Published: 07/04/2022
The pioneering author of Help! and The Antidote takes a highly entertaining and eye-opening look at our time on earth – roughly the four thousand weeks of the title – and explores how best we can use them, with a little help from history’s great philosophers, authors and artists.
What if you stopped trying to do everything, so that you could finally get round to what counts?
We're obsessed with our lengthening to-do lists, our overfilled inboxes, the struggle against distraction, and the sense that our attention spans are shrivelling. Still, we rarely make the connection between our daily struggles with time and the ultimate time management problem: the question of how best to use our ridiculously brief time on the planet, which amounts on average to about four thousand weeks.
Four Thousand Weeks is an uplifting, engrossing and deeply realistic exploration of the challenge. Rejecting the futile modern obsession with 'getting everything done,' it introduces readers to tools for constructing a meaningful life by embracing rather than denying their limitations. And it shows how 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. Its many revelations will transform the reader's worldview.
Drawing on the insights of both ancient and contemporary philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual teachers, Oliver Burkeman sets out to realign our relationship with time - and in doing so, to liberate us from its tyranny.
Embrace your limits. Change your life. Make your four thousand weeks count.
Publisher: Vintage Publishing
ISBN: 9781784704001
Number of pages: 288
Weight: 207 g
Dimensions: 199 x 129 x 18 mm
MEDIA REVIEWS
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 favourite kind of book is this one ... it examines the human struggle with intelligence, wisdom, humour and humility. - Marianne Power, The Times
Perfectly pitched somewhere between practical self-help book and philosophical quest ... as with all the best quests, its many pleasures don't require a fast-forward button, but happen along the way - Tim Adams, Observer
Life is finite. You don't have to fit everything in. Enjoy your life. Breathe out. Read this book and wake up to a new way of thinking and living - Emma Gannon, author of The Multi-Hyphen Method
A wonderfully honest book, Four Thousand Weeks is a much-needed reality check on our culture's crazy assumptions around work, productivity and living a meaningful life - Mark Manson, bestselling author of Everything is Fcked and The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fck
His book will challenge and amuse you. And it may even spur you on to change your life. At the very least reading it would be a good use of one of your four thousand weeks - Robbie Smith, Evening Standard
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“Thought provoking”
A self help book that requires you to stop and evaluate your time and look at everything you cram into it. He points out that if you live to 80 you have four thousand weeks to time manage. I loved his views on the... More
“Some interesting points and tips”
The book starts with the scary premise that typically we only have about four thousand weeks on this earth. Saying that is not surprising we struggle to fit everything in!
An interesting read, although I found all the...
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“A really thought-provoking read”
Thanks so much to Vintage for letting me read Four Thousand Weeks. This is a time management book that focuses not on productivity hacks or mastering your time, but about accepting the fact that your hours are... More
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