If you’re not immortal yet and find it difficult to manage time, then Oliver Burkeman’s “Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals” is a worthwhile read. Not because it will make you a master of managing time. Not because it will help find the time to check off all the items on your to-do list. Not because it will make you a productivity guru. Rather, because it can help you realize that of all the time-management advice, methods, and strategies out there, none of them work.

This from Burkeman, who once made a living writing about and offering advice on managing time. He refers to himself as a recovering time-management junkie.

The premise of “Four Thousand Weeks” is that, if you live to be 80 years old, you’ll have about 4,000 weeks on earth. Technically, it’s 4,160 weeks, give or take a dozen or two, depending on what time of year you kick the bucket. But for the book’s intent, 4,000 weeks works to prove Burkeman’s point.

Considering you get so few weeks to do all that you want in life, managing time efficiently should be a priority, right? Wrong. Burkeman argues the best thing you can do to get time to work for you instead of against you is to accept the fact that there’s a limited amount of it and that you’ll never have enough of it to do all that you want—and need—to do.

Accepting this creates the foundation for effective time management: prioritization. Embracing the fact that you can’t do it all in a day, a year, or a lifetime, Burkeman writes, is liberating and can put the items on a to-do or bucket list into perspective. This sets the stage for prioritizing how to spend your time.

This advice is all good and well, until you factor in the nemesis of effective time management: distraction. Burkeman argues further that distractions are ways for people to deal with the overwhelming realization that there’s only a limited amount of time to do all that needs doing.

For example, there’s a stack of paperwork you need to finish by the end of the workday. You realize the stack of papers will take longer than eight hours to finish. Rather than pull out your hair and bend over backwards to get the work done, you subconsciously crave something to save your sanity. An attention-grabbing headline pops up on your phone. Your subconscious takes control of the situation and off you go to read the story behind the headline instead of buckling down on the stack of paperwork.

On the surface, it would be easy to classify distraction as bad, but don’t be too quick to do that. Burkeman points out that sometimes, distractions are what make it possible to deal with the finitude of life.

There’s a lot of good stuff in “Four Thousand Weeks.” If you’re comfortable with introspection and thought-provoking content, then pick up a copy and see what the book has to offer your life.