Factually! with Adam Conover - Death to Productivity with Oliver Burkeman

Episode Date: February 8, 2023

All of us have too much to do and too little time to do it in. Yet the more we try to increase our productivity, the less happy and productive we seem to be. Why, and what’s the solution? This week Oliver Burkeman, author of Four Thousand Weeks, Time Management for Mortals, joins Adam to discuss how to break the cycle of productivity shame with his radical new approach to looking at time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the truth. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's alright. Yeah, that's okay. I don't know anything. Hello and welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me once again as I talk to an incredible expert from around the world of human knowledge. Now, I want to start by thanking everybody who supports the show on Patreon. If you want to join them, head to patreon.com slash adamconover. For just five bucks a month, you get every episode

of this podcast ad-free. You can join our community Discord. We even do a live community book club over Zoom where we read a nonfiction book together and discuss it. It's so much fun. Hope to see you there. Patreon.com slash Adam Conover. And just a reminder, I am on tour once again this year. If you live in Austin, Texas, come see me at the Cap City Comedy Club

from March 23rd through March 25th. And I'm gonna have a lot more tour dates up soon, just finalizing them with my agent. But don't worry, I'm going to a bunch of cities that I didn't get to go to last year, and I'm so excited to see all of you and to have you all see my brand new hour of stand-up. Now, let's talk about this week's episode. You know, you might be able to tell from the intro that I'm a pretty busy guy. I'm very ambitious. There's a whole lot that I want to do in life. But you know, like many of you, I struggle to get as much done as I want to. I feel like I am constantly behind and I feel like it's my fault. I have this sense that if I could just buckle down

and work harder, I could transform my life. I could get more done and that that would make me happier. And so what do I do? I push myself, like I'm sure a lot of you push yourselves. You know, every single moment I'm like, how could I be using my time more productively? I got to-do lists, I got calendars, I'm reading productivity books, I live life in a non-stop 1980s style training montage, except that instead of learning to box, I'm doing informational comedy. But recently, I've found that this approach has been, let's just say, somewhat unproductive. Here's a recent example. I started making YouTube videos, which I'm really excited about.

If you haven't seen them yet, head to my YouTube channel and check them out. I made a couple, and they were immediately enormously successful. People loved them and said, we want to see more. And also, I got a whole bunch of subscribers right away. I was like, oh my God, I got to do more of these. So at the beginning of this year, I said, you know what? I'm going to take it seriously. I'm going to put myself on a schedule. I'm going to create deadlines by which I need to have a new video script done. I'm going to schedule my shoot date weeks in advance so that I have a deadline that I have to hit. I'm going to hold myself accountable and increase my output. Now, if any of you are productivity nerds, you probably

know that exact approach and you're probably familiar with what came next, which is that I turned my life into a total nightmare. As the deadlines approached and, you know, the scripts weren't quite done yet, I found myself having to spend entire days crouched over my laptop, laboring over the pages. At least that's when I could get myself to the laptop because the rest of the time I was avoiding the work because it felt so terrible to be working while so far behind the deadlines I had set for myself. So I'd spend most of my time wallowing in guilt,

feeling like I should be writing, wondering why can't I get the work done, and then finally have to scramble and get as much done as I could in the last few hours of the day. And, you know, eventually had to push a couple of those shoot days because the fact was the material just wasn't done in time. And let me be clear about something. Writing is supposed to be the fun part of my job. This is the stuff that I got into comedy in the first place to do, presumably because I like writing funny things and then filming them and showing them to you. This work wasn't assigned to me by some TV network or some

boss somewhere. This was self-directed work that I wanted to do. So why was I having so much trouble doing it? Maybe some of you relate to this. Even if you don't, I hope you can empathize. And part of the problem is that writing is only one kind of work that I have to do right now. Because even though I'm a comedian, even though I got into this career so that my job could be fun, I still have to spend most of my day replying to emails. I wake up in the morning and I'm already in email debt. There's already emails flowing in and I got to start bailing the boat out right away. Get those emails out so I can

clear the decks so I can finally get to the writing that I actually want to do. The result of this horrible cycle is that I started to feel like no matter how much I completed, how much I accomplished in a given day, there was always more that I should be doing. Like, yeah, sure, I started working today at 9 a.m. and it's now 7. But no, I can't relax and play a video game because there's more emails to reply to. There's more writing projects I should be doing. I gotta be making a TikTok to get my numbers even higher so I can reach a larger audience, so I can get people to come to my stand-up shows. Oh, by the way, I haven't written any new stand-up in weeks.

Oh, fuck, I need to book some shows so I can practice. And, oh, God, it's just never-ending. And, you know, what I had to start facing is that after 15 years of trying to make myself as organized and productive as possible, I had to face the fact that my life had just become this never-ending cycle of procrastination and guilt and that maybe, just maybe, this was the wrong way to live. Maybe I'm not the problem. Maybe I'm just holding

myself to a standard that is unrealistic and destructive to my actual life. And you know what? I'm not the only one who's been trapped by this sense of life as a never-ending to-do list that follows you all the way to your grave. The feelings that I've been having I think are pervasive in our society. Our obsession with getting as much done as possible, with using every second of our lives as productively as we can. Well, it seems to just be making everyone miserable. Well, it seems to just be making everyone miserable. And in this dark moment, right at the bottom of this bit, I found the perfect book to help me deal with and reframe my relationship to work, time, and productivity

in a way that has immediately helped me and made my life feel much more healthier and frankly, more productive to boot. And we have the author of that book on today. His name is Oliver Berkman. He's a journalist and the author of 4,000 Weeks Time Management for Mortals. And I really cannot emphasize enough how much this book helped me escape from some really destructive patterns of thinking. I was so thrilled to be able to have him on the show. It's one of the unique privileges of doing

this show that I get to read a book and then talk to the author afterwards. So I hope you loved this conversation as much as I did. Let's please quickly get to the interview and not waste any more of our precious time. Let's get to this interview with Oliver Berkman. Oliver, thank you so much for coming on the show today. It's my pleasure. Thanks for inviting me. Let's get to this interview with Oliver Berkman. before you catch your flight that tell you how to get more done in less time. It, it sort of, even the cover has a little bit of that look, you know, sort of reminds me of the power of habit or one of those books. Uh, when I read it, I was like, Oh, this is an anti productivity book in many ways that, that you're almost arguing against the entire genre. Uh, do you feel that's, that's apt? How do you think of it? Yeah, I think so. I think there's probably a bit of a bait and switch, you know, and, and it's, and it's, um and it's partly because that was my journey, right? It's partly because I have geeked out on all those productivity books to the max and kind of discovered that they don't lead where I wanted them to lead. So I guess this is what happened on the other side of that. But yeah, yeah, I'll take anti-productivity book. I'll take anti-productivity book.

Well, what is the, I have so much I want to ask you about, but just to catch everybody up, what do you feel is the thesis of the book? What is meant by 4,000 weeks? Well, 4,000 weeks is very approximately the average lifespan today in the West. It's, I definitely rounded it down a little bit to get to the headline grabbing number.

But I guess what I'm trying to get at, in all sorts of different ways, going to more detail, but is just this idea that we do not take anywhere near enough account of what it means to be that finite. Not just in terms of thinking about the inevitability of death and all that morbid stuff, but just what it means to have such a limited amount of time to use in comparison to all the things that feel like we ought to do them, or they could be good uses of that time. And I think that just to put it briefly, I think a lot of what conventional productivity does, productivity advice does, is that it sort of perpetuates that illusion that one day you might make yourself so super optimized and efficient that you basically would be able to do everything that matters. And I sort of want to say that time's never coming, but it's kind of good news for various reasons that that time is never coming. I mean, it's a harsh realization because you have this belief when you're trying to organize your time.

I'm going to use a to-do list app. I'm going to do a new calendar system. I'm going to start time blocking. Like I've gone down this rabbit hole myself in my sort of quest to accomplish the things that I want to accomplish or that are asked of me. And, you know, since I want to accomplish the things that are asked of me, it's sort of all in the same bucket. There's this, you know, hope that you have that, well, I'm a little bit disorganized right now. It was a little bit of a struggle today, but I want to be better and it'll be easier tomorrow if I just figure this out. And

surely there are other people out there who have figured it out, whose workday is go by in a happy blur. And then they finished at 6 PM and they go play with their kids or they make a nice dinner and they just play video games the rest of the night or whatever it is. Um, like I, it's hard to let go of that. Uh, and you're telling me it's, it's actually never going to happen. Right. And I think it's not, uh, it's not that an individual technique is a, is an intrinsically bad thing, time blocking, or the Pomodoro technique, I'm sure some, some people are going to be aware of, you know, it's, it's the agenda that we bring to them, right? It's this idea that this is going to

save you, this is going to enable you to kind of win the struggle with time, the struggle against time, once and for all. And I guess I want to say that actually we have to sort of admit defeat in the struggle against time if we're going to get somewhere interesting and productive and meaningful rather than constantly be fighting it and thinking that victory might be coming, yeah, next week, next month, next year. It's a very counterintuitive idea, but look, okay, I just want to bring this to myself. I, when I read your book and I kept having that feeling of I'm in this book and I don't like it, you know, I have almost every chapter was like a tonic for what I do. Okay. So like literally I was, my girlfriend was

reading the book and she never reads books like this. So she was a little bit like, like, what is this format of book? But she's like, I think you should read it, you know? And as soon as I started reading it, like, okay, the, you have a, I had found myself saying to her over the past few weeks, I've been trying to get writing projects done, you know, over the last month, like really, really hard. There's, there's a bunch of writing I really, really want to do. And it's self-directed writing. I'm not on a deadline, except for a deadline that I set myself. But I also have all this other administrative work I have to do. I'm a leader in my union now. I have all these emails to reply to. I've got other stuff going on, et cetera.

And so I said to my girlfriend, oh, I feel like I never got to start writing. I spent all day clearing the decks so I could start writing. And then I started reading your book and literally, I don't know, page 20, the header is stop clearing the decks. And I was like, this is the phrase that I use. How was this in the book already? But this feeling of, you know, I've been, I have found myself really overwhelmed by this feeling over the past couple of years of there's always something I should be doing. No matter how much I get done, there's always something else that if I could do it, my life would be better. I would be more successful professionally. I would be more able to achieve my recreational goals. I could plan that vacation, et cetera, et cetera.

And so I've found myself sometimes at the end of a long day, just unable to relax because I can't figure out what is the most optimal use of my time in order to achieve one of these goals, even playing video games, which is like a, uh, you know, has always been one of the ways I've relaxed my entire life. I've been like, I can't decide which game to play because do I want to finish one of the games that like was on everybody's game of the year list that I should experience. So I've kept up with the genre or should I play this other thing that I'm more interested, whatever. I find myself paralyzed by this decision. And I basically found myself enveloped in the mindset that you're trying to counteract in the book. So it was a very uncanny experience for me to read. That's, um, I think that's good to hear, even though you're saying it

triggered some kind of minor crisis or something. I think it's... No, the crisis is already happening. I think it's just a really ubiquitous state that we find ourselves in. We're confronting these sort of infinite or effectively infinite supplies of things to do, demands on our time, but also just ambitions for our lives, fun experiences to have. These kind of infinite supply chains, streams are not limited to kind of boring tasks and and and burdensome chores it applies to all the all the other stuff as well all the fun stuff yeah right absolutely i was i'm i i am uh i have to sort of out myself as knowing almost nothing about any any video games that exist in the world but I've been struck to learn that people consider themselves to have like backlogs of games to play in exactly the same way that I have a huge backlog of emails to answer. Or books to read. It's very similar to, oh, I want to read that and I heard about it and

it's going to be so good, but I need to finish this other book first. And then when you get, when you finally finish the book or the video game that you're playing and you're like, time to move on to the next one, you're like, I should work on this backlog. But then you feel guilt towards it because maybe you're not actually inspired to play it or read the book in that moment. And you're just getting through it. Yeah. And then you're and then suddenly it's become this thing that you liked has become this onerous to do list that you feel that you will never get through. owner-esque to-do list that you feel that you will never get through. Right. And I think the problem or the cause of our suffering there is not that there are these infinite supplies, but that we think there ought to be a way to get our finite arms around

the infinite supply. So one of the ways that I talk about it sometimes, I think resonates with people is like, the really liberating truth is that it's worse than you think, right? Because you think that the problem is, it's really hard to stay on top of your email, to stay on top of your to read pile, or whatever it is. In fact, it's worse than really hard, it's completely impossible. And in that shift from this is really hard to this is completely impossible. There's kind of a liberation right because you don't have to try to do that anymore you can focus on you can actually let yourself enjoy a book or a video game or let yourself really make progress on a work project more when when you've sort of given up this hope that it's all part of some process where you get to some eventual plateau of perfect optimization and

peace of mind. But like, again, it's very, it's very counterintuitive. Like when you write a book called 4,000 weeks, I would expect the book to be, you only have 4,000 weeks. So you got to get a lot of shit done. You know, what are you going to do with your 4,000 weeks? Motherfucker. Like you better buckle down because you got, Oh, how old are you? Oh, you only got 3,000 weeks to go. Wow, you're fucked, dude. Work hard, you know? And it's in fact the opposite of that, that the notion,

I find the title so interesting because the finitude, the radical finitude in the title is actually to you the liberating thing. So just keep expanding on this point for me. Yeah, sure. I think that's, I'm really glad you noticed that because I do think that like, when we, we decided on this title, there was a bit of me that was thinking, is this going to startle people so much that they kind of run away from that part of the bookstore or from that page on Amazon, don't buy the book. And that may have happened. But luckily, it has also not happened in enough cases. There is this kind of, there is this response to the idea of human finitude, which is,

as you say, you know, well, that means I've got to do something absolutely extraordinary with every minute to like really wring the meaning out of it. And I've got, you know, nothing against people spending their lives doing extraordinary things. But I think that to take that lesson from the shortness of human life is actually sort of only to go halfway, right? Because you're still thinking, okay, maybe I can't live forever, maybe I can't do all the things, but I can become so such a sort of optimization efficiency machine that I can do more of them than pretty much anybody else and that's going to somehow be a bit like living forever being a bit like winning the the struggle against time and there's this idea it crops up in all sorts of traditions but like zen buddhism is a place where you get it a lot that sort of says, no, the problem here is thinking that there ought to be a solution to this situation. The problem is, is like the idea that

this disease can be cured. And if you can sort of let go of that even a little bit and see that there are always going to be too many things to do, you're going to die with a really long to-do list. There's always going to be a million more things that that matter that than you get a chance to do yeah again you can say well okay then the pressure to kind of cram stuff in and do the thousand and one things you must do before you die whatever um is is relieved and you can you can sort of drop into the actual, like where you are and the things you you're doing now and here. And, uh, yeah, I guess that's, that's the point. So yeah, I'm, I'm glad that you, you see that like, there's, there's a potential response to that idea,

which is kind of like stressful and it's not the one I'm going for here. Yeah. I mean, when I think about the times that I enjoy, say, you know, reading the most, you talk about the book a lot in the book, quite a bit about how reading is this activity we're constantly drawn away from by all the things we should do. And, uh, you know, we're constantly worried about optimizing it. The times that I feel best about it are during the holidays every year during that sort of like happy period from like December 21st through January 2nd at midnight, when this is the one time a year where I'm like, you know what, I don't have to do shit.

This is my time. You know, especially I go visit my parents at my parents' house. You know, they just put on some, you know, the classical Christmas music. We're just like making cookies and stuff. We're not, there's no goal-oriented behavior. It's just sitting around, you know? And I'm like, oh, now I've got all the time in the world today. You know, I'm just like, oh, I just got to fill the

days. I can just read whatever shitty sci-fi novel I feel like reading, you know? And that gives me a feeling of relief. It sometimes feels like the only time during the year that I can do that. And I think it's because I sort of have that sense of the time is limited, but it's, it's unbounded. I'm not like putting all of this pressure on myself to, uh, to get things done. Whereas when I'm, you know, when I start being goal oriented about it, and I'm like every day, I'm going to read one hour and I'm going to finish 50 books this year, you know, like that kind of thing is like much harder to get any reading done. Um, the problem is that the second version of it is sort of what I have to do for work. You know what I mean? Like

I'm, I do live in a capitalist society where I need to keep producing things. You know, I need to keep producing writing and comedy things that I enjoy in order to make a living. And I have to sort of do it on a timetable often. Um,'s a lot of conflict there. Yeah, totally. And I think it's really interesting that what you point out there about that period around the holidays, that's like a last vestige in some ways of a social rhythm that acts as a buffer to the idea that we've just got to do more, more, more, more, more. and one of the ones that has obviously sort of vanished uh it did coexist with capitalism but it's pretty much vanished now is the idea that of a sabbath right the idea that one day a week a sunday or saturday you you down tools um not because you've finished everything but just because like

there's this that social reinforcement of um like today people won't be won't be working and i quote um in the book the writer judith shulovitz pointing out that like from outside say um uh orthodox judaism it seems really weird the number of rules that uh that exist about the things that you can't do on the Sabbath until you start to think about your sort of one starts to think about one secular life in which, you know, it's so hard to put down social media or to step away from the idea that things need to be done. And actually like, if there was some social, uh, reinforcement on me that there was like almost nothing I could do,

including like, you know, maybe turning on light switches or something, that might be what it takes for us to be able to do that. So, you know, I know people today try to do these sort of individual things where you have like a digital Sabbath or you take one day a week to do this or that. It's great, but it's that social reinforcement that we've sort of in many ways lost in a sort of liquid world where basically, you know, you're going to, you could be dealing with email at half past 11 at night if you, if you want it to be. And as a result, there's a pressure to be.

Yeah. I mean, one of the most beautiful parts of the book, and the book contains so many sections that really surprised me that they were in the book at all, that were really beautiful ideas. You talk a lot about social life and social obligations to each other. And we often have this view that our social obligations to each other are constraining, that they prevent you from doing what you would want to do, that they hold you back. And I'm sure a lot of people feel that way

about their families or other social obligations that they have. There are many ways in which they are actually constraining. But you write about how important it is to be in sync with other people. Just tell me about that a little bit. Yeah, I mean, I think one way to talk about this is that the nature of the good thing that time is, is not what economists, I think, usually call a budget good. It's not something where, like, you just want to have as much time at your disposal as you can. We think that that is the way we want to be. And we talk that way when it comes to sort of dreaming about early retirement or becoming a, you know, just running the show for yourself, whatever it would be. Actually, the benefits in many cases come from your time being coordinated

with other people, because almost anything that's worth doing in some sense is going to require other people to have their time synchronized with yours. So that's something that you get in traditional societies that are governed by fairly strict rhythms. There are definitely downsides to those rhythms. They are constraining. They can be constraining. But they also mean that, like, you know, the sort of recreational event is going to happen on a Sunday because that's the day when everyone's time is going to be coordinated. It's a real sort of...

That's when we all do it. You don't get to choose. You go to church. That's when we all go to church. And then we all go to Sunday dinner and you show up. And that's a constraint. It's like, oh God, I don't want to go this week. But also it is a time that you must...

You can't do any work. Then the boss calls you in and says, Hey, you got to come into work on Sunday. No, I go to church on Sunday. Right. Right. It's like there is a benefit to that. Yeah, exactly. And I think it's a sort of a, it's a ubiquitous experience in modern life, even for people who, for people have pretty fluid schedules and quite a lot of autonomy over their time like i certainly do and i'm guessing that you do um to still not actually be able to coordinate like drinks with a couple of friends who you really like to spend time with because because everybody is out of sync everybody is following their own schedule plenty of people of course in the world don't have a spare minute they're working two jobs just to keep a roof over their heads. But even the people who don't have that problem still can't

meet up to go for a beer. Because even if you have time, it's just going to be the wrong bit of time. So it's a kind of a, it's a sort of a dicey argument, because obviously, at some point, It's a sort of a dicey argument, because obviously, at some point on that spectrum from total individual autonomy over time to total socially controlled time, you know, you pass from 21st century America into like North Korea or something. And you can go far too far in that direction. But I don't think we're in any danger of that. I think the thing that we need a little bit more of in almost all cases is some kind of socially regulated time. And in a small way, families will do that for you, right? I mean, I became a father for just six years ago, and it's been such a kind of wild learning experience to go through that process of like, well, I wanted to do this other thing now, but I can can't and then to realize that

actually there's something incredibly valuable in in being part of a a set of rhythms in that way something really really special and i wouldn't have it any other way most of the time within your family there's a rhythm that is happening that you can't opt out of where, and you know, I, my, my sister just had a, had a baby. So I've seen firsthand the rhythm of having a newborn, you know, every 45 minutes you got to do something. And like, it's on a, it's on a clock and that's sort of a rhythm that you live by that includes other people. And that precludes you from doing some things,

but it gives you a rich experience with the other people and that precludes you from doing some things, but it gives you a rich experience with the other people. And it also, I don't know, there's a degree to which it stops you from driving yourself insane, perhaps to a degree. I've worked with some people who, you know, I've had coworkers who have a kid and then you start, they start to go like, Hey, sorry, I got to go home. Like I got a kid at home. Sorry. I know you all want to keep meeting late past like six, but I got to go.

Right. Because I got this other thing that's more important and that's a nice thing in a way. Right. Yeah, absolutely. I think it provides something to navigate life by other than, you know know the mad quest to get to the end of all the things that there are to do and and uh that's not going to be that's not going to be happening that they're getting getting all the things done it's uh it's it's good and refreshing and sort of uplifting to have an alternative i think the other thing that i thought sort of

applies in a sort of obvious way with small children, but it doesn't only apply to parents and children, is how many of our attempts to sort of manage our time ourselves, things like time boxing and sort of fancy scheduling tricks and all that stuff, create this situation where like they almost create unwanted interruptions because they create the situation where like if something spontaneous happens in your day, if your kid runs into the room to tell you something exciting or if just like a friend phones you right anything like this that that becomes a problem if it violates your your schedule yeah for your day which and it just wouldn't be a problem otherwise it would be a welcome thing so it's that kind of balance between structure and not letting the structure kind of dictate everything that is like so hard to strike. And

yeah, especially for people like me, historically, anyway, who sort of really want to feel like we're in control of our days. It's, it can quickly make the day much worse than if you can go a bit easier. Yeah, I mean, so look, I'll give you an example of this from my own life that, so I've been trying to write, you know, I made some YouTube videos last year. They were successful. I want to make more YouTube videos, right? I'm like, I want to pick up the pace. I want to make the more, I want to release them more often than trying to figure out how to do that. So my first theory was I'll put myself on a deadline. You know, I'll say we're going to shoot it on this day. So I have to have the script done by that day.

And in fact, I want to have two scripts done that day because I want to shoot two on one day. So I started trying to write to deadline going like, OK, I got three days. I got to I got to revise the script. Oh, fuck. You know, and what I found was I honestly could not do it. And I kept having to push. I was like, OK, I'll just have one script done by Tuesday. Actually, can we push the shoot date a couple of days? It's not going to be ready,

you know? And it ended up with me having like, you know, a solid week of misery trying to do this, you know? And especially I would, you know, wake up and say, all right, at 10 AM, I'm going to start writing. It's got to be done by the end of the day. And I've got like 12 hours I can use to finish this. But I've got to like grind on it all day long, you know, and I would find out I'd end up avoiding it. And I'd, you know, I'd have all these, you know, hours of distraction and I'd have self-loathing, et cetera, et cetera. So reading your book, the tactic that I decided is, I was like, this isn't working. The tactic I'll switch to as I'm reading your book. I actually came up with this even before I got to the chapter where you propose it,

was I said, you know what, instead I'm going to just assign myself a certain amount of writing time every day. I'll say I'm going to write for two hours in the morning and get as much as I can done. And then when it's done, then I'll shoot the video, right? So I'm not putting myself on this strict deadline. I'm trying to have more of a rhythm. And then, so I've only been doing that for less than a week and I haven't gotten much done yet, but it's fine. I'm happier and that's good enough for me right now. But what happened literally just yesterday was, I was like, okay, I'm going to get started 10 a.m.

I'm going to start writing. About halfway in, my girlfriend, who I live with, started, like, she was not feeling well. And she said, hey, I think I need to go to urgent care because I'm having some pain. I just want to find out what... She's fine. But she needed to go to urgent care. And I said, okay, well, I'll go with you.

Because if I had been on the deadline, if I had been like, I need to get this done by the end of the day, and I only have this many hours to do it, that would have been so painful to have that interruption to say, oh, I need to go to the urgent care instead of staying here and working. But because I was like, hey, this is just what I scheduled to do for these two hours. I can do it later in the day. I can maybe I can write in the waiting room. I'm not whatever. I'm just trying to make some progress today. It's not so do or die. I was able to go and just sit in the waiting room with her, which was important to me to be able to do. I didn't, she drove, I didn't even have anything to do. I just wanted to sit there, you know,

and be present for the experience. And so I don't know. I experienced that very directly where being able to being able to stand the interruption ended up being very important to me. Yeah, no, I can totally resonate with that. I think, you know, there's so much that can go wrong in that attempt to sort of impose structures on yourself too rigidly because, yeah, firstly, yeah, it turns things you want to do into some kind of problem. Secondly, I mean, you end up sort of really resenting the person who made you follow these rules, even when that person is yourself, right? You get into this kind of like conflict with the internal taskmaster.

And yeah, right. I mean, it's like you've lost, if you were to have refused to, I mean, it doesn't sound like it was a, I'm not clear what level of an emergency it was. But, but it does sound like more generally speaking, when it comes to sort of the people we love needing us right now. Yeah, you've made a mistake in life somehow, if you've built a whole structure for like living well, that then means that you can't actually break off to do things like that. And there's a limit because there are people in situations where their families are always making endless demands on them, and they need to be able to put up boundaries against that. So it's definitely sort of needs to be a fluid situation. But like this idea that we are going to get on top of time and then be the dictator and make it go how we want is going to be constantly create extra suffering by,

because that's just not how reality unfolds. And our control over how events unfold is, is much smaller than that implies. Yeah. Okay. We got to take a really quick break. And by the way, I'm starting to make this like a therapy session for myself, but I'm going to keep doing it after we get back. Uh, I got to talk more talk more about my experience and how this book relates to it and ask more questions about it. We'll be right back with more Oliver Berkman. Okay, we're back with Oliver Berkman. So again, I'm sorry to make you my therapist.

I just want to tell you a little bit about my own work life again and how this relates to me and, and see if you, uh, have any insight into it, which is that, you know, I was, I was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder from a young age. Um, and I always like struggled with getting the work I needed to done. I took medication for a long time. I eventually decided it didn't help me do the creative work that I wanted to do. Um, and I've honestly been able to accomplish a lot despite the,

you know, the, the disability or whatever you want to call it. Um, uh, you know, without, without the aid of medication, but I've realized recently that I've been doing it just by sort of pushing myself as hard as I can at every moment, just cracking the whip, mentally standing over my own shoulder going like, you didn't fucking do enough today. Like buckle down, do the writing, you know, this is your chance. You got to do it you know go out there and you know uh when i was trying to do stand-up i was like you're gonna do you know uh you're gonna do at least seven sets a week and you're gonna go out you know i had a big calendar on the wall and i made x's on the calendar and all this sort of thing you know yeah in order to make myself

get the shit done and i was proud of that for a long time because like well i actually did get a lot done you know i i've i've accomplished a lot in my life that i'm proud of um and i did it through that means but now i feel that i often can't escape myself you know that i that i'm uh i'm just my my that sense is always over my shoulder yelling at myself and and it prevents me from ever relaxing in a way that I used to when I didn't put so much pressure on myself. And so I'm of two minds about like how valuable that was to do, because I'm like, well, well, you know, I created two television shows and I'm a touring standup comedian. I've, I've accomplished every sort of professional goal I ever had for myself or even

life goal that I had for myself when I was, you know, 20 years ago. But I often feel that I've made myself miserable in order to do it. And maybe that's maybe that's a midlife crisis. I don't know. But I felt that that was that I had all those thoughts while I was reading your book. Yeah, no, it's fascinating. And I think there is something sort of midlife-y about this stuff, not in a sort of specific age sense, but in the sense that carl jung meant that sort of idea about the second half of life that there comes a point

no matter what you know your early 30s or your late 60s i think it could probably be but where and anywhere in between where methods of relating to your time that have served you pretty well start to be revealed as not like the whole story. And I don't think that requires us to like throw, like, say that that was a terrible mistake, or that you should have done something radically different in those times. But you get the situation where like, if you're going to instrumentalize your time to that degree, if you're going to focus relentlessly on using it really well to get places and to create things and to complete projects if you if you invest in that you have to invest in that somewhat to do anything decent

but if you invest in it too much completely like you're effectively postponing any kind of real value in life or joy at being alive or whatever into the future into the future into the future and i just think at some point one has to like reinsert um into uh the um you have to reinsert into your use of time some focus on things that you do because they are fulfilling or fun or enjoyable like right now and that can be work right it's not that you're not allowed to enjoy the craft of the thing you do but if there's nothing there except where you're headed then clearly at a certain point in life you begin to realize that this you can't keep this up forever because at some point the end is going to come and that's going to make postponing the meaning

into the future is going to get more and more absurd. You can believe that when you're 20, far more reliably than you can when you're 40, because like the, the distant view things start to come into view. Yeah. Well, you're sort of, this is a theme in your book that, that comes up time. And again, that I found so fascinating. I really related to the idea of not of the purpose of an activity, not being what it brings you in the future but maybe you could find purpose and meaning in it today uh and i find that so interesting because we're often presented with that as sort of the essence of maturity is being able to do something difficult because it's going to pay off in the future not because it's enjoyable right now oh it's fun to play video games right now but if you didn't play the video games

and instead you did something distasteful and difficult, then in the future, things will be better for you. And a lot of times that's how I live my life. I'm like, oh my God, I've got yet, shooting my television show was a succession of 60, 12 to 14 hour shoot days. Every single day, I'd shoot for 16 hours. And it's misery to shoot that long.

There's moments of joy in it, but it is grueling. It's running a marathon every single day. And I remember just, I'm gonna get up and I'm gonna do it because it's gonna pay off later. But it's true when that becomes the only reason you do anything is because you think it's going to pay off later. you can no longer enjoy your life in the moment at all and i've started to appreciate how infected my life has become by that point of view like a couple years ago i got sick of you

know i used to like when i read a book i would put it on the site goodreads and i was like i hate that site i just want to keep track of it myself and i made a little spreadsheet i was like here's what i'm going to do for 2021 every time i a book, I'm going to put it in the spreadsheet. I'm going to put in the date that I started it, the date I finished it, how many pages it was. I'll make a little formula for how many pages the day I read. And at the end of the year, I'll be able to add up how many pages I read this year. You know, that could be fun, you know? And, and I did it for about a year and a half. When I got to the end of the first year, I was like, what, what the fuck do I do with this number?

Like, who gives a shit? I don't even care, you know? And I realized that what I was doing was creating some sort of, like, external goal that I was trying to hit, some sort of external tracking system that would enable me to say, I'm a better reader this year than last year. But what's the point of that? No one's tally of that no one's tallying that for me why am I not just like enjoying reading a book yeah this is all supposedly pleasure reading some of it's professional to like you know I want to learn about this or that maybe I'll make it an episode about this subject I read about but most of it is just I'm reading

science fiction novels and it's just reading you know so why, why have I created this thing again, where I'm, I'm like trying, I'm like adding everything up to track it and quantify it, um, for some imagined payoff that I'm not even sure what it is. Uh, yeah, your, your book really helped me, uh, figure out that I'm doing that. I know I'm not, I don't, I'm not giving you any questions here. I'm just telling you what I related to and then allowing you to bounce off. Yeah, I'm very happy with that. I think it's really, you know, to sort of decide to sort of pretend that you asked me the question. What is it we're getting out of doing that? We that there is this.

There is that sort of certain kind of motivation that comes from that kind of approach, which is that there's a reason we we like to postpone meaning off into the future there's a whole set of reasons and it's you know it's that it's that notion that that um well there's a quote in the book from the economist john maynard keynes who said that you know the the person who's in this mindset is always get the quote roughly right but it's always trying to to attain for his actions a spurious immortality by pushing his interest in them further into the future. So there's this line about how he doesn't love his cat, but only his cat's kittens, nor in truth the kittens, but only the this really interesting notion that on some level, to think that the moment of truth is always coming, and that you're building up to the moment of truth, and that everything now is sort of provisional on that moment of truth, is to sort of not have to confront the idea that this is it, that there's an endpoint to all this. to confront the idea that this is it, that there's an end point to all this. And it manifests in other people, not you by the sounds of it, but it manifests in other people in not getting started on their big life projects, on their big ambitions, in sort of endless procrastination. Because in a different way, you know, if you don't bring a project into reality, you don't have to confront

all those trade-offs and imperfections and flaws and difficulties that that come with bringing anything into reality, you get to keep postponing. So you know, the sort of stereotype of the person who's got big dreams, but they're not doing them yet. And then they're getting older and older and older. One that they're sort of hanging on to a different version of that felt sense of, of immortality, I think. And it's unpleasant and uncomfortable to sort of realize that that's not happening and that you might as well, if you're a procrastinator, you might as well get started. And if you're a sort of productivity fixated person that you might as well take some time to relax in the midst of it, you know, it's the same idea with different, relax in the midst of it. You know, it's the same idea with different, very different results in the outside world, I guess. Yeah, I mean, tell me a little bit more about how the connection between

postponing and, and immortality that I, yeah, I just want to hear more, because I feel like I halfway get it. It's there, there is a connection there, but I'm trying to put my finger on what it is. I think we don't want to, i'm quoting slightly here from a great writer therapist called bruce tift but he says something like we don't want to have to consciously participate in what it feels like to be constrained to be imprisoned by reality in the way that we are right we know intellectually that we don't have all the time in the world we know that we're going to die all that stuff but we don't want to we don't want to go through the feelings that are associated with that. And so we do all sorts of things, this is the theory, as avoidance.

And one of those things is just distraction, just like scrolling endlessly on your phone so that you don't have to sort of be where you are. phone so that you don't have to sort of be where you are but another of them is this kind of endless quest for optimization or for you know winning the battle with time and anything that is to do with postponing and deferring and saying like well the real thing is coming in the future spares you that sort of really unpleasant confrontation with the fact that like this is it it's not a dress rehearsal. It's absolutely fine to be spending some of your time doing things that are prudent for the future. But if you go too far in that direction, you're, you're just doing it. Well, at least I think I was just doing it. Maybe that's what I should say. I was just doing it to sort of, to not have to face

the fact that being here now means taking making tough choices about time, it means maybe disappointing certain people in your life in order to do what you care about. It might mean sort of accepting that you're not going to do things perfectly. It might mean just accepting in relationships, for example, it might mean accepting that a certain amount of emotional vulnerability and distress just comes from getting close to another person. So I think you do see in sort of certain kind of young male productivity person out there in YouTube and elsewhere, you see this kind of like, and certain distortions of stoicism, I think, have been involved in this. They're trying to sort of build an armor so that they can then go into

their lives in this kind of invincible way instead of seeing what you learn gradually and i'm still learning which is actually like doing life fully means means not being invincible it means like being there for the for the distress and the difficulties and obviously like getting close to another person is just basically is signing up for more suffering, right? Because terrible things are going to happen to them and you, instead of previously it was just you.

Yeah. There's a fear of, uh, uh, there's a fear of getting close to someone and being hurt. There's also a fear of, uh, something that's lurking in the background.

I think of your answer of, of closing a door by making a choice. When you choose one thing, you close off possibilities of doing other things. And that's painful because yeah, to, to, to say I'm going to do a,

and that means I can't do B means embracing your finitude means I'm going to die. And I won't be able to do B because if I, you know, if you get married and you have kids, then you can't do a bunch of other stuff that you would be able to do B because if I, you know, uh, if you get married and you have kids, then you can't do a bunch of other stuff that you wouldn't be able to do otherwise. Um, but if you do all that other stuff, then you don't have the experience of getting married and having kids. You have a, you know, you, you have to make a choice one, one way or the other. And, uh, yeah, a lot of times we just don't want to face that, But you write about how rich that can be an experience

of making that choice. Well, yeah, no, I think the big liberation here is to see that it isn't really a choice between closing down options and keeping options open, because actually, we're always closing down options. And, and so it's really just a question of becoming more conscious of something that is already true, which I think on balance is an easier thing to do than sort of radically changing your life. So one of the things I write about in the book, based on, I think, my own past experience as well, is sort of commitment phobia, that idea in relationships, but certainly in other areas of life as well, right? That you're not really deciding yet if you just sort of hang back and and wait to commit but in fact of course you are deciding you're deciding to spend that portion of your life um uh in a

state of not having committed if you decide to spend like 10 years on dating apps instead of settling down with someone that might be the right thing for you. I'm not saying people should all like get married at 21. But, but you're not escaping finitude in that way. You're just using up some of your life in a slightly different way. And, and it's fine if it's the right way to use up some of your life. But it's, but it's not fine if you're convinced that you're not really doing that if you're keeping all your options open. So actually, you know, every moment that we decide to do anything, we're closing down all the options for using that moment for anything else. And although it's sort of alarming, in a sense, I think the fact that it's completely non-negotiable is actually freeing, because

then you get to say like, okay, I'm already closing down options. I'm already burning bridges. I'm already waving goodbye to possibilities in every moment of my life. I can't do anything about that. Nobody can do anything about that. All you can do is try to like, you know, take some good decisions in there and take some, go in some directions that seem promising. Stop me if you want to go on to something else, but there's an anecdote that I repeat in the book

that comes from a talk that Sam Harris gave talking about how our lives are full of experiences that we're doing for the last time and we don't know that it's going to be the last time. It's a sort of extraordinarily alarming thought in a sense that certain friends, certain places you visit, like they may well be the last time you see that place, that person, but you wouldn't know.

And obviously you can assume that's going to get more frequent the older you get, but it's actually happening at every point. And beyond that, kind of every moment is like that. Every single moment is a moment that you're never going to get to live again. And it's, it's happening right now all the time, even if you're 20, you know, nevermind if you're getting to be like a middle aged like me, and it's and it's and it's really obvious that that's the case. So I think that that notion is alarming. But the fact that it's built in for everybody and completely unavoidable is actually sort of liberating because then it's like, okay, well, we just got to figure out some halfway decent ways to deal with it.

Yeah, and taking the pressure, understanding that and taking the pressure off can make it more enjoyable to actually make the choices. I'm thinking about, again, just in my own life, when I'm very, very productivity focused, when I'm in a very stressful time, and then I, oh my God, I have two and a half hours free at the end of the night. Right, right. I don't always. Like, oh my God, I could do something fun. And then I start to stress out over what should I do? Should I watch a movie with my girlfriend? Should I play a video game? Should I read that? Should I make progress on that book? And then as soon as I have so much trouble deciding, I end up just sitting there scrolling

on my phone while I decide, because that has the illusion of being a time-free activity. Right. When actually I'm making the choice to do that. Versus again, when I'm at home visiting my parents for the holidays, it's like two days after Christmas, this like wonderful space in between Christmas and the new year where you're just like, who gives a shit about this time? You can do whatever you want. If you have a couple hours free, should we watch a movie? Yeah, I'll watch a shitty movie. I don't care. Like it's as good as to do as anything else. And it's, and it's delightful to not put so much

pressure on that decision and to just say, yeah, let's do that. Whatever. It'll be fine. It's okay if I don't do the other thing. So I understand that embracing the fact that you have to make a choice, if you're able to take the pressure off a bit, can be really beneficial. But there are so many illusions that are dispelled in your book. One that I'd love to talk about a little bit is you have this idea that, you know, we, we have this sort of fiction that we're going to live great lives, that we're going to do something massive and world historical, that we're going to be the next Steve jobs or whatever.

And you write that, you know, well, Steve jobs probably isn't going to be remembered that long either. Even if, if we want to use him as the example, you know, 10,000 years from now,

no one will remember Steve jobs, except maybe by the layer of heavy metal silicon that is like in the earth's crust somewhere. They'll be like, oh, it seems like somebody invented something around this time that there was a lot of, but we don't know who it was, you know. found to be sort of a stunning thing to try to accept because uh i don't know that's been a lot of the focus of my life has been tried to live a life that is more significant than you know the lives of say the people who the adults who i grew up around you know so i want to do something bigger partly partly that's why i went into the entertainment industry right is i want to be one of those people but the um uh and I've often thought of ambition as a curse because, you know, you can never escape it. If you're ambitious, then you're like,

well, I always want to be doing more. It can always be bigger and bigger and bigger. And accepting the realization that it's, there is no such thing as a great, as a great significant life is like startling to me, but I could also see myself just, if I actually were to accept it, just like collapsing in tears,

like, oh my God, what a relief, you know, to finally take this weight off of myself. Yeah, I mean, what brought you to that thought? Well, what I'm trying to do in that section, and I use this phrase cosmic insignificance therapy to try to sort of hint at the idea that I think it is really therapeutic, is, you know, and I think this is probably the part of the book that I've had the most kind of pushback or arguments with people about because people

naturally say, well, if it's true, and it's kind of hard to deny that if you sort of zoom out to civilizational time or the history of the planet or the history of the cosmos, you know, by definition, like nothing anybody is doing is significant on that scale, because, you know, human civilization is the blink of an eye, let alone any particular lifetime in it. It's very tempting to say, well, like that doesn't make everything meaningless. Is that like, isn't it? Isn't it pointless that we should? Wouldn't that sort of demotivate people? And what I tempting to say, well, like that, doesn't that make everything meaningless? Is that like, isn't it, isn't it pointless that we should, wouldn't that sort of demotivate people? And what I want to say, I can see that reaction, but I think what I want to say is why are we using as the standard of meaning this kind of systematically unattainable thing? Like why, why it's, why, why do you conclude that if something isn't going to matter

a thousand years from now it doesn't matter like what why be so against the notion of meaning in the present or meaning in the next couple of decades why be so intent that your name has to sort of echo through history instead of like make a difference right now i'm drawing a bit here on a philosopher called idodo Landau, who's done a lot of work on this and sort of pointing out that it's just, we don't need to have this standard of meaning. And we know from experiences with like, you know, caring for people we love who are sick or cooking a meal for our kids, whatever it is, you know, there's all sorts of experiences or just being in nature, but clearly do feel very alive, but that it will be really hard to

justify on the grounds that, you know, in a few millennia, it will matter whether we did that thing today or not. And I would say, you know, in terms of my own relationship with ambition, which is present in me as well, that actually it doesn't like make a mockery of that at all, present in me as well that actually it doesn't like make a mockery of that at all it frees it up it's like it's like isn't it far in your situation isn't it isn't it isn't it um like far more fun to just like try to get bigger audiences do more impressive things um create more amazing work win more awards whatever it is just because that's kind of a fun way to express being alive instead of this idea that like you might get to a point where it was gonna where it was gonna echo down the centuries and you know occasionally there are shakespeares and

leonardo da vinci's and they they do echo for a good few centuries but then you can always just zoom out another level um in history and ruin that idea as well so i think it's not about saying life is meaningless it's about saying like this is a weird standard to apply of for meaning but let's apply this this kind of idea of feeling alive and doing something that just feels like it matters here and now and for some people that is going to be a one-to-many uh you know thing involving celebrity or fame and for a lot of people it is going to be a one to many, uh, you know, thing involving celebrity or fame. And for a lot of people, it's going to involve much quieter life. And that could be just as, just as significant. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, but it's connected again to this idea of, of what are you,

are you doing the thing you're doing for the moment that you're doing it, or are you doing it for off in the future? You know, I keep a journal every night. I write in a, I write in a five-year diary where I write, and then, you know, there's, there's five entries on each page for the same day for five years in the future. So as I complete, I've just completed one of these for the first time. It's very rewarding. And now I'm starting a new one. I'm writing right now to, you know, the entry that I make on January 27th today, I'll read next year when I write it, when I write the next one, you know? And, you know, the joke that I've made to my girlfriend is, oh, I'm writing this so that, you know, I want to make sure that when they start the Adam Conover library in the future, that they'll, that they'll be able to go through the documents and, you know, like catalog them because it's going to be very

important to future scholars. I say that jokingly because I know that's ridiculous. The reason, but I feel like, you know, sometimes we have that feeling when we're doing something, oh, I'm doing this for posterity, when really the reason I'm doing it is so I can read it later and understand myself a little bit, you know, or I'm doing it right now to think about the past day. Yeah, no, absolutely. And I also don't think that posterity is like an inadmissible thing here, but it's just that idea of like, you know, sure, it's great to do this now. It's great to look back in a year's time. It would be great if a whole bunch of people

in the near future felt drawn to, benefited from your work. It would be great if some people, a century from now, right? All these things would be great. But making the condition of their being, of these actions being valuable, that they're sort of going to last forever, seems to just rule out so many things that we all know are kind of... It's just a sort of intuitive answer, really, that I'm giving here.

It's like, we all know that all sorts of things are meaningful that we can't justify in terms of like, you know, a thousand years from now, they're going to matter. So just like, let go of that i don't think it means that wanting to leave a legacy say is a is a is a bad motive it's just like it's can only be part of the mix i suppose yeah yeah well we have to take another really quick break i've got some more big questions you want to get back we'll be right back with more ol Berkman. Okay, we're back with Oliver Berkman. I have to ask you about this. You mentioned earlier in the interview, Zen Buddhism, and you quote some Buddhist writers throughout, but you also have a somewhat more complicated view of meditation, especially as practiced in, you know, our current time in, you know, the, what is often called the West, um, uh, and the purposes that

it's done for. I mean, how, how do you, how do you feel about that strain of thought in the way that it's practiced? Huh? It's interesting. I mean, is it too big of a question? No, it's interesting. Cause I sort of, um, you know, I struggle with this, I sort of basically feel like I am a better person when I make time to do 10 minutes, 15 minutes meditation, but I've but I'm, it's not a habit that ever has become easy for me, it's never become sort of that association between doing it. And the benefits of it has never kind of got hardwired into my brain in a way that makes it straightforward and easy. And I think you absolutely see, if this is what you're referring to,

but I think you absolutely see those sort of techniques co-opted in the modern culture into like to become productivity techniques, to become this kind of... Yeah, like how to develop single-pointed focus so that you can x and um that just kind of you know again it's totally fine but if you sort of go read back into these traditions and sort of talk to people who've taken them seriously and made a life out of them it really isn't that it is a way of it is a it is a way of sort of in that moment being more present it isn't like a preparatory technique to be able to like kick ass in a superior fashion later on and even just the idea that like meditation is therapeutic the idea that

meditation is there to become happier which is perfectly reasonable thing but it's like there's something missing from that and and and yet and this is the other side of it that i'm always sort of mentioning as well like that that invocation to just sort of be in the moment yeah it's really really hard like it's not it's actually one of those things where trying to do it seems to undermine the the of doing it. And so a lot of people who sort of say, well, meditation isn't for productivity. They say, no, meditation is just like be here now. And then you've got to sit there and try to be here now. And of course, all that happens is you become incredibly self-conscious and like fail to, to, to be here now. You start thinking, am I here now? Am I being, am I doing it? Am I being there? Right. And, and the strange thing is that, yes, even the, so there is the whole strain of

meditation theory where it's like, oh, it'll help you focus on stuff and it'll calm you down at work. And it's specifically promoted as like the antidote to, you know, capitalism and, and productivity focused culture. Like, oh, if you just meditate a little bit, that'll help you deal with the fact that you're being forced to, you know, work in all these ways you shouldn't. And you have all this internalized capitalism that is making you, uh, giving you all this toxic productivity. So there's that piece of it. Then there's the folks who say, as you say, like, Oh no, the whole point is to be here now. And you're most of the time, you're not being here now you're somewhere else and you're on your phone and your mind is elsewhere and you should learn how to be here now but then what you

point out is no the truth about being here now is that you always are that even when you are distracted or what even when you're scrolling on your phone you that is all that there is to be is here now um and what you're really missing, if anything, I suppose is the realization that, that that is where you are. Again, it's this idea is like, this isn't, it's so much, I think so much more transformative to sort of become more conscious of what's already true than it is to sort of relaunch your life, adopt a completely new mindset. It's just like, yeah.

And so for me anyway that understanding that it all happens in the moment including all the attempts to escape from the moment is is kind of in itself a big sort of and feel my shoulders drop and i can feel myself exhale just remembering that that fact rather you know, turning this into another thing where I've got to use my will and my self-discipline to try to, um, like change who I am. Yeah. Right. I, I feel like I internalized this idea where, oh, okay. If I started meditating, okay. If I really did it and okay, I'm good. No, I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it every, every day. I'm going to wake up. I'm going to meditate. I'm going to start with five minutes, but I'll work it up. So I'm doing a tilt for an hour and I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. Every day, I'm going to wake up, I'm going to meditate. I'm going to start with five minutes,

but I'll work it up until I'm doing a tilt for an hour. And I'm going to do it every single day. And then once I do that, if I do that for a couple of years, then I'll finally be living. Then I'll finally be living in the moment and I'll be aware of everything around me

and I'll reach enlightenment and da, da, da, da, da. And that's bizarre because again, when you actually read you know people who who you know actually understand this stuff they're like no the whole point is that you're fucking doing it every moment of your life right then there's no escape from life and yeah and yeah and if you haven't done this by the way what you actually need to do to bring come back to our discussion about social rhythms and the pressure of your surroundings is to go to like

insight meditation society in barry massachusetts or a number of other places and do like a five six day retreat yeah where you find that you turns out you can meditate for nine hours a day in some sense if every single person around you is doing it and that's what the schedule is and they make it easy and you get some really nice vegetarian food at the end of the day and at lunchtime whatever and um you know it's that is another example of like how how these social rhythms can be everything when it comes to that stuff ah oh and it's actually helpful yeah i mean i've done this a couple of couple of times, just sort of week-long things. They do a three-month, I think, so there's some serious hardcore meditation

that I don't maybe have the guts for. But those sort of one-week type things really kind of, again, it evidently didn't make the daily habit stick in my case, but they're sort of profound and and you you learn things about yourself and about reality and it's not effortless but it's effortless in the sense that like it doesn't take your will once you've signed up and like yeah books the train or the plane it's like it just happens naturally. I recommend it heartily.

How did you, as a productivity geek who, you know, has presumably read all the books and tried all the systems and done all the calendars, how did you start changing your way of thinking? How did you come to these very radically opposite ideas? Well, it was definitely through, it was definitely one of those things where you go so deep into something that you become disillusioned with it in a way that maybe other people don't get to do. So one of the things I did is I wrote this column for years for the Guardian weekly column.

One of the things that I was doing there was like testing out these kind of books, reviewing, putting the systems into practice. Not the only thing, but I did a lot of that and wrote about it, which, by the way, is kind of psychologically a bit weird, too, because it sort of enables your worst habits when you're writing about it in a context like that, because it's for work. So you can sort of indulge your neuroses. of indulge your neuroses. But one of the things that happens there is like, if you've tried out 100 ways of organising your time, and none of them have brought you to this kind of beautiful place of total salvation and unbroken peace of mind, you begin finally to wonder if there might

be some problem with the question you're asking instead of the fact that you haven't found an answer. And obviously, most people don't get test out a hundred of them because they've got real jobs and so um that was really the it was that process of of really going into it and and sort of through the fact of getting sort of all the way through that beginning to to sort of reach the kind of crisis point where you're like well none of this is working it took a lot to sort of get it through my get it through my thick skull but that was that was where that started then there were as i write in the book like one or two moments that were sort of crisis points in that where i had a sort of epiphany or whatever but really i think the most important thing there is just to sort of, there's something incredibly powerful in sort of getting fed up with all that and with yourself as well,

right? Sort of getting fed up with your own bullshit about it and your own sort of, like, endlessly refreshed enthusiasm for finding the one answer. And you're like, okay, this is ridiculous. Then there's space for other things. Yeah. It's something that I've almost noticed just following you know the world of like i i read so much productivity content i'm always like you know the the the way i can figure out that i'm procrastinating from something is i

start reading about different to-do list apps you know um and i've used the same to-do list app for 20 – not 20 years, maybe 10 years. No, which one? And I use Things. Yeah, me too. The app Things. No, carry on. Yeah, and it's – I still like talking about this stuff.

Oh, yeah. No, it's fun. I've used it for that long. I never feel like I'm using it right. But I'll read about other ones and I'll go, no, I'm just going to stick with the one that I have because I have this sense whenever I read the productivity writers, they're never happy either. Like even the people who are still full on in it and have not gone through the conversion that you're talking about, they're still always like, well, here's what I was doing. And I did that and I found it didn't quite work. So I adjusted it this way and I started like keeping everything in Obsidian or like Rome research or whatever the new thing is that these, you know, people are writing about. Um, and you can tell from the

outside that it's a, that it's an endless quest. Um, and, uh, you know, there was a really great piece in the, in the New Yorker, like a year ago, I think that pointed out that like, if you're looking for, uh, most kinds of app, there's just one that does the best. You want a good email app? You can just sort of use this one. You want a good calendar app? You can just sort of use this one. To-do list apps, nobody agrees on which one is best,

and everyone is constantly cycling from one to the other. And it's because the quest to tame this stuff is ultimately self-defeating, and maybe we should just recognize this and stop trying to solve it technologically you know i think that's right and you and you especially find that with these sort of i forget what the generic name is for them but these sort of apps that are designed to be one app to do everything in your life you see people sort of cycle through this this hunt for the single for the single product that's going to uh that's gonna that's

gonna solve everything i have to say my way of finding peace with a interest in productivity stuff has not been to walk away completely from ever having anything to do with that stuff but rather to try to be a bit more accepting of the fact that like yeah i'm always going to have an interest in this i'm always going to be tinkering with my system. It's not going to approach a kind of perfect final form. And yeah, one, hopefully minor track in my daily life is going to be making little sort of tweaks and modifications. And that's actually a different way of finding peace in all that, right? It's like, it's no longer this like, okay, this is it. No, no, this is it.

No, no, this is it. It's like, no, it's fine. It's like, I'll experiment with that and things come and go. And that's fine. It's just like a, it's a hobby. And as long as it doesn't completely obliterate my actual productive output, then like, fine, you know. Well, so let's wrap this up with a little bit of concrete advice, which you

helpfully offer in the book, and some of which I've tried to take. But for folks listening who have felt in a similar state to me, where it's like, oh my God, I'm just constantly bombarded by so much that I have to do, and I never get to the things that I actually want to do and, and et cetera. What, what do you suggest as some approaches that, you know, except your finitude, your, your radical lack of immortality, to build a life where you can actually get some shit done, but be a little bit less miserable about it. I love this idea with the phrasing of this comes from a creativity coach called Jessica Abel, whose work I really admire,

but this idea of paying yourself first with time so like there's this famous idea in personal finance if you want to save and invest money you've got to take it out of your paycheck the moment you get it and then use the rest for your expenses rather than uh hope that there'll be some leftover at the end put away and it's exactly the same with with time it's the opposite of clearing the decks and so if you were kind of if you were going to do this on a kind of daily basis on the level of the day it might be a question of saying like there's some work project that i really care about or there's some creative pursuit that i really want to pursue i'm gonna i'm to do that for however long, might be an hour, but it might be five minutes, you know, first. And I'm going to see that the

challenge is not clearing the decks to get to the point where you finally get the time for that thing. The challenge is learning to handle the anxiety and the discomfort of knowing that the decks are not clear, that you're doing that, that you're doing that hour anyway, even though there are emails in the inbox. And of course, this all depends on specific professional situations. And some people like going to get fired if they don't answer all their emails within the first 10 minutes of the working day. But just that general philosophy that says, if something matters, you have to find a way to do a little bit of it now, You have to find a way to do a little bit of it now in the thick of infinite other demands on your time and infinite other possibilities, rather than thinking that you're ever going to get to this point at the end of all the little stuff where the time will open up and you can and you can plunge into it. And that is an idea, obviously, that you can apply to how you organize your day, how you think about your year or your life,

not putting all the things off, not putting things off for retirement. So it's a kind of, it works on all those different levels. So that's one of them. You can do that with your relaxation or your recreation time as well and say, at this time i'm going to fuck off from work right and watch a movie or go to the park with my kid or whatever

it is even though oh my god there's other stuff i should do no this actually takes precedence and it requires you to prioritize actually prioritize and it yeah absolutely exactly and it requires you to realize that like to adjust your expectations and realize that it's not going to feel great in the first like the first few minutes if you're the kind of person like so many of us are who's trying to maximize the value of your time all the time and you decide that you're going to read a novel for 20 minutes at a certain point or go on a walk in the park whatever like that's going to feel uncomfortable at first. And if you,

and if you respond to that by saying like, Oh, this was a bad idea, then I better go back to work. You're never going to get to the value of that because the flywheel is turning too fast. We are ready to maximize our time. We don't want to fall back into the present experience of where we are.

So like not expecting it to feel great at first, I think is a really important tactic there actually. Well, look, I can't recommend the book enough to any harried creative types who have lived in this misery as I have. Folks can pick it up at our special bookshop, factuallypod.com slash books if they wanna read 4,000 Weeks.

Where else can people find you, Oliver? My website is oliverberkman.com. And I'm on Twitter more than I should be probably at Oliver Berkman. So those are the places, right? Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Really appreciate it. Oh, my pleasure.

I really enjoyed it. Thanks. Well, thank you once again to Oliver for coming on the show. I hope you loved that conversation as much as I did. Once again, if you want to pick up the book, you can do so at factuallypod.com slash books. That's factuallypod.com slash books. I want to thank our producer, Sam Rodman, our engineer, Kyle McGraw, and everybody who supports this show at the $15 a month level on Patreon.

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