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, terrifyingly,

insultingly short. It's about 4,000 weeks or 77 years. Oliver has written a new book called

4,000 Weeks, Time Management for Mortals, which Adam Grant calls the most important book

ever written about time management.

Oliver, thank you so much for joining us.

It's my pleasure.

Thanks for asking me.

We are really excited to talk with you and wonder how the title, 4,000 weeks and why the book came about.

Well, the title came about because I did that mental calculation and practically had a panic attack.

So, you know, I had to share the bad news with everybody else.

The book is really, I mean, I can talk about how it came to be in my own life a little bit maybe,

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,

once you really take into account the fact that we are these kind of shockingly

finite creatures and are probably not going to be able to do everything that we dreamed of,

let alone get to the end of our emails, you know?

Right.

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