Modern Wisdom - #365 - Oliver Burkeman - How To Properly Manage Your Time

Episode Date: August 30, 2021

Oliver Burkeman is a journalist and an author. Time is something we all wish we had more of and tons of productivity gurus have proposed strategies to stop it from slipping through our fingers. After years of investigating and reporting on cutting-edge productivity for The Guardian, Oliver has arrived at a slightly different worldview of time and how we should manage it. Expect to learn why becoming more efficient often just leads to you getting more useless work done, the fundamental problems which all time management strategies fail to address, how deciding what you're going to fail at is a superpower, the danger of seeing your leisure time as an arena for self-improvement and much more... Sponsors: Get a free gift from Tiege Hanley when you try their skincare range at http://tiege.com/modernwisdom (deal automatically applied) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and Free Shipping from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Buy Four Thousand Weeks - https://amzn.to/3BhqQJR  Follow Oliver on Twitter - https://twitter.com/oliverburkeman  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Oliver Birkman, he's a journalist and an author and we are talking about how to properly manage your time. Time is something we all wish we had more of and tons of productivity gurus have proposed strategies to stop it from slipping through our fingers. After years of investigating and reporting on cutting edge productivity for the Guardian, Oliver has arrived at a slightly different world view of time and how on cutting edge productivity for the Guardian, Oliver has arrived at a slightly different world view of time and how we should manage it.

Today, expect to learn why becoming more efficient often just leads to you getting more useless worked on, the fundamental problems which all time management strategies fail to address, how deciding what you're going to fail at is a superpower, the danger of seeing your leisure time as an arena for self-improvement, and much more. As you might be able to hear, I am still on the recovery road back from Laryngitis, which caused me to completely lose the ability to make sounds out of my face. Hopefully, I've got an episode this Thursday actually that I recorded during the midst of it because I had to get it done. So, I can look forward to that sultry seductive affair, but that being said, I'm glad that I got it when I did. Because over the next few months, I've got episodes coming up with Aubrey Marcus, Ryan Holiday, Robert Green, Joan of Auro, Dan Jones, General Stanley McChrystal, John McWirter, and Andrew Hubertman, lots and lots to look forward to. If you want to know when these episodes go live,

you need to be subscribed. It's the only way that you can ensure that you will never miss an episode. So just head to your podcast app and press subscribe. It is the best way to support this show and it makes me very happy, so I thank you. But now it's time for the wise and wonderful Oliver Berkman welcome to the show. Thanks very much for inviting me. What's the unique challenge with time? Do we actually have time? It's so weird.

I mean time is fundamentally, I think, unlike any other thing in a million different ways, and probably also a million different ways related to physics that I hope you're not going to ask me about. But, yeah, I mean, one of the things you're, I think, getting out there is, like, yes, the very notion that we even have it to be managing or to be making good use of or to be making poor use of the very idea that it's even in our possession in the first place seems very flawed when you stop to think about it because you don't ever really have, you don't have, you don't possess next week or the rest of today, you expect it, but you don't possess it in a way

that you can sort of set it aside for later. We just get one moment after each moment and it's the same for everybody. Yeah. What do most people get wrong about time management then? I think the sort of core mistake that I've certainly spent many years of my life making and maybe still make to some extent and then I'm trying to address is It's this idea that we can ever get into a position of mastery and full control over time, right? So so we feel like that but what you have to do in this situation of being overwhelmed by activities obligations tasks ambitions is to sort of become capable of meeting all of these, you know, being sort of optimal, optimally productive and capable of handling

anything that's thrown at you, and also to feel kind of secure with respect to the future, to know that your plans are going to come into fruition. And I think that desire to be in control of time sort of leads us massively astray because it's not possible. And so in trying to do this impossible thing, we end up actually spending time in really suboptimal ways because we're really chasing that feeling, like being in the driver's seat. Is Martin? And like wanting to win the battle, right? and you can't win the battle the time in the

end time is going to win that battle. Yes it's a bit of a it was in King Canotto whatever it was that tried to stop the tide from coming in. It's precisely the same as him. So his time management anxiety and modern phenomenon. I think the way we experience it today is absolutely a modern phenomenon. I mean, you can look at this in different timescales, right? On the one hand, if you're going back to the medieval period, I don't think the average sort of English peasant would have had any concept of time as a separate thing, as a thing that was there to be used or wasted or well used. It was just sort of like, there was this kind of unalienated way of being in time.

It was just the medium in which life unfolded. So to have any kind of anxiety about time, you first of all, after, you know, vent clocks and disidentify from time and see it as this thing that is constantly sort of like a yardstick that's constantly, you're running alongside or something like that. And then I think there's a much more recent thing which is to do with the sort of pace or acceleration and economic competition and all sorts of things just in the last few decades where that effort to use time in the way we think we need to becomes sort of unignorably obviously impossible, right? I think there's probably a quite a long period after the Industrial Revolution when people are

being a bit stressed by time, but it feels doable, like it feels like you could render your life or your factory, you know, as efficient as it needed to be to stay on top of everything. And I think just much more recently, there's a sense that that sort of possibility is breaking down, you see what I mean? Is it not just that we're busier than people in the old Nero were? And we've got more things to do.

I don't think it is just that we definitely feel busier than people did a few decades ago. And I think that there's actually a fairly good, there's fairly good evidence that we're not busier by in a sort of objective sense, in the sense of having less leisure time. We actually have more leisure time than a few decades ago.

It just doesn't feel very relaxing. And then yeah, if you're talking about this time scale that goes back to industrial times or you're including some indigenous cultures, perhaps even today, then it's like, well, what does busy even mean? I mean, their time is full, but this situation of feeling like you have to do more than you can do, which is totally absurd, right?

This is a logical contradiction. You can't have to do more than you can do. I don't think that arises for people in those cultures or at those points in history. So then it's sort of like the question becomes meaningless, the further back you look, I suppose. That's the conflict, right? The conflict is between what we feel we should be getting done and the amount of time in which we have to get it done. Right. And that's the squeeze. Yeah, that's the real trap when it comes to what we call busyness. You know, I write in the book like, busyness per se, I don't know if you're familiar with Richard

Scary children's books, which I am because I've read many of them to my four-year-old, but they're set in a place called busy town and all the animals in them are taped like human jobs, so like the firefighters are pigs and the grossers are raccoons and all the stuff. And like the whole deal is they're busy. But that really brings home that busy can mean something perfectly benign, which is just that you have a lot of things to do and the day is sufficient to contain them. There's no there's no tension there. That's just like being busy. That's a lovely way to live. What we have is overwhelm, right? What we have is the sense that we need to be doing more than we are going to have the chance to do. And it's a really weird

predicament because, you know, this idea and philosophy that predicament because you know this idea and philosophy that ought to implies can that you can't you can't meaningfully talk about having some due to your obligation if it's if it's not possible to fulfill it it's not my obligation you can't be my moral obligation to save you from a burning building if the burning building is two thousand miles away and there's no possibility of getting there in time in the same way, it can't be my obligation to get through more activities than it is possible for a human to get through in the course of a day. And yet that mismatch, that weight of that pressure, that sense that it is the stakes are high and that we have to do it and that we can't do it is a sort of total recipe for stress.

But the belief is that if I just became more focused, more efficient, if I up-regulated my productivity system or down-regulated my sleep, that actually could get more in. Right, and of course you can, right? This is not a tirade against the very idea of efficiency. If it's taking you two hours to like brew your coffee and get washed and dressed in the morning, like there are housemates. My housemate was taking two hours to brew. Probably about, I shit you not,

probably about 30 minutes to make a coffee during lockdown because he's a physio for a professional sports team who weren't playing. And he was just every day there was fresh sourdough bread and like two or three pots of artisan created coffee every day. I've got nothing, it's either this or Xbox. So, yeah. Yeah, I mean, you know, the value of the value you're pursuing is really good coffee

then maybe it should take you that long. But I mean, there's no harm in making efficiency savings in life. That can be very useful. But I think the situation's no harm in making efficiency savings in life. That can be very useful. But I think the situation that we're in is we're in a world of effectively infinite inputs, no limit to the number of emails you could receive, or demands that can be made of you, or of places you want to visit on your bucket list and business ventures you want to launch.

It's not all negative, but it is all kind of limitless and we're limited times finite in a life in a day. So yeah, the struggle to optimize to the point where a finite person can do an infinite amount is doomed to failure. That's not how math works, right? But it also keeps alive this feeling that maybe next week, maybe with the right system, maybe with just a bit more self-discipline, you can sort of burst through to that serene situation. Having spent a lot of time talking to people like James Clear and Ali Abdahl and these sort of real modern productivity wizards, there always is in the back of my mind a sense of never being done. Never being done with advancing the productivity system.

There's an Alan Watts quote that says you can become so preoccupied with trying to improve your life that you all together forget to live it. And you can roll that out to talk about the systems themselves, so you can sort of become very matter about this. You can spend so much time working on your productivity system to enhance your ability to get more done, that you don't even get around to getting stuff done. Let alone, you know, so there's, there are, and I've totally been there as well. I mean, like, I have, you know, yeah, absolutely. Yes, the overheads start to sort of take away from any possibility of doing anything else. Yeah, and I think learning when you have optimized sufficiently deeply, when you've down-regulated the sleep and up-regulated the system to a level where you're happy with it. And this is something that so many young guys

that kind of follow a similar track to what I did, you know, 20-year-old guys who start running a business and really enjoy it and want to do more and they attach their sense of success and self-worth to how the business is performing, you can get into a spiral of working an awful lot. But you need to set yourself an up-about because you will just erode away every single

second of your life. If you're not careful, you can just continue to chip away and chip away and chip away at everything. And then you think, well, what was the productivity and service of? Like what's the end goal of what I'm trying to achieve here? Presumably it's a life that's fulfilled and satisfied and happy and comfortable with sufficient resources, but not so many that I can't spend them. Like, over-earning seems just as stupid as under-earning. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, there's been some amazing work I'm thinking right now of a book by Daniel Markovitz about how, you know, you're a reward for being a winner in the society that we live in now.

Getting to the great best universities and getting the best jobs is this sort of pressure to work with crushing intensity, as he puts it, that is kind of in that respect, not much, not particularly preferable to working with crushing intensity just to keep a roof over your head. I mean, there are other upsides for sure, but it's not like a whole point of being wealthy at any point in history until fairly recently was like, so you didn't have to work, right? So you could hunt stag and have banquets or whatever.

And now the reward for climbing up that ladder in this sort of efficiency dominated situation is is just even more that you have to do. I think, you know, I guess this is an observation that goes back to like Max Weber and probably before, but what happens is that efficiency becomes kind of self-justifying, right? So it becomes, it becomes the end to which a system is tailored rather than a way of maximizing the degree to which you're achieving some other goal, some other value. And especially, you know, the, in some ways, the worst part of this is that it doesn't actually, it sort of attracts more input, right? So this is just, this is Parkinson's law, this is all sorts of

other observations from all sorts of different domains, but like, if all you do is make a system more efficient in the service of nothing other than making it more efficient, then all else being equal, it will attract more and more inputs until it's overwhelmed again, like when they put an extra lane on the M25 or whatever, and more cars come, and it will fill with sort of lower quality stuff. So your reward for becoming brilliantly efficient is to be busier than before, like, on less meaningful things, if that's what you're pursuing in the absence of anything else, yeah. What should I goal with time be then? Wow. I mean, I've got all sorts of, like, I can talk about techniques to the cows come

home, but I think that the, I think that the really important thing is it is a kind of inner gesture. It's a kind of surrender to reality and to the limited situation but we're just in time. We, I think, arguably we sort of are a stretch of time. That's how totally we're just sort of trapped in this situation. And I think we don't like how that feels. So a lot of what we engage in as productivity or self improvement is actually an attempt to avoid these uncomfortable emotions. But if you can sort of let them percolate through you a bit, the actual job of using time well then becomes kind of easy because that's just a question of spending some of your whatever amount of discretionary time you have on things that you know are the

most important things for you to be doing. And I don't, like in the book, I don't try to get a laundry list of like these are the things you want to be spending a meaningful life on. I think most people, when they get quiet and introspect a bit, don't have a lot of problem answering that question. The problem is they expect it to feel comfortable or to be pursuing those things and it probably isn't going to, because it's going to bring you into contact with reality and limitation in various ways that spending all day scrolling through Twitter does not. What's the role with limitation and finitude here?

What's the role of limitation and finitude? Well, it's just completely defining, right? I mean, it's just it, it is, it, it, it's how things actually are. The fact that, you know, every choice you make to do something is a choice to not do a million other things with that period of time. The fact that you can't exert very much control or even influence over the future, a little bit, but you certainly can't know that things are going to go the way you need them to. And so the problem in a way is trying to cure this situation. It's not the situation, it's the fact that we spend so much of our time and so much, especially much of our energy and self-improvement and productivity, trying to pretend that this is not the way things are and that we are in more control

than we really are. So, I mean, there's a quote which I love and keep coming back to from Charlotte, Jocco back, the Americans and Buddhists, which is what makes it unbearable is your mistaken belief that it can be cured, which I think is like totally brilliant, because it's like it's not that there's not going to be difficulties, it's not that there aren't disappointments and losses involved in, you know, being alive and trying to make something of your life. It's this idea that we ought to be able to have it not be that way, and we're going to be stressed and anxious and indignant all the way until we finally reach that situation, which we then never do. Sam Harris had this quote.

It doesn't sound very upbeat, right? No, but I think it's correct. Sadly, we're finite creatures surrounded by infinite complexity. Right. And capable of infinite imagination as well, I think. Correct. Yeah, so not only is there an infinite number

of options of what we could do with our time, but we can actually envision them. And mistakenly, we can believe that we could perhaps maybe do them. If we were able to get the right productivity system and the task management, and I've seen that guy on the internet that can type at 260 words a minute, I bet he can get all of his work done.

I bet he's able to run three businesses and continue the house moving forward. But yes, Sam Harris has this quote where he says, you're never going to not have problems. What, did you just think one day that you were going to wake up and you would have completed problems like leveling up in a video game and entering into a map where there's no features?

No, the problems are going to be there. They are a feature not a bug of features. No, the problems are going to be there. They are a feature not a bug of life. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And they're just generated by, they're just generated by the situation that we're in, right? I mean, what's the definition of a problem? It's that in the most basic sense, I suppose, it's that, you know, that something is not the way you wish it to be, and it's there for you to try to turn it into something you do wish it to be. Well, that's always gonna be true,

and solving one problem is gonna cause another. So, yeah, I think that's a lot of the tenor of a lot of the popular and sort of definitely sort of more aimed at men, male readers, self-help of the last few years. I'm thinking of the stuff Sam writes, but obviously also Jordan Peterson is the obvious example in this mix. And really I think a lot of it all goes back down to that book, The Road Less Traveled, which is years old and a lot, and a lot. It's not so heavy on the sort of masculinity stuff, but it basically comes to the same message.

And the beginning paragraph is something like life is difficult. This is one of those problems that, this is one of the great problems, which means that once it's accepted, it's no longer a problem or something like that. And it's like, that's the point. Yeah, I couldn't have said it better even than the garbled version that I just gave you. What's the efficiency trap then? Is that just becoming more efficient

and more productive in an effort to then fill up the remaining time with more stuff to be done as opposed to using that time to spend on things that are leisure? Yeah, I mean, I just use that phrase. There's sort of two aspects to this. One is that we've discussed, right? That becoming more efficient in the absence of any other value will just increase your workload and your busyness and work will rush in to fill the extra capacity you're creating through various different

means, you know, and the obvious one is email, right? I mean, if you're really, really good at responding to email, you're going to get more email because you're going to get replies and then you have to reply to those and blah, blah, blah. There's also this qualitative aspect which I sometimes, sometimes call the importance trap, I think I need to be more rigorous in the proprietary names I'm giving my concepts. It's holding me back. But which is, this sort of stems from this observation in my own life, but many, many people have sort of resonated with it since that like, as you get really good at getting things done, what tends to happen is that you realize

that you're getting really good at getting the unimportant things done. And actually the important things are being pushed back over the horizon just as much as ever. And I think what's going on there is just, you know, the more you convince yourself that you can do everything, the less filtering you apply when something comes onto your radar, the more likely I'd say yes to anything, either internally if it's a ambition of your own or to a request from someone else, because you never go through that process of like,

well, OK, what am I going to neglect in favor of this thing? And so if you think about it, that just like over time, that just means that your list is going to fill with more and more things that haven't met a quality threshold, and you're willing the words of Jim Benson, a workplace consultant who I quote in the book, become a limitless reservoir for other people's expectations. It's just like you just end up doing what other people would like someone else to be handling on their behalf. That's an interesting way to look at productivity that it actually reduces how skeptical or how many scruples you have around the things that you choose to do. If you can get twice as much

worked on in a given period of time, you can get twice as much of the important stuff done or be half as judgmental when it comes to choosing what you want to get done. Right, and I think the thing to remember there is that most, possibly this is a human universal, but most people who are like sort of have a bit of dynamism and want to do a few things with their lives, that there's going to be no matter how productive you get, there's always going to be more genuinely meaningful and important things than the capacity will allow. So you're probably not going to have the bandwidth to start messing with the things that you don't particularly care about. And there's a lovely observation from Elizabeth Gilbert,

the novelist and writer on productivity and author of Pete Prey loves, underrated book in some quarters, I think it's actually really good. That, you know, we hear all these bromides about the importance of saying no. And you secretly think that what that means is you have to like start being willing to say no to all the crap that people are asking you to do that you don't really want to do.

But actually, it's way more challenging than that. It's saying no to things that you really do want to do and that really do matter. And that it would have been really good to spend some time on. It's not that you just get to choose. This is like a little back door to continuing this kind of problematic way of behaving is like I'm going to get so productive so that everything that matters gets done and I'm going to accept that I'm not going to get all the things

that don't matter done, but it's no, it's way harder than that. It's not doing everything that does matter. So if time management is ultimately doomed to fail, What's novel about what you're proposing here? I mean, I don't know that it's novel. If you're going to go all the way back through the history of philosophy, I think, you know, Senna could got there first and Heidegger in a, in a sort of slightly more Nazi way. I don't really need to have one. I'm going to put one of the moments of the movie. Are you saying that He-again managed to out-natsy you in this book? I was adamant that this was some sort of treaties towards it. This is a word that gets thrown around a lot these days,

but but hide-again was as absolutely canonically a Nazi as it's possible to be. It's very. I am not. No, no, no, just a Nazi. And it's very difficult because like, actually, I think, you know, being in time to the extent that I grappled with it and tried to understand it really gets at something very wise about the nature of time, but then you have to issue all these

caveats because he was literally a party member. What's in New York about my, what's new about what I'm saying? I think it is, what I'm trying to convey is this notion of a kind of surrender that isn't disempowering. So it's this idea of like, it's a kind of acceptance, acceptance of reality that is kind of bracing and motivating and focusing. I guess this word acceptance has been, it has a lot of weird connotations, either it feels like resignation,

or it feels like, sort of just overly new age, you feel like books about acceptance are gonna have a little tablo of flowers on the cover or a pebble, something. But there's something quite muscular about it. There's something quite, I mean, Count Newport, you know, I'm sure you'll be, you and your listeners will be familiar with, but he talks about facing the productivity dragon, which is his phrase for like not pretending that there aren't more

things demanding your attention than there are and facing up to it and making tough decisions if you have to about what you can actually do. And there's something I like that spirit. I like that sort of, I like the idea that it's kind of scary on a level of some way to see how things actually are with respect to time. But the payoff for doing it is that you get to sort of stop using up all your time and attention and energy trying to do something impossible and focus it on doing a few things that are possible. So, if time is limited, that means that we need to say no to certain things. How can people think more clearly about these sort of trade-offs?

I mean, there are lots of ways of implementing this at different levels, sort of, per domain of life or per task. I mean, I think one very simple one of the productivity approaches that really does that is Constantly with all of this is Is anything that's that sort of based around the idea of doing one thing at a time? So if you can limit your work in progress there are sort of the can band methodology is one way of doing this if you can sort of pick one big goal in each domain of your life and sort of the can-band methodology is one way of doing this. If you can sort of pick one big goal in each domain of your life and sort of attempt to complete that one before moving onto the others, it's anything that has this spirit of like, okay, there's lots of things I could be doing,

but instead of giving in to the good feeling of like having a finger in every pie, taking care of business, touching every project in the course of a day, and actually not making progress on any of them, I'm going to tolerate that uncertainty that comes, sorry, that discomfort that comes from knowing that important things are being neglected in order to focus on one thing. And I think that can work at the level of kind of big projects and day-to-day tasks. That's one I can talk endlessly about ways to sort of implement this basic, single-basic

perspective shift. I like the idea of deciding what we're going to fail at. Can you dig into that? Yeah, this is an idea I got originally from an author called John Acuff and he just makes this very kind of obvious once it's been pointed out to you point that if this finite situation means that we're going to fail to excel to 100% in every single domain that we can possibly think of, excel to 100% in every single domain that we can possibly think of, which it does. Then it makes a lot of sense to sort of select in advance for a given time period, you know, something that you're, some area of life that you're going to accept your non-excelling in. So, you might decide that, I mean, one thing is, I think especially for young people

at certain stages, their careers, really going all in to work for a while can be a perfectly legitimate decision and maybe not attempting to have an incredibly rich sort of at-life outside work with, or manner of hobbies and relaxation and etc etc. Or it could be something as simple as saying like, you know, I'm trying to do well in my work and raise a small child. I'm not going to be the person who has a really

tidy house or- Six pack abs. Right, right, right. Or as impressive a cook, this is the thing for me, it's just like, once I accept that like as long as I'm feeding myself and my family basically, healthily, it's like, I think I have to put on hold for several more years from now, the moment when I can really wow people with the with the dishes that I can that I can whip up. And yeah, fitness, right? I don't want to tell anyone that they just give up on that. But there's obviously different kinds of goals you can have between maintenance and reducing your risk of heart disease

through to winning marathon and being sort of incredibly impressively muscular. So the point being that you're going to experience certain kinds of failure and different domains and that if you do this in advance you can really focus your efforts you can make no effort or relatively speaking no effort in some other area. If you don't do that you're going to sort of spread yourself thinly, not get far enough in each one and be constantly disappointed that you didn't reach 100% on any given domain. Yeah, there's two things going on there. One of them is the internal relinquishing of a sense that I should be doing better

by accepting in advance, look, this is the hill that I'm going to work on for the next six months or whatever, or these are the hills, and I'm going to concede that these ones aren't, so I don't have this potentiality gap between where I think I could be and where I am, because I've already conceded, right? I've wrangled the chaos of the next few months into order by having a plan and by laying it out. But the other thing, which is equally important, is that you're going to be more competitive within the domains that you narrowly choose to try and excel in, because you are not going to win a marathon by being great at work, and you're not going to be getting a promotion at work by being good at a marathon. However, if you allow yourself to progress tightly within one domain

for a period of time, you can then coast in that. Let's say that you do spend a good amount of time on a training plan and you decide, right, I'm going to die it down and I'm going to get myself to a good level of body fat. I'm going to get some muscle and build my lift up. That strength will carry itself on far more effectively than if you tried to do. You can get done in six months of focused work, what would take three years of desperately focused work. And the same thing goes for, think about a YouTube thing, the Pareto distribution is a hell of a drug, right?

Like it's everywhere. And you think if you want to be in the top 5% of anything, you're going to get disproportionate returns to somebody that's in the top 10% or the top 20%. Because it gets super competitive at the top, but the returns are also sort of, they become, is it logarithmic? Is that the one I mean, not exponential? The returns become exponential towards the top. So you get far more returns than the tiny, tiny increases that you need to put in. And another thing

to consider, and this is something I've been saying for so long to myself shouting it in my own ears, but everyone else is too, is like, look, the vast majority of people cannot let go of the tether of doing everything at once. This means that consistency and a narrow focus is a competitive advantage. One of the reasons that you can really excel in your industry is because other people aren't prepared to commit to that industry, because they have this same compulsion that you do as well. They have social engagements and a family and they want to spend money on a car, but also a house and they want to learn to be a good cook, but they want to have six pack abs and they want to pick whatever it is. Everybody else has this compulsion too. So by deciding to create some sort of bottle neck or forcing

function or limiting choice or whatever it might be. You are selecting yourself out of that pool of other people. You are giving yourself a competitive advantage and, essentially, it's going to be less painful because you're going right, okay, I'm not going to be super fit. I'll go to the gym a couple of times a week to just maintain for the next year or six months or whatever. But that doesn't matter because I chose this in advance. Yeah, absolutely. I think it's incredibly powerful and I appreciate the way you unpack that into the two, the two different elements that are going on here. And I think, yeah, I think it's the reason that we don't want to do that. Deep, deep, deep down is this notion that if we are that deep deep deep down is this notion that if we are working on everything we're approaching gradually never actually reaching the state of controls because it takes trust right it takes

to put one thing on hold for a while and believe that you're going to get around to it in a subsequent six month period or something it takes takes a kind of self-trust that you need to know that when that time comes, you can switch gears and do that. And if you come at it from a sort of control-freaky, untrusting, unself-trusting position, that's when you're like, well, I better take care of it all right now. And I think quite a lot of the sort of the stuff around like mourning and daily routines has been quite damaging for this because it's sort of the stuff around like morning and daily routines has been quite damaging for this because it's sort of encouraging this notion that you've got to sort of find time in an hour and a half in the morning for 12 different practices. It really sort of, I don't know, I think I've really benefited from meditating, but am I finding time for it at the

moment? I've got to be honest and say no, I'm doing some other things with the time I would be using for that. And I think that's okay, I think that applies to a million different domains. Yeah, and if you're going to have, I know I keep mentioning this, but if you're going to have small children, they're going to be the priority for a good while, whether you like it or not. They're going to be the priority for a good while, whether you like it or not. I think another reason that people like having their fingers in multiple fires, fingers in multiple pies, toes in multiple fires, is that it creates an N of one that gives them culpable deniability about why they might not be performing particularly well within a particular industry.

Oh, yeah. So if you are the only skateboarding, cricketing, bodybuilding, salesperson of insurance in the UK that also moonlights as a chef, then being a bit shit at all of them almost gets excused because it's like, yeah, but no one else is doing this. No one else gets what I'm doing. So there is a little bit of a get out of jail free card there. No, I think that's totally right. And I think that it reminds me of, you know, I think,

especially in the world of sort of content creation and the attention economy more generally, we get confused, don't we, about what constitutes the useful and meaningful form of extraordinary, of being extraordinary, and people sort of, there's a, people are incentivized to like, yeah, to do things that are out of the ordinary or weird combinations, and and there's all sorts of stuff I've read in the past about how the way to find niche in writing or whatever it might be, is to just these seemingly very bizarre sort of combinations of weird stuff and yeah, have your finger in multiple pies. That relates to something else that I write about, which is that actually there's real

power in the willingness to invest the time in sticking to one path and sort of go through that period of, this is the Helsinki bus station theory, I can talk about it if you want. This idea of like going through the process of unoriginality to get to the originality on the other side. That's this idea that goes back to this Finnish American photographer called Arno Minkin and where he tells this whole story about how in Helsinki all the buses at the Central bus station and Helsinki start from the same place and then all the routes, lots of the

routes sort of overlap with each other through the center of the city lots, so the routes are the same and it's only when they get to the outskirts that they start to branch off into different places. And I think I probably won't try and go through the whole story here, but the basic idea is, in lots of creative work, especially, you have to stick with paths that feel like they're what everyone else is doing. Feel like you're just an apprentice. Feel like they're not what you're not sort of making a name for yourself in order to get to the place at the end of that process.

That is unique and defines you as a sort of unique voice. So it's another example of this extraordinary power that being able to cultivate patience can give you, I think, especially in the world we live in now. Even if somebody accepts everything that we've said as gospel, to do list anxiety is still going to arise, how can someone who's addicted to the sense of feeling productive learn to let go of that taba? I think, you know, two approaches that may well be familiar to some of your listeners, but that really work with this process. The first is anything, any form of organizing

your day that draws on the basic principles of time boxing right anything that takes anything that puts time first so so you decide to work on a certain project or to do or to just do work per se for a certain number of hours and then you stop and then you make your choices about what to focus on based on that limitation. You don't say, I'm going to get through all of this, and if it takes me till midnight, that's fine. You say, I'm going to stop at whatever time, I'm going to work for however long, and just like taking those time, going sort of schedule first in that way can be very helpful, I think, for some people, because it's uncomfortable, but it delineates where the discomfort is, and then the big challenges you have to get up when the time goes off or to-do lists, right? So you have your unlimited open to-do list that probably has like 3,200 things on it that you that you need to do. And then

another that is limited to say five slots and you move tasks from the long list to the short list. But the rule is that you can't add more than five. So you can't add a new one until a slot has been freed up by completing it. That's just a one very simple example of a self-chosen bottleneck that, again, you know, it's not that you're doing less. It's that you always were making those choices, but now they are conscious. And so, you know, then you have to decide if I can only focus on five things right now They better be five that are that are worth my time. Have you heard of cold turkey the app?

Yes, but I don't know what it does so it is a good way to ensure that you finish work when you say you do and good way to ensure that you finish work when you say you do. And called Turkey in it has a function called Frozen Turkey. And Frozen Turkey will lock you out of your own computer at a preset time. And there is nothing that you can do about it. So I have a couple of buddies who've got it set. I actually think it was part of the, part of a very argumentative discussion with their partners around, you work too late. Okay, well, I can do this thing that causes me to be locked out of the laptop, but they've told me that the degree of furiousness and anxiety during the three minutes leading up to when that happens is a site to behold

because they just realize that like, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, as fast as possible, trying to get everything done scheduling stuff to be sent for 8pm because they know that they're not going to be there. But yeah, I think it's so interesting that, you know, whether you be a knowledge worker, whether you be an entrepreneur, or even somebody that has a more typical job that does have bounded time slots for it, we set ourselves goals of tasks to be done, not time blocks to be worked in. And I mean, I do it as well. I have tasks that this is what I'm going to do today.

Not this is how long I'm going to work on things to do today. And it's only ever going to lead in a society where you're sort of encouraged. It's a meritocracy and you're encouraged to work hard. It's only ever going to lead to you overindulging in work. Right, and that's why I mean, you can through, absolutely. And I've been there and not infrequently still go there, but it's why I mean, you can through, absolutely. I've been there and not infrequently still go there, but it's, it's, that's why I think practice with various different time blocking approaches. And the sort of fully featured Pomodoro technique does this too when you sort of read the, you know, go beyond just the idea of 25 minute bursts of work. It's this sort of training ground for getting better at estimating

how long things are going to take you or of sort of putting in the inevitable extra hour, like accounting for one of your time blocked hours with all the things that I know, I don't, can't predict, but I know I'm gonna end up having to, that are gonna overrun. So you can get better,

but yeah, I don't think it ever becomes perfect. I don't think it ever goes, the anxiety ever goes away if you're someone who's kind of in any way trying to sort of do interesting things in the world. I mean, there may be exceptions to do with very, very scheduled and timetable based work, which can be, you know, very high status work, as well as low status work, you know, if it really is strictly on a timetable. But even there, I feel like, you know, my go-to thought there is that like surely this must be easier on teachers because of the way timetables work, but I know from every teacher I know that this is not true. So think about personal trainer. Think about a personal trainer.

Like you can't train somebody unless they're in front of you. You genuinely can't. But I know tons of personal trainers and because of access to social media, there's always I could go searching for another client because I've got a Friday 3pm slot that needs filling. And this is the justification that we have around social media, that it always can present itself as utility deriving work, not work distracting time wasting. Yep. Plus, that train probably wants to have a whole sort of content marketing arm to their operations, right? So there will be limitless potential there

to write blog posts. Yeah, no, absolutely. There's no real way around it. I don't know. Lighthouse keepers, maybe they maybe it works for them to just follow. I do it. Other even lighthouse keepers today, I don't know. But like there's a very limited number of jobs that are not subject to this I don't know, but like there's a very limited number of jobs that are not subject to this some this bleed into the whole of life, I think, yeah. It's kind of like being an animal carer, but it's the internet that you're looking after. Yeah, yeah, which is kind of sad. You think about that, yeah. Think about it as well that because of the internet, you are genuinely permitting any person that has

a smartphone, unless you've turned your notifications off, and even if you have, then when you log on and you finally do check, you're actually permitting whatever it is, five billion people that have access to the internet. Every single one of them can make a thing happen that changes the course of your day. There is no way that humans were psychologically designed to be able to imbibe the entire world's news in real time 24 hours a day. Yeah, totally. Yeah, it's a complete, you know, yeah, I always think about it as in the context of like, in the context of like causes that we're supposed to care about, right? The greatest saints in history,

the most compassionate people who ever lived, given the most of their time to other people, we never asked to care about the number of instances of human suffering that like just jumping onto Twitter will expose you to. And in that case, you therefore need a kind of slightly almost callous seeming approach to be like, well, it's not that I'm not going to care about any of this, but I'm going to pick my issues. And if I want to be an activist in some area or give money to some cause, it's going to, like, yeah.

And that phrase, if you're not outraged, you're not paying attention, which always seems like it's so anachronistic now. It's like, no, no, we're all paying attention to everything and permanently outraged about everything. Actually, the only way to really efficiently care about something in your life, and I think this probably applies to everything in life,

is to be okay with not caring about, not caring about other things. What's the danger of seeing leisure as an area for self-improvement? Well, I think that's kind of like, it's almost the epitome of where all this ridiculousness is leading, right? That, like, not only would you be kind of sort of on this productivity treadmill in account of productive fashion in your work, but that it then comes to colonize your time off. And this is this, you know, so that sometimes you get it,

people talk about it literally as in this idea that you should use your time off to become a better worker. But other times it's just a subtler thing thing right? It's this idea that like you're not really using your leisure time well unless you're training for some event or you're improving a skill or you're doing some like program of reading certain kinds of fiction to get through a certain list of them or whatever it might be. It actually, you know, this focus on the future, the total expense of the present, it's a problem in all aspects of life, but it's particularly obviously self-defeating when it's when it's leisure that we're talking about here because

yeah, I mean, it means fundamentally means that a leisure becomes another kind of work. And it actually gets really hard. I mean, this is my personal experience anyway. It's not that you don't get the opportunity to rest. It's that you do get the opportunity to rest and then you kind of don't want to do it when the opportunity arises. Dig into that relationship between the present and the future for me. This is instrumentalization.

This is just the idea that on some level, we all have to treat time as something we're using now for a future purpose or benefit. That's not like, you can't give that up because then you sort of can't do anything. I wouldn't have got this book written. You wouldn't record these podcasts if you were only living for the value of the moment itself. You're always doing these things. But I think all sorts of pressures in the modern world and modern economy push us to completely over invest in that perspective. So you're constantly valuing every moment in time exclusively for that future benefit. And the problem there is pretty obvious, like you place all the value of anything you

do at a time that's always in the future. You're never really fully present for life, which is another thing that there's a great Alan Watts quote about that I can't remember in detail right now, but so it's really sneaky because of course it feels very dutiful, it feels like you're being a good person and doing what you ought to be doing in life when you're doing this. It doesn't feel like you're being a time-waster or sort of addicted to social media or something. It feels like you're doing what you ought to be doing. And yeah, the result is that you're never present for your own life. Isn't there a quote something to do with cats and kittens or something?

Oh yeah, this is John Maynard Keynes talking about the purpose of man, this idea of the person who lives entirely for all the purposes that he's putting his time to. Yeah, it doesn't really love his cat, but only the cat's kittens and not really the cat's kittens, but really the kittens' kittens and so on forward to the end of captain. Yeah, that puts it very nicely, right? kittens and so on forward to the end of captain. Yeah, I mean, that puts it, that puts it very nicely, right? It's like it takes away from the present to invest everything that you care about in some future point because the future just, future just keeps on coming and you never get that.

One of my favorites, Sam Harris quotes, I want to give this to you and get your thoughts on it. As a matter of conscious experience, the reality of your life is always now, and I think that this is a liberating truth about the nature of your human mind. In fact, I think there's probably nothing more important to understand about your mind than that, if you want to be happy in this world. The past is a memory, it's a thought arising in the present. The future is merely anticipated, it is another thought arising now. What we truly have is this moment and this. And we spend most of our lives forgetting this truth, refuting it, fleeing it, overlooking it. And the horror is that we succeed. We manage to never really connect

with the present moment and find fulfillment there because we are continually hoping to become happy in the future. And the future never arrives. Even when we think we're in the present moment, we're in very subtle ways, always looking over at shoulder, anticipating what's coming next. We're always solving a problem. And it's possible to simply drop your problem problem, if only for a moment, and enjoy whatever is true of your life in the present. That's great. Yeah, yeah. What do you want me to say?

I mean, I agree completely. I think the part that really interests me is towards the end there, the sort of subtle ways in which trying to be present in the moment is another example of not really appreciating that it's only always now. Again, because it implies that it might be possible to be separate from the moment and therefore like to sort of succeed or fail at being present in it, which clearly makes no sense. I mean, I think the sort of, this is a very, some aspects of this that I have understood in the middle of a meditation retreat, but then you lose the moment you're trying to let, you know, actually live, rest your life.

The sort of narrow keyhole between those two domains that has always helped me is to understand that, you know, anxious thoughts about what the future holds are also an example of something that you're experiencing in the moment. Plans that you have for your day that feel very, very important are also thoughts arising in the present moment. And it's not that, you know, it's a gross sort of occasionally you get it, it's kind of crude, you can counter the sort of crude misinterpretation of these ideas that we should be stopping or such thinking and that you should only be feeling the physical sensations and perceptual input of being where you are. You know, actually, of course, making plans is really useful, and to a certain extent, anxiety can have a sort of motivating role if you keep it in check.

But understanding or being able to step back again and remember that that is all unfolding now is very powerful. Now I won't pretend to have reached a level of spiritual enlightenment, maybe I don't know if Sam Harris would, where I can sort of get the most value out of those thoughts while in that same exact moment knowing that they are nothing but thoughts arising in the moment. Like I think when I get lost in thought because I'm writing something and I want it to be good, like I am living in the, I am not living fully in the moment in those times, or maybe I am, maybe that's flow, but maybe that's a bad

example. But you know what I mean? It's like that when I'm planning my day because I need it to go a certain way, it's useful to step back and remember that this is just a plan in the present. I'm not sure I'm really thinking that in the very moments of planning that that seems like it would require a power of presence that I'm maybe still working towards. There's a quote in the book that says what we forget is a plan is just a thought, right? Right, that's Joseph Goldstein, the meditation teacher. And I think it's it's such a great, if you get it, I'm not sure one automatically gets it from the words, but I'm sure you, sorry. How do you get it?

What do you say? Well, I don't know. I do, and I think you do. So I'm just saying like, if this quote lands in somebody's mind is listening, and they don't know what's the fuss about there, it's a little hard to say, I think, but to me that is just like, I think we naturally think of plans as kind of hooks

we're trying to throw over the future to bring it under our control. And that quote for me anyway serves as a reminder that a plan is just like any other thought that you're having in the present moment like the thought that you're hungry or the thought that you wish you hadn't said that embarrassing thing to that person. The thought that your intention for your day is that it unfold in a certain way is similarly just a present moment statement of intent. And I think it can be useful and it can be great to write it down so that you can refer to it when you face decision points in the day. But if you think it's more than that, if you think that it's going to somehow

lever you into a position over time such that you're in control and time isn't, then you're just going to be constantly running up against reality in a painful and stress-in-gasing way. Yeah, I think that the challenge that people have that comes right back to what you said at the beginning is that there is a denial of death here, that there is a fear of being a finite creature surrounded by infinite complexity and that the more that I can wrangle that chaos into water through plans, through a productivity system, maybe just maybe I can get more life in, or maybe I can protect myself from the chaos that's

occurring around me. And if that is the case, then maybe I can almost transcend death. I do think it's very much a rehabilitated, eternalistic thinking. You know, far fewer people now are believing that we're going to rise up to heaven or fall down to hell. So how can I assuage this denial of death? Like, would Ernest Becker be a productivity guru in 2021? Yeah, it's a it's a quest for exemption, somehow, isn't it, from from the situation that we're all that we're all in. And you know, I yeah, absolutely. I'm it's I feel it in myself, right? I mean, I don't need to go into the details here,

but right now I'm wrangling some situation involving application for a passport. here, but right now I'm wrangling some situation involving an application for a passport. And it's extremely intoxicating that notion that if certain things could just be confirmed and fixed and known, then it wouldn't just be that this one particular issue could be disregarded. It would be that one had reached one was back in a situation of sort of not being vulnerable to unfolding events It's the level of the computer game where you no longer have any problems Right, but of course if I sorted out this burdensome passport thing and stepped out into the street There is no guarantee that a grand piano won't fall on my head from a From an apartment higher up, right? I mean and that's obviously a little bit absurd, but something else could happen.

And indeed, something else will happen. So. What are some good questions that people can ask themselves to help refine their direction for this? Well I love and always talk about this question that comes from James Hollis, the young Ian analyst and writer, which is to ask of every big life question that you're, that you're encountering, whether it will enlarge you or diminish you. It can sound a bit cute here at first, but this is as an alternative to like, will this job make me happy? Will this

relationship make me happy? Would I be happier if I left this relationship or did this other thing? left this relationship or did this other thing. This question of enlargement and diminishment seems to connect something intuitive that I think most people already know about the path that there are. They know whether the stresses and difficulties that they encounter in say a relationship are the kind of stresses and difficulties that are making them a bigger person and are worth sticking with for the payoff and are sort of part of growth or whether they're the kind that sort of make your soul shrivel up and it's clear that like you two are just completely incompatible and should go your separate ways. And I think that applies to all sorts of other domains as well. So that, I think, is one of the questions

that I like to bang on about. Another one, just to mention, is this whole idea that I think we put off doing a lot of worthwhile and important things, pending some time when we're going to feel sort of fully qualified to do them. And I think even people who aren't burdened by imposter syndrome in that sort of direct sense of thinking that they are a fraud,

they're still very, very easy, I think, especially in younger adulthood to be like, oh well, I'm not going to launch this project now or do this thing now because clearly what I'm going to do is I'm going to, in five years' time, I'm going to really know what I'm not going to launch this project now or do this thing now because clearly what I'm going to do is I'm going to in five years time I'm going to really know what I'm doing and In the sense in which that is meant. I don't think anyone ever knows What they're doing and they're all completely winging it all the time and the only reason you don't hear there in the monologues of

Self-doubt is because you're not inside their heads monologues of self-doubt is because you're not inside their heads. And there are too bold in launching things that they should do more preparation for, but I think the overwhelming bias that we have is towards holding back, pending the time when we feel like we know what we're doing and it might be worth contemplating the possibility that nobody ever knows. Nobody ever feels like they're not doing. I've got some buddies who have risen up through the ranks of financial institutions and they were talking about this sort of red-pilling of their imposter syndrome because they presumed that when you get into the real big boardrooms, you know, when you're on the 35th floor,

and it's floor to ceiling glass, and everybody in there's on a million a year, that finally, finally people will know what they're doing. And they came out and they said, it's literally morons all the way up. Yeah, yeah, well, I guess that's the, yeah, that's the disdainful way to put it. The other way to think about it is,

of course, that we're all morons in some, in some important sense, which means like, yeah, you have as much chance of pulling off whatever you're trying to pull off as, as anybody else, yeah. And obviously the seriousness of your book, titledightle, 4,000 weeks. The reason for that is that that's the length of time of somebody that lives, lives for 80 years. And there's a quote that you open the book with from Douglas Harding. It's the very last thing, isn't it? We feel grateful for having happened. You know, you needn't have happened, you needn't have happened, but you did happen. And the infinitesimal, tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of a chance that you are alive for this moment,

for these 4,000 weeks, that is reason to place a very, very high value on your time to ensure that the things that you are doing genuinely do matter to you, not just now, but that you're going to look back in 10 years, 50 years time and say, that is how I wanted to spend my time. That's the degree of perspective that we should be taking care of the moment. It is. The only thing I want to say to sort of develop that is I wouldn't want people to go away from this with the idea that What that means is this kind of white knuckle attempt to seize the day in a kind of stressful Like got a pack every day with the most amazing experiences

I can find and like spend every weekend based jumping whatever, you know, it's not find and spend every weekend based jumping, whatever. It's not... It's almost like, I hope that I can get this perspective where, yes, the stakes are incredibly high because the chances of you being born were infinitesimal. The amount of time you have is not at all long. But there's also something very, I think, relaxing and liberating and empowering about seeing that precisely because that is the situation. The attempt to sort of outrun these limitations and do more than any human could do and live

longer than any human could live. Like you get to drop that because you already got the gift, which is like some time on the planet. So one way I want to phrase it maybe is not like you must do things with your life that matter to you, but like you might as well do spend your time doing things that matter to you. Like, what have you got to lose compared to someone who never got to be born?

So there's something about this that I hope that I find relaxing. And I hope other people do as well, not, not numbing, not, not like, so spend the rest of your life on a hammock, on a beach, but relaxing in the sense that the pressure is off and it's because the pressure is off that you might as well spend your life doing things that really, really matter to you. Oliver Buchmann, ladies and gentlemen, if people want to check out more of your stuff, where should they go? more of your stuff, why should they go? Well, a book, 4,000 weeks, that's there.

They can go to 4,000weeksbook.com, 4,000,000, weeksbook.com, which is really just a page on my website, which is OliverBurkman.com. I love it. Cheers, Oliver. Thank you very, very much. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,