Thomas's Reviews > Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

Solid four-star book that applies acceptance and mindfulness principles to time management. I liked how Oliver Burkeman confronts death and mortality and asks us to reckon with how little time we actually have on this earth. There’s helpful practical advice within this philosophical framework of acknowledging our limited time for what it is. Even though I consider myself someone with pretty great time management and as someone who already uses several of these strategies (e.g., making a to-do list and recognizing from the start what may or may not be able to get done, honoring what one has been able to do), I still gained some useful tidbits from reading this book (e.g., allowing yourself to anticipate failure in a domain or two to alleviate perfectionism/anticipatory stress).

A couple of critiques that almost made me rate this book lower than four stars. One, I felt that Burkeman draws heavily on mindfulness principles with origins from Eastern spiritual practices but doesn’t give credit to those practices/ideas. Second, there were times where he would try to apply some of his advice to areas that I didn’t think he had the expertise to comment on. Like he started writing about marriage and did so in a super monogamy-oriented/heteronormative way, and his analysis of “settling” in relationships lacked any nuance related to gender dynamics and socialization, how patriarchy shapes engagement in relationships, etc. I’ll still give this book four stars based on the quality parts though it could have been streamlined and more incisive.