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Oliver Burkeman: Four Thousand Weeks (Hardcover, 2021, Farrar, Straus and Giroux) 4 stars

The average human lifespan is absurdly, outrageously, insultingly brief: if you live to 80, you …

A good alternative to traditional time management books

3 stars

I read this as the description really spoke to my todo-list overwhelm and feeling that everything needed to be done.

This book reminds you of the obvious - we're all finite, todo lists are always infinite. You were never going to get everything done anyway, so stop worrying about it. Instead, prioritise ruthlessly, choose things that you're willing to let go or fail at, and value the "now" over the unreachable future that you think will exist when you finish your todo list.

Overall, the book does what it sets out to achieve fairly well. Unfortunately it has a narrowly neurotypical view and doesn't really give space for those of us who struggle to let things go and often fall into absolutist thinking about their todo list. It also makes assumptions that everyone wants similiar things in a few places, especially when it talks about relationships - we don't all want a life time monogamous relationship with children and a white picket fence. IMHO a book like this should just avoid talk of relationships if it's going to spend too few pages on them to do them justice.

For me, this books has provided a much needed alternative perspective on things and there are some suggestions which I will take away and try to implement.