Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
Ratings252
Average rating4.2
Great book. I feel like by reading this early in my life, I'll have at least an advantage on how to live a better life than someone who read this book later in life.
This book isn't really a practical guide however. It's mostly just going through assumptions people have and why they're wrong and what could should be done instead.
My rating, relative to the much higher average rating is a reflection of the obvious insight that an overall rating is the average of all of the subjective measures of how helpful individual readers found the book. This book was obviously appreciated by people different than me. I suspect most of these people were reading it as they had recently become disillusioned by productivity as a measure and were looking for another metric to measure their life by. The author is in the same boat, so for people who people who realised this long ago he is way behind you. This book tells you mostly what not to do but is short on suggesting what you might use instead. Disappointed
Productivity junkie rediscovers nihilism. Not a bad book. Not a great one either.
Impactful
The book has its problems. It says things I wouldn't agree with and the only way I am reconciling it is by chalking it out to difference of perceived meanings. It feels repetitive at times to the point where I feel if I accidentally flipped back to the previous chapter (it's a single message after all). It walks the thin line on the boundary to something quite like nihilism (but stays firmly in being realistic). But, it is an eye-opening read, at least for me. It feels weird to say that practicing a few things mentioned in the book does make me feel a little bit more liberated and a little bit more ready to not obsess over the future. It's weird that I found a strategy to deal with my perfectionism in a time management book.
Abandon hope all ye who enter here.
Hope is a curse. It's putting your faith in something outside yourself, beyond the current moment. It's that future state where your inbox is empty, your tasks well and tightly under control and your time, at last, your own to fully direct towards what gives you joy.
For the productivity minded among us, we live in a perpetual state of hope, inhabiting an imagined future where our lives are well and truly ordered and organized. We need to give up hope and simply do the work. The Germans have a word for it, Eigenzeit, the time integral to a process itself. If a thing's worth doing, it takes as long as it takes.
Aside from the Appendix at the end of the book that includes a list of 10 tools for “embracing your finitude” - tacked on as if to meet some self-help, productivity book criteria, this is more an entertaining philosophical treatise than time management system.
“Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” Becoming more efficient only brings about more work. Your immediate email responses in the hopes of reaching inbox zero only invite further emails. Your FOMO is forgetting that your entire life consists of things you are choosing to neglect. The real measure of any time management technique, according to Burkeman, is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things.
So embrace the limits of your life. Choose to fail at things. Limit technology in favour of savouring the mundane and get good at doing nothing.
If you're like me, you're going to pick this up desperate for a new time management/productivity hack that will rebalance your life and fix your insane schedule. What you will find is something that will help you do that, but in a completely different way than you expect. This book is not at all what I expected it to be, but it was even better. I love that other productivity-seeking people will probably pick this up and experience the same surprise at what it's really about but also hopefully find real, lasting advice on what time management really means to us mortals. Give this book a shot because it will shift your perspective about your busy life!
