Lately, my favorite book recommendation is Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. But it’s not for the reasons you might expect.

It’s not about hustle culture, getting up early (or even earlier than that), and doing more and more and more. It’s not a debate on whether the Pomodoro technique is better than Getting Things Done (“GTD”) or a claim that there’s a project management tool to solve all your woes and change your life.

You’ll find something unique, whether you love pro tips and life hacks or eye roll at the idea of (yet another) book on time management and productivity.

It’s a challenge inviting you to rethink productivity altogether. Tools and techniques can be helpful, but we’re often clenching onto the idea that completing a to-do list is somehow more important than the things on it. And that you will one day get to the end of your list.

The tough love? You won’t!

When you think you’re at the end, notice how the goalposts move, and there’s suddenly… MORE to do!

Along with the book, I enjoy Burkeman’s newsletter. In a recent post, “You can’t hoard life,” he writes:

“Spending your days trying to get experiences “under your belt”, in an effort to maximise your collection of experiences, or to feel more confident about the future supply of similar experiences, means placing yourself in a position from which you can never enjoy them fully, because there’s a different agenda at play.”

“I assume that the buried explanation for all this, as ever, is the very great difficulty we encounter in facing our finitude. True, it’s not so much fun to go through life in the mode of hoarding experiences, rather than having them. But it does help shore up the feeling that you’re standing safely outside of life, getting plenty “out of it” without ever quite fully launching yourself into it, with all the vulnerability and uncertainty (and consciousness of your eventual death) that that would entail. “

Spoiler! I’m not great at this, but I think about it a lot:

When we embrace our finitude/limitations and drop the notion that any tool or trick wins, we suddenly get permission to step in and embrace what matters most. This applies to work, relationships, doing things you love, and more.