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Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman
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Four Thousand Weeks

The smash-hit bestseller that will change your life
Due to publisher restrictions, this audiobook is unavailable for purchase in your selected country.
Narrator Oliver Burkeman
Length 5 hours 54 minutes
Language English
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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
 
“This is the most important book ever written about time management.” 
—Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Think Again and host of WorkLife

What if you stopped trying to do everything, so that you could finally get around to what counts?

Nobody needs to be told there isn’t enough time. Whether we’re starting our own business, or trying to write a novel during our lunch break, or staring down a pile of deadlines as we’re planning a vacation, we’re obsessed with our lengthening to-do lists, overfilled inboxes, work-life balance, and ceaseless struggle against distraction. We’re deluged with advice on becoming more productive and efficient and life hacks to optimize our days. Still, we rarely make the connection between our daily struggles with time and the ultimate time management problem: the question of how best to use our ridiculously brief time on the planet, which amounts on average to about four thousand weeks.

Drawing on the insights of both ancient and contemporary philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual teachers, Oliver Burkeman delivers an entertaining, humorous, practical, and ultimately profound guide to time and time management. Rejecting the futile modern obsession with “getting everything done,” Four Thousand Weeks introduces readers to tools for constructing a meaningful life by embracing finitude, showing that many of the unhelpful ways we’ve come to think about time aren’t inescapable, unchanging truths, but choices we’ve made as individuals and as a society—and that we can do things differently.

Embrace your limits. Change your life. Make your four thousand weeks count.

OLIVER BURKEMAN is the author of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals as well as The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking and HELP! How to Become Slightly Happier and Get a Bit More Done. For many years he wrote a popular column for the Guardian, ‘This Column Will Change Your Life’, on psychology, productivity, self-help culture, and the science of happiness. His writing has also appeared in the Observer, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Psychologies magazine and New Philosopher. A resident of Brooklyn, New York for more than a decade, he currently lives with his wife and son in the North York Moors in England.

OLIVER BURKEMAN is the author of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals as well as The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking and HELP! How to Become Slightly Happier and Get a Bit More Done. For many years he wrote a popular column for the Guardian, ‘This Column Will Change Your Life’, on psychology, productivity, self-help culture, and the science of happiness. His writing has also appeared in the Observer, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Psychologies magazine and New Philosopher. A resident of Brooklyn, New York for more than a decade, he currently lives with his wife and son in the North York Moors in England.

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Reviews

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
BRONZE MEDALIST FOR THE 2022 AXIOM BUSINESS BOOK AWARD FOR PERSONAL FINANCE / RETIREMENT PLANNING / INVESTING

Praise for Four Thousand Weeks:

“In addition to whatever help it might offer, Four Thousand Weeks is also just good company; it addresses large, even existential, issues with a sense of humor and an even-keeled perspective. I found that reading it—Burkeman might balk at this particular way of describing it—was a good use of my time.”
―The New York Times

“Provocative and appealing . . . An enjoyable, insightful, and occasionally profound book, one well worth your extremely limited time.”
The Wall Street Journal


“We all know our time is limited. What we don’t know—but what Oliver Burkeman is here to teach us—is that our control over that time is also limited. This profound (and often hilarious) book will prompt you to rethink your worship of efficiency, reject the cult of busyness, and reconfigure your life around what truly matters.” 
—Daniel H. Pink, author of When, Drive, and To Sell is Human

“This is the most important book ever written about time management. Oliver Burkeman offers a searing indictment of productivity hacking and profound insights on how to make the best use of our scarcest, most precious resource. His writing will challenge you to rethink many of your beliefs about getting things done―and you’ll be wiser because of it.” 
―Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Think Again and host of WorkLife

"The time management book that many of us need . . . insightful and thought-provoking."
Forbes

"Burkeman is the self-help writer for people like me who find self-help books oversold on magical transformations . . . Four Thousand Weeks is full of such sage and sane advice, delivered with dry wit and a benevolent tone."
The Guardian (UK)

Four Thousand Weeks will challenge and amuse you. And it may even spur you on to change your life.” 
Evening Standard (UK)

“How do we use our time better, not only for productivity, but for our own happiness? That’s the question that lies at the heart of Burkeman’s wide-ranging exploration, which urges readers to let go of getting everything done and learn to 'neglect the right things'” 
―The New York Times, Editor's Choice

“A wonderfully honest book, Four Thousand Weeks is a much-needed reality check on our culture’s crazy assumptions around work, productivity and living a meaningful life.”
—Mark Manson, bestselling author of Everything is F*cked and The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck.

“There is only one productivity book I can recommend and that is Oliver Burkeman’s brilliant Four Thousand Weeks.”
The Times (UK)


“Oliver Burkeman provides an important and insightful reassessment of productivity. The drive to get more done can become an excuse to avoid figuring out what we actually want to accomplish. Only by confronting this latter question can we unlock a calmer, more meaningful, more resilient approach to organizing our time.”
—Cal Newport, New York Times bestselling author of A World Without Email and Deep Work

“Life is finite. You don't have to fit everything in. Enjoy your life. Breathe out. Read this book and wake up to a new way of thinking and living.”
― Emma Gannon, author of The Multi-Hyphen Method

Four Thousand Weeks is a book to read and re-read, to absorb and reflect on. Compassionate, funny and wise, it has not left my mind since I read it. The modern world teaches us to pretend to be immortal―this book is a dip in the cold, clear waters of reality, returning us refreshed and alive.”
―Naomi Alderman, author of The Power

“I have long loved Oliver Burkeman's wise and witty journalism that both interrogates and elevates the 'self-help' realm―revealing its possibilities for absurdity while honoring the deeper human impulses that it meets. Four Thousand Weeks is a splendid offering in that spirit. This book is at once sobering and refreshing on all that is truly at stake in what we blithely refer to as 'time management.' It invites nothing less than a new relationship with time―and with life itself.”
―Krista Tippett, host of On Being

“A beautiful, uplifting read. Reading Oliver Burkeman, I feel my shoulders relax and my mouth curl into a smile of admiration. Witty, modest and refreshingly sane.”
― Robert Webb, author of How Not to Be a Boy

“I loved this book - it's a celebration of all that is most human: a deep dive into the value and potency of our finitude. Where we might buckle under pressure and uncertainty, Oliver quietly restores our centre of gravity within. You'll emerge from his writing fortified by wonder.”
― Derren Brown, author of Happy

"Insightful . . . Burkeman’s thoughtful, reassuring analysis will be a welcome balm to readers feeling overwhelmed by the (perhaps unrealistic) demands of life."
Publishers Weekly

“What sounds like a straightforward self-help book is actually a deep reflection on the nature of time and how humans have historically dealt with it.”
Austin Kleon, New York Times bestselling author of Steal Like An Artist

“Part self-help book, part philosophical treatise, Four Thousand Weeks is a call to arms to live a happier, more fulfilling life.”
Independent.ie

“[A] work about how our obsession with productivity can cause us to lose sight of what is most important within our all-too-short lifespans.”
Areo Magazine

“I love . . . [the] new best-selling book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. It’s profound, life-changing, and offers a rather simple solution to the madness.”
Metro UK


Four Thousand Weeks . . . is about making the most of our finite lives in a world of impossible demands, relentless distraction, and political insanity.”
—The Washington Post

“[A] splendid book.”
—Tim Harford, author of How to Make the World Add Up
 
“[A] lively, entertaining, philosophical guide to time and time management, setting aside superficial efficiency solutions in favor of reckoning with and finding joy in the finitude of human life.”
—Next Big Idea Club

Four Thousand Weeks advocates for an embrace of the finitude of our short time here. Drawing from the wisdom of ancient philosophers, spiritual leaders, and psychologists alike, Burkeman urges readers to accept that being the most productive might not mean being the most fulfilled.”
New York Post


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