks on earth, how can we best use them? In light of the ‘existential overwhelm’ that we are faced with, and the widening gap between what we would ideally like to do and what we actually can do, how can we embrace the limits of our time and in turn be rewarded with a renewed sense of freedom and focus.
Burkeman gives practical advice on how to reframe your time - by prioritising your most important activities above the ‘clearing the decks’ trap, to limit your work-in-progress projects, to understand you’ll have to make trade-offs and be prepared to ‘settle’ on the one thing that you want to focus on rather than trying to do everything (ahem - massive note to self there). To be ok to rest and ‘waste’ some of your time and ‘refrain from using every spare hour for personal growth’ (preach!) and to ‘stop postponing the “real meaning” of your existence in to the future, and throw yourself into life now.’
At the end of the book he offers ‘Ten Tools for Embracing Your Finitude’ which include focusing on one big project at a time, deciding in advance what to fail at, embracing boring and single purpose technology and practicing doing nothing.
It’s such an important book - one of the best I’ve read in a long time, and I simply can’t do it justice in this little synopsis. Just go read it and prepare to have your mind just a tiny bit blown.