Book Review, Summary, Highlights, and Quotes from Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management For Mortals by Oliver Burkeman
I first heard about this book on the Tim Ferriss Show. Tim loved the “Cosmic Insignificance Therapy” chapter, but I was hesitant to actually read a book about time management because I feel I’ve got that decently under control.
Well, the last laugh was on me, because this book is not about time management – at all!
This book is best summed up as a philosophical discussion on life, culture, money, and the role that time plays in them.
Four Thousand Weeks is an ode to the shortness of life (or roughly 4,000 weeks). But it’s also a reality check on modern culture:
The problem isn’t exactly that these techniques and products don’t work. It’s that they do work – in the sense that you’ll get more done, race to more meetings, ferry your kids to more afte–school activities, generate more profit for your employer – and yet, paradoxically, you only feel busier, more anxious, and somehow emptier as a result.
– Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks
It is beautifully worded, and thought-provoking as hell. I was in it from the start.
Those familiar with the FIRE movement will appreciate and be experienced with much of the messaging, about money and life:
It turns out that when people make enough money to meet their needs, they just find new things to need and new lifestyles to aspire to; they never quite manage to keep up with the Joneses, because whenever they’re in danger of getting close, they nominate new and better Joneses with whom to try to keep up.
– Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks
Ultimately, Mr. Burkeman urges us to live a meaningful and fulfilling life, one in which we accept that we cannot control time, cannot manage our time, and face the fact that there is absolutely no way to do it all.
And through this acceptance, we can embrace the things that truly do matter to us.
Burkeman’s time management is not about “managing time” at all, and all about crafting a life worth living.
Perhaps where the book falls a little short is on solutions. There is a haphazardly added “Appendix” with tools for living a good life, but it seems added on after the fact.
Despite that shortcoming, it is overall an excellent book. I highly recommend it!
AR Score: 9 out of 10
Key Book Highlights from Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management For Mortals by Oliver Burkeman
This book is split into two parts – Part I: Choosing to Choose, and Part II Beyond Control.
Part I’s emphasis is really on blowing a hole in why time management is simply not possible.
It examines our cultural and economic impacts on time, and why living in the rat race is not a sustainable or healthy way of looking at life.
Our struggle to stay on top of everything may serve someone’s interests; working longer hours – and using any extra income to buy more consumer goods – turns us into better cogs in the economic machine. But it doesn’t result in peace of mind, or lead us to spend more of our finite time on those people and things we care most deeply about ourselves.
– Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks
The title Four Thousand Weeks implies the short (yet long) time span of the average human life, and in Part I, Mr. Burkeman dives headlong into that.
By facing our own mortality we can see that we cannot and should not attempt to do it all.
Part II then really expands on this. It further examines how we can make the most of our time, without falling into the trap of “productivity porn” or feeling guilty for not doing enough.
Oliver offers a few practical suggestions in the latter half of the book, including embracing rest and ultimately accepting that we can’t do it all.
You have to accept that there will always be too much to do; that you can’t avoid tough choices or make the world run at your preferred speed.
– Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks
Finally, Burkeman finds ways to challenge common assumptions about success, happiness, goal setting, and what we consider a life worth living.
Best Quotes from Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management For Mortals by Oliver Burkeman
It’s hard to imagine a crueler arrangement: not only are our four thousand weeks constantly running out, but the fewer of them we have left, the faster we seem to lose them.
– Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks
Once you stop believing that it might somehow be possible to avoid hard choices about time, it gets easier to make better ones.
– Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks
Our struggle to stay on top of everything may serve someone’s interests; working longer hours – and using any extra income to buy more consumer goods-turns us into better cogs in the economic machine. But it doesn’t result in peace of mind, or lead us to spend more of our finite time on those people and things we care most deeply about ourselves.
– Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks
Your sense of self-worth gets completely bound up with how you’re using time: it stops being merely the water in which you swim and turns into something you feel you need to dominate or control, if you’re to avoid feeling guilty, panicked, or overwhelmed.
– Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks
The harder you struggle to fit everything in, the more of your time you’ll find yourself spending on the least meaningful things.
– Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks
Instead of living our lives as they unfold in time – instead of just being time, you might say – it becomes difficult not to value each moment primarily according to its usefulness for some future goal, or for some future oasis of relaxation you hope to rach once your tasks are finally “out of the way.”
– Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks
The more wonderful experiences you succeed in having, the more additional wonderful experiences you start to feel you could have, or ought to have, on top of all those you’ve already had, with the result that the feeling of existential overwhelm gets worse.
– Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks
Contrary to the cliche, it isn’t really the thought that counts, but the effort –which is to say the inconvenience.
– Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks
Why treat four thousand weeks as a very small number, because it’s so tiny compared with infinity, rather than treating it as a huge number, because it’s so many more weeks than if you had never been born.
– Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks
The real problem with time management today, though, isn’t that we ‘re bad at prioritizing the big rocks. It’s that there are too many big rocks.
– Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks
When you can no longer turn back, anxiety falls away, because now there’s only one direction to travel: forward into the consequences of your choice.
– Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks
The future, of course, is no under obligation to comply.
– Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks
One way of understanding capitalism, in fact, is as a giant machine for instrumentalizing everything it encounters – the earth’s resources, your time and abilities (or “human resources”) – in the service of future profit.
– Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks
Discomfort isn’t a sign that you shouldn’t be doing it, though. It’s a sign that you definitely should
– Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks
Spending at least some of your leisure time “wastefully,” focused solely on the pleasure of the experience, is the only way not to waste it.
– Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks
We spend our days pursuing various accomplishments that we desire to achieve; and yet for any given accomplishment [..] it’s always the case either that you haven’t achieved it yet (so you’re dissatisfied, because you didn’t yet have what you desire) or that you’ve already attained it (so you’re dissatisfied, because you no longer have it as something to strive toward).
– Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks
Results aren’t everything. Indeed, they’d better not be, because results always come later – and later is always too late.
– Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks
As society accelerates, something shifts. In more and more contexts, patience becomes a form of power.
– Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks
When it comes to using your finite time, the universe absolutely could not care less.
– Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks
You have to accept that there will always be too much to do; that you can’t avoid tough choices or make the world run at your preferred speed.
– Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks
More from Oliver Burkeman
- Website: oliverburkeman.com
- Twitter: @oliverburkeman
- Email Newsletter: The Imperfectionist
- Videos/Interviews:
I loved this book! I read it twice and I intend to read it again in the future. Anyone thinking about reading it should just go ahead and do it, it can change your life.