“This is the most important book ever written about time management. Oliver Burkeman offers a searing indictment of productivity hacking and profound insights on how to make the best use of our scarcest, most precious resource.”
— #1 New York Times bestselling author Adam Grant
We’re living on borrowed time. “The average human lifetime is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short,” says acclaimed author and writer Oliver Burkeman. If we’re lucky enough to live until we’re 80, we get just four thousand weeks. Yet most of us spend much of that time over-extended, feeling pressured to meet impossible societal demands—to “get everything done”—rather than optimizing our enjoyment of the time we have through meaningful work and building fulfilling lives with those we love.
The pandemic brought home just how short life is and caused many of us to rethink how to better apportion our time between jobs, family, friends and community. Most time management gurus preach becoming more efficient and maximizing every minute. But Burkeman contends that approach doesn’t meet the post-pandemic moment and leaves us more stressed, anxious, and isolated from each other.
In his new book, FOUR THOUSAND WEEKS: Time Management for Mortals (on sale August 10, 2021), Burkeman provides a thought-provoking blend of philosophical musings and practical advice on how to shed our self-imposed expectations. He says the real solution may seem counterintuitive and at first a little scary: we need to acknowledge our limits, embrace the joys of missing out, focus on getting meaningful things done and let the rest go.
In FOUR THOUSAND WEEKS: Time Management for Mortals (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 978-0-374-60313-7; August 10, 2021), Burkeman offers a truly revolutionary, “anti-time-management” approach to the way we live. Drawing on history, philosophy and science—but most saliently on the familiar experiences of all of our everyday lives—he inks a blueprint for less stressful living. We must accept the truth of our finitude and make choices, Burkeman insists. A self-described recovering “productivity geek” himself, Burkeman invites us to drop the futile struggle to carry off the impossible and focus on what’s “gloriously possible” instead, escape the “efficiency trap,” and find our moorings by making peace with “settling.” Burkeman explains why:
· The central challenge of time management isn’t becoming more efficient, it’s deciding what to neglect
· Trying to clear the decks is impossible: the decks just fill up again faster
· Patience—the willingness to let things take the time they take—is a superpower
· In a world of limitless choice, burning your bridges beats keeping your options open
· The lure of too much convenience can erode the pleasures of life
· We’ve fallen out of sync with each other: communal ritual is enriching
Practical as well as thought-provoking, FOUR THOUSAND WEEKS also offers useful tools for embracing our finitude.
“I began this book before the pandemic, but I honestly think it couldn’t be more timely,” Burkeman says. “The last year left many of us feeling utterly unmoored from our familiar routines. As we re-emerge, we have a unique opportunity to reconsider what we’re doing with our time – to construct lives that do justice to the outrageous brevity, and shimmering possibilities, of our four thousand weeks.”
Oliver Burkeman is the author of The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking and wrote a popular long-running column on psychology for The Guardian, “This Column Will Change Your Life.” His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Psychologies, and New Philosopher. He lives in New York City. His website is www.oliverburkeman.com/books.
