Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

There will always be too much to do – and this realisation is liberating. Today more than ever, there’s just no reason to assume any fit between the demands on your time – all the things you would like to do, or feel you ought to do – and the amount of time available. Thanks to capitalism, technology and human ambition, these demands keep increasin

The only real question about all this finitude is whether we’re willing to confront it or not. And this, for Heidegger, is the central challenge of human existence: since finitude defines our lives, he argues that living a truly authentic life—becoming fully human—means facing up to that fact.

Obviously, from any ordinary perspective, this all sounds intolerably morbid and stressful. But then, to the extent that you manage to achieve this outlook on life, you’re not seeing it from an ordinary perspective—and “morbid and stressful,” at least according to Heidegger, are exactly what it is not. On the contrary, it’s the only way for a finit