Name: Liam Ellul's review of Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman
Item: Four Thousand Weeks
Rating: 2
Author: Liam Ellul

Oliver Burkeman

Time is our biggest worry: there is too little of it. The award-winning, renowned Guardian columnist Oliver Burkeman offers 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 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 struggle 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 obsession with “getting everything done,” Four Thousand Weeks introduces readers to tools for constructing a meaningful life, 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.

Time Management for Mortals

Four Thousand Weeks

Storm

Embracing your limits…means giving up, as far as possible, the master hope that lurks beneath all this, the hope that somehow this isn’t really it - that this is just a dress rehearsal, and that one day you’ll feel truly confident that you have what it takes.

To give up hope…is to reinhabit the power that you actually have.

To hope for a given outcome is to place your faith in something outside yourself, and outside the current moment - the government, for example, or God, or the next generation of activists, or just 'the future' - to make things all right in the end.

Once you no longer feel the stifling pressure to become a particular kind of person, you can confront the personality, the strengths and weaknesses, the talents and enthusiasms you find yourself with, here and now, and follow where they lead.

This quest to justity your existence in the eyes of some outside authority can continue long into adulthood. But 'at a certain age', writes the psychotherapist Stephen Cope, 'it finally dawns on us that, shockingly, no one really cares what we're doing with our life…’

And in exchange for accepting all that? You get to actually be here. You get to have some real purchase on life. You get to spend your finite time focused on a few things that matter to you, in themselves, right now, in this moment.

Once you give up unattainable goal of eradicating all your problems, it becomes possible to develop an appreciation for the fact that life just is a process of engaging with problem after problem, giving each one the time it requires - that the presence of problems in your life, in other words, isn't an impediment to a meaningful existence but the very substance of one.

So maybe it’s not that you’ve been cheated out of an unlimited supply of time; maybe it’s almost incomprehensibly miraculous to have been granted any time at all.

Convenience, in other words, makes things easy, but without regard to whether easiness is truly what's most valuable in any given context.

It wrenches us out of the present, leading to a life spent leaning into the future, worrying about whether things will work out, experiencing everything in terms of some later, hoped-for benefit, so that peace of mind never quite arrives.

Maria Buitrago

One need not be a religious believer to feel some of the deep relief in that idea of being "on the receiving end"in the possibility that today, at least, there might be nothing more you need to do in order to justify your existence.

What's needed instead in such situations, I graduallv came to understand, is a kind of anti-skill: not the counterproductive strategy of trying to make yourself more efficient but rather a willingness to resist such urges — to learn to stay with the anxiety of feeling overwhelmed, of not being on top of everything, without automatically responding by trying to fit more in. To approach your days in this fashion means, instead of clearing the decks, declining to clear the decks, focusing instead on what's truly of greatest consequence while tolerating the discomfort of knowing that, as you do so, the decks will be filling up further, with emails and errands and other to-dos, many of which you may never get around to at all. 

alternative: the unfashionable but powerful notion of letting time use you, approaching life not as an opportunity to implement your predetermined plans for success but as a matter of responding to the needs of your place and your moment in history. 

"We labour at our daily work more ardently and thought- lessly than is necessary to sustain our life," wrote Nietzsche, “because to us it is even more necessary not to have leisure to stop and think. Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself.”

Cloudface

To try to live in the moment implies that you’re somehow separate from the moment, and thus in a position to either succeed or fail at living in it . . . Living more fully in the present may simply be a matter of finally realizing that you never had any other option but to be here now. 

This is something about the internet that I’ve always felt but have never been able to articulate. 

The technologies we use to try to get on top of everything always fail us in the end because they increase the size of the “everything” of which we’re trying to get on top.

Might need to tape this over my workspace 

The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control.

Krystal

In a world geared for hurry, the capacity to resist the urge to hurry—to allow things to take the time they take—is a way to gain purchase on the world, to do the work that counts, and to derive satisfaction from the doing itself, instead of deferring all your fulfillment to the future.

Having all time in the world is not as efficient. Since you will not be able to share it with others. Having unlimited time isn't the answer 

Tam Nguyen

As with money, it's good to have plenty of time, all else being equal. But having all the time in the World isn't much use if you're forced to experience it all on your own. To do countless important things with time-to socialize, go on dates, raise children, launch businesses, build political movements, make technological advances-it has to be synchronized with other people's

Tao Oat

david

Liam Ellul

This became a bit of a chore to finish.

There was no consistent principle or core meaning in the book. 

It felt like a series of rambling hot takes the author had seen reading the internet. As though a collection of saved tweets and productivity articles were bookmarked and then ChatGPT’d into a book.

'I loved this book' DERREN BROWN What if you stopped trying to do everything, so that you could finally get round to what counts? We're obsessed with our lengthening to-do lists, our overfilled inboxes, the struggle against distraction, and the sense that our attention spans are shrivelling. 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. Four Thousand Weeks is an uplifting, engrossing and deeply realistic exploration of the challenge. Rejecting the futile modern obsession with 'getting everything done,' it introduces readers to tools for constructing a meaningful life by embracing rather than denying their limitations. And it shows how 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. Its many revelations will transform the reader's worldview. Drawing on the insights of both ancient and contemporary philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual teachers, Oliver Burkeman sets out to realign our relationship with time - and in doing so, to liberate us from its tyranny. Embrace your limits. Change your life. Make your four thousand weeks count. 'A much-needed reality check on our culture's crazy assumptions around work, productivity and living a meaningful life' MARK MANSON, bestselling author of THE SUBTLE ART OF NOT GIVING A F*CK 'The most important book ever written about time management' ADAM GRANT, bestselling author of THINK AGAIN 'A celebration of all that is most human... You'll emerge from his writing fortified by wonder' DERREN BROWN, bestselling author of HAPPY

Time and How to Use It

A momento mori disguised as a book. The writing is very good with charming narration. While I enjoyed the content, the book took what could be a long form essay and drug it out into a book. 

Brock

Jakob Greenfeld

This one came highly recommended but left me dissapointed. My best theory for why it is so popular is that that it makes lazy unambitious people feel good about themselves. There’s clearly a huge market for that and kudos to Oliver Burkeman for tapping into that.

A simple reminder that your time is important. Cherish it. Protect it. 

Brandon Eckroth

The compelling message that the author makes is to stop cramming more into your days. Call it quits and realize that you won't get to the vast majority of things that you could do in life. So, all that matters is what is in front of you right now, and picking things to do now that are worth your time. 

Overall, it's a good philosophy of time and life. The author makes it seem like every productivity system out there is trying to get you to cram more things into your day, but that ignores the many systems and books that speak about prioritizing what is important and dropping the rest. 

This book is good in terms of giving you a framework on how to think about time and life, and your relationship to "doing". Putting things in perspective and using the notion of "life is short, we are pretty much insignificant, there's something liberating about it" and for that I recommend it. How you prioritize and focus your time is ultimately up to you. 

I found Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport, The Bullet Journal Method by Ryder Caroll, and Essentialism by Greg McKeown to be great complementary books and compelling with great tips on how to navigate the finiteness of time. 

Omar Fernandez

The compelling message that the author makes is to stop cramming more into your days. Call it quits and realize that you won't get to the vast majority of things that you could do in life. So, all that matters is what is in front of you right now, and picking things to do now that are worth your time. 

I enjoyed a few concepts: 

Life is short, 4000 weeks on average.

Once you give up on trying to do it all, you can just focus on one thing and enjoy it. Be present. Joy of missing out (JOMO). 

Time sovereignty, choosing what to do with your time, is nice. But more importantly, is being able to do things with other people (friends, family, community). Giving up some time sovereignty to optimize for group activities is generally a good thing. Even retirees experience a weekend boost because that's when others are off work and happy. 

Digital nomad life sounds appealing because it brings new experiences and gives you time sovereignty, but it deprives you from building community and deepening relationships at home. 

Excitement and new experiences are fine, but better to find novelty in what's already around you. Finding joy and novelty in routine is more sustainable than chasing the next big thing. 

Overall, it's a good philosophy of time and life. The author makes it seem like every productivity system out there is trying to get you to cram more things into your day, but that ignores the many systems and books that speak about prioritizing what is important and dropping the rest. 

This book is good in terms of giving you a framework on how to think about time and life, and your relationship to "doing". Putting things in perspective and using the notion of "life is short, we are pretty much insignificant, there's something liberating about it" and for that I recommend it. How you prioritize and focus your time is ultimately up to you. 

I found Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport, The Bullet Journal Method by Ryder Caroll, and Essentialism by Greg McKeown to be great complementary books and compelling with great tips on how to navigate the finiteness of time. 

I absolutely wnjoyed and needed this book and its reminders, questions and truths. Really enjoyed the in-depth and far reaching analysis of why we see and handle tome the way we do whilst sharing helpful questions and observations.

antonia maria wagner she/they

a capricorn multitasking while listening to this book 🤝 the author telling us that even if you optimize time you can’t control everything 

As someone who loves a good productivity book, this felt worth it for the discussions of our need to want to plan and maximize your hours/days/weeks etc but challenges that sense of control! 

Kyra Cracchiola

a capricorn multitasking while listening to this book 🤝 the author telling us that even if you optimize time you can’t control everything 

As someone who loves a good productivity book, this felt worth it for the discussions of our need to want to plan and maximize your hours/days/weeks etc but challenges that sense of control! 

Jenna

The best self-help book I've ever read. It challenged my perfectionism and provided me perspectives I had never considered before. I never thought productivity needed a crossover with mortality, but after reading this, I'm fully convinced that this should be a must-read for all productivity and self-help geeks. Thanks Anthony for celebrating that it took me less than four thousand weeks to finish this book. 🙄

Rohit Arondekar

A trip down various philosophies and other history of productivity with an emphasis on being aware of the finiteness of life and allowing oneself to focus on what is truly important. This was my first audiobook and I enjoyed listening to the author read his own work.

This was not what I was expecting, but in a good way. I was expecting a book of advice for time management and organization, and instead this book asked me why I want to control everything in my life so badly. It asked me why I’m so worried about “living in the moment” as if it’s possible to fail at living in a moment. It asked me why I always choose what feels safe rather than what will challenge me to grow as a person. This book came to me at the right time, because I’m currently in a position to make some changes in my life, but I’ve been too paralyzed to make a decision. I’m not saying my mind’s made up now, but I definitely feel more okay with the possibility that things might not go the way I planned (something that I have always struggled to accept). 

I gave this book 4 stars because, like many self help books, there were parts where I felt the author was repeating himself, and a few clumsy metaphors that felt like they were pulled out of a “how to write” book. But it was still a great, thought provoking read overall, and I’d highly recommend it to any anxious perfectionist out there who struggles to make choices or get anything done. Like me. 

This was not what I was expecting, but in a good way. I was expecting a book of advice for time management and organization, and instead this book asked me why I want to control everything in my life so badly. It asked me why I’m so worried about “living in the moment” as if it’s possible to fail at living in a moment. It asked me why I always choose what feels safe rather than what will challenge me to grow as a person. This book came to me at the right time, because I’m currently in a position to make some changes in my life, but I’ve been too paralyzed to make a decision. I’m not saying my mind’s made up now, but I definitely feel more okay with the possibility that things might not go the way I planned (something that I have always struggled to accept). 
I gave this book 4 stars because, like many self help books, there were parts where I felt the author was repeating himself, and a few clumsy metaphors that felt like they were pulled out of a “how to write” book. But it was still a great, thought provoking read overall, and I’d highly recommend it to any anxious perfectionist out there who struggles to make choices or get anything done. Like me. 

At the time of reading, a contrarian view on productivity that has actually helped me process my effort and energy more intentionally. 

Deep work and slow productivity by Cal Newport are great compliments to this read.

Jacob Medure

At the time of reading, a contrarian view on productivity that has actually helped me process my effort and energy more intentionally. 

Deep work and slow productivity by Cal Newport are great compliments to this read.

Definitely worth a re-read! Very insightful. 

liya n

Gia Palamos

"Now that you've abandonded your futile efforts to dictate the speed at which the experience moves, the real experience can begin."

"Choose uncomfortable enlargement over comfortable diminishment whenever you can."

Okay, hold your horses—this is not a productivity book. It's the complete opposite, and you need this book as much as I did. 

So good to read this during the busiest month of the year—a good reminder that, just because you're filling up your Google Calendar with all these tasks and events doesn't mean you're using your time wisely—you're doing the complete opposite.

I annotated and tabbed this book like crazy. Get your hands on this. 

Pro tip: Read this with the audiobook narrated by the author himself

Gavin

You're all going home with self-help books
Hidden behind Heat because you're worried about the looks
And you know there is no shame
Because we're all doing the same- Malcolm Middleton

  ...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
- Burkeman

A good defence of quietism, and an actually tasteful self-help book. Still completely unconvincing. I’ll never accept this orientation to life, but I appreciate someone doing it well, and I can even see it as an improvement over the default attitude.

Burkeman was the Guardian’s self-help guru. His job consisted in being tasteful, laundering the insights of dodgy thinkers, making self-help palatable for the upper-middle classes. Here he sprinkles Heidegger and Bergson over much the same porridge of Covey and Ferriss and the secular prosperity gospel. He has the standard list of culprits: industrial standardisation, Calvinism, capitalism, but also egocentric bias.

Premises:

* Medieval peasants were "connected to deep time" and so not anxious like us.
* Work isn't sufficient for a meaningful life
* Work expands to maintain you at your limit
* You should let the size of the universe make you less ambitious ("cosmic insignificance therapy")

---

Why not go for his mindful quietism? 

Burkeman's philosophy is healthier than the default one and still very sickly. 'Surrender! We are time. We are attention. We kill lives whenever we choose.'

But he’s asking us to feel small, to be small. If you are small, it behooves you to adjust your self-image. But it is surprisingly easy to be large, to save lives and all that.

* It’s not enough for me to object that we will eventually solve aging. Even in the posthuman future we will die, even if it’s four billion weeks and not four thousand. The essential morbidity and anxiety will remain, just diluted many times over.

The cosmos doesn't care about me? I don't care that the cosmos doesn't care! Recall Ramsey, a greater sage than any cited by Burkeman:

  The stars may be large, but they cannot think or love; and these are qualities which impress me far more than size does...

My picture of the world is drawn in perspective, and not like a model to scale. The foreground is occupied by human beings and the stars are all as small as threepenny bits. 



Laundering spiritualism, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, the dao. Dodgy thinkers like Jung and Krishnamurti
Peck

There’s a bit about the Mumford anti-industry mindset. (Were peasants bored? No, they had nothing better to do. Were they generally connected to deep time? Doubt it.)

Consider also 80,000 Hours.

The position is something like: Things are meaningful in proportion to the measure they destroy.
This position amuses me. Like I am a vampire of other timelines. Like actuality is a gross assimilator, harvesting measure.

He says that infinite beautiful summers with your family is worse than a finite number. But this is direct contradiction with his mindfulness-as-condition-of-value position! If you can actually be present, what does it matter what number of other summers there are?

—-

Things which actually persuaded me

Against extreme option brain

---

Task-orientation as odd and contingent industrial invention:

  Each hour or week or year is like a container being carried on the belt, which we must fill as it passes, if we’re to feel that we’re making good use of our time. When there are too many activities to fit comfortably into the containers, we feel unpleasantly busy; when there are too few, we feel bored. If we keep pace with the passing containers, we congratulate ourselves for “staying on top of things” and feel like we’re justifying our existence; if we let too many pass by unfilled, we feel we’ve wasted them. 

Assembly lines for the human soul.

---

I like Burkeman. He made himself redundant and admitted it, and when has a newspaperman ever done that? And even if he is facetious about embarrassing low-status topics, that's one up on people who never manage to work on them.

Reading this proved to be pretty rich for me, but almost entirely because he’s clearly wrong about me and mine.

Refreshingly this is NOT another productivity, hustle embracing book of how to do more through whatever efficiency enhancing lifehacks. Instead, it is refreshingly arguing for the opposite - time will pass no matter what you do, then you die. Just give up on doing "everything" , because it will simply not be possible. But also give up on "I must do x, y, z before I can do this..." and instead be present, and embrace that the struggle in life is life itself - not something that must be solved before you do what you really want to do. Quite an easy, engaging, quick read.

Stefan Pettersson

Meghan Navoy

This book is absolutely brilliant and life changing. Several people recommended it to me because it’s just so different than most of what’s out there in the world of spirituality and organizing your time and attention. It’s not super dense reading, I breezed through it fairly easily but wanted it to last longer because I loved it so much. I’ll definitely be re reading this one.

Helped switch my thinking to be more present in all aspects of life. There were a lot of examples provided for each point which also made it difficult for me to finish. 

Nick Gracilla

This should be the first read, for everyone, at the start of 2022's new year. Burkeman takes on the essence of the rotten core of "productivity porn": 

you've got only about 4,000 weeks to live in total, and probably less. So now what? 

I haven't read such a great application of Heidegger, Schopenhauer, phenomenology, or existentialism since grad school days — and here, it's all (heavy a topic as it is, your pending end) clear, honed, and to the point. From philosophy through literature and the arts, Burkeman pulls together generations of thinking on topics of stoicism, fallibility, and our current obsession with productivity. Tools won't cut it. Technology isn't the solution. A better system won't free you. Only a fundamentally different approach to "time management" — one that sees our human experience as essentially not able to 'manage' time — can rescue us.

Ivar K. 

This book actually changed my thinking and my own relationship to time and my struggle for continuous productivity and self-improvement. To be more at ease with the limited time we have on this planet and not to waste it by day in and day out trying to squeeze the most efficient and productive habits etc. into our days. Instead enjoying ourselves and what is now. 

Total recommendation for everyone who overthinks productivity, reads to much self-help stuff and still doesn’t feel accomplished even after reading 20 books, taking courses and trying the newest tools and „lifechanging“ methods to get „more“ out of life 😀

Scott Wilson

The premise of course is that you basically have 4,000 weeks in a lifetime. The surprise is that the author uses this amount of time in the perspective of overall history to emphasize just how little this will matter in the grand scheme of things.

While the main idea being that you shouldn't place too much importance on the tasks that other people have on your to-do lists when the outcomes aren't really that meaningful - what was appealing is that you should instead focus on what will bring you and your North Star goals the most meaning and happiness. After all as a famous band once belted out, 'We're here for a good time, not a long time...."

Definitely worth a read, and I'll be rereading it again once it has some time to sit with me - Here is hoping that the second reading will be able to pull out some bigger nuggets to share with you.

Chris G

Almost every chapter challenges some viewpoint that I have held and thought fixed. Possibly it is just like any other self help book and it is just the time I read it that means something but it summarises and questions so many standard thought processes we get stuck in in these times.

Swastik

Not much new, but the ideas are pretty compelling—the book is well written and engaging!

Sanjay Krishna 

Truly doing justice to the astonishing gift of a few thousand weeks isn't a matter of resolving to 'do something remarkable with them'. Back down from godlike fantasies of cosmic significance into the experience of life as it concretely, finitely- and often enough, marvelously-really is.

Musings on how to live a meaningful, modest life. Partially self-help but largely a philosophical discussion on time, attention ("our life is nothing more- or less- what we pay attention to"), choice, and embracing mortality and "finitude". 

david &
Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman

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