How Oliver Burkeman’s ‘Four Thousand Weeks’ Shatters Productivity Myths
Everything we know about how to lead a successful life is wrong
You can end up wasting your whole life by assuming you have time. It’s only when that time runs out, that you realise how finite it is. Part of the challenge of being a human is realising you will never have enough.
This can be alarming, but a force of productivity in itself.
Reading Four Thousand Weeks changed the way I thought about my inevitable mortality. And it’s not often I will read a self-help book and claim that. But it really did. Oliver Burkeman opens his book with a brutal assessment of the fragility of human life with some simple maths.
On average, we all have four thousand weeks to live. That’s if we are lucky enough to live until 80. It may sound like a lot at first, but I’ve done the maths.
Being 26 years old, I have already lived for approximately 1,300 weeks. It didn’t seem like a lot at first. But then I worked out how many weeks I might have left. This gave me 2,700 weeks.
I stared at the number for ages, thinking about all the time I’ve wasted scrolling away on TikTok or not trying at all because I didn’t believe I could ever be good enough at something.
