Meditations for Mortals (2024)
by Oliver Burkeman
Those who distrust self-help books and who might snort and roll their eyes at this book merely for its subtitle – Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts – might be surprised at the sobriety of Burkeman’s advice. In this book, Burkeman picks up where he left off in his previous one –
Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for MortalsFour Thousand Weeks (2021)
Time Management for Mortals
by Oliver Burkeman
Highly recommend to anyone interested in reading about time management. This book has a radical message for you: give up hope. You’re never going to finish. Relearn what it means to spend your time well. You have very little of it and your anxiety about not wasting it is founded on bad assumptions and impossible standards.
I’d rate this book higher if I had learned more from it. I’ve thought lots about time management.
Sometimes I feel like Burkeman allows himself doubtful claims, but his ideas are interesting and useful nonetheless. His writing is good, but
not great.
I enjoyed his anecdotes and references to other works. The idea of pre-clock life blew my mind. I hadn’t thought about the relationship between clocks, time, industrialization, and wage-labor. A great example of fundamental paradigms we don’t question. Pure ideology!
– by revisting the grim fact that a lifetime is a
prohibitively brief window of timehow to live in the moment
It is old advice to live now because now is the only time you will ever live. Embrace this moment because it is the only one in reach. But the advice resonates only so deeply with me. I find many nows made for trading, worthy of giving up for what I can get later.
To this cliche
Oliver Burkemanadds a darker harmony with a note of his own. You will never make the most of your time. It is painfully short and any bid for optimal use of it is doomed. Suddenly the original cliche is not about changing your attitude but about accepting that you get what you get. The task is not to settle, but to admit defeat. Time rules you and the freest you can get is by giving up the fight.
to achieve even a fraction of the things we propose to do. Burkeman’s mention of mortality in the naming of his books is not an empty gesture or a marketing gambit. His writings on the topic of time-management and day-to-day living take death out of the subtext and put it where it belongs, in the text itself.
This book offers a series of cleverly angled perspectives that transform problems by considering them differently. Each chapter begins with a quote and Chapter Three begins with a brilliant one from Sheldon Bernard Kopp:
You are free to do whatever you like. You need only face the consequences.
This is not a fantasy of omnipotence, but an energizing reminder of the control you do have. Reframing my role in this way – from unwilling object to autonomous subject – freed me from the futile and exhausting cycle of resent towards my circumstances and refocused my attention on what I was doing about them. As Burkeman phrases it:
[Sometimes you’ll] do the undesirable thing because you understand the cost and you don’t want to incur it. Notice how different that is, how different it feels from grudgingly saying yes because you feel you have no choice, then resenting it for days.
In short, there are two options. Do nothing and accept the consequences, or do what you can to get the result you want. Idle rage makes no sense. If the consequences are unacceptable then do something about them. If they are acceptable, accept them and move on. This directive prompts another liberating insight:
Most of the potential consequences we find ourselves agonizing about don’t remotely justify such angst.
This also helped me enormously. It simplified my conundrum by helping me realize that my primary task was to eliminate risk of actual harm befalling me and reducing the likelihood of costly consequences. That done, as long as I can fiscally, emotionally, and physically afford the potential consequences, there is no reason to worry like I am in danger.