Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

Author Oliver Burkeman (b.1975) was born and educated in the United Kingdom. He comes from a family of compulsive planners, a trait hailing from his Jewish paternal grandmother who left Germany for Britain in 1933 to escape Hitler’s antisemitic persecutions. His traumatized grandmother’s belief that “if you didn’t plan things exactly right, some very bad fate might befall you or those you loved” (115) was passed on down the family line and manifested in Burkeman’s tendency to be a self-described “Productivity Geek” (26).

Prior to his 2014 revelation on a Brooklyn park bench, Burkeman cherished the anxious hope that there really was a perfect method for time management that would allow him to accomplish all his dreams and wishes. He piloted new time management schemes in his column “This column will change your life,” which he wrote from 2006 to 2020 for The Guardian, and even wrote a 2012 book called Help! How to Become Slightly Happier and Get a Bit More Done. While Burkeman continues to be fascinated with the process of how we can get the most out of our time, he does so conscious of our finitude and knowing that difficult decisions are inevitable in choosing what not to spend our time doing.