If time management is all life is, asks the author and narrator, why do we treat it as such a depressingly narrow-minded affair?
he title refers to the time most humans spend on Earth, assuming they live until their 80s. When the author Oliver Burkeman first made the calculation, he felt unexpectedly queasy at our “insultingly” short lifespans. He also began thinking about how we manage our time.
“Arguably, time management is all life is,” he notes. “Yet the modern discipline known as time management is a depressingly narrow-minded affair, focused on how to crank through as many work tasks as possible, or on devising the perfect morning routine, or on cooking all your dinners for the week in one big batch.” But what is the point of all that “doing” when life is so short?
This book, then, is a meditation on life’s “outrageous brevity and shimmering possibility”. Though it is technically a self-help title, it avoids the pieties associated with the genre along with the impulse to get us to live more productively. Instead, in addressing “the busyness epidemic”, it suggests that we adjust our expectations and look at the value of our day-to-day activities.
Burkeman is the narrator, reading with warmth, humour and without a trace of condescension. Drawing on the wisdom of, among others, Nietzsche, Seneca and Rod Stewart, he espouses a commonsense approach to living where fomo – fear of missing out – is a fact of life, where trying to clear the email backlog is a fool’s errand and where a person may never have the ideal partner or job.
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