Business Book Review: Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman

Burkeman reminds you you’re only human. Four thousand weeks is both scarily short and, if you’re lucky enough to have them, a splendid gift.

My Rating: ★★★★
Length: 288 pages
Publisher: Vintage Arrow - Mass Marketing
Released: 2022

Key Takeaways for Personal Branding

If someone asked you approximately how many weeks on average you’re expected to live, would you know the answer? That’s what Oliver Burkeman, in his best-seller, is here to remind you. If you live until you’re 80, that’s approximately four thousand weeks.

Four Thousand Weeks is unlike any other time management book, designed to get you to perfectly optimise your productivity - with optimisation that leads to ever-changing goalposts. And the more you attempt to control time, the more it slips away:

“So this book is an attempt to help redress the balance – to see if we can discover, or recover, some ways of thinking about time that do justice to our real situation: to the outrageous brevity and shimmering possibilities of our four thousand weeks.”

Instead, Four Thousand Weeks illuminates a harsh truth - the shortness of life. A shortness, that isn’t even guaranteed. You may not make it to tomorrow, let alone four thousand weeks. One of the most glaringly obvious principles in ‘time management’ others, until Burkeman, seem to ignore.

The reality of four thousand weeks can be both terrifying and a glorious gift.

Facing Finitude

Unlike the often overly-prescribed methods of his counterparts, Burkeman takes a more flexible approach to ‘time management’. However, it’s underpinned by ‘facing finitude’. That your life and what you can do in it inherently has limitations:

“We must live out our lives, to whatever extent we can, in clear-eyed acknowledgement of our limitations… aware that this is it, that life is not a dress rehearsal, that every choice requires myriad sacrifices, and that time is always already running out – indeed, that it may run out today, tomorrow, or next month.”

Warren Buffet - Resist Middling Priorities

Burkeman shares the story of when a personal pilot once asked Warren Buffet how to set priorities. Buffet is said to have told him to list the top 25 things he wants out of life, and arrange them in order. Then, organise your time around the top five.

Buffet explains this doesn’t just mean treating your second-tier priorities as something you’ll get to when you have the time. But, as distractions to be avoided at all costs.

Burkeman proposes that embracing that life is limited means having to make hard choices about how you spend your limited time.

Radical Incrementalism

While the ‘hustle’ busy culture is glamourised, consistent daily actions can be less appealing. But, Burkeman shares some science behind why radical incrementalism is important.

Psychologist, Robert Boice, spent his career studying the writing habits of other academics. He concluded that the most productive and successful of them made writing a smaller part of their daily routine. This made it more feasible to keep going every day. Others who engaged in writing binges procrastinated later on.

Smaller inputs strengthen your muscle for patience. And encourage you to want to return to the work time and again.

Favourite Quotes

Stopping helps strengthen the muscle of patience that will permit you to return to the project again and again, and thus to sustain your productivity over an entire career.

I’m aware of no other time management technique that’s half as effective as just facing the way things truly are.

Why, exactly, are we rendered so uncomfortable by concentrating on things that matter?

It’s fair to say that patience has a terrible reputation. For one thing, the prospect of doing anything that you’ve been told will require patience simply seems unappetising. More specifically, though, it’s disturbingly passive.

Your quantity of time is so limited, you’ll never reach the commanding position of being able to handle every demand that might be thrown at you or pursue every ambition that feels important; you’ll be obliged to make tough choices instead.

Burkeman's approach to time management is refreshingly flexible and non-judgemental. Aligned with his four thousand weeks message, he reminds you you’re only human.

Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman:  Available on Amazon.