Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

by Oliver Burkeman

***🏆 A Five Books Book of the Year ***

Recommendations from our site

“I love this book so much. He’s an amazing writer. He was the productivity guru for The Guardian, so every single week he would try out a different productivity hack. He was obviously someone who was quite obsessed with productivity—but realised that ‘inbox zero,’ smashing deadlines, so that you can produce more and more is a trap. This book is all about his realisation that it’s all a bit of a scam: there is no finish line, no trophy for doing the to-do list every day.” Read more...

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Emma Gannon, Journalist

“It’s a book about what we do with our limited time on Earth, how we decide to prioritise and proportion our time. To that extent it’s a book of ethics in the face of inevitable death. It’s a combination of sometimes witty, sometimes terrifying exploration of the human condition, and at the same time an antidote to those time management books that tell you how you can maximise your productivity, taking on more and more tasks and completing them efficiently.” Read more...

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Nigel Warburton, Philosopher

The book, according to the author

The other thing that’s worth saying is that time is an extremely weird phenomenon. It can’t be managed, at least in the way that money or physical possessions can be managed. It just keeps implacably rolling on. Everyone gets 24 hours a day, and you can’t put any of it aside to save for later. And you never know if you’re going to get another moment of it.

Part of my own book, Four Thousand Weeks, is based on exploring this question. What goes wrong with our efforts at time management is treating time as something we can manage in that straightforward way. We can’t, so the attempt to do so leads to various perverse effects, leaving us busier or more stressed, or living less meaningful lives, because the project at its core is flawed.

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