How To Rethink What You Spend Your Time — And Life — Doing

Life Kit

NPR

Kids & Family, Self-improvement, Business, Health & Fitness, Education

4.5 • 4.9K Ratings

🗓️ 14 October 2021

⏱️ 20 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

You've only got 4,000 weeks to live — give or take. While that may come as a brutal dose of reality, it's also an opportunity to think about how you're spending that time.

In this episode, we talk to Oliver Burkeman, author of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, about the idea of time management, why none of us will ever be in control, and how we can better decide what we spend time on, and ultimately, the moments that make up a life.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Okay, you ready?
0:01.0	Yeah.
0:02.0	Okay.
0:06.8	Hey, so I know you're just trying to mind your business and enjoy a quick podcast.
0:11.8	This is NPR's life kit, by the way.
0:14.1	But we're about to throw you a bomb.
0:16.8	A time bomb.
0:19.8	Just as there will be a final occasion on which I pick up my son,
0:23.4	a thought that appalls me, but one that's hard to deny,
0:26.1	since I surely won't be doing it when he's 30.
0:28.9	There will be a last time that you visit your child at home,
0:31.9	or swim in the ocean, or make love, or have a deep conversation with a certain close friend.
0:37.3	Yet, usually there'll be no way to know in the moment itself that you're doing it for the last time.
0:42.4	We should therefore try to treat every such experience with the reverence we'd show
0:46.2	if it were the final instance of it.
0:48.6	And indeed, there's a sense in which every moment of life is a last time.
0:52.4	It arrives.
0:53.5	You'll never get it again.
0:55.1	And once it's passed, your remaining supply of moments will be one smaller than before.
1:05.4	I'm Andy Tagle, one of the producers of this show.
1:08.1	And that was Oliver Berkman, reading from his book, Four Thousand Weeks, Time Management for Mortals.
1:15.0	It's all about how to handle the time we have here on Earth,
	...

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