Four Thousand Weeks

By Oliver Burkeman

Four Thousand Weeks - Oliver Burkeman
  • Release Date: 2021-08-10
  • Genre: Self-Improvement
Score: 4.5
4.5
From 268 Ratings

Description

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.

Reviews

  • Great book! Easy to read!

    5
    By JeffinJapan1972
    Loved all the anecdotes and practical advice.
  • An insightful book that challenges you

    5
    By dagamer34
    Their book challenges you to eschew ways of thinking how to get more done, by proclaiming it’s not possible to do it all. Everything is a choice, and focusing on intently making choices, many of which close doors to other opportunities, is where we find what life is all about. A good read, and worthy of reading again to soak it all in!
  • excellent observation on our relation to time.

    4
    By Big Daddy Mas
    Very good book on our dilemma with time. Read this in one week and it has me rethinking how I look at time and time management(a misnomer) and approaching my day accepting the present and determining a few essentials.
  • Worth it

    5
    By mpm318
    I’m a really harsh critic of books but what, on the surface, appears to be a book about time management ends up being an existential look on how humans interact with time. Think about trying to understand health without first understanding how the human body works… I’ll recommend this book a lot.
  • Reframing Time Management

    4
    By Christian Simamora
    A critique and then helpful reframe of the “time management industrial complex” towards something more aligned with our actual reality as human beings that will die and can’t get everything done. There were new ideas I hadn’t considered previously and old ones I was reminded of. A helpful and thought provoking read.
  • Read the Cliffnotes

    1
    By MikeN!n9
    After three chapters of reading the same thing over and over in different words, I lost interest.