You have approximately four thousand weeks to live. If you’re lucky. If you’ve already lived thirty years, you’ve spent about fifteen hundred of them. They’re gone. You’re not getting them back.
This week we dive into Oliver Burkeman’s book “Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals” and ask a question that productivity culture desperately wants you to avoid: What if trying to “get everything done” is fundamentally broken?
The productivity industrial complex promises that if you just get organised enough, disciplined enough, efficient enough, you’ll finally get on top of everything. You’ll achieve inbox zero. You’ll clear your to-do list. You’ll have free time.
It’s never going to happen.
Burkeman discovered something unsettling: the more efficient you become, the more demands flood in to fill the space. Productivity isn’t freedom. It’s a trap that turns you into a human machine competing against actual machines that never sleep.
Traditional time management says control time to control life. Burkeman offers something more radical: surrender the illusion of control to find actual freedom.
You will never do everything. You will disappoint people. You will die with unlived lives inside you. And accepting this doesn’t diminish you. It liberates you.
Because when you stop trying to do everything, you can finally do something. Something real. Something chosen. Something that’s yours.
Your four thousand weeks are already counting down. What will you do with them?
Much love, David x
