About the Book:

You have only so much time. Are you using it right? The average human life expectancy is absurdly, insultingly brief. If you live an average lifespan of eighty years old, you have just over four thousand weeks.

Nobody needs telling there isn't enough time. Whether we're starting our own business, or trying to write a novel during our lunch break, or staring down a pile of deadlines as we're planning a vacation, we're obsessed with our lengthening to-do lists, overfilled inboxes, work-life balance, and ceaseless struggle against distraction. We're deluged with advice on becoming more productive and efficient and life hacks to optimize our days. But such techniques often end up making things worse. The sense of anxious hurry grows more intense, and still the most meaningful parts of life seem to lie just beyond the horizon. Still, we rarely make the connection between our daily struggles with time and the ultimate time management problem: the challenge of how best to use our four thousand weeks.

Four Thousand Weeks, whose title is based on the typical number of weeks in a lifetime, is a book about embracing your limitations, and finally getting round to what counts. Drawing on the insights of both ancient and contemporary philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual teachers, Oliver Burkeman delivers an entertaining, humorous, practical, and ultimately profound guide to time and time management. Rejecting the futile modern obsession of "getting everything done" or the idea of "bucket lists," Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals introduces you to tools for constructing a meaningful life by embracing the very finite nature of our existence, showing how many of the unhelpful ways we've come to think about time aren't inescapable, unchanging truths, but choices we've made as individuals and as a society – and that we could do things differently. He shows how the relatively small, finite number of weeks we are alive on this planet can bring incredible richness and fulfillment to the time that we do have.

What people say:

"In addition to whatever help it might offer, Four Thousand Weeks is also just good company; it addresses large, even existential, issues with a sense of humor and an even-keeled perspective. I found that reading it – Burkeman might balk at this particular way of describing it – was a good use of my time." — The New York Times

"Provocative and appealing ... well worth your extremely limited time." — The Wall Street Journal

"Burkeman is the self-help writer for people like me who find self-help books oversold on magical transformations ... Four Thousand Weeks is full of such sage and sane advice, delivered with dry wit and a benevolent tone." — The Guardian (UK)

"Four Thousand Weeks will challenge and amuse you. And it may even spur you on to change your life." — The Observer (UK)

"Subtle, provocative, and multi-layered ... Four Thousand Weeks offers many wise pointers to a happier, less stress-filled life, with none of the usual smug banalities of the self-help genre." — The Daily Mail (UK)

"This book is wonderful. Instead of offering new tips on how to cram more into your day, it questions why we feel the need to ... My favorite kind of book is this one – a book that doesn't offer magic solutions to life because there aren't any. Instead, it examines the human struggle with intelligence, wisdom, humor, and humility ... Reading this book was time well spent." — The Times (UK)

About the Author:

Oliver Burkeman is an award-winning features writer for the newspaper The Guardian and author of the book Four Thousand Weeks. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Psychologies, and New Philosopher. He lives in New York City.