Deep Questions with Cal Newport - IN-DEPTH:The Productivity Trap (w/ Oliver Burkeman)

Episode Date: October 17, 2024

In this episode of IN-DEPTH, a semi-regular interview series with people at the frontiers of deep living, Cal welcomes the bestselling author Oliver Burkeman to the Deep Work HQ to talk about his new book, MEDITATIONS FOR MORTALS, and more generally the tension between wanting to get your act together and becoming unhealthily obsessed with productivity.Video from today’s episode:  youtube.com/calnewportmediaINTERVIEW: New York Times best seller Oliver Burkeman [3:40]Links:https://www.calnewport.com/slowThanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, Kieron Rees for the theme music, and Mark Miles for mastering. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I'm Cal Newport, and this is In-depth, a semi-regular series where I interview interesting people about the quest to cultivate a deep life. I'm excited about today's episode. It is the first episode in which we have the guest here in person at the studio at the Deep Work HQ, and I will be talking to Oliver Berkman. You probably know Oliver from his mega bestselling book 4,000 weeks. We talk about this book all the time on the podcast. It's a book that took a really psychologically astute and philosophically sophisticated look at productivity culture, the role of productivity and how we think about our life and the life well lived and how to get past some of the traps that thinking too much about productivity can ensnare you within. He has a new book out called Meditations for Mortals

that helps you take some of the ideas from 4,000 weeks and actually embody them in your daily practice. It's more practical, but it's also philosophical, and it's fascinating, and I loved it. So I was very excited to have Oliver here. What we talked about, the goal of this conversation was to tackle the question, what is the role of productivity in the deep life?

I think to the outside observer, there's places where Oliver and I are at odds. He is very suspicious of productivity systems. He is suspicious of overthinking and trying to be overorganized. He does believe you do need to be organized to some degree, but that we often take it too far. And so what I wanted to understand, because I think this is critical for getting the deep life right, is how do we walk this line of having enough time management organization in our life that it's not chaotic and stressful, but avoid having so much that we become trapped in the pursuit of efficiency for the sake of efficiency, that we use productivity and its promises to escape the realities of life and while doing so also avoid its wonders.

So if you've had these questions yourself, these questions about, am I doing too much to be organized? Am I not doing enough? How much do I need to do? Should I be guilty that I'm not time blocking? Is it a problem that I'm not using full capture? This conversation is for you. We really get into it. We get philosophical.

We get technical. And the second half of the conversation, we try to exactly specify where Oliver and I agree and exactly where we disagree and we try to find what's useful in the space in between. It was a conversation I loved having, I think for anyone thinking about the deep life and the role of organization and time managing the deep life, this conversation is exactly what you need to hear.

I think you're going to like it. Go buy Oliver's books. They're fantastic. He's a great writer, long-time journalist. I love when the professional writers who spent their whole life as professional writers and journalists, when they tackle these topics, the books are really good, right? They know how to turn a phrase. They know how to structure a chapter.

So they're fantastic books. I highly recommend them. But anyway, I think you're going to enjoy this conversation, which we will be presenting without any commercial interruption. Me, Oliver Berkman, and a lot of deep diving on productivity. Enjoy. All right, I am pleased to have joining me here in the Deep Work HQ, none other than Oliver, Berkman, Oliver,

thank you for making the trip here to D.C. It's so exciting to be in the location, you know. Yeah, today is, if I have this right, the American release date, the day we're recording this, of your new book, Meditations for Mortals. That's right. It's very exciting. But now in the UK for a month has been doing very well.

Let me ask you, just so people know off the bat, I'm going to try to describe the relationship of your new book to your last book, 4,000 weeks. Then you tell me how you would modify that. All right. Right? Because I don't see it as, it's not quite right to say a follow-up to 4,000 weeks. It's not quite right to say a response to 4,000 weeks. I see it as maybe a companion slash elaboration

slash iteration. There's new things in it and it's more practical, but it also has a lot of philosophy. And some of the philosophy is refining what you talked about in 4,000 weeks and some of the philosophy is also new, which gives it a really interesting relationship. Am I getting that sort of vaguely right? Yeah, I think so.

I mean, it was very important to me writing it that it not be something that required you to have read a word I've written beforehand. But I think there is, you know, on one level, my subject matter is human finitude, limitation, how we get things done and enjoy life in this situation of being as limited as we are. And I guess the focus of this book is much more in my mind on action at a day-to-day level and really going from, you know, going from the fact that you can have all sorts of ideas about how you want to live and work

and never actually do them. So it's about crossing that gap into sort of actually doing the things. Which is kind of where things get exciting. So let's back up a little bit. So what I wanted to start, my goal, we talked about this offline, my goal is to try to understand,

this is a show about the deep life. What role does productivity play in the deep life? That's going to be our goal, including, and I think this is why I'm glad you're here, the traps. there's a lot of dangers as you try to integrate productivity ideas into your life. There's a lot of traps there. So let's start from the beginning.

I want to try to identify better what it is you are responding to with both this book in 4,000 weeks. Because I think something that's different about you than other writers from the last five years who have had some skepticism about productivity culture is you know about what you speak. You wrote this column for The Guardian. I think I counted over 600 columns over 400. I don't know, I counted at some point, but it was over a decade. Too many, yeah. Too many, yeah. You wrote a column that looked at advice culture, self-help culture, productivity culture,

for a very long time before you came to these books. So what was it that you came to notice that led you to the motivation to start writing skeptically about this culture? Yes, I mean, one of the great benefits of writing a column for a long time where you get to, among other things, you know, test out all these methods and stuff. systems and techniques, is that, you know, once you've tried a hundred of them, and none of them have been the silver bullet that brings total peace of mind and calm productivity to your life, you begin to ask the next question, which is whether there's something amiss with that quest.

Obviously, if you do a more important job in the world, and you only have the time to test out a handful of these, you might still believe that it's just a question of finding the right. system. So I really feel like I went through a very kind of productive and positive kind of disillusionment in that process. How earnest, I read your original column the other day. And there's an earnestness in it. Like I really do want to try to figure out what works. And then there was also, I think, a very British sort of

self-deprecation of it as well. But how earnest, like if you're looking back at 2006, what would, if I interviewed you back then, what were you hoping? At that point, were you holding out a significant piece is going to be found, or were you already pretty suspect? Because the column had a bit of a sardonic title. I'm very curious in where your mindset was back then when you started. It's interesting.

I think of the process of writing that column over the years as being a journey from cynicism to sincerity, really, even though, as well, disillusionment in the ways that were being offered to sort of build a meaningful life. but the, you know, I think I began thinking I was mainly going to sort of be mocking and sarcastic about terrible self-help. Still taking the sort of quest for happiness seriously on some level, because it is obviously on some level a very serious quest. But the big surprise was how much value there was like hiding in the cheesiness and the cringe.

That's also a much more interesting and provocative thing to, present to the archetypal guardian reader, right? Yeah. My audience was, I took my audience anyway to be similarly jaded and skeptical. So that sort of obviously is at odds with what I just said about getting disillusioned by the methods. But I think the sort of, so it was a sort of a twin track thing where I gradually was sort of forced into having different or my own ideas about how to get to these goals. But I did get more sincere about the goals. And I think what's going on there partly, obviously, is that when you start that thing,

often when you start writing sardonically about stuff as a relatively young adult, part of what you're doing is sort of a bit of a defense mechanism against the fact that you do care about these things and you would like to find ways to be less anxious and feel less oppressed by obligation and overwhelm. But it's kind of a little bit embarrassing to admit it. So you do sarcastic stuff instead. Do journalists have a like a special relationship with these type of topics like productivity because it's a weird job. It's very autonomous in some sense. It's also very deadline driven.

There's an unlimited ceiling, it feels like. You can go, you can advance to become as famous or as successful as you can imagine or anywhere along the way. And it all kind of comes down to what you're going to do. And you're all sort of starting from the same place. And everyone's, you have to find some way to break out. It feels like journalism, maybe similar to like academia, has a special relationship to this advice because they worry a lot about the things that this advice promises to help.

Yeah, I think that's right. And I was sort of doubling that up by then the substance of what I was writing about was this stuff as well. But yeah, that kind of deadline-driven environment where you are a part of a collective operation and getting the pages filled physically or digitally is the ultimate sort of driving goal. But yeah, it's really sort of individual. in another way. Everyone inside that organization, who's a writer anyway, is sort of fiercely on some level competing with each other.

And it yeah, it feels like it really matters to find the most effective and efficient ways to deal with each project so you can get on to the next bigger one. Yeah, it's in the water there. So then what was

when you had the revelation, and you talk about in your last book, it was on a bench famously. And in Brooklyn. How do you describe the revelation you had that led to 4,000 weeks? Well, this was very much an intellectual kind of revelation. And the process with me, I don't know if it's, I think it's probably quite common,

is that I have these kind of what seem like incredibly clarifying intellectual insights, and then it can take years and years to kind of live into a new way of living. My intellect goes first, and then the rest of me has to catch up. But I was, yeah, I tell this story. I'd stopped to sit on a park bench on my way to my co-working space in Brooklyn, where we lived. And I just had even more article deadlines and stuff I was supposed to do by the end of that week than I usually had. I was even more anxious about it all. Cycling through what combination of productivity tricks and total suspension of my social life or sleep,

I was going to use to try to force my way through to, state of completion on this stuff, and just being struck really powerfully by the thought, oh, it's impossible. I'm trying to do something that isn't possible here. I'm trying to do more things than there will be a way to do in the time available. And just experiencing that as just incredibly liberating,

as opposed to depressing, right? That moment of, I'm trying to do something that isn't on the cards. So actually, the very best thing I can do, is to pick some of the things that seem like the best use of my time and energy and do them. And instantly, like, you're sort of not overwhelmed in that moment because the whole conceptual structure of overwhelmed kind of evaporates. Did you take things off your plate right after that? Like, was this a matter of saying no to some things or backing out of some things?

What was the practical implications on your workload in that moment? I think in that moment, a lot of it was just, yeah, a little bit of renegotiation of existing deadlines, facing up to the risk of people being furious with me, and of course finding out that they've got their own problems. They were not pacing up and down their offices cursing my name and didn't really mind at all, taking a bit of extra time. I don't remember in detail, but I think there might well have been a project or two that I had to essentially put on ice. And then the rest of it is, it's almost like it wasn't even real in some sense, right? It's like, yes, I've got a lot of emails that need answering

for some value of need answering, but if it takes, in a lot of those cases, if you sort of triage them, and some of them maybe you'd never reply to, and some of them, yeah, it's going to take two weeks. It's not not particularly proud of that, but it's not going to bring catastrophe.

And there's the depth of the sort of unexamined idea that something absolutely terrible is going to happen if you don't get to the end of a sort of purely, on some level, self-created list of masks is extraordinary. We have this joke on the show that people like to imagine

there's a dark room somewhere where all the people you work with are sitting around and they have all this data about you up on a board somewhere and they're studying your patterns of like how many things did Oliver say no to? Wait a second. He said no to 50% more things than normal and what's his average response time and they're all caring about this and no one cares. And how I mean, you know, how weirdly insulting to the people involved, right?

It's like, you know, when I was saying this to my editor at the publisher just the other day, right? Not that I suffer from this like I used to, but when I'm late with a deadline or something, there is this sort of involuntary mental image that this you know, busy, high status person with lots on their plate is doing nothing but just sort of sitting around, thinking

bad thoughts about me, right? How dare he? You know, they're all sitting around, yeah, with sifters of Sherry. And look, obviously, there's a certain factor here where people are in different situations and there are genuinely people who are in a sort of tight to spot than me in terms of it's part of a job requirement to answer every email from a certain person

or kind of person in a certain timescale. And so these trade-offs can be different and I've got a certain amount of good fortune in this very sort of autonomous life. But even in those cases, the sort of existential layer that people bring to it. Like then they have not earned their right to exist on the planet if they don't power through all the things. I think that is something we can all let go on. Okay. So you have this insight.

So walk us through the response. So once you recognize, you can't do it all. There's a, I mean, I think you used the word futility. There's a futility to the idea that you can get it all organized, right? am I saying this right that people have this idea that there's this this group of things you need to do to be successful and it's maybe a little bit outside of what you could do comfortably but if you just get your systems right you can tackle it then you'll be successful but the reality you write about is no no there's a vast universe of things you could be doing no matter how organized you are most things you're not going to do so why have that epsilon of that like extra 20 exhausting percent

does it really make much of a difference in terms of how much you're getting done not really Most things you're saying no to anyways, if I have that right. Well, first of all, do I have that right? Am I thinking about that right? Yeah, I think one way that sort of resonates a lot with me is that it's about a certain kind of feeling of control, right? It's about wanting to feel all these phrases, like on top of everything or like you have your life sorted out or something like that.

And it's the problem with that whole approach. is that that sort of, the point at which that feeling of control would be satisfied, yeah, is essentially when you had your arms round an infinite amount. Yeah. So before we get too far into, okay, so now how do we rewire our mindset and then what practically we can do from the new book?

I'm curious in the relationship between your ideas and critiques and what I think is the other main line of productivity critiques of the last five years, which I guess I would characterize as like the Ginny O'Dell, maybe Anne Helen Peterson camp. That's much more of an economic critique, I think more of like a classic Marxist critique, which says, okay, these productivity mindsets

that are sort of causing issues that you also talk about are essentially implanted by the imperatives of capitalism. It's more of a Marxist critique, that these are, it's a mindset that's been implanted to try to exploit labor. Your critique seem very different. They seem more psychological than economical. But how do you think about the relationship between your critiques and the other kind of big names

that have been critiquing productivity in the last few years? Yeah, it's such an interesting question because I do appreciate the best of that work so much at the same time as kind of feeling that I diverge from it. for me it starts with an issue of like my personality really at the end of the day i'm i want to try to um salvage the idea of productive ambition within the kind of context that we that we live i'm not sort of drawn to the revolutionary implications of of that more sort of marxist critique so i'm just like okay i would really like to have much more peace of mind this is me coming into this and to some extent still today, right? I would like to have much more peace of mind

and calm, but I would like that not to be a kind of checking out of accomplishment society and launching cool stuff and making some money out of it and all the rest of it. So I'm sort of trying to reconcile those things for myself. The question then, I suppose, is whether that can be done or whether sort of consistency requires you to eventually end up in that in that Marxist camp. And then at the end of the day, I just sort of think, well, look, I feel like I'm writing for people who get up in the morning and have a to-do list and have stuff they want to achieve

and stuff that they feel pressured to do and all the rest of it. So maybe in a sense it's just like, while we're waiting for the revolution, what can we do? Because I absolutely think that there's a legitimate criticism to be made of what I do, which is that it sort of puts the, social economic critique to one to one side and doesn't very much address it head on and sort of says that's all very well but at the same time here we are as individuals trying to sort of live

flourishing lives right here right i mean i guess it's the standard critique from the revolutionary is don't distract don't distract the masses with practicality because you'll turn their mind away from revolution. But actually it's a very healthy tension. That it's good to have the pressure on the world of work and capitalism, but you also have to be helping individuals as you say, who right now

feel completely overwhelmed and don't know what to do and capitalism is probably not going to fall this year. Right, and I'm being a little bit unfair in talking about revolution, right? There's a completely legitimate version of this that says what really matters is family-friendly health care systems

and childcare systems and all sorts of other aspects. And if we have that, then a lot of these kind of bad tensions that we feel in our work and our productivity might not arise. But again, you know, the response is, yeah, totally. And meanwhile, what should we do? I think an interesting place where maybe I'm closer to those writers than you is something that I think those writers and me are very interested in is the kind of boring detail

of knowledge work. Like, how does knowledge work function? How does management happen in knowledge work? How does work flow? Like, what's the structure of a typical job where you work out a computer and you go to a cubicle or this or that? And I'm interested, and I want to get your opinion on this

because it feels like there's two different relevant forces that are both a source of people's exhaustion with the idea of productivity. One is the psychological, which I think you talk about very well. the pressure you put upon yourself to figure it out, have the best systems,

get it all done, find peace through productivity. Then there is what's happening in the workplace. So it's like what I write about in my last book, pseudo productivity, the rise of the managerial strategy

of using visible activity as a proxy for useful effort, the impossibility of that. It's an institutionalization of, I think, the feudal mindset that you talk about in your book as ultimately being nihilistic and you're never going to get your arms on everything.

And yet the modern workplace has these pressures of activities what matters, so more is better than less. And any moment where you could be working and you're not, you're actually having a personal negotiation and having to balance your life against work and it's this like impossible sort of balance you have. I mean, so how do you, how do we think about the world of work? Like, what is its contribution to this exhaustion that people feel with, productivity and how's that overlap with the way you talk about it. Wow, that's an interesting question. And I think you're right that it's something that connects you with the,

we might say, more radical productivity critique in some way. And the main difference I always say is they think the world of work is doing it on purpose to exploit and get more labor. And I say, no, no, no, the managers in the role of knowledge work have no idea what they're doing. It's a dumpster fire. It's random. and everyone's running around. And actually it makes people very unproductive.

It doesn't create value. It's not like getting the longer hours out of the assembly line worker or it's bad for the worker, but you build Model T is cheaper. I was like, actually, the way we work in knowledge work is chaotic. It exhaust people. It's unproductive. It's bad for the organization. It's more ignorance and not understanding how knowledge work works.

That's the main place we differ. But we both see, I guess, the world of work as being a big force of productivity, negativity. Yeah, and listen, I don't dispute that at all. I just, I think the only answer I have really is that, is that, yeah, I am coming, I think, from this somewhat more psychological place where I'm asking, like, how one confronts the reality with which one is faced each day, one big part of which is obviously, you know, organizational life and the office and how work works. So one place where this comes up is in sort of the question of how much autonomy you need. in your work situation to benefit from the things that I'm saying, the things that you're saying, things that anybody's saying. And I think one place that I go in this new book is almost in a sort of existentialist philosophy

direction, right, to look at the kind of the choices that we retain, even in situations where we're very much sort of our actions are guided by these kind of, as you say, probably in many ways largely irrational and counterproductive. ways of approaching work. So, yeah, I think they're just different angles on the same material. It's not a very good answer on some level. Well, one of the things I like about the way you talk about, and you even said this earlier in this interview,

and I think it's a good point for me, and I think it's something that my audience really likes about you, is that I think you're pointing out that some non-trivial percent of what people in a normal office job feel like is unavoidable and put upon them by their managers is actually in their mind, which I think is really interesting, that we tell a story of everyone is demanding this email to be answered. And everyone is demanding, and I say yes.

And if not, in the control center, they're going to notice this and start getting upset. And I think that's a really important point, that even in knowledge work, which does put these weird productivity pressures, we amplify it in our head. Right, absolutely. And if you go sort of, if you zoom out or up or something from that, far enough, you get to this kind of question of what it means to be a human facing options and choices in the world that sort of dissolves the boundary between the work setting and the rest of life because it applies to the whole of life. And in one of the chapters in this book, I talk about this quotation from the therapist Sheldon Kopp, who says, you're free to do whatever you like,

you need only face the consequences. And it's this whole sort of vision of the world, which is absolutely on point, I think, for finite human beings, where every single thing that you feel you have to do is really a question of saying you're not prepared, perhaps quite wisely, to shoulder to pay the costs of not doing it, right? That's always the only question at hand. And I think, you know, there's a terrible, cliched version of self-help,

that says you can always choose anything and you've got no limits on your autonomy at all and just like by thinking about large piles of gold you can become a billionaire. But there's another, the more sort of, as I say, existentialist idea of choice, which is like actually it's never unless you're under physical restraint,

I suppose, it's never literally the case that you have to do anything. It's always the case that you're choosing which disadvantages to put up with the disadvantages of submitting to those pressures of the workplace or not doing. And that can be very, very obvious for some people, right? Like, I've got to do that. Otherwise, I get fired.

But there's something important in terms of one's sense of oneself in the world. There's something very important about seeing that it is still technically a choice. Yes. Even if to take one of the options would be kind of totally insane and you'd never do it. The fact that you could means something. Right. There's nothing stopping you from saying, I'm not answering emails, or I'm just going to say, no. I don't want to do this type of projects anymore.

Like, all this is that you're choosing sort of what your day-to-day is. And it might be a bad option, but you're not being forced to do anything. Right. And if you start from that sense in which your freedom of choice is sort of unlimited and you can say no, it's like I would prefer not to, right? It's Bartleby the Scrivener as the key. to modern productivity culture. Like, I'm not suggesting that most people are going to,

or should, decide just to stop answering emails from people more seniors to them in an organization, for example. But just once you see that what we're getting at here, it then allows you to more consciously let back in the pressures you're going to submit to, the ones you're going to resist, and through that sort of process, navigate to where you want to get to. Well, I like this because it's compatible with what we talk about here on the show a lot about lifestyle planning.

So working backwards from an image of what makes a good life good, as opposed to like fixating on a singular grand goal and hoping this will fix everything. It's knowing like what do I want my schedule to feel like? What do I want to live? What do I want the rhythm of my day to look like? You have a lot more options for sort of working in small steps and taking advantage of small opportunities to make. move towards an ideal lifestyle image. There's a lot more options than you think versus I just want to be at the top of the pile.

And if I get there, then I'll be happy. But I want to actually, so what I want to survey, I want to get your help on this. Like I know a lot about the business world and its intersection with productivity. Somewhat ironically, given that I write about this, I know very little about the other types of productivity culture. Online, books, the way people talk about productivity when they actually are talking about productivity. You know a lot about that world because you wrote this column for so long and you push back against that world in the books. Can you give me like what is this world saying? I don't use social media. I'm not very online. I don't read a lot of books in my own genre.

What is the non-corporate productivity self-help advice world? Like what is this? Is it books? Is it online. What are the core messages? Like, how do we define this world that you were reacting to? I mean, I think on some level it's getting more varied and multifarious. So I don't want to sort of totally

caricature it. But I do think that what you get in all of that, and I am familiar, especially with what's going on in this world in YouTube and on Twitter, whatever it's called now. And to some extent this is there in the book world as well. There is still this driving focus on the idea that there is one very simple way.

Obviously it's a totally different way depending on whose video you're watching, but that there is one very simple way to, there's a rule of some kind, a system of some kind, that if you follow it, everything will fall into place. and it will be essentially automatic that you do an enormous amount that it's the right stuff and that you make huge amounts of money

from it. This is very YouTube, right? This feels very YouTube. There's this extraordinary escalation in like it starts off with like how I make $10,000 a month and then by the, you scroll through the videos and you're like how I make $10 million a month

and it's like well if you did I don't think you'd be in front of a jet right right right yeah Exactly, yeah. Exactly. So that's the sort of really money-focused side of it. But even when it's not really money-focused, right, it has the same basic idea that there is something that will make it sort of plug and play.

And I think, for example, I know you say you're not so familiar with it, but I think this stuff, but I remember you talking about in the world of when it comes to writing, right? There's a version of this in the world of like personal knowledge management and note-taking and the great, very interesting writing that's been done on things like the idea of a Zetelcast and which we probably don't need to get into now. But again, sharing this notion that if you really do all this well,

the bit where you're sitting down to write will be effortless and you won't have to ever go through the difficult bit of like, I don't know what to write. I'm thinking. And I think I'm quoting you all the time on writers' block just being the feeling of writing.

So I'm seeing this maybe now, with AI too, right? So now I think I am kind of plugged into what you're talking about, because I see this with AI a lot. Oh, just if you, there's a possibility, and this is the exact same thing, by the way, that went on in the 2000s during the productivity prong period, or the idea was if you're using technology

in the new way to support your task systems, work will become effortless, right? And you would believe it because, like, this technology is new, so it's possible that there's like some sort of new insight. I'm seeing that now with AI. Oh, totally. If I just, I have this, look, I have this like interactive. I built a custom LLM and I talked to it.

And there's, yeah, okay, so now I think I'm plugged into what you're saying. It's less about sometimes productivity culture is characterized as like, well, there's all these books saying, do as much as possible or do more. But what you're saying is much more subtle. No, no, it's not that the books are saying do more. It's there's a system that's going to cure you. There's a system that's going to make the hard thing. go away. It's going to make life easy. Like, it's going to be

cranking widgets. Right, right. And I want to say at least two things against this, right? One is that it, yeah, maybe three. One is that it this doesn't exist. You're not going to define this thing. But another is that you

you really wouldn't want it if you had it. So first of all, if you put something like that in place and it sort of works a bit, one of the things you find is this thing I've referred to elsewhere as the efficiency trap, right? You find even if an AI assistant can handle huge amounts of what you'd previously been handling,

what do you think is going to happen to all that freed up bandwidth, right? It's just going to all else being equal, it's just going to get filled with even more stuff for you to do. But also, and I think this is where I, this is the new book in some ways, whoever thought that a life of cranking widgets isn't fun, and this idea that if you could sort of get everything running completely smoothly and not have to engage with problem after challenge after problem, that would actually, this is my argument,

that would actually be a much less rich and meaningful life. So we are really capable of sort of, and this is a quote from some game design about this, right? People left to their own devices will optimize the fun out of a game. And I think that's what we really are at risk of doing in productivity as well. So I agree with you. you probably agree with me. I think David Allen,

he's so misunderstood. Yeah. Because the title of that book, getting things done, makes people who just hear the title think it's a book about maximizing output or getting ahead. It's a dark book. I keep telling people,

it's very nihilistic. Like, he wants to reduce work to just cranking widgets because he sees work as so stressful and anxiety-producing and soul-num. I mean, he's like, I just don't want to be, feel this way anymore. So can't we just make things into like automatic actions that you just do and you can just disengage? I mean, it feels almost like something you would see.

Yeah, maybe from an existentialist writer or a nihilist writer from like the early 20th centuries or something. I see it as a dark book. I see it as a cry for help too. It's saying like, look, the fact that we have people trying to figure out how to numb themselves to work means the world of work is broken. Like you should see getting things done and be like, okay, what's going on? in knowledge work in the late 90s, early 2000s. But instead, people see that title and think, oh, he's saying, yeah, if you can just do more,

we're going to get ahead. He doesn't want anyone to get ahead. He's just trying to, he's numbing himself with task list. Like, can we just like take our mind, like just disconnect from this grimness that is knowledge work? I have never really considered the, the dark version of GTD. I do think it's misunderstood. I tend to come at it from a somewhat more,

somewhat less nihilistic perspective, I guess, about the book in the sense that, like, firstly, he's a little bit like, you know, Shakespeare or somebody, and that there are ideas from that book that we just all completely use now and don't give him credit for because they just... For capture. Right. It's like a brilliant idea. Exactly.

And then the other thing is, yeah, I mean, in a way, and there is a whole kind of spiritual dimension to his life and biography, which is interesting, actually. but in a way this debate about whether it's positive or negative is a debate that goes through all sorts of kind of Eastern philosophies, right? Should you deal with the things that burden us in life by trying to sort of non-attach from them? And then is that a recipe for kind of retreat from life or is that actually the way to plunge into life?

So I think there's a positive reading of getting things done where we're sort of reducing everything to cranking widgets might then allow you to sort of be more fully present. So maybe that will be a more positive reading. But you're right, in neither case is it about maximizing your capacity to move through as many tasks as possible, certainly not that you might ever get to the end. Yeah.

To the end of them. There was a, it was reference. I went and looked this up the other day. Getting things done was reference in the office. The American version of the office. The book was that they had one of the characters, and the story arc was he was trying to impress the managers. He had been given, and so he was trying to show that he was productive.

And he said, yeah, I've been reading this book, getting things done. And I saved, it was something like, I saved 90 seconds this morning by like brushing my teeth while I showered. And he's like, and I just lost that 90 seconds explaining this to you. Oh, shoot, or whatever. I was like, oh, that was the conception of getting things done, that it was somehow about, you know, if you brush your teeth in the shower. Yeah, you're going to save more time. I think of more of the archetypical. I like going back in Memory Lane.

This literature is very interesting to me. Probably the archetypical book in my mind of you can get your arms around at all is maybe Stephen Covey, which was really trying to unify its work, but your life outside of work. Nothing about that book was about optimization. I don't think anything about that book was about getting more, trying to get more done than other people. In fact, there's very few books that actually make the argument. do more. The closest one I can think of is maybe hyper-productivity.

Yeah. Which was, but that was like pretty pragmatic. He's like, look, I'm an executive. This is a stupidly hard job because you have to do 50 things. Here's how I do it, right? But Stephen Covey seems like maybe the archetype of you could figure out what's important to you

and then you can very carefully plan based on these visions of the roles and making sure that your actions are aligned. And there's a super optimism. And I wrote about this in the New Yorker. I did this whole history of time management and productivity books. And I was like, that book reflected the optimism of the late 80s. Capitalism is booming.

All the baby boomers were doing well. They all were buying houses. Everyone was feeling pretty good. And it was very optimistic. Like you can shape a really meaningful life with the right system. Right. And also the sort of especially digital connectivity is not yet at a place where the sort of challenge to that from what I think of as infinite inputs, right, has become evident, right?

You're not going to feel, you're not going to be suffering from this problem of just a completely unlimited incoming stream of emails or completely unlimited list of things you feel you want to read or opportunities to go play, right? It's still sort of sheltered by the sort of lack of that kind of technology. I mean, that's the difference between Allen and Covey, is email came along. I mean, I think of Allen as entirely a response. to the digital workplace. And it went from this optimism.

I have a couple meetings during today, and maybe I'm going to like dictate a memo, which I'll give to the typing pool. It went from that in 1989 to, oh my God, the stuff that's coming in. Alan talks about in his book, working with clients for an intake process. We're like, let's just write down everything that you're,

you have some sort of commitment to do or obligation. And it would take, he said on average, like four to six hours. Right. Which I think in Covey's time, it'd be like, yeah, I'm working on this project. And when I'm done, I'm going to do this and I'm having a martini with lunch. I think it was a different time. Yeah, for sure.

Okay, so let's get into then. So in 4,000 weeks, you kind of go through the psychology, the futility, also the liberation of recognizing you can't do it all. Life is finite. And it's okay. You can, instead of trying to control everything, trying to master your life with systems. You can make sure you make time for the important things.

Make sure you make time for just the present right now. Your new book now wanders a little bit more into, okay, how do we put some of this in the practice? Yeah. Which I appreciate. So this is my big question, kind of my goal for this interview. How do we find a line between having enough structure that it's not chaos

but not getting snapped in the productivity or efficiency trap. How do we find that line? Yeah, that's the question. And it's probably the question that will surface the most interesting kind of differences between us, I would expect.

So, you know, make for a better debate, as it were. So I want to say something quickly, I don't want to go on and on about the book, but about the structure of the book because I think it's like substantively relevant to this point. Yeah, the 28-day structure. So this book is divided into four weeks,

and each week has seven short chapters. And the invitation, as I put it, right? Certainly not an instruction, is that you might read one of these chapters roughly per day for a month. And part of the thinking there was that I really needed to avoid this book itself becoming another example of the kind of thing that you read and maybe take notes on for your note-taking system and then decide to put into practice one day

when you've got lots of free time and you can do it perfectly, right? I really wanted to resist that and pull the rug from that every opportunity. Right, no, I should. I'll just go into our Zettel casting system, which will surface automatically the semantic connections

and then we'll be brilliant. Awesome, yeah. If it works for you, I'm not sure I've ever found someone for whom it does work. No, so the idea of this is that like, if you're reading it roughly on this pace or maybe you read it through once

and go back and do it, if you like something, that these tiny little perspective shifts which are all in the direction of this approach that I call imperfectionism and all about sort of getting around to doing the stuff here and now these little perspective shifts will actually take root and have some impact

like in the next 24 hours after you read that chapter and so it doesn't become another of these things that you have to sort of make a big transformation in order to put it into place or wait until you've got the bandwidth it can just be something that helps right here and now in the midst of the too many emails

and the anxiety-inducing news headlines that you can't stop thinking about or whatever. So in that sense, to come back to your sort of guiding question here, it's really about getting over the, it's really for people, at least on one level, who are very drawn to lots of structure and lots of plans and lots of systems, like me because it's sort of constantly saying well yeah that has a role to play

but the main thing is can you just like do one of the things now and it's like well this is an interesting rule you might like to follow but for the main in the meantime just do that thing it's about sort of taking the things that we know we want our lives to consist of

and building the muscle that allows you to just do a little bit of that thing today for 10 minutes however imperfectly with however little confidence that you're to be able to make a practice of it and come back to it every single day for the rest of your life. Because actually I think that skill and the willingness, and it's kind of an emotional struggle, anyway, for a lot of us, I think. That skill to be able to do that, almost notwithstanding the systems,

is kind of foundational. And when you have that in place, I think, that's when all sorts of rules and structures can play a role. I think my big fallacy in my earlier life was, thinking that, you know, first of all, I needed to figure out the structure. I would then put the structure in place and the emotions and the motivation and the inspiration would all sort of follow. And I think it's probably the other way around. I mean, I think that's really interesting because most people, including myself, don't always think about that aspect of delivering ideas.

Like the actual functional intake, like how you encounter and start making progress on ideas. is we just give out the frameworks, which leads to, I think a lot of people do, which is framework collecting. Let me just collect some more. I'm getting closer to being ready to put things. But let me collect a little bit more information. Let me figure out exactly how this system is work. Let me get my computer set up just perfect before I turn it on.

And so I really appreciate that about the book. The book itself has a framework of like, hey, I know you don't want to hear it. It's a page a day, like a week. like trust me, you need to actually start doing some things. Religion kind of has this figured out, right? Where it's, okay, wait, you actually have to start doing the rituals for you to have a deeper religious experience. You can't just sit and study the religion from afar.

And you're like, okay, I'm convinced, let's do it. Like, religion has been very good about that. And so maybe it's borrowing a pretty good idea of like, you've got to kind of get in there and we need help. How do you kind of messalade with imperfection, kind of get in there and get started, trying some things, making ideas that are abstract embodied so that it's intuitive and you understand what's going on. That's very smart. I really like that about the book. Thank you. And yeah, I think when it comes to the structure piece, I've got this chapter in there

on the idea that really summing this up in some sense that the role of rules and the role of systems in a productive and meaningful life has to be that those rules serve the life we want to live rather than that our lives become in service to the rule. So one example of where this comes, and I think could be maybe an interesting, I'm interested to know if you agree or disagree, is that an awful lot of approaches to productivity seem to me to be based around holding in check or even suppressing moods and desires, right? And to sort of say that the question of what you feel like doing in any given moment has really got to be put away in a box. And I feel like I've tried that many, many times,

and not without realizing I was doing it, and found that all that does is run into this sort of constant internal combat between what I feel like doing and what my system or my plan calls for me to do. And so one of the things I'm looking at in this book is how can we maybe think about riding or harnessing those flows? What is the role for our asking yourself, if you have the autonomy, of course, in your situation. What is the role for asking yourself? Wow, what do I feel like doing now? And I quote Susan Piver, the meditation teacher who has written very eloquently about this idea that actually once she was able to sort of navigate a little bit more by pleasure or by what you wanted to do, you don't find that actually

all you want to do is sit around and eat ice cream and not pay your bills and do your taxes. You find that at the appropriate moment, you're happy to do those things. So obviously there is at least a sort of surface level tension here with most obviously time blocking, even your very sort of flexible and accommodating approach to it. I'm really interested to know what you make of those thoughts. Well, I think it's a place where we disagree and agree. Right. So I actually agree with you.

It is draining the fundamental psychological psychological. state of time blocking is keeping your attention on the thing that is blocked. Yeah. Even if you don't want to do it. And it's draining. And it's why I talk about you can't, don't time block your evenings, don't time block your weekends. Not that that wouldn't be useful, but you're just going to exhaust yourself.

Right. It's really, it's really hard. You have to take breaks more. You have to kind of take days off. I think time blocking is very psychologically difficult. I also think I'd be glad actually if we didn't have to do it. So where I think we actually secretly agree is I see time blocking as a necessary evil for a lot of knowledge work jobs. The amount of things that are being put on people's plates and knowledge work jobs,

the only way for people to actually get them done in a way that they don't have to work late at night or in the morning or be running around with their hair on fire is they have to do this really hard discipline. They have to become, it's like the monk. the Zen monk that masters Shaolin Kung Fu to sort of accomplish another mind state. It's really hard work, but that's what they have to do.

That's like that's the trial. So I think I said this on my show a few weeks ago. I think you said something in response to something I'd said. It was in response to yeah, I heard that. It was great. It was in response to, yeah, an interview you were doing where you were talking about it.

And I was saying, okay, where I agree is I want, to me an ideal job, you wouldn't need a time block. Time blocking is pretty brutal. It also, however, gets about 2x more things done during a normal workday. And for like the really overloaded knowledge worker who doesn't want to bring their work home, who only has like a child care window that lasts from here to there, it's like it brings home the bacon.

That's really interesting because actually, you know, there's a little chapter in my new book about, you know, what I call the three to four hour rule about getting creative work done. We can talk some more about it. And actually, in a sense, that is advocating for some kind of time blocking, right, for sort of vigorously defending three or four hours in your day for this sort of deep work. But then what I'm also saying is that not trying too hard to structure or block the rest of the time, being open to interruption and distraction that time and serendipity in that time.

like that is where I place the sort of reasonable balance in terms of how much control we can expect to have over the flow of a workday. So this leads me to the interesting, although possibly in some ways, very kind of mundane conclusion that maybe the difference we're talking about here is just that I think I have the kind of stamina

and capacity for time blocking about half of a ordinary working day and you're advocating doing it and including those sort of more bity, email-y, conversational parts of the day, in which case, like, you know, unity and consensus has been established. Peace in our time. And I'll say, and I think this is an important data point in the summers. Right.

So when I'm during the normal academic year, my job approximates, I think, like a busy executive. Right. Because I have the academic responsibilities. I often have service responsibilities at Georgetown. Right now I'm the director of undergraduate studies for the computer science department and the director of computer science ethics major. And I know academics always love getting lots of admin responsibilities.

It's our dream. It's why we got into academia was to run things and go in committees, yeah, for sure. And then I have my writing and my podcasting. So I feel like I'm a mid-level VP. And I have to like time block to hell out of my days. in the summer, I'm a full-time writer, I don't time block. I think that's probably telling.

In other words, when my load becomes possible that I feel like I don't have to time block, I am like good. Right. Let me stop actually doing it. My fear is in the type of positions like I have during the school year, if I went it through the second half of the day, and so this is going to be a little bit more reactive and chaotic because there's a lot of little things to do, the reality of the modern workplace is you would lose the entire afternoon.

Right. It would all be emails and meetings. Like nothing would have. I mean, it's basically riding off that time is the way I see it. Interesting. Yeah. No, it's really interesting because I sort of, the other author who I, and I mentioned him a couple of times in my book,

and I'd be fascinated to hear an interview between, I'm fascinated if you ever decided to interview him. This Dutch writer called Paul Loo. who's written this book called TimeSurfing that I think you must maybe has passed across your radar I don't know but it's a it's a completely intuition based approach to time it's like I'm slightly exaggerating but it's basically throw away all lists throw away all plans and just just navigate by your intuition and choosing what to do and it's certainly the most sort of well-developed and credible version of that very radical approach that I've ever encountered.

And so it's on the other end of the continuum here. And so I guess why I'm bringing him up right now is that when I think about that second half of the day or whatever it is, I think there's something very useful about developing the muscle, metaphorically speaking, that permits you to not just be lost to that flow. Now, maybe there are workplace contexts where, you know, there's people yelling at you and you can't possibly develop that muscle. But to sort of be able to think, well, actually what I would like to do now is this thing, even while I can feel the pressures of this other thing.

I think in that there's something very useful being strengthened there. And it's actually, I guess I'm a bit more optimistic than you. that it can be relied upon. I love this idea, though, right? Because I think this is the number one fear people have, you know, I'm thinking about like my audience. If I say, if they hear your advice, kind of feel where your energy is.

They don't trust themselves. They said, my energy is always going to say, look at social media or whatever. But what you're saying is, no, no, no, that's trainable. And you have. And so like tell us about that. Like, give us confidence that with some practice, you can actually make good decisions.

I think this thing about trusting yourself is extraordinarily powerful. I'm so glad you brought it up. Yeah, and it comes up in all sorts of context. So, yeah, one of them is in planning the notion that the reason we have to sort of plan so vigorously is because we will just completely lose ourselves to dopamine hits or whatever if we aren't following a plan. It comes up in some sort of anxiety and worry about the future. And I quote Marcus Aurelius in this book, right? There's a famous line. and his meditations where he says, don't worry about the future,

because you'll meet it with the same psychological resources, basically, weapons, one translation, that you meet the present. In the moment, we trust ourselves a lot. We trust ourselves to implement all sorts of great productivity systems and make all sorts of plans. But it's all premised on the idea that the future version of ourselves will be this kind of totally vulnerable a person who's sway to everyone else's agendas.

And Marcus is saying, well, actually, like if you've got some agency over your life now, why not assume you're going to have agency over your life in the future as well? So when it comes to planning, yeah, we have this kind of strong sense that we know what we're doing now, but only on the basis that we won't know what we're doing,

that we won't be able to trust ourselves later on. And the ridiculous part about that, I don't know if I've ever quite managed to convey what I mean here, but is that even if you think of yourself as a person who's very plan-driven, you are in fact completely spontaneous, right? Because you're deciding in each new moment to carry on following your plan. So

every bit of evidence you've got that's brought you to where you are now is that you can trust yourself to navigate through life like that. And, you know, absolutely, the attention economy, social media, the world we live in is more of a threat and a challenge to that than anything before. But no, I think it is

completely trainable and that question I mentioned before about like what do you feel like doing is part of that, right? Because it's to do with trusting that the emotions and the whole world of your mind and psyche that are separate from your sort of rational thought right now might have some role to play, right? There might be something that can a little bit guide you instead of something you've got to constantly be trying to sort of eradicate and stamp out. So yeah, I think it gets a little bit woo maybe, but I think the sort of self-trust part of this is huge.

I believe that, right? Like I buy this. that I think, tell me if you think this is fair. I think part of the benefit we provide the sort of collective audience, you and I, like the collective audience who, who, you just care about, like, look, I feel overwhelmed, they care about my life, I want to be meaningful, I don't want to just be stressed out, all the issues that we deal with is we can present sort of two ends of a spectrum in which people find their way in the middle. So like in my situation, you know, I have these multiple roles. I'm an extreme. And so I have systems dialed in that makes it all manageable. My planning is complicated because it's really pretty intricate. I'm trying to make the writing

career dovetail with the academic career with this new media piece coming up over here. Like how does this all, it's complicated long-term plans? And so like in my world, I do planning at different timescales for simplicity. I say, look, I can't, in the moment, I'm not going to be able to keep straight the sort of complexity of how I'm trying to make these things work. So why don't I like put aside time when I think about the big picture and then at the weekly scale, I can sort of distill that down to like what matters about that for this week because a lot of the stuff doesn't. And then on the daily scale, I don't have to worry about that at all. Yeah.

But I also agree with you. I think most people, their plan's not so complicated. And the intuition, like they know, like this is what I'm trying to do and this is what's important to me. And maybe it's okay. It's like you represent for people, first of all, there's like a psychological validation reality of like what we struggle with

and how we think about it, trusting intuition more. And maybe a lot of people find this is why both of us are popular is not that most people maybe aren't, they're not taking on all my systems. I'm kind of an extreme. But maybe they have more than you're talking about.

But they need to encounter both of us that try to figure out what they're doing. Yeah, I think. This is like an Aristotelian approach to productivity. The golden mean is where virtue lies. I think there's a lot to that. Certainly, you know, my working life is less complex than yours in the sense of these kind of whole big, significantly separate domains.

On the other hand, I kind of feel like I almost want to say, that my working life, and maybe everybody's working life by definition, in a sense, is sort of maximally complex, right? It's like there are, I still feel very much like I'm navigating through, you know, 2,000 things that I could in principle do with the next moment. Definitely not sort of divided up in the way that I know your work is, but certainly like just a huge kind of pointless nightmare of things that I could spend the next. And it's the reality of writing is that the better you do at writing, the more people want to try to stop you from writing.

By giving you all these things, all these opportunities. That is absolutely true. Although I'm sure that something similar is there for almost any knowledge work, right? This sense that there's just an endlessly proliferating number of things that you could be keeping track of. So actually, I think a lot of what you say is right, but I also think that something about a somewhat more intuitive approach, a somewhat more self-trusting approach, actually fits very well with a situation of great complexity,

because it's almost as if you can't work this out using, there isn't some algorithm you can bring to any sort of to-do list that's bigger than your time, than the bandwidth you have. It's just going to be a question of, broadly speaking, feeling your way, and developing the self-trust to, to, to, focused entirely on the thing that you do decide to do, because at least, like, you know, do that thing and finish it

instead of being distracted by the knowledge that there are an infinite number of other things you could be doing. So is this a good summary? I want to hit someone like the big practical ideas from the book that resonated with me. So here's three I want to underscore. One, protect a few hours for deep work, essentially. Like, you do, make sure you have some time protected every day for working on what's important. So the kind of acknowledgement of like, okay, if you're not protecting time at all, you're never going to just sort of have a lot of free time.

So it's going to protect these like two to four hours. For working on something that's important, try to make progress on the things that matter. Use the term daily-ish, which I like. So that means like be regular, but don't beat yourself up. It's got to be every day. I like the way you talked about Seinfeld. And the Seinfeld don't break the chain,

which is very popular online. And he said, I just said that as a, equip, like to try to do things often. Like, it wasn't supposed to be a big productivity system. Again, self-trust, because it's like, have the willingness to see that you can bring discipline to your work without, in some way other than sort of being absolutely enslaved to a very, very specific, brittle system that you've got to follow every day, right? Right.

You take your comedy seriously. Right. You're going to work on it if you were sick on Sunday. Right. It doesn't really matter. And then the third idea I was going to put into this trio, You talked about be okay with your house being messy when guests come over, which I actually see as probably meant as a broader metaphor for the imperfectionism philosophy you talk about,

which is be okay with not everything has to be perfectly done. Like, yeah, I didn't get around to cleaning up the house before people came over, but it applies to work as well. Like, you know what, I didn't like polish this thing or I was going to go do. It's okay. It's okay. the goal is not everything has to be perfect. Right, and I think something that's important to say about that,

that's the chapter on so-called scruffy hospitality, right? Which is this great phrase that comes from an Anglican pastor from Tennessee called Jack King. And he's not just saying, and I'm not just saying, like, it's okay, permission to not be able to do everything perfectly. That's important because actually our fundamental nature as limited humans in this world is such that we're not going to be able to do things, perfectly. But it's also in that context, this really interesting relational side of it that this approach to literal hospitality to having people around for dinner is very often more connective, right? That actually when you sort of drop the facade of trying to do things perfectly, people feel more welcomed in to your home and they feel like they must be your real friends

because you're showing them the unvarnished version of you. And I think where that sort of generalises, I'm not suggesting that at a sort of white shoe New York City law firm you can just walk around the office in your pajamas all day. There are obviously limits to this. But there is this thing, and I find this in my writing all the time, that when you're willing to sort of confess a little bit more

to the kind of flaws and imperfections and insecurities that we all sort of navigate through the world with, people respond extraordinarily positively to that. Because they have the same. Right. And there's a kind of a, there's a, not just a sense of shared problems, but also a kind of an empowerment that comes from, like when I write an email newsletter that even mentions,

like, this is what I do when I'm feeling completely overwhelmed by to-does. I will get some responses that are like, I can't believe even you sometimes feel completely overwhelmed by to-dos. And I'm like, what part of calling everything the imperfectionist? Did you not understand? But, you know, there's something directly empowering and connecting and part of building a meaningful life for us all to just be a little bit more open with each other

about the fact that we're not sort of sailing through it in absolutely perfect confidence. So what do you think about the anxiety of workload ideas like David Allen's full capture, having a place to store a thing so it's not in your head? Because I could see you falling on either side of this. It's system-y, but also the idea of full capture comes out of, I don't want to be stressed about stuff all the time. It can be sort of freeing.

So where do these ideas of not keeping stuff in your head, how does that fall into how you think about productivity? This is an interesting one, because this is definitely one area where I'm sort of less intuitive in the sort of Paul Lumen's sense that I mentioned and more systems-e. And I don't know what you think about this. You may well have spoken about it,

but I think there's a really important and interesting distinction to be made between tasks, management and time management. And I think there's quite a strong argument that sort of very intuitive and flexible and forgiving approach to managing your time is actually aided by having a really quite rigorous and clear system of where you're recording things. And I think that, you know, yeah, that full capture part of David Allen, to this day, it's my immediate response to feeling like I'm overwhelmed and need to get clarity is to

literally get like, you know, an enormous stack of index cards and write down on one per card every single thing until I've got a big pile and then think, okay, I'm not, the difference now is that I don't mistakenly think now if I just do one after the other, I will get to zero. I'm just like, there it is. And that enables me not to be taking on this, yeah, this role that the brain is not so, is not so great at. So, you know, I'm not sort of a, I don't tend to sort of hugely structure those lists. I've written elsewhere, I think, you know, having a sort of endlessly huge master list and then feeding things from that onto a very limited thing. That's just the sort of Canban has aspects of that idea in it, right? Limiting your work in progress,

anything that does that incredibly powerful. But it starts with being willing to be, yeah, completely comprehensive. Because otherwise, I think what you end up doing is not writing things down or not recording things because were you to do so, you'd frighten yourself by how many things there are. And actually, part of owning your limitations is to say, yeah, I exist in a world that has a 400 item list of things that are in some sense on my plate. Okay, and I'm going to be doing about four today.

I mean, we used a phrase on the podcast, facing the productivity dragon. Right, exactly. I've heard you use that, and that's exactly the phrase, yeah. Okay, so a place where it seems like we definitely agree, and this might differentiate us from some of the other writers on the topic, it sounds like we both agree a life with no thought about productivity, that's not better either.

If it's just productivity is a construct of false consciousness or whatever, and I'm not going to have to-do list. I'm not going to think about what I am and am not going to do with structuring my time, or having no thinking about organization, it seems like, and you could correct me if I'm wrong, we both sort of agree, well, that's going to be a stressful existence as well. It's the, it's the horseshoe theory. No productivity can bring you right back around to too much productivity. It gets you to a stressful existence just via different means.

Yeah, absolutely. And the sort of the part of you, the frontal cortex part that is planning and taking an overview, that's a part of you too, right? There's a place you can go, not so much in the sort of radical work critique stuff, but more in the spiritual literature. that I've spent an awful lot of time in as well, there's a place you can go that sort of takes you to the idea that there's something wrong about thinking and strategizing and tactics

and it's sort of, it's to be switched off, if at all possible. And then you get into the places where people use that phrase, like, don't forget we're human beings, not human doings, and I get very annoyed and want to sort of grab them by, hells and say no, doing stuff is the point here on some level, right? Doing the right stuff,

absolutely. Not just doing the biggest quantity of items, totally, but there is some sense in which the point of being alive, just to zoom out to the biggest picture possible, is to bring things into reality, to create stuff. Yeah, people like doing things. Right. And maybe that's not what we traditionally think of as productive tasks. Maybe it's to do with building a family or strengthening the bonds of a community, all sorts of things it could be. But it's still creative in the broadest sense. And I don't think that that requires or even benefits from trying to sort of switch off the part of your brain that can make plans and strategies and organizational systems for that.

So we can summarize the goal here as you want to do things that are important without being chronically stressed out by the things you have to do. Yeah, I love that. Yeah. Okay. All right. So I think we've made some progress here. I mean, it sounds like, okay, we agree.

a life with no thinking about tasks and organization time management, that's very stressful. It'll alienate you from your nature. We agree task management's important because if you have stuff just in your head, it's stressful and you can't relax, you can't do anything.

You've got to have things written down somewhere. Where we differ is actually pretty minor, I think, which is the degree of systemization needed to deal with the question of managing your time. Once you have that down, your advice falls short of systems. I tend to talk about things in terms of systems. That's pretty similar water, I would say.

And then we kind of have the same goal of we're both, I think we both have a real aversion to anxiety and stress. I have a huge aversion to, I have too much to do. I'm overwhelmed. My day is packed. I really dislike that. I think we have that aversion. So we're sort of on the,

same page and where we're differing is just to the degree of structuring in time management. I think there's a lot to that point. And, you know, it's always a little bit dissatisfying to bring kind of sort of personality type based arguments into things. I don't like those things generally. And I think I've heard you, I suspect that you also don't like that kind of form of argument. But I do think that it's relevant and important to what I'm doing that. That that when I say I'm not so into systems, I'm doing that from the point of view of someone who has sort of gone so far in the direction of systems,

but I'm sort of providing an antidote to myself and to people who think like me in this way and are this particular kind of recovering productivity geek or whatever the phrase I've used sometimes is. So it's definitely sort of a, it definitely has that sort of antidote. feeling to it. It's like

this is the way to think if your tendency through your upbringing or whatever else is to swing so far in the other direction. So I'm super curious as to,

in your aversion to being overwhelmed, for example, is that because you've been through large phases of being very miserable through being overwhelmed? Or are you actually coming from a significantly different personality

than me who is in no danger of kind of massively overinvesting in attempts to control your life. It's actually, it's more psychological with me. In graduate school, I develop an insomnia that could be severe but random. And it gave me this anxiety of if I try to do too much. So if my days are filled with like these things have to get done, what would happen if I don't sleep?

I wouldn't be able to actually do that. work. From that like a quirk of braid wiring got me the way I started thinking about work is, okay, I need work to be something where tomorrow doesn't matter, but next month does. In other words, like no particular day is critical, but it's critical that over the next month I make progress on the book. So it's like Sunday's not important, but February is. That's the way I began to think about work. And it was just happenstance. I think if I hadn't had the insomnia, I probably would have fell into the let's rock and roll. Let me fill, let me fill every minute of the day. Let me crush it because I'm a capable person. I have high energy. I'm a smart guy. I probably would have pushed a lot

more into it and I probably would have been, I don't know, a more successful professor or something like this or had businesses or something. So it's a quirk. Like a lot of my approach to time management, which is anxiety and stress reducing based is I don't trust myself to be able to get after it. every day. So how do I design a whole life where that's not necessary? Right. That makes perfect sense. Yeah, I love that. Yeah. Yeah. Well, anyways, I could talk, we could kick out about this forever,

but I know you're on a book tour, you have a schedule. Oliver, my audience loves you. They love your stuff. They're always talking about it. We talk about a lot on the show. So I know they're excited, they're excited for this one. And I'm excited that you're here by the new book.

If you like, if you like what we talked about on the show, you are going to absolutely love Meditations for Mortals. And if you haven't read 4,000 weeks, you should read that too. You don't have to, but you should read both of those as well. Oliver, a real pleasure. Thanks for joining the podcast. Thank you.

I'm so glad we got to do it. All right. So that was my conversation with Oliver. I hope you liked it. We have some more in-depth interviews lined up in the spirit of Oliver Berkman's philosophy. I'll release them as I have time. I'm not trying to put too much pressure on myself. I'm just using my intuition as he would say

to figure out when there's an idea I like and to release them as I am able. Again, you've got to check out Oliver's book. His new book is called Meditations for Mortals and is fantastic. His previous book, 4,000 Weeks, is a must read if you haven't read that as well. We'll be back on Monday with another normal episode of the show

and we'll be back with In-depth, probably in the next three or four weeks or so. And until then, as always, stay deep.