Book Review : Four Thousand Weeks
Nobody in the history of humanity has ever achieved “work-life balance”! That’s a powerful statement and validation of a feeling which I was carrying for many decades. I myself giving productivity seminars and coaching people to be productive and get the “work life balance”. Actually, I stopped suggesting people on “work life balance” long time, and was asking for “work life fit” , and I suppose that’s the crack in my belief in Getting Things Done.
Very recently I celebrated my 42nd Birthday, and one of my well wisher has sent me this. 🧐
And I came across this book, 4000 weeks! I lived 2200 weeks approx, and 4000 weeks is what typically a person leave at the age of 80! I just crossed my half life, And luckily this book got me into great revelation.
Master Your Time, Master Your Life
Brian Tracy (Time Management Guru)
This is what I believed, and striving so far to “manage the time”, This dream of somehow one day getting the upper hand in our relationship with time is the most forgivable of human delusions because this book made me understand the alternative, and it is so unsettling.
unfortunately, it’s the alternative that’s true: the struggle is doomed to fail. Because your quantity of time is so limited, you’ll never reach the commanding position of being able to handle every demand that might be thrown at you or pursue every ambition that feels important; you’ll be obliged to make tough choices instead. And because you can’t dictate, or even accurately predict, so much of what happens with the finite portion of time you do get, you’ll never feel that you’re securely in charge of events, immune from suffering, primed and ready for whatever comes down the pike… and that’s the “enlightening moment for me from this book”
Let’s talk about the book
By Oliver Burkeman,
lovely and short book on making us understand the concept of Finitude. The finite amount of time we have, and rather than spending this finite amount of time in struggling to manage it, how to be more effective by being in present and utilising it.
Key Take Aways
Patience become a form of power
In a world geared for hurry, the capacity to resist the urge to hurry—to allow things to take the time they take—is a way to gain purchase on the world, to do the work that counts, and to derive satisfaction from the doing itself, instead of deferring all your fulfillment to the future.
Hobbies have acquired this embarrassing reputation in an era so committed to using time instrumentally.
I’m also guilty of this feeling. Sometime hobbies become kind of mandate, pushing me to consume me time under hobby to help me be more productive. Hobbies on other hand should help me relax not make me more busy. Kind a oxymoron.
Be in present.
You’re so fixated on trying to make the best use of your time—in this case not for some later outcome, but for an enriching experience of life right now—that it obscures the experience itself. A more fruitful approach to the challenge of living more fully in the moment starts from noticing that you are, in fact, always already living in the moment anyway, whether you like it or not.
basic mistake—of treating our time as something to hoard, when it’s better approached as something to share.
What would it mean to spend the only time you ever get in a way that truly feels as though you are making it count? It’s never late to find yourself doubting the point of what you’re doing with your life, because it demonstrates that an inner shift has already occurred. we are no more preoccupied with the thoughts, ignoring the facts.
The real truth. that what you do with your life doesn’t matter all that much—and when it comes to how you’re using your finite time, the universe absolutely could not care less.
My mindmap
