Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts

"[Oliver Burkeman] will challenge you to rethink many of your beliefs about getting things done—and you’ll be wiser because of it.” —Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Think Again and host of WorkLife

Meditations for Mortals takes us on a liberating, invigorating journey toward a more meaningful life—a journey that begins not with fantasies of the ideal existence but with the reality in which we actually find ourselves. It brings themes at the heart of Oliver Burkeman’s bestselling Four Thousand Weeks—our finite time, the lure of distraction, the productivity trap—into our daily lives. Looking beyond the challenges of time management to the most fundamental questions about how to live, he offers here a powerful new way to take action on what counts: a guiding philosophy of life that he calls “imperfectionism.”

How can we embrace our nonnegotiable limitations? Or make good decisions when there’s always too much to do? How to shed the illusion that life will really begin as soon as we can “get on top of everything”?

Reflecting on quotations drawn from philosophy, religion, literature, psychology, and self-help, Burkeman explores a combination of practical tools and daily shifts in perspective. The result is a life-enhancing and surprising challenge to much familiar advice—and a profound yet entertaining crash course in living more fully. Designed either as a four-week “retreat of the mind” or to be devoured in one or two sittings, Meditations for Mortals will be a source of solace and inspiration and an aid to a saner, freer, and more enchantment-filled life. In our anxiety-inducing times, it is rich in truths we have never needed more.

About the Author

Oliver Burkeman worked for many years for The Guardian, where he wrote a popular weekly column on psychology, This Column Will Change Your Life. His books include the New York Times bestseller Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals and The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking.