Oliver Burkeman has thoughts on to approach our remaining weeks on earth

With your one wild and precious life?

So asked the American poet Mary Oliver back in the 1990s, in a work that resonates ever more strongly for the many of us looking for an excuse to seize the day.

But it's all very well to talk about wild and precious lives, but there's so much to do. One wild life that ends too soon? Not specific enough. How about four thousand weeks?

That is, after all, the average human lifespan. As if you needed a more stark reminder of how little time there really is.

British journalist Oliver Burkeman was worried readers might run a mile when they saw the title of his book and what it implied. Four Thousand Weeks: Time and How to Use It may have a soothing green-and-blue-toned cover showing lake, forest and mountain, but its central premise is rather startling.

And yet, there is something so tantalising about the idea of, having absorbed this stark reality, organising the rest of one's (wild, precious but actually quite compact) life to maximise those remaining weeks. It's more than just the cover that makes the book so tempting.

"It's just the fundamental challenge that we all face in the world, right?" he says.

"It's the fact that we have this little portion of time that we want to make the best use of, and that all sorts of inner and outer forces seem to conspire to lead to these kind of perverse effects, where trying to do more makes you busier, trying to get more things done generates more things to do, trying to get control of time makes you feel more insecure."

Speaking via Zoom from Brooklyn, where he lives with his wife and toddler, Burkeman says he's been "really amazed" at how many people have been willing to go on a journey of discovery with him about what time really means, and how maybe we're looking at it all wrong.

Or not, of course. Despite his years in America, Burkeman is as diffidently English as they come. Those who pick up his book having recognised his name should know what to expect in this regard.

A journalist formerly at The Guardian, he wrote a long-running series, This Column May Change Your Life, ruminating on time management, living in the present, and myriad other routes to mental wellbeing. It was gentle, comforting, illuminating and, most importantly, written with the understanding that there was no need to take it all so seriously, in the end, really.

Burkeman wrapped up the column last year after more than a decade of dishing out entertaining life hacks. Luckily (for this fan at least), this book, which he admits has paradoxically taken a long time to write, is almost like an extended version of his column, many of which have focused on time management in one way or another.

"I think that just speaks to how everything is a challenge of time management," he says.

"And more than that, time is this incredibly weird thing when you start to try to look at it - it evades your attempt to clarify it, it just is the medium in which everything we do unfolds. So of course, every challenge is a challenge of time management."

Like most journalists, Burkeman has taken a democratic, curious and eclectic approach to the reading he has done, the things that have stayed with him, the sources he has drawn on and the people he has consulted, from psychologists to Buddhist monks, romance writers, pop stars, ancient philosophers and comments underneath viral Youtube videos.

One of the most profound - or at least defining - of Burkeman's sources is, surprisingly, Martin Heidegger. Yes, the Nazi whose magnum opus, Being and Time, basically posits that we are time, and time is all there is.

"Whether I 'got through' his work is debatable - I definitely grappled with it," Burkeman says. "But what I take from that, and that certainly makes sense to me, is this idea that time is more fundamental to our being than anything else - we just sort of are time in the sense that everything we experience - we're getting deep quickly here - is just an aspect of unfolding time.

"So the way you experience time and the ways you use it, to the extent that using time even makes sense in this situation, that's just synonymous with how to live. There isn't anything else, really."

So, with this out of the way, Burkeman proceeds to explore our modern and ultimately futile pursuit of constantly needing to get everything done in our allotted time. He challenges the concept that our self-worth should be tied in with whether we spend our time productively enough. And he suggests that much of it is down to emotional avoidance of some form or another.

"I set up this idea that what goes wrong in our relationship with time stems from, at least in part, a sort of emotional avoidance - we don't want to face up to certain truths," he says.

"Definitely part of the reason we don't face up to them is because we live in a system and a society that makes us feel like we can't afford to face up to them. But we want to avoid feeling that feeling, so we engage in certain sort of mythologies of time management."

He recounts a moment in 2014, sitting on a park bench in Brooklyn, when it dawned on him, suddenly, that "none of this was ever going to work". All his anxiety around unfinished tasks and future projects was never going to miraculously disappear once he was on top of it all.

For a self-professed "productivity geek" - the kind who extolls the benefits of Inbox Zero, writes a lot of lists in overpriced notebooks and is constantly researching new ways to build new habits and maximise efficiency - this was both terrifying and liberating.

It was, he says, an epiphany on an intellectual level, but one that took some time to translate into changed behaviour. During the process of writing the book, he became a parent for the first time, another source of mind-blowing revelations about the nature of time and one's place in the cosmos.

But he thinks writing the book did change him somewhat, in ways he hopes the reader will see as they take the journey with him. Not that he has become less of an over-thinker.

"I think I have a greater ability to sort of tolerate the discomfort," he says.

"The fact that there's more to do than I can ever get around to doing, to focus in the moment on a few things that I care about, without constantly scrambling for this feeling of being on top of everything and controlling everything, to sort of let certain things fall by the wayside if they're not as important as the most important things."

And he doesn't expect his readers to have similar epiphanies, if they haven't already, but rather to reconsider their own relationship to time, to-do lists, and productivity hacks.

"I really hope this comes across in the book, that you don't have to, in order to justify our existence on the planet," he says.

"It's this idea that all this productivity is needed just to get up to the zero level of being enough. It's not what it probably ought to be, which is that you're fine as you are, and anything you do on top of that is kind of extra."