About Oliver Burkeman

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Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

The average human lifespan is absurdly, insultingly brief. Assuming you live to be eighty, you have just over four thousand weeks.

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 readers 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.

Always somewhat nervously punctual, I have now advanced to the point where I prefer to get to the airport a solid three hours early, allowing for a meal, cocktail, and some uninterrupted reading time. This has transformed an experience that once induced anxiety into actual leisure. I’m not, as you might infer from this fact, someone who likes to wring as much productivity as I can from each day.

I hate to start by making this all about myself, but “Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals,” Oliver Burkeman’s new work of almost meta self-help, is — even more than most books — going to be about whoever is reading it at the moment, and in this case that just happened to be me.

How would you spend a week if you knew it was your last? Questions don’t get more personal than that. Burkeman says that we’re closer to being in that position at all times than it’s comfortable to recognize. The book’s first sentence, which gets repeated for emphasis on the last page, is: “The average human life span is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short.” (About 4,000 weeks, on average; thus the title.)

For more than a decade, Burkeman, a British journalist based in New York, wrote a regular series for The Guardian called This Column Will Change Your Life, in which he explored “routes to mental well-being,” both earnestly and skeptically. A previous book of his was called “The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking.”

Burkeman’s work could sit comfortably on a shelf next to the books published by Alain de Botton’s School of Life, literary-flavored advice on love, friendship, work, and other conundrums. Burkeman cites everyone from Nietzsche and Seneca to Rod Stewart and Danielle Steel to make his points.

His primary one is to stop trying so hard. “Nobody in the history of humanity has ever achieved ‘work-life balance,’ whatever that might be,” he writes, “and you certainly won’t get there by copying the ‘six things successful people do before 7 a.m.’”

Besides, getting more done is just a way of inviting … more to do. “Every time you reply to an email, there’s a good chance of provoking a reply to that email, which itself may require another reply, and so on and so on, until the heat death of the universe.”

In place of checklists of things to do before you’re fully awake or paths for getting to inbox zero, Burkeman offers some history lessons, a bit of Buddhist philosophy here and there, and a few actual tips. (“The real measure of any time management technique is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things.”)

Early in the book, we revisit the era of medieval farmers, who, Burkeman says, didn’t even think of or experience time as “an abstract entity — as a thing.” Nature and necessity provided a rhythm for days and tasks, and they simply followed that rhythm. But then somewhere along the line (hashtag capitalism?) “time became a thing that you used,” a resource that you could feel bad about mishandling. Burkeman wants to “prompt us to question the very idea that time is something you use in the first place.” (He enjoys italics.)

One of the ways to do this is to exercise a Buddhist-like detachment and acceptance. “The world is already broken,” Burkeman writes, and so is the possibility of your making the most of your time. In the face of the tyranny of choice, you can find freedom (and presumably stress relief) in understanding that “you’re guaranteed to miss out on almost every experience the world has to offer.”

He lost me a little when he wrote about time being a “network good,” something that’s best optimized among groups of people in order to “socialize, go on dates, raise children, launch businesses, build political movements, make technological advances” — but that’s only because, aside from socializing, I don’t really want to do any of those things.

No contemporary guide to time management can ignore the need to ignore our phones, and Burkeman pauses to acknowledge the attention plague. After describing his use of Twitter, he says he’s “now in recovery.” (In addition to Twitter, I’ve spent a not-insignificant portion of the prime of my life playing various anagram games on my phone. You?)

In the end, some of Burkeman’s advice (“focus on one big project at a time,” “keep a ‘done list’”) seems disappointingly traditional, given how good he is at puncturing his genre’s pieties. As another example, he is withering on one page about the mindfulness mandate to “be here now.” (“It’s like trying too hard to fall asleep, and therefore failing.”) Then, near the book’s end, he counsels us to “pay more attention to every moment, however mundane.”

But part of the pleasure of reading Burkeman is that you assume he would happily point out these same reversals and contradictions. His tone is not confident or hectoring; he’s in the same leaky boat we’re in, just trying to stop things up where he can.

Despite my airport habits, there are things I want to accomplish in this life. And some of Burkeman’s modest suggestions about how to prioritize things, without simply adding stress about prioritizing things to life, seem well worth trying. And 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.