Four Thousand Weeks: Embrace your limits. Change your life. Make your four thousand weeks count.

Four Thousand Weeks is a good book with lots of ideas for wanting to get oneself organised and focused on relevant, big things, rather than the small, less significant things in life that can get in the way and bog down more important projects. As I read the book, I felt that much of what Burkeman advocates chimes very much with my own ideas about productivity.Burkeman outlines his thesis at the very start, writing:“The real problem isn’t our limited time. The real problem – or so I hope to convince you – is that we’ve unwittingly inherited, and feel pressured to live by, a troublesome set of ideas about how to use our limited time, all of which are pretty much guaranteed to make things worse.”There is little to disagree with in Four Thousand Weeks. Most of the advice is useful and evidenced based as Burkeman guides his readers through a labyrinth of self-help, organisational and productivity tips, some of which are very good and worth taking on board. Others, put to the test, fall to the wayside.His own ideas, which amount to using one’s time well by focusing mainly on a few key projects, only adding new projects when initial key ones are completed, is a fairly loose way of putting it, for there is more detail and nuance in Burkeman’s approach.For example, when referring to Stephen Covey’s parable of the rocks in the jar, he writes: “The critical question isn’t how to differentiate between activities that matter and those that don’t, but what to do when far too many things feel at least somewhat important, and therefore arguably qualify as big rocks.”In addition, Burkeman writes particularly well. There is the occasional flourish into the long, abstract sentence; though this is the exception rather than the rule. For most part, ideas were expressed clearly throughout the book and generally easy to comprehend. And there are some great stories along the way, such as the one about Franz Kafka being torn between his work and love for Felice Bauer.The book is also full of quotable passages. Here are three, though I could have picked many more.“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.”“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.”“One can waste years this way, systematically postponing precisely the things one cares about the most.”All in all, I would recommend Four Thousand Weeks for it has much to offer, whether you agree with Burkeman’s ideas or not.I hope you find my review helpful.

Thought provoking book, that is completely different to other time management books, and a much more realistic response. Though haven’t given five stars as I don’t think last chapter does the earlier ones justice and doesn’t round the book off. I think I will dip back into the book and to see where the final chapter might have gone.

The ideas in this book are floating around in the ether at the moment. It's the antidote to the productivity, work smart, squeeze every moment philosophy that's been around for 20 or 30 years. There's books about rest, 4 day week initiatives and a growing realisation that trying to be more productive is only making us more stressed. So I think it's fair to say that Burkeman won't be the only person to write this book, but I do think he will have written the best and most thoughtful iteration of it.A self proclaimed productivity geek, Burkeman has come to a lot of the same conclusions that have started to bug me over the last few years. Time is finite. No matter how efficient we get we'll never do everything we feel we're supposed to do. The answer he says is to acknowledge our limitations and be honest with ourselves that the life we're living right now is what we have.By stopping struggling against the limits of time we can enjoy what we're doing right now, and really invest and commit to it. Instead of believing we're capable of engaging with every opportunity the modern world presents to us, we have to make hard choices about what we really want to do. What if you weren't trying to get somewhere? What if you accepted that you're already as here as you're ever going to be, what would you do then? He highlights the peril the instrumentalisation of time, always doing something for what might happen in the future. Taking a picture of fireworks so you can enjoy it later instead of enjoying the moment.It's not necessarily an easy thing to do. Because the theme that runs through the book is that you genuinely can't do everything you want to do, and not doing some things means giving up on some of your dreams. But it is liberating to realise that actually, it doesn't matter in the end, you can let go and really focus on what you're doing. It means trading in a flawless fantasy where you do everything perfectly for the messy reality where you do a handful of things in ways you might fail at. It means giving up certainty to some extent, since committing to something means taking a path without knowing exactly where you're going. But the alternative is to go nowhere.It's a level headed read that takes in a wide range of influences from philosophy and other writers, to great effect as the wisdom of the book is much deeper than you would expect from what is technically a tome about time management. I've highlighted all the way through and I'll definitely be returning to it to absorb it more fully.There aren't really any tricks or frameworks to subscribe to. A while ago I read books on techniques on how to make better choices, how I could weigh up each option and make the "right" choice. It's more like a guide to confronting reality, accepting that you will fail and you will make the wrong choices sometimes. But that's ok, and it's a lot less stressful than trying to maintain the impossible standard of always choosing right, always filling your time in the right way.

Just so good....

Easy to read and make sense of. Puts things into perspective and encourages you to make the most of your life in whatever way you feel is right.

This book made me anxious, but it was an anxiety I had been postponing to feel. It made me realize what had been knocking the back of my mind for years and yet remained there, ignored, suffocated in the midst of endless chores and an ever accelerating to-do list.Your time is finit, and what you can do with it is finite. You won't be able to do all that you want, but perhaps all that wanting is actually misguided. To want to much may be a symptom of not really being here, "now".On the other hand, "being here now", as new age types often promote, is not exactly to be pursued in the same way such spiritual people day that you should. It's an uncomfortable feeling, and there are traps and pitfalls that inhabit this proposition or desire to "be here now". Falling into these traps makes us behave in a way that actually mirrors the productivity meatgrinder that is the attitude towards life pushed by the current culture.This is not a mumbo jumbo self help "you can do it", nor is it some "lite feel age" book for you to feel good. It's a cold bath and a wake-up call. It will make you feel uncomfortable, not because of some new fact but rather because it will make you pay attention to what you've been avoiding.

As a devoted productivity geek, I immediately got on the waitlist for a Kindle copy at my library. Once I finally got it, I was delighted.The real measure of any time management technique is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things.The premise of Four Thousand Weeks is that an average person lives for only four thousand weeks. What will you do with that time? All of human history has taken approximately 310,000 weeks. We are but a blip, and knowing this, Burkeman asks the reader, how will you get everything done?We don’t. Plain and simple.Arguably, time management is all life is. Yet the modern discipline known as time management—like its hipper cousin, productivity—is a 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.Burkeman advocates not for Pomodoro techniques, bullet journals, and habit trackers but for actively choosing what you won’t do. He explains how we strive for things like Inbox Zero or crossing things off our to-do lists only for more things to find their way into our email and onto our lists. The key, Burkeman shares, is not eschewing stuff you don’t want to do in favor of what you do want to do but choosing what matters most for your time of all the things you do want to do. For example, you may not want to go to your upcoming reunion, so saying no to that event in favor of going on a vacation might be easy. We must genuinely manage our time when we want to spend time with our partner, write a book, learn to ski, adopt a pet, decorate cakes, and take a vacation. It’s much more challenging to choose what you won’t do when you genuinely want to do the things on your list.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.There are dozens of great quotes throughout Four Thousand Weeks. I love the thought that you can only have three things or projects going on at any given time. To take on a new project, you must finish or quit one of your other three. I also appreciated how Burkeman addresses side hustle culture and burnout culture, which seems prevalent in the millennial generation (hi! That’s me!).…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.He also describes hobbies as critical, but it’s okay if you feel silly talking about them with others because you do them out of pure enjoyment – not with the goal you might one day monetize it.When an activity can’t be added to the running tally of billable hours, it begins to feel like an indulgence one can’t afford. There may be more of this ethos in most of us—even the nonlawyers—than we’d care to admit.Four Thousand Weeks is the book everyone must read to get over hustle culture and project mindsets. Sometimes the purpose of life is to enjoy existing.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.I instantly loved this book, and it will sit at the top of my recommendations for quite some time.

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If you live by your to-do lists and are in a constant anxious state to get more of it done, you need to read this book. It's not preachy or "self-helpy" at all, it just tells you how it is: you have about 4000 weeks on this planet. Are you going to spend it as a slave to a perfect future that will never exist, or are you going to start living right now?

It took me many months to read this book. I found it after listening to a podcast interview of the author. The message can be boiled down to, you'll more or less live 80 years, and most likely 50% of that is already gone, you'll inevitably find yourself wondering where did the time go, and how little is left, you over plan, and you under execute, you are in a constant state of non-presence due to worry about the future and regret about the past. Well... that's just life. Embrace it, and be glad you have health now and be present in the moment you are experiencing right now. The book never struck me as pop-psi nor too self-help, it seemed like an honest conversation to be had, and to question our existence, forgive ourselves and move on.