- The Reading Life
- Posts
- Time Management for Mortals (Plus a Free Book for You)
Time Management for Mortals (Plus a Free Book for You)
Matt Karamazov
June 07, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 23 minutes
YOUTUBE đź“š CREATOR LAUNCH ACADEMY đź“š PATREON
To my everlasting shame, I once recorded a podcast episode with Oliver Burkeman, the author of today’s book…and lost the video files!
We recorded the episode, had a great conversation about productivity, books, priorities, meaning and fulfillment, and all the rest of it.
Then I sent it to my editor, deleted the files from my own computer for some reason (because I was dumb…that’s the reason), he misplaced the files I sent him…not ideal.
But even better than sending you the podcast, I wrote a complete book breakdown of his book, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, one of the best time management books I’ve ever read. And I’ve read dozens and dozens of them.
Four Thousand Weeks is near the top of my list, and my full breakdown (with all the Key Ideas, Takeaways, Action Steps, and more) is right here. Plus I’ve got a preview below.
But before we get into that, I wanted to pass along a completely free audiobook from Rory and AJ Vaden, called Wealthy and Well-Known.
The physical book doesn’t come out until next month, but you can download the audio version right now (again, completely free) before the release date.
If you want to build your personal brand and “turn your reputation into revenue,” then this is the book you need to read.
I can’t tell you what a difference building my own personal brand has made to my life (I literally get paid to read books all day and recommend the best ones), and for most people, it’s a decision you will not regret.
And with this book, you get to learn how to do it from one of the greats.
My latest YouTube video is now published, featuring a personal finance book I’m loving right now (plus 4 other great books), but I’ve also made my monthly donation to First Book, on behalf of all the Premium Members of The Reading Life.
Each month, I donate $1 per Premium Member to help kids learn how to read, and with this month’s $34-donation, we’re up to $443!
It’s not a massive number (yet), but still pretty damn cool!
But okay, let’s not waste any time…
Before our coffees get cold, let’s hit the books!
“If you want to surround yourself with successful, growth-minded people, you must first embody those qualities yourself. Your standards reflect your identity, and your identity attracts the environment and relationships that will elevate your life.”
This Book is For:
*People who feel completely overpowered by the escalating expectations of the modern world, how much there is to do, and how little time there is to do it in.
*Working professionals seeking solutions to their persistent overwhelm, and those of us who want to find a better way to be productive, without sacrificing our sleep, sanity, or our personal standards of excellence.
*Anyone who feels as though there’s more to life than increasing its speed, and who find themselves seeking answers to the most difficult, yet most important questions of how we spend our limited time on this planet.
Summary:
“Once you truly understand that you’re guaranteed to miss out on almost every experience the world has to offer, the fact that there are so many you still haven’t experienced stops feeling like a problem.
Instead, you get to focus on fully enjoying the tiny slice of experience you actually do have time for – and the freer you are to choose, in each moment, what counts the most.”
Wharton professor and leading expert on motivation and meaning Adam Grant calls this the most important book ever written about time management, and I’m certainly inclined to agree! In the opening pages of Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman gets things started with a jolting, yet indisputable claim:
“The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short...But you? Assuming you live to be eighty, you’ll have had about four thousand weeks.”
There's just something about putting a specific number on it that makes the idea of our finitude and our smallness so visceral, so affecting, and so real.
Here in these pages, we're no longer able to live under the delusion that we’ll ever be able to get everything done; the progress reports, the product launches, the career planning, the kids' events and extracurriculars - we will simply never be able to fit a full, meaningful human life into just four thousand weeks. Unless...
You see, Burkeman’s approach has always been the “negative” one, by which I mean operating by negation – focusing on eliminating rather than adding.
He suggests abandoning the idea that we could ever live up to the impossible expectations imposed on us by ourselves and others, rather than continuing to stack impossible commitments and doomed promises into a calendar that’s already bursting at the seams.
The fact is that you’re never going to get to a point where you feel like you’re totally on top of everything. The very effort is wearing us out, stressing us out, and leading us to waste our absurdly, terrifyingly-short lives on trivia and nonsense. As Burkeman says:
“The more you try to manage your time with the goal of achieving a feeling of total control, and freedom from the inevitable constraints of being human, the more stressful, empty, and frustrating life gets.
But the more you confront the facts of finitude instead – and work with them, rather than against them – the more productive, meaningful, and joyful life becomes."
Efficiency is a trap, he says, and "productivity" is just a giant treadmill in disguise. When you're known as someone who responds to every single email within a half-hour, you're going to have more people emailing you.
When people start to learn that you'll never say no to a request, you'll start to get asked for more favors. And the more you think you can do in a single day, the more you'll expect from yourself in a single day, regardless of whether your expectations actually line up with reality.
So just give up!
Giving up, however, absolutely does not equate to admitting defeat.
Giving up the idea that you'll be able to do everything frees you to consider what you would do if you wanted your choices to have the maximum positive impact. Narrowing your options and committing to one choice confers meaning on the choice you do make.
In much the same way, sunlight warms the entire earth; but, focused through a single magnifying glass, the sun's rays are incendiary. Your attention is like the rays of the sun, and whatever you pay attention to becomes your life. What you pay attention to in your life grows, and it's our current poverty of attention - how we just give it away to anyone who asks for some of it - that’s diminishing us all.
Because those two options, ultimately, are the result of every choice we make in life. Every choice either enlarges us or diminishes us, and what we pay attention to, what we make time for, matters. It matters like you wouldn't believe, and that's one of the reasons why Four Thousand Weeks is such a special book. It's about making the most of the limited time we do have, and giving up the losing fight against a universe within which our time is finite and immeasurably valuable.
The book also goes into the idea of what's known elsewhere as "the adjacent possible." It's a term that refers to the next available action we're able to take, and it's incredibly relevant to our discussion here. Our choices at this moment determine which choices are available to us in the next, and this is a dizzying type of freedom that can be easier, psychologically, to ignore.
Our options for what to do with our four thousand weeks are near-limitless, and whenever we take any action whatsoever, we're forever closing off possibilities we once had and opening ourselves up to new possibilities that were closed to us before we took that first action - that's the adjacent possible.
It's taking this job, in this city, rather than another job in a different city. It's dating this person as opposed to this other person, which would lead to you having a completely different child with that person, who will grow up with completely different interests, all leading to you making - and being offered - completely different decisions for the rest of your life! That's a terrifying responsibility!
We can try to escape it by trying to fit everything into this one, four-thousand-week life, or we can take Burkeman's negative approach: we can embrace the limitations, and thereby confer absolute, perfect meaning on the choice we do end up making.
Even the people who try to fit every possible pleasure and experience into their lives are caught in the exact same trap as the workaholic who believes they can answer every email, and the same trap as the single parent who believes they can manage everyone's expectations and keep everyone happy forever.
All of the individuals above are equally doomed to failure.
In Four Thousand Weeks, however, we're reminded that the point of managing our time - to the extent that that can be done at all - isn't just to "do" more; it’s to show up, fully alive, in a world that's just bursting with wonder.
We are more than our to-do lists, and there's more to life than the walls of our self-imposed cubicles. We’ll explore all of these concepts and more in the Key Ideas that follow, but suffice it to say, Burkeman and Bradbury both get it:
“Stuff your eyes with wonder. Live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories."
Key Ideas:
#1: What’s the Point of It All?
“The world is bursting with wonder, and yet it’s the rare productivity guru who seems to have considered the possibility that the ultimate point of all our frenetic doing might be to experience more of that wonder.”
This right here is the core of the book. It's why Burkeman's approach is so much deeper - and more enlightening - than most of the other approaches to time management that we've all seen in recent years.
Four Thousand Weeks is about life, and about deepening the quality of our experience, rather than just stuffing more and more into it, trying to get it all done. Because we’ll never get it all done, and that’s the point. There’s just too much “stuff” to do, not enough time to do it in, and it’s that disconnect that Burkeman identifies so persuasively.
When we're so extremely focused on the doing, and not focused enough on the why, our quality of life suffers immensely, and we turn ourselves into walking, talking to-do lists - rather than fully alive, engaged human beings.
The world is more beautiful than most of us can even imagine - and there's certainly more depth and resonance available to experience than we ever will in our whole lives. So why do we sell ourselves so cheaply? What’s the point of all this frenetic doing?!
#2: The Paradox of Limitation
“The more you try to manage your time with the goal of achieving a feeling of total control, and freedom from the inevitable constraints of being human, the more stressful, empty, and frustrating life gets.
But the more you confront the facts of finitude instead – and work with them, rather than against them – the more productive, meaningful, and joyful life becomes.
I don’t think the feeling of anxiety ever completely goes away; we’re even limited, apparently, in our capacity to embrace our limitations. But I’m aware of no other time management technique that’s half as effective as just facing the way things truly are.”
The more strongly you embrace your limitations, the more free you become. That’s the paradox of limitation, encapsulated by Aristotle’s saying that discipline equals freedom. The natural existence of limits allows us to experience freedom within and because of those limits.
That’s why “disciplining” yourself to follow a healthy diet will grant you the freedom to live well into old age. It’s why “disciplining” yourself to save and invest diligently when you’re young will grant you the freedom to experience total financial security later in life.
When it comes to time management, “disciplining” yourself to confront your own limitations grants you freedom from worry, stress, and anxiety. Maybe not complete freedom - these feelings are likely to creep back in at least occasionally.
But Burkeman’s one hundred percent right in this, that confronting the facts of your own finitude will lead directly to a more peacefully productive, meaningful, and joyful life. And it’s certainly better than the alternative!
#3: Collapsing the Adjacent Possible
“I’m already who I am and where I am, which determines what possibilities are open to me. But it’s also radically limited in a forward-looking sense, too, not least because a decision to do any given thing will automatically mean sacrificing an infinite number of potential alternative paths.
As I make hundreds of small choices throughout the day, I’m building a life – but at one and the same time, I’m closing off the possibility of countless others, forever.”
This is such a terrifying concept for most people (including myself sometimes) that many of us refuse to even look at it. It goes back to the idea of the "adjacent possible," which basically means the very next step we can take based on every step we've taken previously to get to where we are now.
We are, all of us, all the time, opening and closing our own sets of possibilities, creating opportunities for ourselves at the same time as we close off other opportunities forever and ever. I know, scary shit, right?
But we're doing this at every moment of every day: When I'm reading one book, I'm not reading every other book that has ever been published, ever, essentially choosing the specific thoughts and ideas that are going to enter my head and which will lead to my next thoughts.
If I had chosen to read a different book, I would have had different thoughts, and perhaps been led down an entirely different path.
If I were to move to another city, I would be shutting down every possibility - every meeting, every accident, every experience - that I could actualize in the city from which I just moved. The possibilities that New York made available to me are lost forever, and the new possibilities available to me in Los Angeles are opened up to me.
Last time I checked (and I did check!), there were something like 4,000+ cities on earth, and they all come with their own sets of possibilities.
No wonder that people don't want to face these actualities! It's scary to have that much freedom, and to think that perhaps your dream job or the love of your life exists in the country you just left - or the one you're too scared to move to.
I don't have any final answers either, by the way. These are fundamental human freedoms and terrors that we all must live with, be aware of, and struggle against.
But sometimes the recognition of one's own freedom can liberate us from the chains we fashion ourselves.
Book Notes:
“The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short.
Here’s one way of putting things in perspective: the first modern humans appeared on the plains of Africa at least 200,000 years ago, and scientists estimate that life, in some form, will persist for another 1.5 billion years or more, until the intensifying heat of the sun condemns the last organism to death. But you?
Assuming you live to be eighty, you’ll have had about four thousand weeks.”
“I don’t want to live on forever in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment.”
“So maybe it’s not that you’ve been cheated out of an unlimited supply of time; maybe it’s almost incomprehensibly miraculous to have been granted any time at all.”
“The real problem of time management today, though, isn’t that we’re bad at prioritizing the big rocks. It’s that there are too many rocks – and most of them are never making it anywhere near that jar.
The critical question isn’t how to differentiate between activities that matter and those that don’t, but what to do when far too many things feel at least somewhat important, and therefore arguably qualify as big rocks.”
“Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.”
Action Steps:
#1: Give Up
Surrender can be an active process. Giving up has no relation to failure when the purpose behind it is to gain your freedom; you're not accepting defeat, but rather you're realizing that you're never going to get everything done, you're killing yourself trying, and that that way can only lead to unnecessary anguish and a diminished quality of life.
So give up your unrealistic expectations; give up the idea of making everyone happy; give up the pursuit of perfection and the relentless striving. Perform actions with excellence and care, but, as much as possible, do these things for their own sake, giving up the idea that you need to "earn" your place on this planet.
#2: Track How You Spend Your Time for 1 Week
The best way to manage your time (to the extent that that can be done) is to track how you're spending your time now. The same goes for your finances; if you don't have a budget, you have no idea what you're spending and where, and you're likely to have some "month" left over at the end of your money!
So pick any average week, and during the day, set a timer to go off every hour or so. Or every fifteen minutes, depending on how crazy you are (see #2, above). Then, when the timer goes off, take a few moments and write down how you spent your time since the last timer went off.
At the end of the week, when you have the data laid out in front of you, you can make intelligent choices about where to adjust your schedule and where you want to be spending more/less of your time. I've done this many times myself and the results are always instructive.
#3: Make Choices That Enlarge You
Much of the wisdom in Four Thousand Weeks comes from the focus placed on the fact that we can either make choices that enlarge us or diminish us. Those are pretty much our only options - every choice we ever make falls into one of those two camps.
We can choose not to steal, even if we know that we'll never be caught. We can choose not to cheat, even if there's zero chance that we'll ever be found out. We can honor the best in us and bring it to life in the world through our actions and our words.
This is one of the highest responsibilities of the authentically free individual: to make the world better, incrementally, little by little, with everything we say and do.
You know when you're acting from your highest or lowest self. You know when you're making a choice that makes you bigger - you can feel it. And so, guided by this feeling and this knowledge, you can refuse to contribute to the cause of those who are making the world worse. Every free action can be guided by the impulse to make life better, for all of us; I can't think of any better use of anyone's four thousand weeks.
This Book on Amazon:
Forward this to a friend you think would love this book!
If you were sent this newsletter, click here to subscribe.
To read past editions of The Reading Life, click here.
​Click here to recommend The Reading Life on Twitter (X).
OK, that’s it for now…
I’ve got plenty more excellent book recommendations coming your way soon though!
And if you want to learn how I’ve built an audience of 160,000+ followers across social media, became a full-time creator, and how I’m rapidly growing my audience and my profits in 2025, join us inside Creator Launch Academy and that’s exactly what I’ll teach you — we’d love to have you in the community!
With that said, I hope you enjoyed this edition of The Reading Life, and enjoy the rest of your day!
Until next time…happy reading!
All the best,
Matt Karamazov
P.S. Whenever you're ready, here are two more ways I can help you:
Content Creators: Book a 1:1 call and I’ll help you hit $5K/month with a plan tailored to your business.
Join Creator Launch Academy, my mastermind for educational content creators building real revenue and real freedom.
Reply