Four Thousand Weeks

Time Management for Mortals

By: Oliver Burkeman

Narrated by: Oliver Burkeman

Length: 5 hrs and 54 mins

Publisher's summary

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

“This is the most important book ever written about time management.”
—Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Think Again and host of WorkLife

What if you stopped trying to do everything, so that you could finally get around to what counts?

Nobody needs to be told there isn’t enough time. Whether we’re starting our own business, or trying to write a novel during our lunch break, or staring down a pile of deadlines as we’re planning a vacation, we’re obsessed with our lengthening to-do lists, overfilled inboxes, work-life balance, and ceaseless struggle against distraction. We’re deluged with advice on becoming more productive and efficient and life hacks to optimize our days. Still, we rarely make the connection between our daily struggles with time and the ultimate time management problem: the question of how best to use our ridiculously brief time on the planet, which amounts on average to about 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 obsession with “getting everything done,” Four Thousand Weeks introduces readers to tools for constructing a meaningful life by embracing finitude, showing that 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 can do things differently.

Embrace your limits. Change your life. Make your four thousand weeks count.

©2021 Oliver Burkeman (P)2021 Allen Lane

Critic reviews

2021, Axiom Business Book Award - Personal Finance / Retirement Planning / Investing, Short-listed

“Burkeman’s work could sit comfortably on a shelf next to the books published by Alain de Botton’s School of Life, literary-flavored advice on love, friendship, work and other conundrums. . . . “Four Thousand Weeks” is [also] just good company; it addresses large, even existential, issues with a sense of humor and an even-keeled perspective. I found that reading it — Burkeman might balk at this particular way of describing it — was a good use of my time.” (The New York Times)

“We all know our time is limited. What we don’t know—but what Oliver Burkeman is here to teach us—is that our control over that time is also limited. This profound (and often hilarious) book will prompt you to rethink your worship of efficiency, reject the cult of busyness, and reconfigure your life around what truly matters.” (Daniel H. Pink, author of When, Drive, and To Sell is Human)

A shifting perspective

The author has used a technique that invites the listener to stay with the author's analysis- right up to the point of reaching a decision or a choice he should make; then "out of the blue" he changes the ground rules and introduces or withholds an action or inaction that is either contrary or at least not exactly congruent with the heretofore assessment. It is a verbal "sleight of hand" that causes the reader to doubt the author's forthrightness. It is cleverly done, but it leaves me wondering about the author's intent. As his story progresses, the author proves to be quite elusive and perhaps self-delusional.

Recovering Perfectionist

I started this book expecting a precise method of how to get everything done and fulfill all my life goals. And finished the book with an astonishing (wonderfully freeing) perspective on my entire life.

Forget all you knew about time management

Amazing book. The author brakes all the dogma around time management and productivity.

This book has helped me dump a ton of performance anxiety and made me remember that we are here for a very limited time.

I've taken so much out of this book !

Life changing!

This was entirely NOT the book that I was expecting- another time management book to organize my life- instead it was a refreshing new way to look at time and what gives life meaning. I highly recommend this to anyone at almost any stage in life.

an absolute must for those who never have time

this book is very well research
lots of great personal and international examples
changed good I think about efficiency
changed my mind about going back to the office
just read it

Be still and listen

Great journey within. Simple things seen in a new light.
A little daunting at first. Stick with it.

Just finishing in now, but not panicking

This book needs two or three passes to have it all sink in. So many fantastic perspectives to create presentness.

If you need to find the balance between going for it and achieving big goals, and have fulfillment in your personal time, this book is a must listen/read.

Don’t worry about not finding it sooner, now is when you were meant to find this book. Enjoy!