I Read It So You Don’t Have To

I Read It So You Don’t Have To: Four Thousand Weeks

A recovering productivity addict wants us to think about time management through the lens of our imminent mortality

What did I read?

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman

So who is Oliver Burkeman?

Burkeman is an award winning feature writer for The Guardian, where he wrote the weekly column, “This Column Will Change Your Life.” He’s also the author of The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking.

Give me the 30-second sell.

Four thousand weeks. If you live until you’re 80, that’s roughly how many weeks you’ll get — a sum that is, as Oliver Burkeman puts it, “absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short.”

And that’s if you make it to 80. But regardless of how many years you, I, or anyone else has left on this earth, we all have a problem: our relationship with that time is, to put it gently, fraught.

As Burkeman notes early on, given the relatively short time frame of even the longest life, time management should be everyone’s most pressing concern. “Arguably,” he points out…