Four Thousand Weeks

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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.

*Includes an interview with James Hollis*NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
BRONZE MEDALIST FOR THE 2022 AXIOM BUSINESS BOOK AWARD FOR PERSONAL FINANCE / RETIREMENT PLANNING / INVESTING

Praise for Four Thousand Weeks:

“In addition to whatever help it might offer, 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

“Provocative and appealing . . . An enjoyable, insightful, and occasionally profound book, one well worth your extremely limited time.”
―The Wall Street Journal

“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

“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. His writing will challenge you to rethink many of your beliefs about getting things done―and you’ll be wiser because of it.” 
―Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Think Again and host of WorkLife

“The time management book that many of us need . . . insightful and thought-provoking.”
—Forbes

“Burkeman is the self-help writer for people like me who find self-help books oversold on magical transformations . . . Four Thousand Weeks is full of such sage and sane advice, delivered with dry wit and a benevolent tone.”
—The Guardian (UK)

“Four Thousand Weeks will challenge and amuse you. And it may even spur you on to change your life.” 
— Evening Standard (UK)

“How do we use our time better, not only for productivity, but for our own happiness? That’s the question that lies at the heart of Burkeman’s wide-ranging exploration, which urges readers to let go of getting everything done and learn to ‘neglect the right things’” 
―The New York Times, Editor’s Choice

“A wonderfully honest book, Four Thousand Weeks is a much-needed reality check on our culture’s crazy assumptions around work, productivity and living a meaningful life.”
—Mark Manson, bestselling author of Everything is F*cked and The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck.

“There is only one productivity book I can recommend and that is Oliver Burkeman’s brilliant Four Thousand Weeks.”
—The Times (UK)

“Oliver Burkeman provides an important and insightful reassessment of productivity. The drive to get more done can become an excuse to avoid figuring out what we actually want to accomplish. Only by confronting this latter question can we unlock a calmer, more meaningful, more resilient approach to organizing our time.”
—Cal Newport, New York Times bestselling author of A World Without Email and Deep Work

“Life is finite. You don’t have to fit everything in. Enjoy your life. Breathe out. Read this book and wake up to a new way of thinking and living.”
― Emma Gannon, author of The Multi-Hyphen Method

“Four Thousand Weeks is a book to read and re-read, to absorb and reflect on. Compassionate, funny and wise, it has not left my mind since I read it. The modern world teaches us to pretend to be immortal―this book is a dip in the cold, clear waters of reality, returning us refreshed and alive.”
―Naomi Alderman, author of The Power

“I have long loved Oliver Burkeman’s wise and witty journalism that both interrogates and elevates the ‘self-help’ realm―revealing its possibilities for absurdity while honoring the deeper human impulses that it meets. Four Thousand Weeks is a splendid offering in that spirit. This book is at once sobering and refreshing on all that is truly at stake in what we blithely refer to as ‘time management.’ It invites nothing less than a new relationship with time―and with life itself.”
―Krista Tippett, host of On Being

“A beautiful, uplifting read. Reading Oliver Burkeman, I feel my shoulders relax and my mouth curl into a smile of admiration. Witty, modest and refreshingly sane.”
― Robert Webb, author of How Not to Be a Boy

“I loved this book – it’s a celebration of all that is most human: a deep dive into the value and potency of our finitude. Where we might buckle under pressure and uncertainty, Oliver quietly restores our centre of gravity within. You’ll emerge from his writing fortified by wonder.”
― Derren Brown, author of Happy

“Insightful . . . Burkeman’s thoughtful, reassuring analysis will be a welcome balm to readers feeling overwhelmed by the (perhaps unrealistic) demands of life.”
―Publishers Weekly

“What sounds like a straightforward self-help book is actually a deep reflection on the nature of time and how humans have historically dealt with it.”
—Austin Kleon, New York Times bestselling author of Steal Like An Artist

“Part self-help book, part philosophical treatise, Four Thousand Weeks is a call to arms to live a happier, more fulfilling life.”
―Independent.ie

“[A] work about how our obsession with productivity can cause us to lose sight of what is most important within our all-too-short lifespans.”
―Areo Magazine

“I love . . . [the] new best-selling book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. It’s profound, life-changing, and offers a rather simple solution to the madness.”
―Metro UK

“Four Thousand Weeks . . . is about making the most of our finite lives in a world of impossible demands, relentless distraction, and political insanity.”
—The Washington Post

“[A] splendid book.”
—Tim Harford, author of How to Make the World Add Up
 
“[A] lively, entertaining, philosophical guide to time and time management, setting aside superficial efficiency solutions in favor of reckoning with and finding joy in the finitude of human life.”
—Next Big Idea Club

“Four Thousand Weeks advocates for an embrace of the finitude of our short time here. Drawing from the wisdom of ancient philosophers, spiritual leaders, and psychologists alike, Burkeman urges readers to accept that being the most productive might not mean being the most fulfilled.”
—New York Post


Oliver Burkeman is the author of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals as well as The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking and HELP! How to Become Slightly Happier and Get a Bit More Done. For many years he wrote a popular column for The Guardian, ‘This Column Will Change Your Life’, on psychology, productivity, self-help culture, and the science of happiness. His writing has also appeared in The Observer, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Psychologies magazine and New Philosopher. A resident of Brooklyn, New York for more than a decade, he lives with his wife and son in the North York Moors in England.Introduction: In the Long Run, We’re All Dead
 
The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short. Here’s one way of putting things in perspective: the first modern humans appeared on the plains of Africa at least 200,000 years ago, and scientists estimate that life, in some form, will persist for another 1.5 billion years or more, until the intensifying heat of the sun condemns the last organism to death. But you? Assuming you live to be eighty, you’ll have had about four thousand weeks.

Certainly, you might get lucky: make it to ninety, and you’ll have had almost 4,700 weeks. You might get really lucky, like Jeanne Calment, the Frenchwoman who was thought to be 122 when she died in 1997, making her the oldest person on record. Calment claimed she could recall meeting Vincent van Gogh—she mainly remembered his reeking of alcohol—and she was still around for the birth the first successfully cloned mammal, Dolly the sheep, in 1996. Biologists predict that lifespans within striking distance of Calment’s could soon become commonplace. Yet even she got only about 6,400 weeks.

Expressing the matter in such startling terms makes it easy to see why philosophers from ancient Greece to the present day have taken the brevity of life to be the defining problem of human existence: we’ve been granted the mental capacities to make almost infinitely ambitious plans, yet practically no time at all to put them into action. “This space that has been granted to us rushes by so speedily and so swiftly that all save a very few find life at an end just when they are getting ready to live,” lamented Seneca, the Roman philosopher, in a letter known today under the title On the Shortness of Life. When I first made the four- thousand- weeks calculation, I felt queasy; but once I’d recovered, I started pestering my friends, asking them to guess—off the top of their heads, without doing any mental arithmetic—how many weeks they thought the average person could expect to live. One named a number in the six figures. Yet, as I felt obliged to inform her, a fairly modest six- figure number of weeks—310,000—is the approximate duration of all human civilization since the ancient Sumerians of Mesopotamia. On almost any meaningful timescale, as the contemporary philosopher Thomas Nagel has written, “we will all be dead any minute.”

It follows from this that time management, broadly defined, should be everyone’s chief concern. Arguably, time management is all life is. Yet the modern discipline known as time management—like its hipper cousin, productivity—depressingly narrow-minded affair, focused on how to crank through as many work tasks as possible, or on devising the perfect morning routine, or on cooking all your dinners for the week in one big batch on Sundays. These things matter to some extent, no doubt. But they’re hardly all that matters. The world is bursting with wonder, and yet it’s the rare productivity guru who seems to have considered the possibility that the ultimate point of all our frenetic doing might be to experience more of that wonder. The world also seems to be heading to hell in a handcart—our civic life has gone insane, a pandemic has paralyzed society, and the planet is getting hotter and hotter—but good luck finding a time management system that makes any room for engaging productively with your fellow citizens, with current events, or with the fate of the environment. At the very least, you might have assumed there’d be a handful of productivity books that take seriously the stark facts about the shortness of life, instead of pretending that we can just ignore the subject. But you’d be wrong.

So this book is an attempt to help redress the balance—to see if we can’t discover, or recover, some ways of thinking about time that do justice to our real situation: to the outrageous brevity and shimmering possibilities of our four thousand weeks.
 
Life on the Conveyor Belt
 
In one sense, of course, nobody these days needs telling that there isn’t enough time. We’re obsessed with our overfilled inboxes and lengthening to- do lists, haunted by the guilty feeling that we ought to be getting more done, or different things done, or both. (How can you be sure that people feel so busy? It’s like the line about how to know whether someone’s a vegan: don’t worry, they’ll tell you.) Surveys reliably show that we feel more pressed for time than ever before; yet in 2013, research by a team of Dutch academics raised the amusing possibility that such surveys may understate the scale of the busyness epidemic—because many people feel too busy to participate in surveys. Recently, as the gig econ-omy has grown, busyness has been rebranded as “hustle”—relentless work not as a burden to be endured but as an exhilarating lifestyle choice, worth boasting about on social media. In reality, though, it’s the same old problem, pushed to an extreme: the pressure to fit ever- increasing quantities of activity into a stubbornly nonincreasing quantity of daily time.

And yet busyness is really only the beginning. Many other complaints, when you stop to think about them, are essentially complaints about our limited time. Take the daily battle against online distraction, and the alarming sense that our attention spans have shriveled to such a degree that even those of us who were bookworms as children now struggle to make it through a paragraph without experiencing the urge to reach for our phones. What makes this so troubling, in the end, is that it represents a failure to make the best use of a small supply of time. (You’d feel less self- loathing about wasting a morning on Facebook if the supply of mornings were in-exhaustible.) Or perhaps your problem isn’t being too busy but insufficiently busy, languishing in a dull job, or not employed at all. That’s still a situation made far more distressing by the shortness of life, because you’re using up your limited time in a way you’d rather not. Even some of the very worst aspects of our era—like our viciously hyperpartisan politics and terrorists radicalized via YouTube videos—can be explained, in a roundabout way, by the same underlying facts concerning life’s brevity. It’s because our time and attention are so limited, and therefore valuable, that social media companies are incentivized to grab as much of them as they can, by any means necessary—which is why they show users material guaranteed to drive them into a rage, instead of the more boring and accurate stuff.

Then there are all those timeless human dilemmas like whom to marry, whether to have children, and what kind of work to pursue. If we had thousands of years in which to live, all those would be far less agonizing, too, since there’d be sufficient time to spend decades trying out each kind of possible existence. Meanwhile, no catalog of our time-related troubles would be complete without mentioning that alarming phenomenon, familiar to anyone older than about thirty, whereby time seems to speed up as you age—steadily accelerating until, to judge from the reports of people in their seventies and eighties, months begin to flash by in what feels like minutes. It’s hard to imagine a crueler arrangement: not only are our four thousand weeks constantly running out, but the fewer of them we have left, the faster we seem to lose them.

And if our relationship to our limited time has always been a difficult one, recent events have brought matters to a head. In 2020, in lockdown during the coronavirus pandemic, with our normal routines suspended, many people reported feeling that time was disintegrating completely, giving rise to the disorienting impression that their days were somehow simultaneously racing by and dragging on interminably. Time divided us, even more than it had before: for those with jobs and small children at home, there wasn’t enough of it; for those furloughed or unemployed, there was too much. People found themselves working at strange hours, detached from the cycles of daytime and darkness, hunched over glowing laptops at home, or risking their lives in hospitals and mail- order warehouses. And it felt as though the future had been put on hold, leaving many of us stuck, in the words of one psychiatrist, “in a new kind of everlasting present”—an anxious limbo of social media scrolling and desultory Zoom calls and insomnia, in which it felt impossible to make meaningful plans, or even to clearly picture life beyond the end of next week.

All of which makes it especially frustrating that so many of us are so bad at managing our limited time—that our efforts to make the most of it don’t simply fail but regularly seem to make things worse. For years now, we’ve been deluged with advice on living the fully optimized life, in books with titles such as Extreme Productivity and The 4- Hour Workweek and Smarter Faster Better, plus websites full of “life hacks” for whittling seconds off everyday chores. (Note the curious suggestion, in the term “life hack,” that your life is best thought of as some kind of faulty contraption, in need of modification so as to stop it from performing suboptimally.) There are numerous apps and wearable devices for maximizing the payoffs from your workday, your workouts, and even your sleep, plus meal replacement drinks like Soylent to eliminate time wasted eating dinner. And the chief sell-ing point of a thousand other products and services, from kitchen appliances to online banking, is that they’ll help you achieve the widely championed goal of squeezing the most from your time.

The problem isn’t exactly that these techniques and products don’t work. It’s that they do work—in the sense that you’ll get more done, race to more meetings, ferry your kids to more after- school activities, generate more profit for your employer—and yet, paradoxically, you only feel busier, more anxious, and somehow emptier as a result. In the modern world, the American anthropologist Edward T. Hall once pointed out, time feels like an unstoppable conveyor belt, bringing us new tasks as fast as we can dispatch the old ones; and becoming “more productive” just seems to cause the belt to speed up. Or else, eventually, to break down: it’s now common to encounter reports, especially from younger adults, of an all- encompassing, bone-deep burnout, characterized by an inability to complete basic daily chores—the paralyzing exhaustion of “a generation of finely honed tools, crafted from embryos to be lean, mean production machines,” in the words of the millennial social critic Malcolm Harris.

This is the maddening truth about time, which most advice on managing it seems to miss. It’s like an obstreperous toddler: the more you struggle to control it, to make it conform to your agenda, the further it slips from your control. Consider all the technology intended to help us gain the upper hand over time: by any sane logic, in a world with dishwashers, microwaves, and jet engines, time ought to feel more expansive and abundant, thanks to all the hours freed up. But this is nobody’s actual experience. Instead, life accelerates, and everyone grows more impatient. It’s somehow vastly more aggravating to wait two minutes for the mi-crowave than two hours for the oven— or ten seconds for a slow- loading web page versus three days to receive the same information by mail.

The same self- defeating pattern applies to many of our attempts to become more productive at work. A few years ago, drowning in email, I successfully implemented the system known as Inbox Zero, but I soon discovered that when you get tremendously efficient at answering email, all that happens is that you get much more email. Feeling busier—thanks to all that email—I bought Getting Things Done, by the time management guru David Allen, lured by his promise that it is “possible for a person to have an overwhelming number of things to do and still function productively with a clear head” and “what the martial artists call a ‘mind like water.’ ” But I failed to appreciate Allen’s deeper implication—that there’ll always be too much to do—and instead set about at-tempting to get an impossible amount done. In fact, I did get better at racing through my to- do list, only to find that greater volumes of work magically started to appear. (Actually, it’s not magic; it’s simple psychology, plus capitalism. More on that later.)

None of this is how the future was supposed to feel. In 1930, in a speech titled “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” the economist John Maynard Keynes made a famous prediction: Within a century, thanks to the growth of wealth and the advance of technology, no one would have to work more than about fifteen hours a week. The challenge would be how to fill all our newfound leisure time without going crazy. “For the first time since his creation,” Keynes told his audience, “man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem—how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares.” But Keynes was wrong. It turns out that when people make enough money to meet their needs, they just find new things to need and new lifestyles to aspire to; they never quite manage to keep up with the Joneses, because whenever they’re in danger of getting close, they nominate new and better Joneses with whom to try to keep up. As a result, they work harder and harder, and soon busyness becomes an emblem of prestige. Which is clearly completely absurd: for almost the whole of history, the entire point of being rich was not having to work so much. Moreover, the busyness of the better- off is contagious, because one extremely effective way to make more money, for those at the top of the tree, is to cut costs and make efficiency improvements in their companies and industries. That means greater insecurity for those lower down, who are then obliged to work harder just to get by.

 . . .

Four Thousand Weeks is yet another book about making the best use of time. But it is written in the belief that time management as we know it has failed miserably, and that we need to stop pretending otherwise. This strange moment in history, when time feels so unmoored, might in fact provide the ideal opportunity to reconsider our relationship with it. Older thinkers have faced these challenges before us, and when their wisdom is applied to the present day, certain truths grow more clearly apparent. Productivity is a trap. Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster. Nobody in the history of humanity has ever achieved “work-life balance,” whatever that might be, and you certainly won’t get there by copying the “six things successful people do before 7:00 a.m.” The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control— when the flood of emails has been contained; when your to- do lists have stopped getting longer; when you’re meeting all your obligations at work and in your home life; when nobody’s angry with you for missing a deadline or dropping the ball; and when the fully optimized person you’ve become can turn, at long last, to the things life is really supposed to be about. Let’s start by admitting defeat: none of this is ever going to happen.

But you know what? That’s excellent news.US

Additional information

Dimensions	0.7000 × 5.1000 × 8.0000 in
Imprint	Penguin Canada
Format	General Trade
ISBN-13	09780735232488
ISBN-10	0735232482
Author	Oliver Burkeman
Audience	General / adult
BISAC	PSY036000, BUS088000
Subjects	self development, time management for mortals, time and how to use it, books best sellers 2021, best selling books 2021, books best sellers 2023, non fiction books, BUS088000, self improvement books, motivational gifts, personal development books, inspirational gifts, change your life, mortality, business books, self improvement, to do list, time management, productivity, work life balance, habit, motivational books, inspirational books, habits, mental health books, self help books, graduation gifts, nonfiction, PSY036000, spirituality