Welcome to the Monthly Newsletter by Amer Kaissi 

Edition #22, September 2021

If you are looking for a traditional time management book about how to get your email inbox to zero or how to track your productivity in 25-minute increments, then this new book is definitely not for you. “Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals” is written by Oliver Burkeman, a self-proclaimed productivity geek, and it pokes fun at all the time management hacks that you may have heard of. His counter-intuitive advice is that we should stop trying so hard to be too efficient with our time. He writes “Nobody in the history of humanity has ever achieved ‘work-life balance,’ whatever that might be, and you certainly won’t get there by copying the ‘six things successful people do before 7 a.m.’” Ouch!

The more tasks we try to finish in our limited time, Burkeman argues, the more new tasks will appear on our to-do list, which eventually means that we will have less time in the long-run. In other words, work will always magically expand and fill out our time again. “Every time you reply to an email, there’s a good chance of provoking a reply to that email, which itself may require another reply, and so on and so on, until the heat death of the universe,” he explains.

This book may not teach you anything you didn’t know before, but it is a timely reminder that we only have whatever remains of our 4,000 weeks of life (for an average lifetime of 80 years). “The average human life span is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short”, it reminds us. Therefore, we need to stop driving ourselves crazy with stress in our attempt to do too much, and instead to focus on the few important things that are worth doing. If we can’t find fulfillment and happiness now, in this moment, then we will never find it. Pretty depressing, but very true.

——————————————————————————————————————–

Dr. Amer Kaissi is a Top Leadership Keynote Speaker. He speaks about leadership, teams and culture.