Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

by Oliver Burkeman

Fortunately, precisely because that’s all you can do, it’s also all that you ever have to do. If you can face the truth about time in this way—if you can step more fully into the condition of being a limited human—you will reach the greatest heights of productivity, accomplishment, service, and fulfillment that were ever in the cards for you to begin with. And the life you will see incrementally taking shape, in the rearview mirror, will be one that meets the only definitive measure of what it means to have used your weeks well: not how many people you helped, or how much you got done; but that 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.