Oliver Burkeman Audiobooks

Oliver Burkeman, born in 1975, is a British author and journalist who for years wrote This Column Will Change Your Life, a weekly column for The Guardian patrolling the crowded ground where psychology, productivity and the pursuit of happiness collide.

In 2021 he published Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, a book on the philosophy and psychology of time management and happiness. Nominally it sits on the self-help shelf; in practice it is self-help for people who are instinctively suspicious of self-help, and it is all the better for it. The long columnist’s apprenticeship shows in the writing: sceptical of easy answers, but never sneering at the human problems underneath them.

Burkeman’s great subject – what to do with a finite life in an age of infinite demands – is almost uncomfortably well suited to audio, a format most of us reach for precisely because we are trying to do two things at once. Our catalogue carries both Four Thousand Weeks and Meditations for Mortals, which together amount to a compact course in thinking more sanely about time.

For UK listeners there is the added relief of a British voice in a genre dominated by American cheerleading. Burkeman does not shout, promise miracles or instruct you to rise at five. He asks better questions instead, which turns out to be rarer and considerably more useful.