I'm Brad McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness Podcast.

And a lot of ink has been spilled on time management and productivity hacking.

I mean, you can find endless tips on how to master your workflow, tame your inbox, slay

your to-do list.

Far less examined, however, is the philosophy that underlies these strategies.

My guess says that when you do examine that philosophy, you find it doesn't actually

align with lived experience.

His name is Oliver Berkman, and in his book, 4,000 Weeks Time Management for Mortals,

he forwards a philosophy of time management that is more realistic and more humane.

Today on the show, Oliver makes the case for a kind of contrarian way to make the most

of the 4,000 weeks of the average human lifespan.

Beginning with why you reached a point in his own life, where you realize that standard

methods of productivity hacking were futile and just made him feel busier and less happy.

We then get into the fact that we'd like to do an infinite number of things but our

finite beings, and how this contrast creates an anxiety that we attempt to soothe and

deny through productivity techniques.

We then discuss the problem of treating time as a thing, a resource that's separate from

the self, and how one handed out to this mindset is to do things for pure enjoyment alone.

Oliver explains why engaging in efficiency for its own sake only creates more stuff to

do, and why recognizing you can never clear the decks at your daily tasks nor get everything

done can actually help you focus on the things that matter most.

We inter-conversation with why you really dig into a deep philosophy of time by facing

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