Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

British journalist and author Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (2021) is his third book. The self-help book, which was an instant Sunday Times bestseller, follows in the spirit of Burkeman’s career-long inquiry into what constitutes a good life. From 2006-2020, he was the author of The Guardian’s “This column will change your life” section, which gave practical and philosophical advice on how to enhance wellbeing, and he wrote two books on happiness, one of which was titled The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking (2012). Burkeman aims his work at intellectually minded audiences who are incredulous about the self-help movement’s platitudes.

This guide references the Vintage Digital edition published in 2021.

Summary

Four Thousand Weeks confronts the reader with the sobering truth that an 80-year lifespan includes just over four-thousand weeks. Burkeman suggests that people should accept this time limitation rather than try to be endlessly productive and busy throughout their lives. He shows that while modern technology promises to cut down menial tasks, such as going to grocery store or calling a local cab company, technological convenience has done little to enhance our satisfaction in life or give us more time to complete our goals. Efficiency in itself does little to enhance happiness.

While the distracting-by-design aspects of social media are in part responsible for shortened attention spans and our inability to focus on important, difficult tasks, we unconsciously opt into distractions when we encounter boredom or come to a roadblock in a challenging project. Online distractions, including social media, provide the perfect forms of procrastination and sort-term gratification.

Worrying about the future is another temporal challenge that limits our experience of autonomy over time. The increased pace of modern life has led to more impatience and less of a focus on the present; people avoid being present in favor of imagining a hypothetical future in which our plans will take shape. This is accompanied by ceaseless productivity and outsized rage at slow-moving things—traffic or toddlers—because they do not comply with the pace at which life should move. While having a packed schedule is seen as the norm, Burkeman points out that this makes it more difficult to collaborate with others. This makes life lonelier and diminishes the potential of meaning and enjoyment. We must therefore consider whether having control over one’s schedule is worth it if it gets in the way of meaningful relationships.

Burkeman ends his book with 10 tools for embracing our temporal limits, such as limiting oneself to a 10-item to-do list, deciding in advance that we will fail in some areas of life, and consolidating our caring strategies to focus on one important cause above 20 that we engage in superficially. Finally, he advocates that we practice doing nothing, in order to come to terms with the limits of our existence as it is in the present and make wiser decisions about time-use from there.