Our 'busy' culture: How best to manage your time during your short stay on earth

Bruce Whitfield talks prioritising your time with author and media consultant Kojo Baffoe.

Every week The Money Show interviews the author or reviewer of a new or trending business book.

This week Bruce Whitfield talks to writer and media consultant Kojo Baffoe.

He reviews the New York Times bestseller Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, written by British author and journalist Oliver Burkeman.

They discuss the 'genius' of just the title itself -  assuming you live to be eighty, you have just over four thousand weeks on this earth.

"While the starting premise is a little daunting, the book is very simply written... I think once you get your head around the idea, it's liberating because like you said, it is about prioritising."

"One of the things that Burkeman talks about is not having too many things as work in progress... being very deliberate about the things you're working on and putting your attention into. He talks about paying yourself first when it comes to time, and limiting your work in progress as well as resisting the allure of middling priorities."

"So it's about being self-aware enough - which is part of the journey - to know what is important or what needs to be focused on, and what needs to be neglected.
Because if you know you're not going to have time to do everything, you might as well then take that finite time and devote it to things that matter to you."

"He does give a 'tips list' towards the end... and references a couple of techniques in terms of being able to limit your work in progress. He does bring everything tog without being overly prescriptive."

"The starting premise is you only have finite time, so stop stressing about what you can't control - for me that is the key. That's the paradigm shift; once you've figured that out within the context of your own life, whether it's professional or personal... then everything else starts to make sense and fall into place."

Kojo Baffoe, Media Consultant

Description on Amazon:

The average human lifespan is absurdly, insultingly brief. Assuming you live to be eighty, you have just over four thousand weeks.

Nobody needs telling there isn’t enough time. We’re obsessed with our lengthening to-do lists, our overfilled inboxes, work-life balance, and the ceaseless battle against distraction; and we’re deluged with advice on becoming more productive and efficient, and “life hacks” to optimize our days. But such techniques often end up making things worse. The sense of anxious hurry grows more intense, and still the most meaningful parts of life seem to lie just beyond the horizon.

Still, we rarely make the connection between our daily struggles with time and the ultimate time management problem: the challenge of how best to use our four thousand weeks.

Drawing on the insights of both ancient and contemporary philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual teachers, Oliver Burkeman delivers an entertaining, humorous, practical, and ultimately profound guide to time and time management.

Rejecting the futile modern fixation on “getting everything done,” Four Thousand Weeks introduces readers to tools for constructing a meaningful life by embracing finitude, showing how many of the unhelpful ways we’ve come to think about time aren’t inescapable, unchanging truths, but choices we’ve made as individuals and as a society―and that we could do things differently.

Scroll up to listen to Baffoe's review