4000 Weeks

This is a perspective from which you can finally ask the most fundamental question of time management: what would it mean to spend the only time you ever get in a way that truly feels as though you are making it count?

So if a certain activity really matters to you—a creative project, say, though it could just as easily be nurturing a relationship, or activism in the service of some cause—the only way to be sure it will happen is to do some of it today, no matter how little, and no matter how many other genuinely big rocks may be begging for your attention.

Prioritizing Time in Our Everyday Lives This chapter and chapter 4 are designed to help you internalize the good practices I’ve laid out in previous chapters and build a time-affluence regimen that you can live by. These strategies are designed to help you walk the talk when it comes to treating time as the valuable, precious resource it is. To mak

if you plan to spend some of your four thousand weeks doing what matters most to you, then at some point you’re just going to have to start doing it.

Abel saw that her only viable option was to claim time instead—to just start drawing, for an hour or two, every day, and to accept the consequences, even if those included neglecting other activities she sincerely valued. “If you don’t save a bit of your time for you, now, out of every week,” as she puts it, “there is no moment in the future when y

Thinking in terms of “paying yourself first” transforms these one-off tips into a philosophy of life, at the core of which lies this simple insight: if you plan to spend some of your four thousand weeks doing what matters most to you, then at some point you’re just going to have to start doing it.