Book Review: We Are All Going To Die, In Case You Weren’t Feeling Enough Time Pressure

“Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals” by Oliver Burkeman

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

If there’s one thing Oliver Burkeman wants readers of his latest book, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management For Mortals, to know, it’s that we’re all going to die. It’s right there in his title For Mortals, because mortals, by definition, die. If we’re lucky and make it to eighty, we’ll have lived four thousand weeks. Life is finite. In Four Thousand Weeks, Burkeman is more interested in what we mortals want to do with that finite time overall than he is in the traditional time management issue of how to achieve a specific goal.

Since his approach is different, Burkeman treats aspects of time other time management writers don’t. Among them:

The history of how humans have thought about time. Until recently, Burkeman says, they didn’t. This left me feeling some anxiety about whether or not we evolved in such a way that we are incapable of judging how much time we need to do something, let alone more than one something.

Accepting that we can’t do everything. There are so many things we want to do with those finite lifetimes of ours. Many time management programs give the impression that if we organized time better or differently, we could do them all…