Almost everyone I know – clients, colleagues, friends – struggles with managing their time. We’ve all experienced the feeling that there will never be enough time to do all that you want or have to do, and many of us live with anxiety and stress created by this perceived crush of time.

Well, there’s good news for all of us when it comes to feeling better about managing time, and it comes in the form of a truly terrific, totally eye-opening book called 4,000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, by Oliver Burkeman. It’s an entertaining read (not always true for books like this) and provides a powerful way to de-fang the stress we feel around time. Oh, and it comes highly recommended by the brilliant Adam Grant (as if my reco isn’t enough).

4,000 Weeks (which is roughly how long you can expect to live) suggests that by embracing the finite reality of mortality, you can free yourself to be far more intentional about what you choose to do with your time, in every moment. Burkeman suggests that the very act of making a choice to do one thing over another is the key to successfully and satisfyingly managing your time. Even more important, it is the choosing of one thing over another that is the true path of finding meaning in life. If this sounds a bit like Zen wisdom, it is. But Burkeman turns his insights into powerful and applicable approaches to feeling better about your time and your life.

Here are just a few of the gems I took from this little book. If intrigued, get a copy of the book and let me know what resonated for you.

The more you try to manage your time with the goal of achieving a feeling of total control, the more stressful, empty and frustrating life becomes. So let go of the the total control fantasy.
Since you simply won’t/can’t/don’t have time for everything life serves up, hard choices about what to do are unavoidable. Your real challenge is to be willing to make conscious choices about what you will focus on and what you will let go or neglect.
Any decision to use your time on one thing is a sacrifice of all the other ways you could spend your time but didn’t … and the meaning in the things we choose is derived by making choices about what matters to you.
The more we focus on managing our time, the more a day can feel like something we have to get through, en route to a future state, rather than focusing on where we are now.
Existential overwhelm: It’s important to realize that you can never experience everything life has on offer, and since you’re guaranteed to miss out on most of it, it can become easier to be at peace with choosing select things.
Perfection is very often the source of procrastination. When we can accept that reality will always fall short of our dreams or fantasies, it becomes easier to just get on with something and leave procrastination in the dust.
Getting more efficient isn’t bad, but it generally doesn’t give you the feeling of having “more time” because, inevitably, your demands will increase to offset the gains. A bummer, but a helpful insight for releasing some of the pressure.
Incorporate more things into your life that you do their own sake alone … not for some future value. Great examples include reading a book, walking in nature or just enjoying a friend or colleague’s company, with no agenda.
Develop a taste for having problems. Since problems are inevitable and fundamental to life, there’s great power in approaching problems not as something you have to deal with but as the actual, essential substance of life.
Put more focus on what you have accomplished rather than on what is left to do. Keeping a daily “done list” is a simple way to feel great about each day.
Meet uncertainty with curiosity rather than worry. Curiosity keeps you in the present moment, rather than focused on a future state.
Practice instantaneous generosity. Generosity feels great and is a deeply meaningful practice. So when you have an inclination to reach out, to give money, to pay someone a compliment – do it at that moment, or it may not get done.