The Most Honest Book on Time Management I’ve Ever Read

Did you ever think about how many weeks you’ve got in a lifetime?

It’s about 4,000.

That number stuck with me when I picked up the book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman. I’ve read many productivity books (as you probably know if you’ve seen my past posts), so I wasn’t expecting anything radically new. But this one was different.

Photo by Age Barros on Unsplash

It’s not another book filled with hacks and morning routines.

It’s about prioritization and in a way contradicting what is preached in other productivity literature. Burkeman dives into the uncomfortable truth that our time is limited, and maybe the endless chase to “get everything done” is exactly what’s making us miserable.

In this post, I’ll break down the key ideas in a simple, digestible way and hopefully leave you thinking a bit differently about how you spend your own 4,000 weeks.

So, if you are interested, let’s grab a coffee and dive in.

Quick Summary for Those in a Hurry

Oliver Burkeman sums up today’s productivity culture: higher, faster, further. But where is this leading us? As a self-diagnosed productivity enthusiast, the author has realized in recent years that productivity becomes toxic at a certain point.

His book offers a refreshing perspective on the world of productivity, illuminating it from the angle of finitude. Human life is finite. It only has 4,000 weeks. We just can’t keep up with endless to-do lists (no matter how productive we actually are).

Most sections of the book are rather philosophical, but it is entertaining and fun to read. The concluding chapters are particularly exciting as the author presents practical tips on how we can better understand our finitude and make the most of our time and energy.

Introduction

If you live to be around 80 years old, you live 4,000 weeks. Written down like that, it doesn’t seem that long: life is short.

The author sees his book as a countercurrent to productivity literature.

Part I: Choosing to Choose

The Limit-Embracing Life

The problem isn’t the little time we have, but rather the expectations around how we use our time.

The author briefly shares his story: he was a “productivity geek” and intensely explored various methods to become more efficient and squeeze in more productivity. He now sees himself as “recovered,” having realized that no matter how productive he became, he would never achieve the “peace of mind” that he sought through productivity techniques.

The Efficiency Trap

Busyness has become ubiquitous in recent decades. Being busy or “stressed” is partly seen as something positive (like a badge of honor).

The efficiency trap, according to the author, is that increased efficiency often leads to more work (e.g., answering emails efficiently just results in receiving even more emails).

Convenience can also be a trap. Are we so tired in the evening that all we can do is sit on the couch, or could we finally tackle one of those things we’ve been putting off?

Facing Finitude

Life is finite. It has an end.

This is often forgotten in productivity culture: moments in waiting lines feel like wasted time. But how do these empty moments compare to not living at all?

Becoming a Better Procrastinator

The author references the following story:

A professor stands before a class with a large empty jar. He fills it with big rocks and asks if the jar is full. The students say yes. Then he adds pebbles, which fill the spaces between the rocks. Again, he asks if it’s full, and they agree. Next, he pours in sand, which fills the remaining gaps. Finally, he explains: The jar represents your life. The big rocks are the most important things: family, health, purpose. The pebbles are other meaningful things like work or hobbies. The sand is everything else (the small stuff). If you fill the jar with sand first, there’s no room for the rocks.

While the core message of the story is that there’s always room for something more, Oliver Burkeman argues that the real problem is not that small things fit around the big ones, but that there are just too many big rocks.

One method the author suggests is Personal Kanban (maximum of 3 things in progress at once). This helps avoid having too many open projects at the same time.

Another method is Buffett’s priorities: Write down the 25 things most important to you in life, then prioritize them. Only pursue the top 5 and ignore the rest. Why? Because those “mid-tier” priorities often prevent us from focusing on the most important ones.

Every decision for something is simultaneously a decision against something else.

In this context, Burkeman argues that burning bridges is often a good thing. People tend to be happier with fewer options. Marriage is one example.

The Watermelon Problem

The author describes a livestream of a watermelon being slowly wrapped with rubber bands until it explodes after 40+ minutes.

The stream had many viewers, and many in the chat wondered what they were even doing there.

It’s distraction.

And it’s becoming more prevalent in the age of social media and doomscrolling.

But it’s our own fault. We spend time on social media to distract ourselves from the fact that we’re not spending our time on the things we claim matter most.

The Intimate Interrupter

The author advocates being more present (even in uncomfortable moments). Buddhist monks even use focus on something unpleasant (like pain) to build endurance.

Part II: Beyond Control

We Never Really Have Time

In this section, Hofstadter’s Law stood out. It says that we underestimate how long things take (even when accounting for Hofstadter’s Law).

You Are Here

The author says he only truly grasped the importance of the present moment after becoming a father. Children give us a sense that the present, the shared moments, are more important than chasing future rewards.

Nevertheless, our education and parenting systems are built around constantly chasing the future.

Rediscovering Rest

Even though we have more leisure time than ever before, it feels like we have less (reading for knowledge, partying for networking, etc.).

Real leisure should be wasted. In recent decades, leisure has become something we also need to optimize. But true leisure is only leisure when it’s spent without aiming for some future benefit.

Rules for leisure are for example:

• Jewish Sabbath (strict rules to enforce rest)
• Activities where the journey is the goal (hiking, meeting friends, etc.)

The Impatience Spiral

The author defines the impatience spiral as our constant striving for more speed by following the motto: higher, faster, further.

He compares it to alcoholism: at some point, the shame of drinking is so strong that the only way to cope is to keep drinking. It’s similar with productivity. We want to be more productive to save time to do what we really want, but new tasks keep piling on, so we need to become even more productive to manage them.

Staying on the Bus

A Harvard professor regularly assigns her students the task of picking an artwork and looking at it for 3 hours (no breaks, no distractions).

Why?

Details only truly become apparent when we really take the time to look at them and step out of everyday stress.

The Loneliness of the Digital Nomad

There’s a common belief that time sovereignty is the most desirable thing. So, the goal should be to have as much free time as possible.

But free time alone isn’t enough. What really makes free time valuable is sharing it with others (family, friends, etc.).

This is suggested by an interview with the “happiest guy in the world” (a man who’s lived on a cruise ship for years): he freed himself from mundane chores like laundry and cooking, but ultimately he lives alone, and his only “friends” are the ship’s crew.

A similar outcome was seen in the Soviet 5-day week model: to maximize productivity, people worked 4 days and had 1 day off, with 5 rotating schedules. But it led to frustration because people no longer had time off at the same time (families and friends were just split with these schedules).

Cosmic Insignificance Therapy

The “great pause” brought on by COVID showed many people what really matters and that you can still do good work from home without commuting for hours.

It also helped many of us to realize the insignificance of most things we do.

And it had one effect: realizing how insignificant we are on the cosmic scale. And this is actually a good thing. It can be very liberating.

The Human Disease

In the concluding chapter, the author suggests reflecting on the following 5 questions to become more aware of your finitude:

1. Where in your life or work are you currently pursuing comfort, when what’s needed is a bit of discomfort?
2. Are you holding yourself to impossible productivity or performance standards?
3. In what ways have you not yet accepted that you are who you are, not who you think you should be?
4. In which areas of life are you still holding back until you feel like you know what you’re doing?
5. How would you spend your days differently if you didn’t care so much about your actions producing results?

Ten Tools for Embracing Your Finitude

Finally, Oliver Burkeman shares ten tools that can help embracing one’s fintude:

1. Adopt a Fixed Volume Approach: Two to-do lists (one open with maximum 10 items and one closed one as a backlog for ideas).
2. Serialize large projects (work on one big project at a time).
3. Pre-decide where you’ll fail (invest less energy in certain areas on purpose).
4. Focus on what you’ve achieved (e.g., keep a daily “done” list).
5. Consolidate your caring (especially in the context of charity).
6. Use boring tech or make technology boring (an extreme form would be to uninstall social media).
7. Seek novelty in the familiar (escape routines).
8. Be a researcher in relationships (stay curious: “Who is this person?”).
9. Cultivate immediate gratitude (act on it as soon as you feel it).
10. Practice doing nothing