There are about four thousand weeks
If you live to eighty, you get about four thousand weeks. Burkeman starts there and then spends the book taking away the comfort I usually add next, which is that a better system will fit more of life into the weeks I have. His argument is the opposite. The inbox is infinite. The list of books, cities, and people is infinite. Any method that promises to get me on top of it is selling a contradiction. Choosing one thing is refusing the rest, and the refusal is the actual work.
I argued with him while I read. Some of the chapters are happier to be wise than I like, and a few of the examples are the kind of story a columnist reaches for. The spine of it still seemed true, because I could watch myself do the thing he describes. I keep a list so I will feel less afraid of forgetting, and then I treat the list as a debt. Finishing the debt becomes the day. The day I wanted is somewhere under it. He is good on the difference between those two.
I did not come away with a new method. That is probably the point. I came away less impressed by the feeling of being caught up, and a bit more willing to leave a book unfinished without calling it a failure. I finished this one, though. It is short, and it earned the evening.