Four Thousand Weeks: Embrace your limits. Change your life. Make your four thousand weeks count.

„‚Four thousand weeks’ is yet another book about making the best use of time. But it is written in the belief that time management as we know it has failed miserably, and that we need to stop pretending otherwise.“ It indeed is not a self-help book, but offers food for fought instead. Oliver Burkeman starts by explaining that our thinking of „time as something abstract and separate from life“ is relatively new and how, once time and life have been separated in our minds, time became a resource. That is why, like with most resources, we feel pressured to use it well and make the most out of it. He goes on declaring that „the problem is not that […] ‚time-saving‘ techniques and products don’t work. It’s that they do work […] and yet, paradoxically, you only feel busier, more anxious, and somehow emptier as a result.“ In the first part of the book, Burkeman explains why „the day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control“ and that we should instead accept the truth of our limited time and our limited control over it. „The average human lifespan is absurdly (…) short. But that is (…) a cause for relief. You get to give up on something that was always impossible - the quest to become the optimised, infinitely capable (…) person you‘re officially supposed to be.“ In the second part of the book, Burkeman shares several ideas on how to accept and celebrate our finitude. By understanding that we won‘t have time for everything we want to do, we are forced to make choices. That is no reason for despair because „missing out is what makes our choices meaningful in the first place“. He also encourages to shift our priorities: Usually, „our days are spent ‚trying to get through‘ tasks, in order to get them ‚out of the way‘, with the result that we live mentally in the future, waiting for when we’ll finally get round to what really matters.“ But „if you try to find time for your most valued activities by first dealing with all the other important demands on your time, in the hope that there will be some left over at the end, you will be disappointed. (…) Pay yourself first when it comes to time.“ He then goes on giving examples on how to do that and even offers a list of tools for embracing our finitude in the appendix. As an avid reader, I especially like his observation that „reading is the sort of activity that largely operates to its own schedule. You can’t hurry it very much before the experience begins to lose its meaning - it refuses to consent, you might say, to our desire to exert control over how our time unfolds.“ Indeed this might be one of the reasons I enjoy reading so much - I am „forced“ to take my time and slow down in a world where I usually feel hurried and busy all the time. Between mind-shifting deeptalk, humorous side notes and personal anecdotes, he changed the way I think about procrastination, priorities, the ‚fear of missing out‘ and even saying no to things I actually do want to do. To be honest, I wasn’t expecting too much because I have started saying no (to things I do not want to do) and tried (more or less successful) to embrace the concept of ‚joy of missing out‘ long before I read this book, but I still took a lot away from it. I have highlighted more passages than I can count and would recommend the book to everyone who feels like they never have enough time. „Now is all you ever get. (…) Being alive is just happenstance, and not one more day of it is guaranteed.“