Four Thousand Weeks

Time Management for Mortals

De: Oliver Burkeman

Narrado por: Oliver Burkeman

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

This program is read by the author.

"Burkeman and his irresistible British accent shifted my paradigm a couple centimeters . . . 'The day will never arrive when you have everything under control,' he calmly whispered in my ear, and I think I believed him." - Vulture

"The philosophical tone of his delivery is perfect for [Burkeman's] thoughtful message: We can enjoy life more if we appreciate the present moment, stay in touch with our deeper selves, and nurture our connections with people and the natural world." - AudioFile Magazine

"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 listeners 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.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux

©2021 Oliver Burkeman (P)2021 Macmillan Audio

Do less for a more fulfilling life

Astute advice for cutting through the many distractions that keep us from doing the things that are truly meaningful to us, our family and friends. Recognize that you cannot do it all regardless of what the myriad time management schemes tell us. Gain peace and satisfaction by choosing to do fewer things more fully and be OK with saying goodbye to all the rest. From a reader who once described her job as a ten thousand-headed monster.

Just Different Enough

It's hard to find a new angle in time-management advice. I'm not sure this book is dramatically different, but it was different enough to engage me.

What caught me by surprise is that usually personal development books make audacious promises to help discover who you are or what you are meant to be, but then provide a bunch of oversimplified time-management or organizational tactics. This book appears to be a time-management book, but is really much more philosophical and attempts to challenge the fundamental thinking about how we approach time.

The key takeaway is that people try to do way more than they can ever do in a lifetime but are unwilling to give anything up. We always want to keep our options open, which leads to making only marginal progress on any one of your big goals. Sort of like Cal Newport's Deep Work approach but applied more broadly. And it's a little different from other advice which tells people to eliminate the things that don't make them happy in order to focus on what does, but Burkeman says the list of things that might make us happy is probably too long so there's a need to cut some of those goals as well.

Overall, I didn't feel like he completely wrapped up the philosophical angle, and rambled a bit in the end. And definitely the practical advice felt kind of thrown in. But I got some good stuff out of it and enjoyed the listen.

Attention is reality

This book prompted me to stop and write many thoughts and save several clips, probably more than any other. Brilliant book. So timely. I’m recommending to everyone I know.

It’s much deeper than your typical ‘get ahead in business self help.’ In fact, it makes many of them silly by comparison.

Read it!

Loved the delightful & rich narration

The content truly makes you feel more relaxed with the time you use when approaching your daily life. Though, not in the sense of procrastinating more, instead by valuing the time you get as a gift, making every moment worth and by consequence using it the right way.
Thanks!

get this

loved it. this is now one of my top 3 favorite books. i do not think there will ever be a better time management book.

Phenomenal!

As soon as I finished listening to this audio book, I immediately started it over and listened to it again — it’s that good.

The liberation of insignificance!

What a great contribution to the challenging topic of time / life management and mortality! I enjoyed the narration, the writing style and the deep and digestible contemplation… along with practical advice to top it all off. Highly recommend ✅

Essential truths we often forget

If you're a productivity junkie, this book is definitely what you need. I never was one, so most of the ideas presented here seem quite obvious to me, and the fact that some of them are repeated more than once in different words is often annoying.
Still, there are interesting facts and historical allusions in this book thar make it worth listening in any case. Besides, the performance is quite impressive - I loved the accent, the intonation, and the timbre.

Inspiring!

Who knew it could be so liberating to embrace finitude? This is a refreshing and rejuvenating alternative to much of the time-management/productivity-guru style of advice out there. The author is also an excellent reader.

A cathartic dose of reality

Overall, listening to this book was a very valuable use of part of my 4,000 weeks. I feel that I gained a lot from it... the ability to relax, the genuine understanding that things take the time that they take, and better skills for using my time in a way that feels good to me and prioritizes what I actually care about.

One thing that I did not enjoy was the author's take that we should "settle" in our relationships. There is some middle ground between settling, and striving for absolute perfection, and I think that that is where we should land rather than either extreme. Maybe this is ultimately what the author was trying to convey, but it wasn't elaborated enough to get beyond sounding like you should just deal with a relationship that is sub par because you can't have what you really want.