Oliver Burkeman

The average human lifespan is absurdly, insultingly brief. Assuming you live to be eighty, you have just over four thousand weeks.Nobody needs telling there isn’t enough time. We’re obsessed with our lengthening to-do lists, our overfilled inboxes, work-life balance, and the ceaseless battle against distraction; and we’re deluged with advice on becoming more productive and efficient, and “life hacks” to optimize our days. But such techniques often end up making things worse. The sense of anxious hurry grows more intense, and still the most meaningful parts of life seem to lie just beyond the horizon. Still, we rarely make the connection between our daily struggles with time and the ultimate time management problem: the challenge of how best to use our 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 fixation on “getting everything done,” Four Thousand Weeks introduces readers to tools for constructing a meaningful life by embracing finitude, showing how 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 could do things differently.

From Oliver Burkeman, author of the New York Times bestseller Four Thousand Weeks, a four-week journey to embracing your limitations, thriving in an age of bewilderment, and finally making time for what counts.Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman’s breakout New York Times bestseller, touched the lives of hundreds of thousands of readers. Inspired and moved by his investigation of how to live unblinkingly in the face of our limited time on earth, some of them changed their lives—and made big decisions to rethink careers, relationships, priorities, and misguided assumptions about productivity.Now, in Meditations for Mortals, Burkeman brings the themes and questions at the center of Four Thousand Weeks—time, mortality, imperfection, productivity, and how to live fully and deeply even when things are most challenging—into the heart of our daily lives. How do we embrace the reality of our finiteness? How do we make decisions and act with conviction when there is always too much to do and failure is inevitable? How do we find a deeper sense of purpose when we realize that life is not a problem to be solved? How does care for others make us more free?Comprised of four weeks of extended reflections on inspiring quotations—drawn from philosophy, religion, literature, psychology, and self-help—Burkeman’s latest is the perfect companion during a time of turbulence and pervasive a source of solace and enlightenment, inspiration and insight, and humor and provocation. The result is a winking challenge to the usual self-help platitudes—a surprising and entertaining crash course in living meaningfully.

A witty, fascinating, and counterintuitive read that turns decades of self-help advice on its head and forces us to rethink completely our attitudes toward failure, uncertainty, and death. The Antidote is a series of journeys among people who share a single, surprising way of thinking about life. What they have in common is a hunch about human psychology: that it's our constant effort to eliminate the negative that causes us to feel so anxious, insecure, and unhappy. And that there is an alternative "negative path" to happiness and success that involves embracing the things we spend our lives trying to avoid. It is a subversive, galvanizing message, which turns out to have a long and distinguished philosophical lineage ranging from ancient Roman Stoic philosophers to Buddhists. Oliver Burkeman talks to life coaches paid to make their clients' lives a living hell, and to maverick security experts such as Bruce Schneier, who contends that the changes we've made to airport and aircraft security since the 9/11 attacks have actually made us less safe. And then there are the "backwards" business gurus, who suggest not having any goals at all and not planning for a company's future. Burkeman's new book is a witty, fascinating, and counterintuitive read that turns decades of self-help advice on its head and forces us to rethink completely our attitudes toward failure, uncertainty, and death.