“The average life expectancy in the UK of the combined male/female population is 80 years. That equates to approximately 4000 weeks.

I don’t know about you but4000 weeks doesn’t seem anywhere near as long as 80 years.

This book ‘4000 weeks: Embrace Your Limits, Change Your Life’ explains how we can make the most of the weeks that we’ve got left in a meaningful way, bringing more joy, satisfaction, and pleasure from the limited time we spend on this planet.”

Review by Chris Williams, Network Marketing Leader, Author of Don’t Just Dream Do It

(Available as an audio download on the website www.knowledgeisking.co.uk)

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The average human lifespan is absurdly, insultingly brief.

If you live to be 80, you’ll have had about 4,000 weeks. But that’s no reason for despair.

Confronting our radical finitude – and how little control we really have – is the key to a fulfilling and meaningfully productive life.

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We live in an age of impossible demands, infinite choice, relentless distraction and spiralling global crises. Yet most productivity advice, like other modern messages about time, makes things worse. It encourages the fantasy that we might one day “get everything done”, becoming the fully optimized, emotionally invincible masters of our time. The pursuit of this limit-denying delusion systematically leaves us more busy, distracted, and isolated from each other – while postponing the truly important parts of life to some point in the future that never quite seems to arrive. 

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Four Thousand Weeks is (I hope!) an entertaining and philosophical but ultimately deeply practical guide to the alternative path of embracing your limits: dropping back down into reality, defying cultural pressures to attempt the impossible, and getting started on what’s gloriously possible instead. It’s about actually getting meaningful things done, here and now, in our work and our lives together – in the clear-eyed understanding that there won’t be time for everything, and that we’ll never eliminate life’s uncertainties.

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In it, I explore why the central challenge of time management isn’t becoming more efficient, but deciding what to neglect; why, in an accelerating world, patience – letting things take the time they take – is a superpower; and why, in conditions of limitless choice, burning your bridges beats keeping your options open. I look at how to resist the soul-destroying lure of too much convenience; how to rediscover the benefits of communal ritual; why it’s so hard to “be here now” –and more.

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I began this book before the pandemic, but I honestly think it couldn’t be more timely. The last year left many of us feeling utterly unmoored from our familiar routines. As we re-emerge, we have a unique opportunity to reconsider what we’re doing with our time – to construct lives that do justice to the outrageous brevity, and shimmering possibilities, of our four thousand weeks.

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