Four Thousand Weeks: Burkeman’s method for re-thinking time management
- Madeline Curtis
- Dec 19, 2025
- 6 min read
A familiar feeling creeps in at the end of a year—the realization that time is slipping by faster than expected. That’s something time is notorious for. Your ‘bucket-list’ is still long, your inbox fuller than it was this morning, and somewhere in the back of your mind is the belief that if you were just managing your time better, you’d have a lot more by now: more productivity, more balance, more fulfillment. Modern life tells us there’s enough time in the day— that’s it’s just a matter of optimizing it and using certain hacks to maximize every minute of our time. But what if the problem isn’t how we manage time?
Time management has become a cultural and professional obsession. We download apps, build routines, and follow hacks just to take back some time and feel on top of things. Time management is sold as a way to gain control over our lives and our time. While many time-management tips do offer solid advice, many of us still feel overwhelmed even after putting these practices into place. Why? The short answer: modern time management fails.
Why modern time management fails?
Time-management is a necessary soft skill. Knowing how to invest your time and what to invest it in is essential to every facet of life. However, many modern time-management techniques fail for a few different reasons. To dive into these reasons, we turned to Oliver Burkeman’s New York Times Bestseller, Four Thousand Weeks. This work asks tough questions about today’s time-management systems and pushes you to make the most of your time. One of the central arguments Burkeman makes is that traditional time management is fundamentally flawed—not because we’re doing it wrong, but because it’s based on unrealistic assumptions.
First, we tend to fall into the ‘efficiency’ trap. This trap baits us into believing the more efficient we become, the more we should expect to accomplish. While this approach can be successful and efficiency is often fruitful, it can also throw us into a vicious cycle. Instead of freeing up time, productivity often just raises the bar, filling any reclaimed space with new obligations. The more we aim to be productive with our time, the less time we have.
Second, there’s the stress of thinking we can ‘do it all’--and the feeling of defeat that comes when we realize we can’t. This ‘do it all’ notion has been on the rise— especially in the last decade. While it’s noble to pursue a life rich in personal fulfillment, we inevitably fail to keep up. The result isn’t motivation—it’s defeat. We internalize this failure as a personal shortcoming rather than recognizing the impossibility of the expectation itself.
Third, today’s time-management hacks and systems tend to create more work. They focus on organizing tasks rather than questioning which tasks are worth doing. Prioritization takes a back seat to completion. We become excellent at checking boxes without asking why those boxes exist.
Last, time management often helps us do more, but it doesn’t help us become more fulfilled. Productivity and meaning are not the same thing. Sadly, productivity is often valued more than and confused with fulfillment. That can result in a busy, unsatisfying life.
Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks
The title of Burkman’s book comes from a sobering truth: the average lifespan is about four thousand weeks. This finite number shouldn’t necessarily provoke urgency or fear. Rather, it should invite honesty. How are we spending our 4,000 weeks?
Rather than offering another productivity system, Four Thousand Weeks encourages a shift in mindset. The book challenges the unrealistic idea of total control and invites us to accept that time is our scarcest resource. Burkeman aims to help us recognize that choosing one thing sometimes means not choosing another. Far from failing to ‘have or do it all’, this choice means prioritizing what really matters.
Living an authentic life that fulfills our deepest needs sometimes requires removing things of lesser value. If we only have four thousand weeks, Burkeman recommends living that time in alignment with your true purpose rather than aiming to check off as many boxes as you can from your to-do list.
So, how do we begin to make the ‘Four Thousand Weeks’ mindset shift? With five these principles from Burkeman.
5 Tips to incorporate the Four Thousand Weeks principle into your life
1. Pay yourself first
Burkeman suggests you must pay yourself first. Instead of giving your best energy to everything else and using the leftovers for yourself, do the opposite. Prioritize the people, projects, and practices that matter most to you before the day fills up. The time and resources leftover can be used on tasks or projects that come next in order of importance. Pay yourself first with your time, then distribute the leftovers to secondary priorities. Remember, your time is your own–put it first towards the efforts that are most important to you.
2. Limit commitments
Saying yes to everything and adding more items to your to-do list only leads to burnout. Burkeman emphasizes the power of deliberate limitation–choosing fewer things and committing to them more fully. In doing so, you again ensure your priorities remain intact. You also set yourself up for greater success by giving your attention more fully to the projects and people that matter most to you. That means being more selective with what you say ‘yes’ to, limiting yourself to what matters most. Remember that every ‘yes’ is also a ‘no’--we sacrifice time and effort in one area to invest it in another. Make your ‘yes’ count.
3. Choose where to invest your effort
Not everything deserves the same level of attention or effort. Decide consciously where your energy goes, understanding that deep focus on a few areas is more meaningful than shallow effort across too many. Burkeman encourages something he calls “strategic neglect.” In other words, you don’t need to excel at everything. Pick the areas that genuinely matter and align with your purpose. Let the rest be “good enough.” Take stock of your life–personal or professional–and note what needs the most and least attention. Then, order your time accordingly.
4. Be present
When time is treated as something to conquer rather than embrace, the present moment becomes an obstacle. Presence, however, embraces the finitude of time and allows us to experience our lives instead of racing through them. Stop treating the present moment as a stepping stone to a productivity milestone. Instead, aim to experience the present—in all its imperfection. This helps us to live a more engaged life and opens us up to opportunities in the moment. By embracing the present completely, we can find the hidden opportunities for growth, development, and fulfillment. Rather than looking past the present to what lies ahead, try focusing on the here and now. Four thousand weeks can slip by too fast if we’re always looking ahead to the next week.
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5. Focus on what really matters
Ask yourself: If I only had 4,000 weeks, how would I want to spend them? Chances are, the answer isn’t zeroing down your inbox or endless multitasking. Make the most of those weeks by focusing on what truly matters. This requires being uncomfortably honest with yourself. What do you want your limited weeks to stand for? Fulfillment comes not from doing more, but from aligning your time with your values. Try making a list of your values. What do you treasure most in life? What, or whom, do you want to spend your four thousand weeks on?
We can’t control time, but we can control what we do with it. Four Thousand Weeks reminds us that our goal shouldn’t be to fit everything in. It’s to let go of the impossible standard that says we should. Maybe it’s time to embrace the fact that we can’t do everything. But, we can do what matters most and brings fulfillment. As we close one year and open another, let’s strive to live our four thousand weeks–and the next fifty-two–in line with what matters most.
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