Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

by Oliver Burkeman

Book Overview

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

Provocative and appealing . . . well worth your extremely limited time. --Barbara Spindel, The Wall Street Journal

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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374159122
• ISBN13: 9780374159122
• Release Date: August 2021
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.93 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.7" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Unbelievably Good!

The author has interesting and helpful observations about our common perspectives on life and its meaning. I highly recommend this book. Oliver Burkeman wrote a weekly column for The Guardian until recently. It is still possible to go to The Guardian website and read many of his columns.