# Four Thousand Weeks ![rw-book-cover](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71udc7ZQtVL._SY160.jpg) ## Metadata - Author: [[Oliver Burkeman]] - Full Title: Four Thousand Weeks - Category: #books ## Highlights - Assuming you live to be eighty, you’ll have had about four thousand weeks. ([Location 36](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=36)) - The world is bursting with wonder, and yet it’s the rare productivity guru who seems to have considered the possibility that the ultimate point of all our frenetic doing might be to experience more of that wonder. ([Location 55](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=55)) - So this book is an attempt to help redress the balance—to see if we can’t discover, or recover, some ways of thinking about time that do justice to our real situation: to the outrageous brevity and shimmering possibilities of our four thousand weeks. ([Location 60](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=60)) - 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. ([Location 163](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=163)) - 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. ([Location 177](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=177)) - Historians call this way of living “task orientation,” because the rhythms of life emerge organically from the tasks themselves, rather than from being lined up against an abstract timeline, the approach that has become second nature for us today. (It’s ([Location 219](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=219)) - The fundamental problem is that this attitude toward time sets up a rigged game in which it’s impossible ever to feel as though you’re doing well enough. Instead of simply living our lives as they unfold in time—instead of just being time, you might say—it becomes difficult not to value each moment primarily according to its usefulness for some future goal, or for some future oasis of relaxation you hope to reach once your tasks are finally “out of the way.” ([Location 282](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=282)) - There is an alternative: the unfashionable but powerful notion of letting time use you, approaching life not as an opportunity to implement your predetermined plans for success but as a matter of responding to the needs of your place and your moment in history. ([Location 390](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=390)) - the more firmly you believe it ought to be possible to find time for everything, the less pressure you’ll feel to ask whether any given activity is the best use for a portion of your time. ([Location 560](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=560)) - The real measure of any time management technique is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things. ([Location 837](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=837))