FOUR THOUSAND WEEKS by Oliver Burkeman

This book is about something that affects absolutely all of us - time and our perceived or experienced problems with it. Olga suggested the title and I am happy to organise and moderate (unless somebody else would like to take over?) a meeting to discuss this non-fiction text.

This is what the Guardian says about the book:

„In the current average human lifespan we get 4,000 of each day of the week: 4,000 Saturday nights, 4,000 lazy Sundays, 4,000 Monday mornings. When we are young, that might feel like a dizzying number of tomorrows. As the years go by, not so much. Oliver Burkeman’s midlife inquiry into how we might most meaningfully approach those days is perfectly pitched somewhere between practical self-help book and philosophical quest. Having been the Guardian’s resident “pursuit of happiness” correspondent for a decade, offering the weekly promise that “This column will change your life”, this is something like his accumulated wisdom.

It starts with some necessary caveats. The day will never arrive when you have emptied your inbox. There will always be too many demands on your time, or nowhere near enough. Anything might happen in the next half an hour. Burkeman’s own journey as he describes it over the past years is perhaps a familiar one. He started out in his adult life believing there might be a trick to optimising personal productivity. He was a planner, a to-do lister, a buyer of highlighter pens. He was half-persuaded that there might be three or seven or 12 robust habits that allowed you finally to feel in control, on top of things.“

If you have a Spotify premium account you have already paid for the audio version of the book and can listen to it in 5 hours and 55 minutes while working out or commuting or sitting in your armchair watching the day go by. :)