Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

by Oliver Burkeman

Things just are the way they are, such metaphors suggest, no matter how vigorously you might wish they weren’t—and your only hope of exercising any real influence over the world is to work with that fact, instead of against it.

reading something properly just takes the time it takes.

We push ourselves harder to get rid of anxiety, but the result is actually more anxiety, because the faster we go, the clearer it becomes that we’ll never succeed in getting ourselves or the rest of the world to move as fast as we feel is necessary.

give up “demanding instant resolution, instant relief from discomfort and pain, and magical fixes.”

first is to develop a taste for having problems.

When lockdown ended, Gambuto warned, corporations and governments would conspire to make us forget the possibilities we’d glimpsed, by means of shiny new products and services and distracting culture wars; and we’d be so desperate to return to normality that we’d be tempted to comply.

when it comes to how you’re using your finite time, the universe absolutely could not care less.

“We do not disapprove of a chair because it cannot be used to boil water for a nice cup of tea,”

consider the possibility that many of the things you’re already doing with it are more meaningful than you’d supposed

now is all you ever get.

it’s only unbearable for as long as you’re under the impression that there might be a cure.

Five Questions

The truth is that it’s impossible to become so efficient and organized that you could respond to a limitless number of incoming demands. It’s usually equally impossible to spend what feels like “enough time” on your work and with your children, and on socializing, traveling, or engaging in political activism.

Peace of mind, and an exhilarating sense of freedom, comes not from achieving the validation but from yielding to the reality that it wouldn’t bring security if you got it.

if the feeling of total authority is never going to arrive, you might as well not wait any longer to give such activities your all

What actions—what acts of generosity or care for the world, what ambitious schemes or investments in the distant future—might it be meaningful to undertake today, if you could come to terms with never seeing the results?

One lives as one can.

working within the limits of your moment in history, and your finite time and talents, you actually got around to doing—and made life more luminous for the rest of us by doing—whatever magnificent task or weird little thing it was that you came here for.