I was expecting a time management book and instead got a book on philosophy.... the philosophy of time management. Overall I found this book very useful and timely in my life, especially his discussion of Stephen Covey's rock and jar analogy -- which, as he points out, ignores the fact that we all have too many big rocks to fit them all into the jar. However the book felt like perhaps it took the idea that there will never be enough time a little too far? Also, as I page back through the book, I find that it is hard to find the parts that seemed very illuminating as I read it. Perhaps this would be a good book to listen to in the car on a yearly basis so I can pick out one or two things to focus on as I listen.

This book was very intriguing and unlike other time management books out there. A few, among many points that the author based his thesis, were the fact that we all need to come to terms with and accept the finite nature of our life, we don't have time to do everything, no matter how much we rearrange our schedule or work, so prioritizing is essential, and we need to more fully live in the present moment. The book is filled with interesting philosophies and insights that extend well beyond that, though those are some of the main ideas. I didn't agree will all of his assertions, but overall, found his thought process compelling. His prose was very engaging and made the book extremely enjoyable to read.

I am one of those people who constantly tries to manage my time better. I love lists, apps, charts and books that promise to help me become the kind of person who accomplishes far more. I constantly beat myself up for not doing more of the stuff other people get done. My house is never tidy, I have never stuck to any kind of exercise routine, our homeschooling has always been one part magic and two parts mayhem, our living room wall has been half painted for years, and I am quite likely to be found in the bathtub reading in the middle of the day instead of finally catching up on the piles of laundry for our large family. Right now I should be finishing the rough draft for a book I got a grant to write and instead I am here on Goodreads. So this book was right up my alley.

It turns out I'm doing a lot more right than I ever realized and I don't really want to change anymore. I've learned that there is not enough time for a fraction of the stuff I could ever do and that's okay. I've come to realize that I really like my life and I am getting done all the things that really matter to me (time with my family, foraging, canning, cooking, teaching my kids, writing books, reading books, helping people, playing, spending time with awesome people, putting out a free monthly nature magazine for kids, starting a community arts center in a 120-year-old church we bought...). It's okay that the house is probably always going to be messy and that I will probably always exercise, homeschool, clean, garden and live in great bursts and long pauses. I don't need lists or apps or ways to squeeze productivity out of every minute of my day.

Don't worry - the book does still offer some really good advice about "time management" and how to work with the time you've got. It may not be what you're expecting, but it's all really good stuff. Each chapter expands on another really insightful concept about time and the ridiculous notion of managing it, in addition to the stuff that really doesn't work like multi-tasking. It offers really good suggestions and insights, and it's just plain good reading.

I read over 300 books in an average year and there are always just a handful that are my favorites. This is definitely one of my favorites for 2021. I loved, loved, loved it.

I read a digital ARC of this book via NetGalley.

Most of us wrestle (and lose) the battle of valuing productivity at all costs. This wonderful new book helps us win the fight with time in our approximately four thousand weeks.

"Assuming you live to be eighty, you’ll have had about four thousand weeks."

In our moments of "existential overwhelm" Burkeman advises us to "approach 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."

In a way, Burkeman is telling us to just surrender to time. We'll always have too much to do and not enough time to do it. Give up on trying.

"Once you truly understand that you’re guaranteed to miss out on almost every experience the world has to offer, the fact that there are so many you still haven’t experienced stops feeling like a problem. Instead, you get to focus on fully enjoying the tiny slice of experiences you actually do have time for—and the freer you are to choose, in each moment, what counts the most."

It's in the giving up--the accepting of reality--that our victory comes. It draws us to pay attention to the better things.

"At the end of your life, looking back, whatever compelled your attention from moment to moment is simply what your life will have been. So when you pay attention to something you don’t especially value, it’s not an exaggeration to say that you’re paying with your life."

"This dream of somehow one day getting the upper hand in our relationship with time is the most forgivable of human delusions because the alternative is so unsettling. But unfortunately, it’s the alternative that’s true: the struggle is doomed to fail."

If you're looking for the best way to use your four thousand weeks, add in a few hours for this book. I highly recommend it.

My thanks to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Girouxfor the review copy of this book.

Thanks to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and NetGalley for an advance copy of this book. I loved it so much I have bought a copy, and plan to give more as gifts!

I’ve been a fan of Burkeman’s since his first book, The Antidote, which is a long-time favorite of mine. I loved the way Burkeman reviewed positive psychology through a skeptical lens, and somehow came out with perhaps the most useful, meaningful self-help book I’ve read yet. (I genuinely still think about that book, almost a decade later). When I learned that he had written a book about productivity, I could not wait to read it, and was so delighted to receive an early copy.

Well, it’s simply the best nonfiction book I’ve read in years. It’s provocative, entertaining, and genuinely useful. The ideas in this book will improve your life, and even if you read a fair amount of self-help and productivity, I doubt you’ve heard them before.

There are a lot of mind-expanding insights here, but the key one is that to be a productivity nerd is to feel existential anxiety. The premise of the productivity genre is that if we can just get our lives ever-more optimized, we need never face the reality that we can’t, in fact, do everything that we care about. Burkeman says we have to start by admitting defeat: our time is limited, and the future we imagine when we’ve become our most self-actualized, accomplished selves, with inboxes empty and goals achieved, is a fun-house mirror that keeps us separate from our real lives.

I don’t want to spoil too much of this book in advance, because it’s an absolute joy to read: Burkeman’s writing crackles, he has such big and original ideas, he illustrates those ideas with lively and unfamiliar examples (did you know that the Soviets experimented for decades with their own work week?! Do you know why it failed??), and he’s just so damned humane. He balances his counterintuitive ideas with practical, actionable advice, which, I can say with confidence, have already improved my productivity and mental health way more than a pomodoro timer ever did.

If you’re interested but not ready to commit, (or if like me you’re a devoted fan of Burkeman’s already!), I highly recommend Burkeman’s twice-a-month newsletter, the Imperfectionist, which you can find on his website oliverburkeman.com.

I had a hard time managing my time to be able to read this book! I think that a lot of it is common sense, but a lot of it takes some amount of time to absorb and think about how it might be applicable to one's own life. Thus said, it's a good read for those that really want to dig deep, but I think it could have been slightly more concise.

Thank you to NetGalley for an advance copy of this book.

Do we need another time management book and what is 4000 weeks? This is what I asked myself before launching into Oliver Burkeman’s “Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals”, but I was wrong - I did need this book!

Four thousand weeks is a human lifespan, and with a philosophical opening Burkeman reflects on how we have the mental capacity for infinite plans yet no time to put it into action. It’s not about time management in a work sense, but life management nd that’s the crucial point. We are busy, distracted and bad at managing our limited leisure time nd then feel that it should be productively spent. “Admit defeat” Burkeman says.

We have inherited ideas about how to use out limited time, got caught in an efficiency trap and bottomless bucket lists. Stop clearing the decks, he says, claim back time and rediscover rest. Leisure as we know it is defined by its usefulness but leisure isn’t means to another end. We never really have time and Hofstadter’s law says that any task will take longer than we expect.

Burkeman has three rules of patience, five deep questions to ask yourself and ten tools of which the last is “practice doing nothing”. It’s gonna be hard but I’m trying to break the productivity habit.😉👊

A self-proclaimed productivity geek, the author here gives more of a ruminative look at time while still giving self help type advice.

I have been most impressed by this book! I only had a small peak at its summary after being intrigued by the cover, and it immediately drew me in. It took me a few weeks to read the book in its entirety, because it was like a delicious piece of cake, better enjoyed slowly, savouring each bite.

"Four thousand weeks" is not a random title: it is the amount of time that most humans, on average, will get on this planet. This may seem big or this may be small, but time, after all, is flexible. Time is elastic: it stretches the way you don't want it to stretch: a movie will seem to last a lot less than a visit to the dentist, for instance. Time may not seem the run at the same speed for others, but for you, time runs at its own speed. So rather than trying to manage time at any cost, to squeeze everything out of every minute of our time, we'd better accept the finitude of it and be grateful for every moment, without always making them productive.

With hindsight, it's hard for me to precisely remember what the book was about as if it were a novel, but I feel I have gained some wisdom by reading it and will revisit the book to absorb more of its content over time.
However, I have to say I never highlighted so many passages in any book I ever read, so I will quickly review them, and point out some of the ideas that impacted me the most (or at least that's how I interpreted Burkeman's reflexions), although summing them up in this way is obviously reductive. Here are some of my takeaways from the first two chapters:
- we should rather live in the moment and enjoy it rather than look at the "what ifs" and how much time we have left
- we don't have that much time on this planet, so we don't have time to get close to perfection, or to try every combinaison that might make us the happiest, but accepting that things cannot also go perfectly might allow us to enjoy them more
- the less we wait for something, the more aggravating it is to wait -- we will always find anything to be too long (going from Britain to Australia by boat is taking *a lot* less time than it used to be by boat, yet we still find it super long), we will always feel as if you're losing time, but time isn't about squeezing everything out of it -- let's rather be grateful we have time and the opportunity to travel
- one cannot master time -- time expands itself to the time we have available
- we worry too much about the future (as we were taught to do) to truly enjoy the present
- accepting the ways things are allows us peace of mind
- we always feel we have too much to do yet we can live through it -- it's more about the way we see things than how we live them
- to feel that "you've truly lived", you don't need to experience every bucket list experience, but to enjoy what you had/have the chance of doing. You won't be able to do most of what life has to offer, and so what? Life has limits, but it doesn't make it any less valuable, on the contrary.

To conclude, I would congratulate to the author for such a beautiful, reflective, thought-provoking, illuminating book, which I will surely read time and time again until I become a little wiser ;) And special shout out for including varied sources, and being sensitive to include minorities' ideas.

*I received an ARC and this is my honest opinion*

Many thanks to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest review!

This was a marvel to me. It was a lot of information to take in, and it kind of blew my mind. Burkeman somehow managed to cater to my obsession-with-time-usage side while still reminding me that it is all, in the end, useless and futile. So many points I want to go back and reference.

4 stars because I got pretty lost in the Heidegger (although Burkeman predicted that would happen).

Thoughtful and interesting book--will cover it in my June column. The last chapter alone is worth the price of the book.

Oliver Burkeman call himself a productivity geek. As he describes it, “you know how some people are passionate about bodybuilding or fashion, or rock climbing, or poetry? Productivity geeks are passionate about crossing items off their to-do lists. So it’s sort of the same, except infinitely sadder.” His newest book, Four Thousand Weeks, is like a self-help book designed to help recovering productivity geeks recognize the emotional and mental traps laid by other books like “Getting Things Done,” “Eat the Frog,” or “The Four-Hour Workweek.” Drawing more from the field of philosophy than from time management, he systematically rebuts the arguments of Taylorist time management systems and instead provides suggestions for recreating “productivity” as a concept that encourages building communities and helping “geeks” find meaning in life.

As a productivity geek myself, I’ve been following Burkeman for a while. I’ve enjoyed his similar book The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking and his occasional newsletter articles. While Four Thousand Weeks covers similar, sometimes repeating ground, I am still glad that I read every word of this book. It is the rare “self-help” book that would not have been better as a bullet point list or an article. I enjoyed slowly struggling with these ideas, the pleasant voice of Burkeman nudging me on, and discussing them over beer with my partner. I highly recommend it not just to geeks like myself but to anyone who struggles with FOMO or a classic mid-life crisis.

The first half of the book is really good. Burkeman points out we can't possess time - we can't waste it, put it aside, carve it out, etc. Really really crudely, we *are* time. Burkeman makes a lot of fleeting references to philosophy and to Buddhist concepts without really committing to any (I would genuinely love to know which principles he applies to his own life), but I think it's a pretty powerful idea, that if we understood ourselves as our time, we would be more careful with what we pay attention to and what we allow ourselves to be distracted by.

He is good on distraction — how it's a way of avoiding discomfort. I did think that every time I come to a difficult patch of work, I immediately go into the kitchen and start grubbing for snacks instead. When we really commit to something that is very difficult and that we *want to do* (and requires cutting other things out of our lives) we're confronted with our finitude. This is it - the project might not work out, it might not be a success.

The second half I found less effective. It really sets out the idea that our time is made meaningful by other people. There's a fascinating example of a Soviet experiment of a five-day week designed to keep the factories going, four days at work, one day off - all workers were assigned different starting days (signified by a colour), which meant that it was only possible for friends to meet up, in some instances, a few days a year, unless they were lucky enough to get the same starting day. I would have been interested in learning about its impact in more detail but it was sufficiently unpopular that it was acceptable to complain about in Pravda, so that's probably enough. There are other examples like this, to demonstrate how our time is actually experienced differently with other people, in a way that allows us to experience it, ourselves as time, rather than feeling it 'slipping by'.

But this half was marred for me by a tendency that's slightly less annoying earlier on. In talking about our fixation on the future, for example, he frequently says things like 'of course, this principle doesn't apply if you're a cleaner where it makes sense to be focused on the future, but isn't it crazy that an architect plans her career with one project after the other to reach a particular point of her career'.

Ultimately, I think a time management system that really got to the bottom of our attitudes and fears about time and 'losing' it would be grounded on the principle that *everyone*, regardless of their job and background, should be able to live in the same way, and not feel that they are somehow less valuable and less able to do what they really want to do (I don't mean big projects, I mean spend time with family, for example).

That probably involves tearing up society and our ideas about the value of work and status in the first place. He does reference some of these movements to challenge work as identity but not in any detail, and if he did, it wouldn't be a book aimed at...a hypothetical you that is very much like a freelance writer or someone who has enough control of their life and enough resources to step back from their work. It's not forceful enough to argue that we should all be able to do that.

I think the book has some hard truths, but not for everyone!

Burkeman does a good job at exploring our various relationships to time - how we spend it, how to manage it, and what it means to have commodified it.