Four Thousand Weeks cover art

Four Thousand Weeks

Embrace your limits. Change your life. Make your four thousand weeks count.

 Preview

Get 30 days of Standard free

£5.99/mo after trial. Cancel monthly.
Try for £0.00
More purchase options

Four Thousand Weeks

By: Oliver Burkeman
Narrated by: Oliver Burkeman
Try for £0.00

£5.99 a month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy Now for £11.20

Buy Now for £11.20

LIMITED TIME OFFER

£0.99/mo for 3 months - terms apply. Offer ends 31 August 2026.

A life-changing gift of a book: What if you tried to stop doing everything, so you could finally get round to what counts?

**The Instant Sunday Times bestseller**

Rejecting the futile modern obsession with 'getting everything done,' Four Thousand Weeks introduces readers to tools for constructing a meaningful life by embracing rather than denying their limitations.

Drawing on the insights of both ancient and contemporary philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual teachers, Oliver Burkeman sets out to realign our relationship with time - and in doing so, to liberate us from its tyranny.

Embrace your limits. Change your life. Discover how to make your four thousand weeks count in 2026.

'Life is finite. You don't have to fit everything in... Read this book and wake up to a new way of thinking and living' Emma Gannon

'Every sentence is riven with gold' Chris Evans

'Comforting, fascinating, engaging, inspiring and useful' Marian Keyes

© Oliver Burkeman 2021 (P) Penguin Audio 2021

 Personal Development Philosophy Psychology Psychology & Mental Health Science Social Psychology & Interactions Society Stress Management Time Management Inspiring Feel-Good
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_t1

Critic reviews

This book is wonderful. Instead of offering new tips on how to cram more into your day, it questions why we feel the need to ... My favourite kind of book is this one ... it examines the human struggle with intelligence, wisdom, humour and humility. (Marianne Power)
Perfectly pitched somewhere between practical self-help book and philosophical quest ... as with all the best quests, its many pleasures don't require a fast-forward button, but happen along the way (Tim Adams)
Life is finite. You don't have to fit everything in. Enjoy your life. Breathe out. Read this book and wake up to a new way of thinking and living
A wonderfully honest book, Four Thousand Weeks is a much-needed reality check on our culture's crazy assumptions around work, productivity and living a meaningful life (Mark Manson, bestselling author of Everything is F*cked and The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck)
His book will challenge and amuse you. And it may even spur you on to change your life. At the very least reading it would be a good use of one of your four thousand weeks (Robbie Smith)
I loved this book - it's a celebration of all that is most human: a deep dive into the value and potency of our finitude. Where we might buckle under pressure and uncertainty, Oliver quietly restores our centre of gravity within. You'll emerge from his writing fortified by wonder (Derren Brown)
A beautiful, uplifting read. Reading Oliver Burkeman, I feel my shoulders relax and my mouth curl into a smile of admiration. Witty, modest and refreshingly sane (Robert Webb, author of How Not to Be a Boy)
Comforting, fascinating, engaging, inspiring and USEFUL, actually genuinely useful (Marian Keyes)
Oliver Burkeman provides an important and insightful reassessment of productivity. The drive to get more done can become an excuse to avoid figuring out what we actually want to accomplish. Only by confronting this latter question can we unlock a calmer, more meaningful, more resilient approach to organizing our time (Cal Newport, bestselling author of A World Without Email and Deep Work)
We all know our time is limited. What we don't know - but what Oliver Burkeman is here to teach us - is that our control over that time is also limited. This profound (and often hilarious) book will prompt you to rethink your worship of efficiency, reject the cult of busyness, and reconfigure your life around what truly matters (Daniel H. Pink, author of When, Drive, and To Sell is Human)
All stars
Most relevant
Listened to this in two days, am now re-listening and am about to buy the hard copy so I can make notes. I immediately started recommending it to everyone who I think needs it, which I rarely do. Never before has a book so radically changed the way I think about life: Burkeman advocates fully acknowledging the finitude (my new favourite word) of life, embracing both your limitations and the fact that you'll never reach that imaginary place in the future where everything is ticked off the life list, and using these insights to just relax and allow yourself to enjoy the present (without any preachy mindfulness) doing just a few things that are actually important to you. Life is short, and you have to make choices: we shouldn't need to be told this, but we CAN'T have it all (where would you keep it?), and trying to chase a never-ending list of life goals is a recipe for unhappiness and endless striving. As he so refreshingly remind us, the universe *really* doesn't care how we spend our time on earth.

I feel utterly liberated having read this and can't recommend it enough. Burkeman's writing is intelligent, eloquent, funny and completely devoid of padding: his references to attitudes towards time through history are fascinating. I'm already working my way through his other books.

Life changing

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Great book overall, just felt like rehashed advice from other authors with little originality, however if you’re not well read on the self help genre, I think many people will gain a lot from this book. Definitely worth a listen. It’s concise and pretty informative, I certainly got a lot out of it

Good advice

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Or you might regret it but you'll have more insight into why you regretted it and then you'll be back to not regretting it

Don't wait, just get it. You won't regret it

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Utterly true and eye opening. I read this book often. I highly recommend this book to those who feel guilty when they’re not busy.

Original and brilliant

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Olives voice is so easy to listen to. He reminds me of Hugh Grant narrating the start of Notting Hill. I could listen for ages... Which I did.
The story itself is a little repetitive of WHY we should be changing our thoughts and habits, instead of HOW this can be accomplished - which might be more useful. But it's easy to understand and is a great book overall.

Great listening experience

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
See more reviews