I don’t like making New Year’s resolutions, pretty much for the reasons that you might expect: if one wants to change something, it’s not a good idea to wait until the beginning of next year to do it. That said, the end of the year naturally prompts some reflections. And mine was that I didn’t read nearly as many books as I would have liked to in 2025. So I resolved to change that in 2026.

The first book I read and highly recommend, “Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals”, was not at all on my list in 2025. A friend sent her family’s annual email update/virtual card and mentioned it as one of her favorite books of the year. I think highly of her, so I ordered a copy. (I also bought and recommend the companion book, “Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts,” which is meant to help you remember the core ideas and implement them in your day-to-day life.)

To be honest, I wasn’t particularly excited about reading a time management book. I like to think I’m pretty good (if not perfect) at time management. I’ve mastered the Eisenhower matrix, I use the Pomodoro technique when I feel stuck, and I have a well-organized to-do list. I get a lot done, and I have a pretty full life outside of work: I play tennis, spend a good amount of time with my kids, travel, and so on. Plus, the “mortals” part of the title sounded like it was going to remind me about how short life is, contributing to my stress about not doing enough despite all my efficient practices and well-organized schedule. In short, I’m not exactly sure what prompted me to buy the book. But I’m glad I did.

It turns out this book is aimed at people exactly like me: those who have invested a lot of time and energy in techniques to get more done, whether in their personal or professional lives. It’s for people who feel like they manage pretty well but are still unsatisfied with the results because they want to get even more done. It doesn’t matter whether the “more” is writing more papers, cultivating more hobbies, spending more time with kids, or something else entirely. The common thread is that there are a lot of people out there who are highly productive and still feel like it’s not enough.

Rather than writing a book about how to get even more done, Burkeman convincingly delivers some bad news: unless you change your attitude toward time management and life itself(!), it’s never going to feel like enough, regardless of how much you do. And it’s simply because there isn’t enough time to do it all, no matter what organization system you adopt. There will always be more to do than we can possibly get done, more opportunities than we can pursue, more worthwhile ways to spend our time than will ever fit into a single life.

But if we get stuck in the fantasy that it’s only a matter of finding the right system, we will fail to recognize the need to make fundamental tradeoffs and decide what to leave undone. It’s easy enough to do with things that we didn’t want to do in the first place (although even this can be challenging to a productive procrastinator!), but how about figuring out which thing to give up that we really want to do?

So the book is more philosophical than anything else. But it’s not dry, difficult-to-read philosophy: Burkeman brings in a lot of humor and writes in a very accessible way. What I also appreciated is that he doesn’t tell you what you should value but leaves that up to you. This is in contrast to books that insist there’s something specific you should be spending more of your time on (usually family, leisure, exercise, or mindfulness). If you’re like me, the message you need is not that your priorities are wrong, but that your attitude toward time and accomplishment is what needs changing.

As Barbara Spindel from The Wall Street Journal wrote, this book is “well worth your extremely limited time.”