Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman

Nobody needs to be told 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 yet 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, the average length of a human life.


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 with “getting everything done,” Four Thousand Weeks introduces readers to tools for constructing a meaningful life by embracing finitude, showing that 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 can do things differently.

Why I Picked It Up

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This is a difficult book for me to review—similar to Tiger Lily in that, because it's a favorite and I have so many thoughts, it's difficult to not go down a dozen tangents about related thoughts. I'm sure I'll talk about this book plenty and absolutely will post a separate compilation of highlights, so I'll do my absolute best to keep it short and sweet and save my limited time (hahaha.)

Confession: I actually walked away from this review because it overwhelmed me and then later returned to it—which semi-proves the entire damn point of the book.

Basically, Oliver Burkeman uses this book to beautifully describe our relationship with time and why that sense of it being limited—a ticking clock, the pursuit of optimization—feels so urgent. As a perfectionist with what I fondly call a "child prodigy complex," I deeply resonate with a lot of the ideas, both positive and negative, expressed in his assessment.

I read this first in 2022 (I believe) and absolutely adored it. I reread it recently this January as a reminder to keep my head on straight. Although I can't remember for sure, I think reading this book marked a significant shift for me in how I looked at my choices and presence, and either catalyzed or finally articulated my curiosities about how I best want to live my life. It's one of those packed with perspectives I'd say most people (or at least those who might consider themselves similar to me) "need to hear."

It's going to get personal, so bear with me. (Let's book club.)

Voice & Tone

I love so much about Oliver Burkeman's book and writing, but one aspect I'd absolutely praise him for off the bat is that his voice comes off as authoritative yet humble, and not in a faux way. It feels genuinely self-aware, especially as he wryly points out he's part of the tech/productivity bro crowd churning out similar books like Eat the Frog, Atomic Habits, etc,. (which all include fabulous points too. There's a balance.)

His intent is more so to examine those bigger-picture ideas of "what really matters" and why we're so desperate for control over our time. He described me in a way that made me feel extremely seen and partly uncomfortable, holding up a mirror to some aspects of myself I don't necessarily like confronting.

About the Book

The book dances fluidly around a variety of studies, topics, and considerations, but has a strong, organized core.

There are tangibles (and a thrilling amount of fun facts and historical anecdotes) to sink into, and some meaty philosophical discussion about the fears, attitudes, and needs we feel surrounding time and how to best use it.

For example, after I read it a few years ago, I actually stopped working weekend contracts because of an experiment Burkeman detailed about how it's not time off that makes us happy, but synchronous time off—that we coordinate with others. I still work often in the margins of a weekend because writing inspiration stops for nobody (so I can flex my schedule based on what's working), but have really tried to stick to a routine that keeps me aligned with the science.

I loved a lot of his small points, like that reading can feel especially slow and frustrating to people nowadays because you can't rush it; it takes the time that it takes, or else you miss the point, whereas you can accelerate pretty much every other "hobby." For that reason, it feels extra-special and grounding to me. The book is full of gems like that.

“The real problem isn’t our limited time. The real problem—or so I hope to convince you—is that we’ve unwittingly inherited, and feel pressured to live by, a troublesome set of ideas about how to use our limited time, all of which are pretty much guaranteed to make things worse.”

“The same goes for chores: in her book More Work for Mother, the historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan shows that when housewives first got access to “labor-saving” devices like washing machines and vacuum cleaners, no time was saved at all, because society’s standards of cleanliness simply rose to offset the benefits; now that you could return each of your husband’s shirts to a spotless condition after a single wearing, it began to feel like you should, to show how much you loved him. “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion,” the English humorist and historian C. Northcote Parkinson wrote in 1955, coining what became known as Parkinson’s law. But it’s not merely a joke, and it doesn’t apply only to work. It applies to everything that needs doing. In fact, it’s the definition of 'what needs doing' that expands to fill the time available.”

The non-exhaustive list of ideas Burkeman tackles includes:

• our relationship to productivity itself,
• the historical shifts between event-based and task-based time (there is a great Aeon article about this),
• what "wasting time" even means (not in a corny way),
• Hofstadter's law, which I talk about all the time,
• every era's concern over distraction and bottom-up vs. top-down attention,
• how we tend to balance being "in the moment" vs. planning for the future (also top of mind thanks to The Molecule of More, which was one of my top books of 2024),
• how wanting to be "in the moment" actually us even more self-conscious about it in a way that totally undermines the moment itself (and what to do about that),
• our struggle between control and generosity,
• etc,. etc,.

There are many fantastic points in Four Thousand Weeks regarding the passage of time, but one especially salient argument for me is the one he made that just absolutely transformed my existential priorities. He argues that our sensitivity to time passing has a lot to do with our relationship to our own finitude—for several reasons.

“Heidegger next turns to humans specifically, and to our own particular kind of being. What does it mean for a human being to be? (I realize this is starting to sound like a bad comedy sketch about philosophers lost in wild abstractions. I’m afraid that’s going to get worse for another couple of paragraphs before it gets better.) His answer is that our being is totally, utterly bound up with our finite time. So bound up, in fact, that the two are synonymous: to be, for a human, is above all to exist temporally, in the stretch between birth and death, certain that the end will come, yet unable to know when. We tend to speak about our having a limited amount of time. But it might make more sense, from Heidegger’s strange perspective, to say that we are a limited amount of time. That’s how completely our limited time defines us.”

“We invariably prefer indecision over committing ourselves to a single path, Bergson wrote, because “the future, which we dispose of to our liking, appears to us at the same time under a multitude of forms, equally attractive and equally possible.”

“We’ll do almost anything to avoid burning our bridges, to keep alive the fantasy of a future unconstrained by limitation, yet having burned them, we’re generally pleased that we did so.”

Holding Up the Mirror—The Inevitability of Spending Our Time

The first problem is that we secretly resent the inevitability of having to choose anything. No matter how you slice it, each definitive action that we take narrows down the possibilities we leave open for ourselves later á la The Paradox of Choice. It's a familiar existential worry, buried within novels like The Unbearable Lightness of Being or On Love. What is ultimate freedom? Isn't it having options, getting to pick up and leave, the ability to 'waste time,' etc,.?

When we assign ourselves so much gravity in how to best use our time, we get paralyzed instead. It's not conscious procrastination. Delaying just gives us the illusion of choice in the matter, but Burkeman argues that postponement leads to the same regrets with none of the possible benefits.

“The undodgeable reality of a finite human life is that you are going to have to choose.”

“The great irony of all our efforts to avoid facing finitude—to carry on believing that it might be possible not to have to choose between mutually exclusive options—is that when people finally do choose, in a relatively irreversible way, they’re usually much happier as a result.”

The second point Burkeman makes is that we resent having to confront our own limitations, which is why we have an unfortunate tendency to feel most overwhelmed by and unready to deal with the very things that matter most to us. It turns out that it's actually terrifying to get what you really want because then it's subject to reality instead of romanticization. After all, aren't fear and excitement the same feeling? Sometimes hard to distinguish, and maybe that's for a reason.

It could be less satisfying than you expected. You might hold up a mirror to our own flaws because you didn't execute it as well as you expected. You run the risk of feeling like a poor decision-maker if it doesn't go your way. And, more broadly: the dizzying, numbing, destabilization that comes with entrusting something you want so badly to the world outside you. You can no longer control it, and what we want the most often makes us feel the most vulnerable.

“One can waste years this way, systematically postponing precisely the things one cares about the most.”

So a lot of our attempt to control time, Burkeman (gently) argues, is a noble but ultimately misguided belief that we can work backwards to avoid the possibility of future pain.

I'm risky. I'm really damn brave. I'm disciplined, work myself to the bone, control myself extremely well, and generally shoot for the big, big dreams. For much of my life, I've considered myself relatively fearless. But this is where Burkeman absolutely got me.

“In what ways have you yet to accept the fact that you are who you are, not the person you think you ought to be? Where in your life or your work are you currently pursuing comfort, when what’s called for is a little discomfort? In which areas of life are you still holding back until you feel like you know what you’re doing? Are you holding yourself to, and judging yourself by, standards of productivity or performance that are impossible to meet? ”

I've said for years that one of my favorite qualities about myself is that I go after what matters to me, and I do, but—this gets personal, and I have thoughts, and the realization did a lot for me. All I'll say is that I think it's really accurate that I could sometimes get this total mental [BLOCK] on the things that are most important to me, and that had nothing to do with my capability or desire. I don't think you can fully understand this feeling unless you've been there, but it's real and paradoxical and nuanced, and so you shouldn't judge it from the outside, but it is comforting to see it recognized from the inside—if that makes sense?

I wrote a lot of words about this and the book and my parallel realizations and decided not to share them with the World Wide Web, but: epiphany, at the time, to say the least. And it was provoked in such a compassionate way; I really like Burkeman's ability. My review right now feels terrible and I'm not wording this well, but I have so much to talk about here that I almost can't word any of it properly.

“You only ever get to feel certain about the future once it’s already turned into the past.”

But as Burkeman concludes, this is the wasted time that actually matters. That you actually have to push through. For one, the outcome could be better than we expect. The choice itself literally makes you more grateful for everything that comes after it "versus pining after fantastical alternatives." So it's automatically a better use of your time to face whatever it is you really want.

And if you don't choose, the world will choose for you, and the answer will be no. The window closes. The time passes anyway.

So how much control should you let go of?

A Brief Tangent Re: Whirling Dervishes (I Can't Stop Myself)

This got tangential and I didn't mean it to be. I'll update it tomorrow with fresh eyes.

I think Burkeman absolutely nails a mix of perspectives honoring both individualism and a peace with the greater system. His balance reminds me of some other favorite thinkers: Mary Oliver, Dacher Keltner, Marcus Aurelius, etc,. They're both in tune with the bigger picture but individually empowered, and their method of choice in striking this balance is awe and gratitude. The universal as expressed through the specific, etc,. etc,.

That particular balance is probably the only line I can walk that gives me genuine peace, so it's no wonder that it characterizes all my favorite experiences (being in nature, reading fiction, dancing, etc,.)—one step beyond flow.

Basically: this line of thinking resolved my need for autonomy/individualism with my other concurrent, contradictory desires.

“If you plan to spend some of your four thousand weeks doing what matters most to you, then at some point you’re just going to have to start doing it.”

“Moreover, most of us seek a specifically individualistic kind of mastery over time—our culture’s ideal is that you alone should control your schedule, doing whatever you prefer, whenever you want—because it’s scary to confront the truth that almost everything worth doing, from marriage and parenting to business or politics, depends on cooperating with others, and therefore on exposing yourself to the emotional uncertainties of relationships.”

(Needless to say, I've been thinking a lot about the metaphors and rituals surrounding this concept lately; I've always had a particular fondness for whirling dervishes: centered but ecstatic.)

I've really only started being happy—or at least, fulfilled and expansive most of the time—once I broke down this rigid idea I maintained for myself of self-control relying on constant individualism. What should I "let happen"? How do I build in room to be moved without losing my core sense of self? etc,. etc,.

Which is mostly Burkeman's point—the line is really hard to find and stay on. Most of us lean one way or another.

We want to be moved and that means allowing ourselves to actually be moved. Shit.

As this book argues, having ultimate control over yourself paradoxically means letting go of control in many domains first, and that used to send up so many red flags for me because it made me feel "not like myself."

Busyness can keep you distracted so you don't have to face the choice. You waste time more by choosing not to "waste" it at all. Control can keep you comfortable—but it keeps your world and landscape of options at a distance, which paradoxically gives you less choice in how it all goes down. Fear of limitation can create the limitation itself (a huge tipping point for me.) What's the ultimate balance? How do we reframe finitude with gratitude for our focus and depth, rather than automatically viewing any definitive path as a trap? As the book points out, it's precisely because we cut ourselves off from the myriad of other options by making a decision in the first place (like the Latin stem of the root verb meaning "to cut") that gives our chosen commitments their depth, expansiveness, and joy. Lean in.

Oh God—the Fear of Wasting Time

Frankly, the book makes some phenomenal points that totally changed the way I think about time passing. Maybe I would have balked at this book for throwing me off-balance at one point, too afraid to give up my illusion of complete mastery over my path. (Recently, I've definitely been better at reading books that have made me uncomfortable, from How to Be Multiple to This Is How You Lose Her.)

Burkeman very effectively argues that we cannot possibly postpone the things that matter to us most until we're "ready" because the variables of the future will never actually feel safe enough for us to actually feel good enough to go after them. Instead, we focus on optimizing every minute, streamlining habits, predicting the future, and other attempts at control that are ultimately futile—and only serve to distract us. You can fill your schedule with whatever you want, but it won't make the time meaningful. And when you do chase what's meaningful to you—that surfaces questions of limitation and execution and the gap between our ideals and realities. What is the ultimate goal?

“We fail to see, or refuse to accept, that any attempt to bring our ideas into concrete reality must inevitably fall short of our dreams, no matter how brilliantly we succeed in carrying things off—because reality, unlike fantasy, is a realm in which we don’t have limitless control, and can’t possibly hope to meet our perfectionist standards. Something—our limited talents, our limited time, our limited control over events, and over the actions of other people—will always render our creation less than perfect.”

He elegantly presents evidence that we're actually making our lives smaller by refusing to let go of the illusion. Our attempt to master time is actually boxing us in in the name of supposed "freedom" because we're afraid of letting go of that idea. So, we have to change our relationship to some of these ideals or else it's just...shrinking us.

“James Hollis recommends asking of every significant decision in life: “Does this choice diminish me, or enlarge me?” The question circumvents the urge to make decisions in the service of alleviating anxiety and instead helps you make contact with your deeper intentions for your time. If you’re trying to decide whether to leave a given job or relationship, say, or to redouble your commitment to it, asking what would make you happiest is likely to lure you toward the most comfortable option, or else leave you paralyzed by indecision. But you usually know, intuitively, whether remaining in a relationship or job would present the kind of challenges that will help you grow as a person (enlargement) or the kind that will cause your soul to shrivel with every passing week (diminishment). Choose uncomfortable enlargement over comfortable diminishment whenever you can.”

The concept of facing what freaks us out is familiar, echoing ideas of fear inoculation or how our minds blank at what is most important or the spattering of various quotes implying that the hardest tasks are usually our most important. But I've always considered myself a very brave, active person, and Four Thousand Weeks called me out on my bullshit in a necessary way that made me really consider which behaviors were actually getting me closer or further away to what I want long-term, even if that required some unraveling of some philosophies. Burkeman disarmed a lot of my logic around avoidance or perfectionism or self-reliance, but never ceased to be kind and thoughtful and inspiring rather than judgmental. It just got me reflecting.

I'm not sure why this one, out of all books, hit me hardest. I'm not wording this well.

Lines & Topics I Loved

“We've been granted the mental capacities to make almost infinitely ambitious plans, yet practically no time at all to put them into action.”

“Choosing curiosity (wondering what might happen next) over worry (hoping that a certain specific thing will happen next, and fearing it might not) whenever you can.”

“Convenience culture seduces us into imagining that we might find room for everything important by eliminating only life’s tedious tasks. But it’s a lie. You have to choose a few things, sacrifice everything else, and deal with the inevitable sense of loss that results.”

“You can’t know that things will turn out all right. The struggle for certainty is an intrinsically hopeless one—which means you have permission to stop engaging in it.”

“But since time is finite, the decision to refuse to settle—to spend a decade restlessly scouring online dating networks for the perfect person—is also a case of settling, because you're opting to use up a decade of your limited time in a different sort of less-than-ideal situation.”

“The more individual sovereignty you achieve over your time, the lonelier you get.”

“Maybe it’s not that you’ve been cheated out of an unlimited supply of time; maybe it’s almost incomprehensibly miraculous to have been granted any time at all.”

“Even an undertaking as seemingly hedonistic as a year spent backpacking around the globe could fall victim to the same problem, if your purpose isn’t to explore the world but—a subtle distinction, this—to add to your mental storehouse of experiences, in the hope that you’ll feel, later on, that you’d used your life well.”

Overall Thoughts

I have no idea if this review reads cohesively at all (probably not, because I'm so fried from book edits, and normally I sleep for 20 hours after finishing but today I wrote a book review instead) but it's one of my favorite books and so I struggle to entirely articulate how transformative it was for me. I'll absolutely post my favorite highlights. I underlined roughly half the book, and it forced me to take a good hard look at myself and reconcile with the ways in which I shrink away from what matters most to me out of perfectionism or fear.

It's not corny in the way that other similar books feel—and has a lot of vivid, specific science grounding it—which is exactly my type of read. It forced me to look at what I want and how I really want to spend my limited life, and it poked a lot of bruises I have re: "wasted time" and what that really means.

It got into the details and the weeds about the cultural treatment of time, but remained zoomed out enough to feel genuinely moving and meaningful. What matters most to you? How much time do you really think you have to go after it? What's your relationship to control, and is it serving you or sabotaging you?

Overall, I love Burkeman's presentation, found his logic to be pretty damn airtight in a way that forced me to really look at myself and my limits—and recognize that I was actually doing myself a disservice in how I treated limited time, productivity, commitment, etc,. Four Thousand Weeks was exactly what I needed, both then and now; it's informative, poignant, clear, and felt like the right book at the right time.