Oliver Burkeman: ...that I didn't have to justify my existence through productivity

Nobody Told Me!

Business, Entrepreneurship

4.2 • 671 Ratings

🗓️ 12 August 2022

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Our guest on this episode, British journalist and author Oliver Burkeman says,“The average human life span is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short.” It’s about 4,000 weeks or 77 years. Oliver has written a new book called, "4000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals", which Adam Grant calls, “The most important book ever written about time management.” His website is https://www.oliverburkeman.com/

Note: This episode was previously aired.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Nobody Told Me. I'm Laura Owens. And I'm Jan Black. According to our guest on this episode, British journalist and author Oliver Berkman, the average lifespan is absurdly,
0:23.0	terrifyingly, insultingly short. It's about 4,000 weeks or 77 years. Oliver has written a new book
0:29.8	called 4,000 Weeks, Time Management for Mortals, which Adam Grant calls the most important book
0:36.3	ever written about time management.
0:38.6	Oliver, thank you so much for joining us.
0:40.8	It's my pleasure.
0:41.5	Thanks for asking me.
0:42.5	We are really excited to talk with you and wonder how the title, 4,000 weeks and why the book came about.
0:50.6	Well, the title came about because I did that mental calculation and practically had a panic attack.
0:55.6	So, you know, I had to share the bad news with everybody else.
1:03.4	The book is really, I mean, I can talk about how it came to be in my own life a little bit maybe,
1:08.7	but the book is really an attempt to ask what it does to our ways of thinking about time and especially time management, you know, the daily questions of how you decide what to do and schedule your day and your to do lists and all that stuff.
1:24.3	Once you really take into account the fact that we are these kind of
1:28.9	shockingly finite creatures and are probably not going to be able to do everything that we dreamed
1:36.4	of, let alone get to the end of our emails, you know?
1:39.1	Right.
1:39.8	So how does that change everything in terms of how different this is from other time management
1:45.2	books that just kind of make it seem like we're going to go on forever. And yeah, we should
1:49.6	manage our time better. But at the same time, we're going to have an unlimited number of
1:53.2	weeks. Well, I think what a lot of time management, bad time management does, and there's lots of
1:58.5	good time management, but then I think people take it
2:00.9	and use it in a kind of a bad way, is that it serves to bolster this illusion, right?
	...

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