Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman review – a brief treatise on time

A sage and sane theory of time unmanagement' exhorts us to stop chasing the seconds and embrace the joy of missing out

You've probably already worked out what this book's title means, even if the number seems outrageously small. Four thousand weeks is roughly the amount of time you'll get through if you live to be 80. That will appear even more paltry as you age - not just because you're running out of weeks, but because time speeds up in your head the older you get, until the weeks seem to flash by in minutes.

But Oliver Burkeman is not here to scare you into squeezing every last drop of pleasure and productivity from your meagre ration of weeks. His previous book, The Antidote, was subtitled happiness for people who can't stand positive thinking". He is the self-help writer for people like me who find self-help books oversold on magical transformations. Here, true to form, he tells us to abandon the impossible - the quest to become the optimized, infinitely capable, emotionally invincible, fully independent person you're officially supposed to be". Four Thousand Weeks is a time-unmanagement book, a pushback against what the American writer Marilynne Robinson calls the joyless urgency" of our age.