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

This book really does make you stop and think ! 4000 weeks does sound like a long time but when you start noticing just how quickly each week passes you realise that our time on this earth is limited. I have changed my whole outlook on life and now, and try to do all the things we put off until another day TODAY !! I think once you have read this book you will also do the same. A fantastic thought provoking well written and informative book, well worth reading and passing on to someone you care about. The moral DONT WASTE ANOTHER DAY, Get on and enjoy your life.

Language is a bit hard and takes some time to understand, but overall manifest the idea well. You can't get and do everything, therefore you must choose consciously where you want to put your effort and time. What I like about the mist is different philosophers' viewpoint toward time and why using time as a currency is not wise as well. Sometimes patient is what we need to settle down impact on our lives. Wisdom

Four Thousand Weeks is a good book with lots of ideas for wanting to get oneself organised and focused on relevant, big things, rather than the small, less significant things in life that can get in the way and bog down more important projects. As I read the book, I felt that much of what Burkeman advocates chimes very much with my own ideas about productivity. Burkeman outlines his thesis at the very start, writing: “The real problem isn’t our limited time. The real problem – or so I hope to convince you – is that we’ve unwittingly inherited, and feel pressured to live by, a troublesome set of ideas about how to use our limited time, all of which are pretty much guaranteed to make things worse.” There is little to disagree with in Four Thousand Weeks. Most of the advice is useful and evidenced based as Burkeman guides his readers through a labyrinth of self-help, organisational and productivity tips, some of which are very good and worth taking on board. Others, put to the test, fall to the wayside. His own ideas, which amount to using one’s time well by focusing mainly on a few key projects, only adding new projects when initial key ones are completed, is a fairly loose way of putting it, for there is more detail and nuance in Burkeman’s approach. For example, when referring to Stephen Covey’s parable of the rocks in the jar, he writes: “The critical question isn’t how to differentiate between activities that matter and those that don’t, but what to do when far too many things feel at least somewhat important, and therefore arguably qualify as big rocks.” In addition, Burkeman writes particularly well. There is the occasional flourish into the long, abstract sentence; though this is the exception rather than the rule. For most part, ideas were expressed clearly throughout the book and generally easy to comprehend. And there are some great stories along the way, such as the one about Franz Kafka being torn between his work and love for Felice Bauer. The book is also full of quotable passages. Here are three, though I could have picked many more. “Productivity is a trap. Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster.” “The technologies we use to try to ‘get on top of everything’ always fail us, in the end, because they increase the size of the ’everything’ of which we’re trying to get on top.” “One can waste years this way, systematically postponing precisely the things one cares about the most.” All in all, I would recommend Four Thousand Weeks for it has much to offer, whether you agree with Burkeman’s ideas or not. I hope you find my review helpful.

This book made me scared. Like many of us, I was always hurrying between work schedules, home responsibilities, being a parent, trying to exercise, and finding a few minutes for reading… and so on. I felt like I was always running, always in motion. This never stops. However, this book changed that. It's based on the idea that we have only 4,000 weeks in this world. And that's what scared me the most — because my weeks were disappearing fast without me even noticing them. I wasn't present. I wasn't enjoying those passing weeks. But the book's idea hit me hard: my time is limited, and there will be no replay. The book changed me. And I'm so happy it did. I try to enjoy each day now. I still work hard. I still have long to-do lists. I still read about "productivity hacks". But my priority has changed. I'm more present now. Each day, I have scheduled time for my kid and family — a wonderful time. And all this changed because the book scared me.

I'm about a third of the way through this book and not finding it particularly enjoyable or inspirational so far. I'm not learning anything new but maybe it's because I reappraised how I spend my time and what I valued when we were all locked down in the pandemic. The advice so far has been practical but there is nothing profound or leftfield which fires up the neurons. All personal development and growth mindset books have their fans and haters. If I'm only considering the highly rated ones with widespread acclaim, this is the one so far that I've enjoyed the least.

The ideas in this book are floating around in the ether at the moment. It's the antidote to the productivity, work smart, squeeze every moment philosophy that's been around for 20 or 30 years. There's books about rest, 4 day week initiatives and a growing realisation that trying to be more productive is only making us more stressed. So I think it's fair to say that Burkeman won't be the only person to write this book, but I do think he will have written the best and most thoughtful iteration of it. A self proclaimed productivity geek, Burkeman has come to a lot of the same conclusions that have started to bug me over the last few years. Time is finite. No matter how efficient we get we'll never do everything we feel we're supposed to do. The answer he says is to acknowledge our limitations and be honest with ourselves that the life we're living right now is what we have. By stopping struggling against the limits of time we can enjoy what we're doing right now, and really invest and commit to it. Instead of believing we're capable of engaging with every opportunity the modern world presents to us, we have to make hard choices about what we really want to do. What if you weren't trying to get somewhere? What if you accepted that you're already as here as you're ever going to be, what would you do then? He highlights the peril the instrumentalisation of time, always doing something for what might happen in the future. Taking a picture of fireworks so you can enjoy it later instead of enjoying the moment. It's not necessarily an easy thing to do. Because the theme that runs through the book is that you genuinely can't do everything you want to do, and not doing some things means giving up on some of your dreams. But it is liberating to realise that actually, it doesn't matter in the end, you can let go and really focus on what you're doing. It means trading in a flawless fantasy where you do everything perfectly for the messy reality where you do a handful of things in ways you might fail at. It means giving up certainty to some extent, since committing to something means taking a path without knowing exactly where you're going. But the alternative is to go nowhere. It's a level headed read that takes in a wide range of influences from philosophy and other writers, to great effect as the wisdom of the book is much deeper than you would expect from what is technically a tome about time management. I've highlighted all the way through and I'll definitely be returning to it to absorb it more fully. There aren't really any tricks or frameworks to subscribe to. A while ago I read books on techniques on how to make better choices, how I could weigh up each option and make the "right" choice. It's more like a guide to confronting reality, accepting that you will fail and you will make the wrong choices sometimes. But that's ok, and it's a lot less stressful than trying to maintain the impossible standard of always choosing right, always filling your time in the right way.

This isn't one of those typical time management books, telling us how to increase our efficiency, and pack ever more work into our ever more crowded lives. Instead, Burkeman notices that it is entirely impossible to do everything: even if one were to succeed in finishing the to do list, all that would happen is more would be added. So, instead, we should embrace our limited life spans (why does 4000 weeks sound so much shorter than 77 years?); we should be happy we have the chance to experience as much as we do, and we should choose wisely what to do, prioritising the meaningful over the merely efficient. A refreshingly upbeat philosophy.

A liberating and potentially life changing book - not every section will relate to everyone but the mirror held up to our self-destructive culture and habits will resonate with most. Our obsession with busy-ness that intrudes even into our leisure time, the postponing of everything we really want always just down the road to be achieved after our next project/promotion/payrise will be familiar to all of us. While we shy away from the salient message “We don’t know what will happen tomorrow” even without it the revelation that our super-productivity mindsets are working against our happiness gives opportunity to change for the better.

I bought this book thinking it would teach me how to manage my time, but instead, it triggered an identity crisis. The book is simply AWESOME. It will invite you to reflect on your relationship with time and productivity, with great analysis and provocations - for me, it's more of a philosophical book than a time management book. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is tired of producing so much or wants to take a step back and analyze the life they have been building.

Exactly what I expected 👌

Great to relax mind about life I had read this slow and nice without rush to finish it Definitely recommend

Worth reading

If you live by your to-do lists and are in a constant anxious state to get more of it done, you need to read this book. It's not preachy or "self-helpy" at all, it just tells you how it is: you have about 4000 weeks on this planet. Are you going to spend it as a slave to a perfect future that will never exist, or are you going to start living right now?