If you’ve not heard of Burkeman’s book (Four Thousand Weeks, I’ve not yet read it) the seed is simple: Your life will be about 4,000 weeks in duration.

In this podcast episode, Burkeman talks about the common advice to prioritize your work and to do the important things first—an echo of Stephen Covey’s metaphor of rocks, pebbles and sand to be put into a jar representing your limited time. Burkeman zooms in on the implication—missed by most people—within Covey’s advice.

You only have finite time. If you have a prioritized list of what’s important to you, it’s the stuff in the middle that will do you in.

Your top 5 items are clearly those big things you should work on. But, your number 6 item—that one feels almost as important as number 5. You need to actively avoid the danger of getting sucked into that number 6 (and the other almost as important items right behind it.)

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