Four Thousand Weeks PDF Download Free

After reading this book, I was in a bit of a slump for a week and a half. I figured, I’m going to die. I’m not going to accomplish the things I want to accomplish. Apparently hope is meaningless (which is my biggest problem with this book). In a sense, I believe this is what the author was looking to accomplish and shock us by giving the reader a “reality check”.

So why 3 stars? Hope. Yes, there are people that “only hope” and don’t get around to actually doing anything. These are your “thoughts and prayers” folk that pop up in the news who pretend they care to make themselves look good or feel better for just a moment. But just because some misuse hope doesn’t make it useless or harmful. Sometimes all you have is hope and faith. There is no logical reason for you to believe you can succeed, yet you believe anyways. “Hope is independent of the apparatus of logic.” The refugee in a war torn country trying to survive and give their child a better life, what reason do they have to hope? Yet they hope anyways and that’s what leads them to take action. As humans, we need that emotional and illogical reason to keep going.

Some other things I question… Often we CAN accomplish much more than we believe. Yes, obviously I can’t accomplish everything in the world and my time is finite. Obviously I shouldn’t be constantly living and planning for the future and not living in the moment. Yet, look at how far humanity has come. Go tell people 5000 years ago that we will have airplanes and the internet.

I don’t write a ton of reviews but felt compelled to write this. My point is that there is a balance. One can be too hopeful and optimistic but also stray too far to the other side. Your goals can be too lofty and grandiose but you can also limit yourself and never set out to reach your highest potential. The author paints his ideas as black and white, right and wrong.

That’s not to say there isn’t a lot of great information in this book. In particular, the idea that if we do everything right and push ourselves, there will be a time in the future where all our problems and stress will go away. So constantly waiting for this moment or turning point where we can start truly living our lives. This is a fantasy that I think most can relate to on some level.

So again, not a bad book. Many refreshing but unoriginal ideas packed into one neat book. But: “Hope is a good thing, may be the best of the things. And a good thing never dies.”

A self proclaimed productivity geek, Burkeman has come to a lot of the same conclusions that have started to bug me over the last few years. Time is finite. No matter how efficient we get we’ll never do everything we feel we’re supposed to do. The answer he says is to acknowledge our limitations and be honest with ourselves that the life we’re living right now is what we have.

By stopping struggling against the limits of time we can enjoy what we’re doing right now, and really invest and commit to it. Instead of believing we’re capable of engaging with every opportunity the modern world presents to us, we have to make hard choices about what we really want to do. What if you weren’t trying to get somewhere? What if you accepted that you’re already as here as you’re ever going to be, what would you do then? He highlights the peril the instrumentalisation of time, always doing something for what might happen in the future. Taking a picture of fireworks so you can enjoy it later instead of enjoying the moment.

It’s not necessarily an easy thing to do. Because the theme that runs through the book is that you genuinely can’t do everything you want to do, and not doing some things means giving up on some of your dreams. But it is liberating to realise that actually, it doesn’t matter in the end, you can let go and really focus on what you’re doing. It means trading in a flawless fantasy where you do everything perfectly for the messy reality where you do a handful of things in ways you might fail at. It means giving up certainty to some extent, since committing to something means taking a path without knowing exactly where you’re going. But the alternative is to go nowhere.

It’s a level headed read that takes in a wide range of influences from philosophy and other writers, to great effect as the wisdom of the book is much deeper than you would expect from what is technically a tome about time management. I’ve highlighted all the way through and I’ll definitely be returning to it to absorb it more fully.

There aren’t really any tricks or frameworks to subscribe to. A while ago I read books on techniques on how to make better choices, how I could weigh up each option and make the “right” choice. It’s more like a guide to confronting reality, accepting that you will fail and you will make the wrong choices sometimes. But that’s ok, and it’s a lot less stressful than trying to maintain the impossible standard of always choosing right, always filling your time in the right way.”