Oliver Burkeman – författare

"Burkeman har skrivit en lika roande och tänkvärd som spirituell och intellektuell självhjälpsbok för läsare som avskyr självhjälpsböcker"BTJ

”Förutom att ge goda råd är Fyratusen veckor trevligt sällskap…  att läsa den är väl använd tid.”The New York Times (US)"Burkeman är rolig, intressant och underhållande. Fyratusen veckor är en insiktsfull, bitvis mycket djupsinnig bok och väl värd din extremt begränsade tid.” The Wall Street Journal (US)"Burkeman är självhjälpsförfattaren för folk som tycker att sådana böcker är humbug och trams… Fyratusen veckor innehåller visdom och hälsosamma råd, som levereras med värme och torr humor. The Guardian (UK)

Vårt liv är i genomsnitt ungefär fyratusen veckor. De veckorna ska räcka för allt du vill och måste göra: arbete, familj, fritid, träning, andlig och personlig utveckling. Det är inte underligt att vi har svårt att hinna med, och att det numera finns en hel industri som säljer system för tidshantering av såväl hemma som på jobbet. Den hyllade brittisk-amerikanske skribenten Oliver Burkeman har själv känt stressen inpå livet. Han har provat på det mesta som finns av tidshanteringsmetoder, och han har konstaterat att nästan ingen fungerar. Orsaken är, menar han, att de bygger på en lögn om att det finns ett rätt sätt för att hinna med allt du vill och anser dig behöva göra. Men i en ändlig tillvaro är något sådant helt enkelt inte möjligt. Vi måste acceptera att livet inte rymmer hur mycket som helst, att vi hela tiden måste välja väg, och att vi därför måste avstå från många andra alternativ. Oliver Burkemans Fyratusen veckor är tänkvärd, underhållande och skriven med underfundig humor. Det här är inte i första hand en självhjälpsbok – snarare ett kulturhistoriskt strövtåg bland märkliga nutidsfenomen och filosofer, psykologer och författare som genom tiderna har stångats mot tillvarons och tidens ändlighet. Boken avslutas med några råd om hur vi bäst utnyttjar det begränsade antal veckor som har fallit på vår lott. “Fyratusen veckor kommer att utmana och roa dig - och kanske till och med inspirera dig till ett nytt sätt att leva.”  Evening Standard (UK)"Både en praktisk självhjälpsbok och en filosofisk visdomsbok." The Observer (UK)"Skarp, provokativ och mångbottnad. . . Fyratusen veckor bjuder på visdom för ett lyckligare och mindre stressigt liv, utan de vanliga förenklingarna." The Daily Mail (UK)”En underbar bok. … Jag gillar den här typen av böcker som inte föreslår magiska lösningar på livets utmaningar, för det finns inga. I stället undersöker den människans tillkortakommanden med intelligens, visdom, humor och ödmjukhet." The Times (UK)

Brought to you by Penguin.Survive and thrive in uncertain times by listening to the insights and inspirational ideas of world-leading experts on staying calm, focused and in control, brought to you by Penguin.Too much time on your hands? Too busy to think? Too tired to do anything? Too anxious?Life as we know it presents us all with different challenges - whether it''s the anxiety of loneliness or the stress of being cooped up with the kids 24/7, working at all hours from home or finding yourself unable to fill the long hours of each day.By listening to The Here and Now you''ll discover how to master the difficult art of living in the moment. Combining the expertise of some of Penguin''s most trusted authors, this audio collection of practical wisdom and calming advice will help keep you grounded during these uncertain times.· Let Chloe Madeley advise you on exercising at home.· Allow The Mindfulness Project to reconnect you with nature.· Banish anxiety with Chloe Brotheridge.· Sophie Fletcher''s advice will help keep your family (and yourself) calm and connected.· Follow Helen Tupper and Sarah Ellis'' advice as they redefine what a successful career means.· Listen to Dr Amir Khan''s advice on how to achieve better sleep results.· Let Rukmini Iyer introduce you to the joys of cooking.· Learn from Sara Milne Rowe how to adjust your habits for positive change..Incorporating guided walks, meditation exercises, workout routines and so much more, this enriching, affirming guide will help each of us realign how we are living right now to make every moment the very best it can be, and develop habits and strategies that will last a lifetime.(P) Penguin Audio 2020

A National BestsellerAddressing the fundamental questions about how to live, Meditations for Mortals offers a powerful new way to take action on what counts: a guiding philosophy of life Oliver Burkeman calls “imperfectionism.” It helps us tackle challenges as they crop up in our daily lives: our finite time, the lure of distraction, the impossibility of doing anything perfectly, the feeling that the world is spinning out of control.How can we embrace our nonnegotiable limitations? Or make good decisions when there’s always too much to do? How do we shed the illusion that life will really begin as soon as we can “get on top of everything”? Reflecting on quotations drawn from philosophy, religion, literature, psychology, and self-help, Burkeman explores a combination of practical tools and daily shifts in perspective. The result is a life-enhancing and surprising challenge to much familiar advice—and a profound yet entertaining crash course in living more fully.To be either read as a four-week “retreat of the mind” or devoured in one or two sittings, Meditations for Mortals will be a source of solace and inspiration, and an aid to a saner, freer, and more enchantment-filled life. In anxiety-inducing times, it is rich in truths we have never needed more.

Brought to you by Penguin.The instant Sunday Times bestsellerA FINANCIAL TIMES, GUARDIAN AND OBSERVER BOOK OF THE YEARONE OF THE DAILY TELEGRAPH''S 75 BEST BOOKS OF 2021 What if you stopped trying to do everything, so that you could finally get round to what counts? We''re obsessed with our lengthening to-do lists, our overfilled inboxes, the struggle against distraction, and the sense that our attention spans are shrivelling. Still, we rarely make the connection between our daily struggles with time and the ultimate time management problem: the question of how best to use our ridiculously brief time on the planet, which amounts on average to about four thousand weeks. Four Thousand Weeks is an uplifting, engrossing and deeply realistic exploration of the challenge. Rejecting the futile modern obsession with ''getting everything done,'' it introduces readers to tools for constructing a meaningful life by embracing rather than denying their limitations. Drawing on the insights of both ancient and contemporary philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual teachers, Oliver Burkeman sets out to realign our relationship with time - and in doing so, to liberate us from its tyranny. Embrace your limits. Change your life. Make your four thousand weeks count.''Life is finite. You don''t have to fit everything in... Read this book and wake up to a new way of thinking and living'' EMMA GANNON ''A much-needed reality check on our culture''s crazy assumptions around work, productivity and living a meaningful life'' MARK MANSON, bestselling author of THE SUBTLE ART OF NOT GIVING A F*CK ''Comforting, fascinating, engaging, inspiring and USEFUL, actually genuinely useful'' MARIAN KEYES© Oliver Burkeman 2021 (P) Penguin Audio 2021

Oliver Burkeman''s guides to leading a better life in an age of confusionJournalist and author Oliver Burkeman is well-known for his long-running Guardian column, ''How to Change Your Life'', and has written three bestselling books on happiness, productivity and time management. In this radio collection, he looks at four central ills of modernity - busyness, anger, the insistence on positivity and the decline of nuance. Talking to a range of experts, he discovers how these problems became so widespread, and how we can go about tackling them.In Addicted to Busy (first broadcast as Oliver Burkeman is Busy), Oliver explores why we all feel so busy nowadays, asking whether we''ve talked ourselves into feeling overwhelmed, and if our problem might not be lack of time, but lack of bandwidth. Could the solution lie not in working harder, but in indulging in a little idleness?The Power of Negative Thinking sees Oliver examining the virtues of negativity. Asking why ''thinking yourself happy'' can so often have the opposite effect, he probes the ways in which negative visualisation can achieve positive results; considers the phenomenon of hedonic adaptation; ponders whether workplace fun is ever a good idea; and wonders whether confronting our own mortality could make us happier. And in a special one-off episode, The Impostor''s Survival Guide, he inquires why so many of us spend our working lives feeling like a fraud. Where do these feelings come from, and what can be done about them?In Why Are We So Angry?, Oliver attempts to understand why we are frequently so full of fury. Explaining how anger gave humans an evolutionary edge, he divulges how companies today profit from our outrage; investigates how anger can be essential for social change; learns how to manage rage in a healthy way; and asks if the future will become ever more angry, or if there''s a point where our anger will finally break.Finally, in The Death of Nuance, he looks at how nuance is vanishing from public discourse. He discovers that our brains are wired for snap decisions, and that language can limit our capacity for nuanced thought - depending on how we choose to use it. He also considers how to open minds through moderation; explores how society has become polarised across political divides and reveals how to restore nuance and evolve our thinking in a changing world.Production creditsPresented by Oliver BurkemanProduced by Peter McManusAddicted to Busy: Why Life Has Got So Hectic first broadcast as Oliver Burkeman is Busy, BBC Radio 4, 12-16 September 2016With Maria Popova, Tony Crabbe, Jonathan Gershuny, Brigid Schulte, Stephanie Brown, Dan Ariely, David Drever and his team, Eldar Shafir, Mark Cropley, Andrew Smart, Tom HodgkinsonThe Power of Negative Thinking first broadcast BBC Radio 4, 21-25 November 2016With Gabriele Oettingen, Russ Harris, Jim Trodden, Derrick Jensen, Peter Congdon, Carol Barraclough, Kelsang Zamling, Kiera Lawlor, Ian Bogost, Marcus Coates, Josefine Speyer, Rebecca GreenWhy Are We So Angry? first broadcast BBC Radio 4, 17 October-14 November 2018With Ryan Martin, Aaron Sell, Maya Tamir, Mark Vernon, Charlie Beckett, Molly Crockett, Tobias Rose-Stockwell, Martin Boyce, Brett Ford, Martha C. NussbaumThe Death of Nuance first broadcast BBC Radio 4, 28 December 2020-1 January 2021With Kevin Dutton, Susan Neiman, Tim Lomas, Naomi Baron, Damon Linker, Daniel Ravner, Robert B. Talisse, Poppy Noor, Richard Holloway© 2022 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd. (P) 2022 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd

Oliver Burkeman examines the insidious way in which convenience has warped our existence

Bestselling author Oliver Burkeman is well known for his books and radio programmes exploring how we can lead meaningful and productive lives in an age of overwhelm. This time, he brings his keen sense of the ridiculous to bear on our obsession with convenience, looking at the hidden pitfalls of a life of ease.

Over the past 20 years, the on-demand industry has flourished, promising to solve our problems, save us time and spare us from tedious, time-consuming tasks. But, in attempting to excise mundane experiences, we''ve inadvertently ended up getting rid of many things that are actually necessary for our well-being. Having everything delivered denies us the chance to interact with other people, leaving us lonelier. Services such as Apple Pay encourage us to make pointless purchases, meaning we''re less likely to have spare cash to give to someone begging on the street. And our demands for immediacy and instant gratification have made us lazier and more impatient.

In these five episodes, Oliver attempts to assess the consequences of our reliance on convenience. Helping him are a wealth of authors and thinkers, including Kat Rosenfield, Julian Baggini, Jonathan Rowson, Mark Manson and Coco Krumme. He asks how our sense of belonging is undermined by frictionless travel and effortless digital communication; spends time with the gig economy workers who pick up the tab to smooth our path; delves into the spiritual and psychological implications of convenience; and explains how, since moving from Brooklyn to rural Yorkshire, he has come to love his less convenient life.

Throughout, Oliver shows how convenience culture has made our lives subtly worse - and how, by resisting its temptations at least some of the time, we could become happier, healthier and more fulfilled individuals.

Production credits

Presented by Oliver Burkeman

Produced by Peter McManus

Executive Producer: Heather Kane-Darling

With Kat Rosenfield, Julian Baggini, Jonathan Rowson, Mark Manson, Craig Lambert, Coco Krumme

First broadcast BBC Radio 4, 29 May-2 June 2023

© 2023 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd. (P) 2023 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd.

Oliver Burkeman explains why we need to pay less, not more, attention to the news

Award-winning journalist and author Oliver Burkeman has written three bestselling books on happiness, productivity and time management. Now, in this thought-provoking radio series, he looks at the way we consume and obsess over the news, and why it''s so bad for us.

Tracing the origins of the modern news cycle, from the first mass production of newspapers in the 19th century to 24-hour rolling news and the alluring interactivity of social media, he shows how we have gone from a scarcity to a superabundance of information. Hooked by attention-grabbing headlines, we''ve dived into the dramas of presidential politics, pandemics and wars, feeling actively involved in - and infuriated by - things we can''t control. And this illusory sense of participation in events inevitably causes stress, anxiety and a loss of perspective. So how do we rethink our dysfunctional relationship with the news?

Talking to authors, academics and media experts including Emily Bell, Robert Talisse, Pandora Sykes, Rolf Dobelli and ''Doomscrolling Reminder Lady'' Karen K Ho, Oliver considers how we can free ourselves from the relentless grip of the news. Do we have to be up to speed with the latest stories to be responsible citizens, or is our increasing engagement with current affairs actually bad for democracy? Is going cold turkey the solution, or could simply stepping back, pausing and reflecting be the key to greater understanding? And is it possible, by focussing only on issues over which we can personally exert an influence, to let the rest of the world take its course?

Over five fascinating episodes, Oliver shows how we can switch our default state, put real life centre stage - and make the news somewhere we visit, rather than where we live.

Production credits

Presented by Oliver Burkeman

Produced by Peter McManus

With Charlie Beckett, Tanya Goodin, Emily Bell, Karen K Ho, Bryan McLaughlin, Rossalyn Warren, Robert Talisse, Ben Toff, Pandora Sykes, Rolf Dobelli, Graeme Forbes

First broadcast BBC Radio 4, 19-23 December 2022

© 2023 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd. (P) 2023 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd.

Brought to you by Penguin.Banish burnout. Choose calm. Embrace life. One day at a time.Meditations for Mortals takes us on a liberating journey towards a more meaningful life – one that begins not with fantasies of the ideal existence, but with the reality in which we actually find ourselves. Designed as a four-week ‘retreat of the mind’, it offers daily wisdom, solace and inspiration to aid a saner, freer, and more enchantment-filled way of living.Addressing fundamental questions about how to live, Oliver Burkeman proposes a powerful new guiding philosophy of ‘imperfectionism’. How can we embrace our limitations? Or make good decisions when there’s always too much to do? What if being truly productive means letting things happen, not making them happen?Reflecting on philosophy, literature, psychology, religion and self-help, Burkeman explores practical tools and shifts in perspective. The result is a bracing challenge to much familiar advice, and a profound yet entertaining crash course in living more fully.‘Full of wisdom and comfort…a really important book about embracing truth and reality which will help a lot of people leave their fantasies and dive into real life'' CHRIS VAN TULLEKEN, author of Ultra-Processed People''Oliver Burkeman has a way of giving you the most unexpected productivity advice exactly when you need it’ MARK MANSON, author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck''Thoughtful, level-headed, and useful ... a book to meditate upon'' THE TIMES© Oliver Burkeman 2024 (P) Penguin Audio 2024

There''s a ritual of the modern workplace - one you''ve heard and most likely indulged in yourself. It''s the call and response we go through when you ask a workmate how they''re doing: "Busy!" "So busy." It is pretty obviously a boast disguised as a complaint. And our simultaneously grim and half chuckled reply comes as a kind of congratulation: "Ha, better than the opposite." When did we start doing that? As if he didn''t have enough to do, Oliver Burkeman explores this epidemic of busyness to reveal that it may not be what it at first seems. He asks if we are talking ourselves into feeling overwhelmed with busyness, and if our problem with busyness is not that we do not have the time but rather we literally do not have the head space. He questions whether people have become addicted to busy, either because it makes them feel like heroes fighting the odds, or because problems can be avoided by never sitting still. Finally, he examines whether the solution to busyness is perhaps not to work harder and organise ourselves, but to indulge in a little idleness.Oliver Burkeman is an award-winning feature writer for the Guardian. He writes a popular weekly column on psychology, ‘This Column Will Change Your Life’, and has reported from London, Washington and New York.Produced by Peter McManus. This programme was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 as ''Oliver Burkeman Is Busy.''

Why is everyone so angry nowadays, and what is it doing to the world?In the developed world we live in a blessed epoch, a time and a place where life has never been better. Infant mortality has been all but abolished, we have greater personal choice than ever before, we have access to technology that would have been seen as the stuff of science fiction little more than a decade ago. We are safer and wealthier than at any time in human history. So why are we so damn angry about everything? On-line, in the street, in the ballot box, anger is the most dominant public emotion of our age. So what are we so angry about, and how is our anger shaping our world? We know the issues that people seem to be angry about - the iniquities of globalisation, diversity, democratic disconnect - but why has anger become our default emotion when responding to the state of the world- and what is anger doing to the world we live in?Oliver Burkeman is an award-winning feature writer for the Guardian. He writes a popular weekly column on psychology, ‘This Column Will Change Your Life’, and has reported from London, Washington and New York.

ALIVENESS is the bold successor to Four Thousand Weeks, which offers its reader, once again, a radically fresh way of engaging with life. This book is Oliver Burkeman’s bracing answer to a widely shared, if only half-articulated, discontent: the feeling that in these alarming and uncertain times, something vital has drained out of our everyday lives. ALIVENESS is the name of that missing quality: a feeling of vibrancy, clarity, connection and immediacy that’s essential for living an accomplished and creative life – and a life that makes a difference in this deeply unsettling era. Aliveness is what makes life worth living. It isn’t the same as happiness, because you can feel alive in the midst of challenge or sadness. It’s a quality AI and the robots will never have; it’s what they can’t fake. And our current sense of overwhelm, perma-crisis and threat definitely erodes it. And so, in an age of doomerism and algorithmic predictability, Oliver Burkeman shows us that the problem isn’t our lack of control but, rather, our desperate clinging to it. His invitation is to ‘unclench’, physically and psychologically, so as to step out of the defensive crouch in which we usually meet the world. He explains how – by learning to relax into reality, embracing spontaneity and imperfect agency, and trusting our own idiosyncratic interests and desires – we can find our way back to feeling more fully and exhilaratingly alive.