Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 456: Time Management for Mortals | Oliver Burkeman

Episode Date: June 1, 2022

In a culture that values persistent productivity, one can be left feeling chronically behind. In this episode, author and recovering time management junkie, Oliver Burkeman  encourages us to stop scrambling to fit it all in by exploring the relationship between our mortality and getting things done. Oliver Burkeman is the author of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. Former guest Adam Grant has called it, “The most important book ever written about time management.” This is Oliver’s second appearance on the show. Burkeman joined us on the show a few years ago to talk about his other book, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking. He also writes a bi-weekly email newsletter called The Imperfectionist.In this conversation, we talk about: Why accepting mortality is a crucial step in improving our relationship to timeHis conviction that it’s not about being more efficient. It’s about knowing what to neglectPatience as a superpower and the impatience spiralThe benefits of burning bridgesBecoming a better procrastinatorThe benefits of restWhat he calls “cosmic insignificance therapy”Practical tips, such as the “fixed volume approach to productivity,” the value of serialization, and strategic underachievement. Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/oliver-burkeman-456See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. In my experience, time management is incredibly, diabolically hard. One of the trickiest aspects of my life, actually. And I suspect I'm not alone in this. The culture enforces a sense of always behindness and never enoughness. It's not uncommon for me to get to the end of my day and feel both fried and like I'm a failure

because I didn't get everything I was supposed to get done, done. And I'm saying this as an alleged happiness expert who has conducted many interviews right here on this show on this subject. My guest today is a recovering time management junkie. That's his description who went way down the rabbit hole on this stuff for many years and emerged with a really interesting thesis. Stop trying to get it all done. It's never going to happen. There is no such thing, he says, as work-life balance. There is no time management, Nirvana.

The answer is to accept that we're all going to die, that we have limited time, and so we need to stop scrambling to fit it all in. Oliver Berkman is the author of 4,000 weeks time management for mortals, great title. Former guest Adam Grant has called that book the most important book ever written about time management. I should say this is Oliver's second appearance on the show. He came on a few years ago to talk about his other book, The Antidote, Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking. He also writes, by weekly email newsletter called The Imperfectionist, also a great title.

In this conversation, we talk about why accepting mortality is a crucial step towards improving our relationship to time. His conviction that it's not about being more efficient, it's about knowing what to neglect, patience as a superpower and the opposite, the impatient spiral, the benefits of burning bridges, how to become a better procrastinator, the benefits of rest, and what he calls cosmic insignificance therapy. I should say, despite Oliver's focus on big picture, fixes to time management, he also has a bunch of super practical tips,

such as the fixed volume approach to productivity, the value of serialization, and what he calls strategic under-achievement. So we'll talk about all of those. Before we jump into today's show, many of us wanna live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again.

But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the great meditation teacher Alexis Santos to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm. All

one word spelled out. Okay. On with the show. Hey y'all, it's your girl, Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, singer with the show. Oliver Berkman, welcome back to the show. Thank you very much for the invitation. You have said that you used to be a productivity junkie. In fact, if memory serves the last time you were on the show, you talked about being a productivity junkie. Why were you a productivity junkie and then what changed? Well, the why I could answer on a deep therapy level, maybe we'll get there, but I guess

the simple quick answer is because I thought that I was eventually going to discover the productivity technique or system or set of systems that was going to cause me to finally feel secure and in control of my work and my life and how, you know, things in the realm of work or relationships or finances were no longer going to feel scary because I was going to be in control. And then an equally speedy answer to why did I stop is because if you do that for years and you write a column about it and the Guardian newspaper and you test out huge numbers of such techniques and none of them ever bring you to this place of serenity and security you begin to wonder whether there's a problem with the quest rather than the fact that you haven't found the solution yet. So that was when I sort of began to doubt that this was a sensible way of approaching time, I suppose. So are you now of the belief

that productivity, Nirvana, is unachievable? Either that it's unachievable or that it is defined as giving up the quest for that kind of total control. Like, I do not pretend to be that kind of total control. Like, I do not pretend to be any kind of Buddhist expert, but there is so much overlap. There is so much, to me, anyway, in the experience of sort of seeing through the illusion of where I thought I was going

with all these productivity techniques and what I understand to be some of the illusions that one hopes to see through on a meditative path. I'm sure you get asked this all the time, but I'm going to be one of the annoying interviewers who's going to ask you it nonetheless. Tell me about the title 4,000 weeks. That is very, very roughly the average human lifespan of the average lifespan in the West. You get a bit more than 4,000 weeks on average, but I just wanted to go for the attention grabbing round number.

And obviously on some level, it doesn't even matter because you have no idea whether you're going to get that many or quite a few more. But even if you live to break records for longevity, it only gets into the 6,000s, really. So it's just really a way of driving home my starting point in this book, which is, it only gets into the 6,000s really. So it's just really a way of driving home my starting point in this book, which is, it's finite. It's really finite. The specific number is not the point, but the finiteness of it absolutely is.

So the, to use a loaded word here, because your last book was called the antidote, but the antidote But the antidote to endless productivity, hamster wheel spinning is to see our own finitude and to throw the whole question into a completely different context. Yeah, I think that's a great way of summing it up. There's a sort of potential misunderstanding, I always think, which is that the message is something like life is really short, therefore you've just got to kind of relentlessly pack meaning and value and extraordinary activities into every second of it. That kind of high stress, very self-conscious way

of thinking about the fact that life is short. And I really don't mean that. What I mean, I think, is that a real appreciation of that finitude leads us to give up, or at least somewhat loosen our grip on this notion that we are heading to some place where we are going to be totally capable, fully optimized, able to say yes to everything and meet every obligation that's put upon us, never disappoint anybody, never drop a single ball. When you see exactly how impossible that is, it motivates you to sort of stop trying to do that and spend your time trying to do a few meaningful things instead, I suppose. Okay, so I could think of another pitfall.

The one is that you just mentioned, which is that you relentlessly try to pack meaning into every nanosecond, which would be its own version of frustrating in futile. Another would be, oh, well, life is so short, why even try to do anything? Right, then Nileist alternative. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's a slightly harder to argue against,

but I think that the, I think that, I mean, and this is, right, this goes through, like the why do anything question. I know is one that comes up in sort of Buddhist philosophy, as well. I think the answer to that is something like, what has changed when I remind you that life is short and it is not unlimited? What has actually changed in a concrete way that should mean that you shouldn't spend your life doing things that feel meaningful to you. I think all that's changed is that you're no longer in any illusion that meaning can be defined as something that will last forever, or that you're

going to leave a legacy that seems extraordinary to people several thousand years from now, all these kind of very, very taxing definitions of meaningful, but basically rule out all sorts of things we do with our families and our neighborhoods and you know, every day of our lives. So I guess it's a roundabout way of saying, I don't see why you need that sense of permanence or that sense of eternity in your actions to render the meaningful, that

just seems like a bad criterion for a meaningful life. I should credit the philosopher Idolandao here who influenced my thinking on this a lot. He wrote a book called Finding Meaning in an Imperfect World. And a lot of it is about this kind of really unkind standard of meaning that we often and increasingly perhaps place on ourselves. like the definition of a meaningful life gets harder and harder to meet when, in fact, as I say, I think most of us have that sort of intuitive sense of meaning in like cooking meals for our kids or going on our hike in the countryside, things that clearly seem to add meaning to life, but don't meet the standard of, you know, everyone's going to remember you like Shakespeare in a bunch of centuries. standard of, you know, everyone's going to remember you like Shakespeare and in a bunch of centuries.

It would be unfairly reductive to say that your book starts and ends with the notion of productivity hacks or a recipe for frustration. You just need to remember that life is short. Good night. You actually do. There, there's a lot in here that is practical. And you have a real knack for coming up with compelling ways to phrase these notions that you've come up with. So I'm going to, if it's okay with you, throw some of these phrases you've come up with at you and get you to unpack them if that's okay. Totally. So one of the things you say is that it's not about being more efficient.

It's about knowing what to neglect. Please hold forth on that. Yeah. So I think that, I mean, very conventional approaches to time management and to just using time well are all based around this idea of efficiency. They're all based around this notion that we borrowed from the industrial revolution. Basically, the way to make enough time for what matters is to pack more and more stuff into the same amount of time.

And there are definitely contexts to where efficiency has a role. I'm not sort of against it at all costs. But I think if it is pursued as the way that you are going to get to a meaningful life and a feeling of being on top of everything and a feeling of being the master of your time. It's going to fail because the inputs into the system are effectively infinite right if you get really efficient answering email.

If you get the reputation in your office for being the person who deals with work projects the quickest you just get given more work right there is this kind of. Basically a law that says if you make yourself more efficient and that's all you do, you just get busier because you attract more inputs into the system. Meanwhile, it's never going to be the case that you get around to everything that matters because the set of things that matter, again, it's just sort of limitless. There's no reason to believe that you should have enough time to do all the things that feel like they matter. So this is a kind of hamster wheel quest to get to some point where you've got your arms around it all

that you're in fact never going to succeed in that quest. So once you see that, it becomes obvious that any life, the most meaningful life in the world, the most successfully meaningful life, is going to entail neglecting, not doing huge numbers of things that would have been legitimate uses for your time. And therefore, I think it's good to think about healthy time management as a question of making the best conscious choices about what you're going to neglect, rather than fueling this fantasy that you might get to a point where you didn't have to neglect anything important. So how do you go about the process of figuring out what to neglect? Because that's not easy.

It isn't. And for me, I mean, I can definitely answer this on the level of like, which apps I use and to do lists and things like that. But the fundamental thing for me has been to understand, certainly not perfect at it, but to understand that this not perfect at it, but to understand that this feels uncomfortable, right? If you consciously set out to do a couple of things that really matter today, knowing that there are another 50 that like really need your attention or people who are probably mad at you for not responding to their emails on

time or other things that would be a really important use of your time. That's just a sacrifice. There isn't a way around that and that feels uncomfortable. It triggers anxiety. So I think that the big shift for me was realising that the answer here was not to try to get rid of all my anxiety by becoming omnipotent in terms of productivity, but to learn to live with that anxiety and be a bit friendly towards it, we're upon it to much less troublesome, but it's still there, so that you can move through a given day, focused on a couple of things that you care about, in the full knowledge of the fact that there are lots of other things being neglected. I think we feel on some level like we've got to find a way of handling all this that feels

perfect and realizing that that is never going to happen was very helpful to me. Baking in some level of anxiety as normal, not a problem per se. Right, right. And you know, then that mysterious thing happens where if you bake it in as normal, not a problem per se. Right, right. And you know, then that mysterious thing happens where if you bake it in as normal, actually, it often, you often do feel freed from it to a significant extent. But I think it's something that you've written about and that is probably familiar to anyone who's done any meditation, right? There is a reason to think about accepting negative emotions and isn't the expectation that they're going to get worse in real life. isn't the expectation that they're going to get worse in real life. It's the expectation that there is going to be some measure of freedom

from them in the acceptance that wouldn't be there if you just went into all out war against them. But can't prioritization in and of itself done with some sort of compassionate ruthlessness, reduce anxiety. I mean, I have been engaged in the process of serial divestment from professional responsibilities, quitting first, my job as an anchor of Nightline, now quitting ABC News Alt together, and focusing instead on a few big things. And now I spend most of my time writing my next book and hosting this podcast. And a lot of the anxiety I had about

trying to hold down an anchor job and make my bosses happy about various responsibilities that I had volunteered for at ABC News, it really has evaporated because they're not writing me a paycheck anymore. I don't need to worry about that. And now obviously my circumstances are very specific, but I think for other people, if they have the freedom and flexibility in their life circumstances, not everybody does, to say, okay, I'm going

to pick a few things here and the other things I'm going to just tell everybody, I can't do them. Wouldn't that actually turn down the volume on ambient anxiety? Oh, yeah, totally. I don't think we're saying opposing things. I mean, I'm saying that I think in order to turn down the volume of that ambient anxiety that there are things you ought to be doing that you're not doing, that people are tapping their fingers impatiently on the table waiting for you to do things that you said you do ages ago. You know, to dampen down that anxiety, you need to be willing to step into this

kind of discomfort, at least initially, that involves not doing things, right? So on some level, the fact that you're able, just going to like unsolicitedly, therapies you hear, but like the fact that you're able to step away from those commitments means that you have on some level been able to tolerate the anxiety that might have erupted in anyone doing that, that like, oh no, I'm giving up all sorts of things that I ought to be keeping going at, whether for financial security or for profile or for a million things like that. There is a sense in which you have to sort of move into the truth of finitude. You have to move into the truth that every gain comes with a loss, that there's a trade-off in everything you do.

But no, absolutely. The goal here is some kind of tranquility or serenity with respect to time. I just think that what we're doing when we try to efficiency eyes our way out of that is being unwilling to even move through that initial phase of sort of accepting losses in order to focus on what we care about the most. Maybe it's two different kinds of anxiety. Well, yes, I will certainly agree that there are many flavors of anxiety. It's like

baskin robins. I'm in the process of tasting them all. I mean, I have one of the things I do in the book. I'm really an ice-threader, and I'm just going to do it anyway. Is I try to learn something from the philosophy of Heidegger, which is doubly problematic because it's really hard to understand and he was literally an artsy, but he really did sort of address this topic of living in finitude, and I wonder if Heideggerians would say that there is the kind of anxiety that comes from trying to escape our limited situation, trying to sort of get to a place we'll never reach through becoming capable of doing everything and in control of reality when in fact we're just on a glide path to our death from the moment we're born.

And then there's the kind of anxiety that is the anxiety associated with like stepping authentically into reality and being sort of clear-eyed about it, but not expecting that to feel absolutely great all the time. Yes, and I would say there are even more. No, no doubt. I was going to hold this question, but I think we've kind of put us in a position of needing to address it now. We've gotten some useful feedback, or I specifically, we've gotten some pretty tough, but useful feedback about the fact that when we talk on the show about time management or productivity or making your work life

sayener that there's quite a bit of, I don't love this word, just because it is kind of loaded culturally, but privilege, or you might say, luck that is unacknowledged on my end. The advice that my guests sometimes bring and that I often sort of endorse or resonate with is geared toward people who've got flexibility and financial security, but that obviously is a pretty thin slice of the population.

And so I'm just wondering, have you wrestled with that? And do you feel pretty comfortable that what you have recommended thus far and will continue to discuss as we go through this interview? Really is applicable to folks beyond this sort of, let's say, one to five percent. Yeah, I think it's a really good and really important question and I have grapple with it. And I think it divides into two layers for me. There's no doubt that like the examples that I draw on and the specific techniques that I suggest come from my experience, come from

being someone who does have a lot of flexibility over how I divide up my time and when I focus on what. I do honestly believe that the sort of underlying principles here are sort of timeless and universal and that was really what I was going at all the way through trying to, you know, make this but work, was to make sure that level of it was coherent. It's this very thorny issue I often encounter actually. Certain things are easy for me to say, but I actually think they're also true. And then it's a thorny situation because absolutely there's a sense of saying, well, like, oh, just don't answer all your email if you're getting an impossible amount. And then it's very easy to think of counter cases where not answering a certain volume of email

means you lose your job and you can't feed your family. There's, and that's just one example you obviously get as far worse than that. The basic point I want to make about overwhelm and limitation is that if you are in a situation where impossible demands are being placed on you, then those demands are impossible. And you are not going to fulfill them all. And if you're lucky, those impossible demands are going to be that you've got like too many exciting ambitions for your life, too many interesting business ventures you'd like to launch, too many wonderful exotic locations you'd like to visit. And if

you're much less fortunate, those impossible demands are going to be that you have to work more hours in the day than is compatible with being a minimally satisfied that you're doing a good job of parenting or it's going to be having to deal with people making impossible demands on you at work who can fire you if they don't think you're meeting those demands. But at the end of the day, if they're genuinely impossible, they're still impossible. And that's something we all are going to have to grapple with in terms of how we then use our time best. And it's going to be easier for some people to grapple with it than others. but I think it is going to be important

for everyone to grapple with it. If only to achieve a kind of psychological freedom from that situation, right? The implication of what I'm trying to argue in the book is not that most people will want to sort of walk away from their jobs and go and live, you know, stunning, setting in the mountains and change their lives completely. It's a question of that sort of more extreme thing that's associated with existentialist philosophy, I guess, where you see the reality of the situation and you obtain some kind of freedom from it, even if only an internal freedom, because you see that trying to get to a point where you can do the impossible is never going to bring happiness. Let me see if I can restate it back to you. You're acknowledging that there are many people who don't have flexibility.

They can't set the pace of their own work, the flow of their own work. They don't have power within their organization or don't feel comfortable speaking up. And so there might not be much they can do, but there is an internal shift they can make, which is to give themselves a break and to see that they are in an impossible situation and don't add a layer of beating themselves up for not being able to keep up with what are impossible demands. Exactly. And none of this says, and it's therefore okay that we live in a society where people have jobs like that, right? Where people are obliged to take jobs like that or be in an economic situation like that. There is this critique of all self-help from the left, which I've

made myself and plenty of occasions that anything that seeks to bring peace of mind to people in unjust situations is ultimately doing something ideological about preserving those unjust situations. And I hope it's clear in the text of the book that like none of this says we don't need significant policy changes to address the issues of overwhelm and all sorts of other cultural economic changes. But my interest has always been in saying like meanwhile you have this crazy to-do list for tomorrow and like you've got to have some kind of relationship to it. And I think the relationship that involves beating yourself up and not being able to effectively make two plus two

out up to five, beating yourself up for the fact that there will be trade-offs and that something will give in that situation. You can let go of that at least. That well said, let me go back to some of your phrases used that I like. You talk about patience as a superpower and it's

opposite, you call the impatience spiral. Can you say more about that? Yeah, this has been a huge discovery for me personally because I do not think I am a naturally patient person at all, but I think that one of the key ways that we try to get to this position of being on top of everything and feeling secure with respect to our time and all the rest of everything and feeling secure with respect to our time and all the rest of it is by sort of trying to hurry the pace, trying to force the pace of reality. And it fails, obviously, because reality has its own pace, and it fails, because even to the extent that you can make things go faster, it's not going to get you to sort of escape velocity where you

it's not going to get you to sort of escape velocity where you can sort of do absolutely everything instantaneously all the time. And so there's a huge concrete benefit, I think, psychological, but also in terms of productivity and professional advantage and all the rest of it in being able to let things take the time they take. I'm influenced in this by Jennifer Roberts, who's an artist or in a Harvard University, who has this terrifying exercise, which you make certain new students, she's a painting, and go and sit and look at it for three hours solid, which I did

as part of the research with this book. And just in order to understand that there are experiences that we can only benefit from if we don't try to dictate their pace, that once upon a time we might have thought about patients, this is Robert's point as well, once upon a time we might have thought about patients as something that sort of people without power were told they had to try to cultivate so that they could reconcile themselves to the fact that they just their social role was to be downtrodden or something like that. But now in an accelerating society, patients actually becomes a form of control.

It becomes the ability to resist the omnipresent cultural pressure to go faster and faster and faster. And I think it can give you a professional edge and a competitive edge as well as more peace of mind to tolerate, again, the discomfort that is involved in not being able to make everything go at the pace you want it to go. And really the impatient spiral is just the sort of flip side of that.

This idea that you sort of move really fast, you feel busy and stressed as a result of moving really fast. You're cutting corners as a result of moving really fast. You're getting frustrated because the first you go, it doesn't ever seem to get you to this place of everything being in control. So all you can do then to think of is to go even faster. And so you just sort of end up at warp speed, extremely stressfully, unhealthily, racing through your life with no time for yourself, or the people you care about, or the projects that you care about. Just to go back where we're talking about a moment ago, what if you work for somebody or for an organization where the impatient spiral is just baked into

the equation? You can have as much patience as you can humanly muster, but if you're in a situation where nobody's giving you the time to do your work with any level of thought, how do you manage that? Well, again, I suppose we're back to this question of people having a different room from a newver in terms of making changes to their circumstances, but the same at least potential degree of psychological freedom from seeing what's really going on. So somebody in that position might be able to leave their job. Somebody in that position might be able to exert a patient counter pressure from within the organization. They might be able to refuse to patient counter pressure from within the organization,

they might be able to refuse to some extent to go at that pace and to deliver results that are superior as a result, or to show that the wheels don't come off when emails are responded to in 24 hours rather than one hour. And somebody with a least room for a new ver might simply have to understand that fully buying into this way of being, getting on board, the impatience roller coaster and trying to make things go as fast as possible, was never going to bring them the satisfaction that seems implied by it. So then there's at least the theoretical possibility, again, easy for me to say, to be a calmer mind inside a culture like that, simply by not having bought into the broken logic at the heart of it. Coming up, Oliver Berkman on the benefits of burning bridges, why it's so hard to be present, and what to do about the so-called water-melon

problem right after this? Life is short and it's full of a lot of interesting questions. What does happiness really mean? How do I get the most out of my time, you're on earth? And what really is the best cereal? These are the questions I seek to resolve on my weekly podcast, Life is short with Justin Long. If you're looking for the answer to deep philosophical questions like, what is the meaning of life? I can't really help you, but I do believe that we really enrich

our experience here by learning from others. And that's why in each episode, I like to talk with actors, musicians, artists, scientists, and many more types of people about how they get the most out of life. We explore how they felt during the highs and sometimes more importantly, the lows of their careers. We discuss how they've been able to stay happy during some of the harder times, but if I'm being honest, it's mostly just fun chats between friends

about the important stuff. Like if you had a sandwich named after you, what would be on it? Follow Life is short wherever you get your podcasts. You can also listen to Add Free on the Amazon Music or Wondering app. Another phrase of yours, the benefits of burning bridges. What do you mean by that? I mean, all the things I guess are in this book are just the different ways in which we try to maintain this fantasy of total control over time or that we're going to get there one day or that we're going to find a way to get our lives in full working order. And I think that again, maybe

this is just a sort of ex-commitment fob talking, but in keeping your options open, in refusing to commit to things, career paths, relationships, anything, there is that feeling, isn't there, that you retain the control because you haven't allowed yourself to quote one famous union, psychological, you shouldn't quite allow yourself to be pinned down to sort of enter your life completely, you're sort of holding back, you could walk away from anything at any moment and it feels like you're maintaining the control of the situation. But because time just keeps on marching on, if you do that for very long, you end up using up large chunks of your life that you'll never get back, just holding back from life. So burning bridges,

making a reversible commitment is a counterforce to that because it acknowledges your limitation. It says I only have one life to live at some point. I have to go all in with something. It sacrifices this lovely feeling of being in control because you haven't committed to anything. And what you get in return is to enter more fully into the real experience of being alive while you still are. So ended a little bit gloomily, sorry. But this takes courage because foreclosing opportunities is not the way many of us are wired. We want to keep our options open. That keeping of options open can make us feel like our anxiety can go down because well, this doesn't work. I got this other thing cooking.

Yeah, absolutely. So, it is that kind of a voidant anti-anxiety method instead of that sort of stepping into an authentic way of life, form of managing anxiety. Yeah, I mean, what you find, though, of course, I feel like most people can probably point to examples in their own lives, is that once you can bring yourself to make a commitment, the experience of stepping into it is often the very best antidote to anxiety because having burnt the bridges, having cut off the other options, there's no longer that anxiety about whether you should be doing something different because you can't do something different and so you just can only go forwards into the consequences of your choice. There's a really famous study that Daniel Gilbert and

some other people did at Harvard whereby people who got to choose a painting to take home with them were much happier with the painting if they were told that they had no choice to change it as opposed to the group of people who were told that like they had three months to decide if they wanted to swap it for another painting because you're just there, it's just it. You got it. So now you've got to make the best of it. And that's actually all we're doing always, right? Because you are actually cutting off options and burning bridges with sort of every moment of existence. It's just that we don't like the times when we're doing it consciously and we're aware of doing it, I guess.

Well, you are throughout this interview and throughout your book, pushing people to live their lives fully at the only time that is ever available to us, which is right now. And yet you do, in fairness, point out that it is hard to be in the vanted present moment. So I'd love to hear your thoughts about how hard it is and why it's so hard and what we can do about it. Yeah, I mean, I've spent enough time sort of just thinking that the idea here was to sort of make yourself be more aware of everything that was happening to you in that very moment. And I write in the book about trying to do this when I saw the Northern Lights in the Arctic Circle.

And you know, one of those moments where you try really, really hard to be in the moment because like, this isn't gonna happen again in it's a, or to you anyway. And it's amazing. And as a result of that, just becoming completely mad in self-consciousness, questioning myself as to whether I was being present

enough in the moment, which pops you right out of the moment. And literally having the thought that the Northern Lights looked like one of those old-fashioned green screen computer screen savers, like taking this wonder and diminishing it about as far as it's possible to diminish it, through the effort, apparently, of trying to be present there. I mean, I don't have a sort of final settled view of all this, but I think that you have to get to this place through sort of, you know, the via negative as they call it in theology and some philosophy. It's not a question of sort of forcing yourself to be in the moment. It's more a question of understanding that you don't really have any option but to be in the moment. So I think what I'm doing, if this book works,

is trying to sort of help clear away, in me as well, absolutely, a whole bunch of illusions and mistakes that get in the way of how we could be and how we could live. But then you just sort of have to let that happen. If you try to sort of follow that with a very sort of proactive, will attempt to be here now, I think that just ends up being more ego, basically. And I don't know how that can really work. It's more about understanding that all attempts to try and escape the moment are utterly absurd than it is trying to figure out ways to be in the moment with capital letters. Let me see if I can do an alternate reading on your Northern Lights moment. I love the screensaver thing. Maybe the barrier to being in the moment then was that you were not just trying to be in

the moment, you were trying to enjoy the moment. That's forcing on a whole different level. Whereas if you just relaxed into, oh, look at what my mind is doing. It's comparing this natural beauty to the most mundane aspect of my work life, which is the screensaver. Well, that was actually what was happening at that moment, and you could have just relaxed into what was naturally arising instead of what you were hoping to force into reality. And maybe that would have been the route to accessing the moment.

Yeah, I can see that. And I think that would be, you know, in the spirit of the best sort of mindfulness, wouldn't it, to be non-judgmental about what was arising and to sort of feel it on a level that was more than intellectual? Yeah, I think that's true. I think that one of the things

that's probably going on for me in this book and for those with whom it resonates is I'm sort of a very Left brain if that is an acceptable way to talk about this, you know, very sort of cerebral intellect first kind of person trying to use the methods of the left brain to basically pop myself through into the right brain. So I always have had a lot of difficulty with the kind of meditation that just asks me to be a different kind of person

that asks me to not use my intellect first, that asks me to just sort of be mindful of my emotions and of physical sensations and things like that. But I've had quite a lot of success and I think this is something that Zen probably does, although I don't really know what I'm talking about, in sort of pushing the intellectual thing so far that it collapses and you sort of have to just enter

into this more real thing. So I think that's my sort of preferred route to some of these insights, but it doesn't mean they're onto other ones. Well, there are two people in this conversation who don't know what they're talking about when it comes to Zen, but have you said that I believe in Zen they have something called a koan, KO-O-A-N, which is a question like what's the

sound of one hand clapping that is unanswerable, but you then dedicate yourself to using your workling at left brain or discursive mind to tackle this unanswerable question. And at some point, the mind completely just cracks in a healthy way and you drop out of all of this thinking. I understand what you're saying that you're reading on most of the meditation instructions has been like to make bad your natural perclivity for intellectualization. I actually think the real answer is just kind of see that that's happening in any given moment and don't fight it. It's kind of like back to the Northern Lights. It's when you're either dealing with the classic meditation hindrance of desire,

which is desiring to be so happy and blissful in this moment, which can get in the way, or the classic meditation hindrance of a version, which is feeling a verse of vis-a-vis your screen-saver observation. And really, it's just continually training the mind to relax back into whatever is happening right now. You have to do that a million times, several million times, but that is meditation. That is mindfulness waking up over and over and over again.

I don't know if I'm making any sense, but that's my response. You're totally making sense. I wonder if there are approaches that are better suited to different personalities or if there are just things that I'm still missing about the sort of underlying essence of sort of mindfulness approaches. For me, the fast path to entering into a different relationship with life has always been apparently, it's not very fast actually, but it's the one that's fastest for me, has always been to exhaust the possibilities of the one that I'm on to pursue that so far that it's logic just starts to shake and then falls down. And yeah, I think that's what comes naturally to me, but I don't think it means it's, yeah, by no means the only way I'm doing it. So I totally understand what you're saying. I don't know if

I can feel my way into it, but I understand it. For sure, there are many, many ways into this. And it really is about what works best for you. I mean, there are so many schools of meditation, so many schools of Buddhism and Hinduism. And obviously, there's meditation in the Abrahamic faiths too, so there are lots of ways into this. And I have no criticism of the one you've chosen. And now that we're on the subject of being in the present moment, I think it may be a good place to bring up distraction, which you do talk about in the book. You use the phrase, the watermelon problem.

What do you mean by that? I'm just facetiously referring to this famous event. What was it, probably six years ago now, when Buzzfeed had a couple of reporters gone Facebook live and put rubber bands around a watermelon one by one over 45 minutes, until 600 and something rubber bands that it exploded, and that was the end of the Facebook live. And millions of people either live or shortly afterwards in a recording were deeply compelled by this. I probably would have been, if I'd known that it was happening that day.

You look at the comments they were leaving on Facebook, it wasn't exactly that they wanted to be compelled by it, but that they couldn't not. And so I'm just using it to illustrate this point, that very little of what we're talking about here about making the best use of time means anything if we can't grapple with this phenomenon whereby our attention apparently chooses to go to things or is common did by things that are absolutely not how we intend to just spend our time that day. I think it's a safe assumption nobody woke up that day thinking what I'd really like to do is spend 45 minutes watching people put rubber bands around a watermelon and that's just

it's just interesting. It's just a way into thinking about distraction and while again I think there's an awful lot to be said about the ways that our attention has been common-dead and commodified in the modern world. There's also this really interesting point to me anyway that we kind of choose to be distracted. We kind of collaborate with all these platforms that steal our attention. It's not quite stealing because when I sort of switch my attention from the article I'm trying to write that's become difficult and scroll through my phone instead, I'm doing that willingly with relief. There's something in me that wants to be

distracted, and that was what I was sort of focused on exploring in that part of the book. So you're saying there's not necessarily something bad about doing this. We don't need to beat ourselves up for our desire for distraction. I think that's what you're saying if I'm right. And is that what you mean by the notion of, and this is another phrase of yours, becoming a better procrastinator? Yeah, I'm trying to say that, no, we shouldn't feel bad about it, but it's very useful to see what's going on. Because I think if you just think about distraction as a question of external assaults on your attention, and that is true, but I think if you think about that as the only

thing, then you're going to think that you can solve the problem through some combination of willpower and apps that block your access to social media, or, you know, unplugging your Wi-Fi and going and living on the top of the mountain. In fact, when you see that we willingly succumb to temptation, and if you agree with me that the reason we do that is because meaningful, important activities bring us into a sort of

comfortable confrontation with our limitations, whereas distraction lets us go off into this limitless realm of sort of the internet or whatever else it might be, you're moving away from the call face of actually trying to sort of do important and usually difficult or intimidating things. If you see that that's what's going on, there's actually some release from it. It's a bit like the anxiety we were talking about earlier. You begin to see that, yeah, when I sit down to write and it feels hard to me or intimidating or even boring, like the reason for those negative emotions is deeply connected to the fact that I'm trying to

do something I really care about, whether stakes are somewhat high and I can have no certainty that I'll do it well or that people will receive it well or anything like that. So once you're like, oh, okay, it's going to feel like that. That's actually really helpful because then you don't treat it as an emergency that needs instant numbing by means of social media or something. You're just like, yeah, this is the experience of writing. And actually, that is when you can sometimes move past that into a sort of pure flow state where it's absolutely beautiful and wonderful and feels great, but you have to be sort of willing to accept that things that matter to you, that bring you up against your edges, I'm using writing because it comes so naturally to me to use that example,

but there are many, many others, not all of them at work, they're not going to feel comfortable necessarily. There's no reason why you should expect that. So the yearning for distraction can be viewed not as some sort of failure on your end, but as a sign that you are working on something you care about. And if you just learn to relax into that discomfort and reframe it, you might not then go watch somebody explode a watermelon. I mean, in some sense, it's a failure, right? If your intentions for your day are being replaced with things that you don't value, I mean, on some level, you've got to say that's a failure, but it's not because you're weak-willed or because you haven't found the right apps to stop you being distracted. It's just a sort of,

it's the most understandable and forgivable kind of failure of all, which is just that like doing things that bring us up against our limits as finite humans, with finite time and finite control over our time and all the rest of it. Yeah, it's hard and you certainly shouldn't beat yourself up for preferring to do easy things than hard things. But armed with the insight that that's what's happening, maybe you can steal yourself to keep going with some of the hard things and not be so ready to slide off into the easy ones. You managed to finish a whole book. You know, at a moment to moment basis, what are you doing in order to actually get stuff done?

One of the things that was big breakthrough, probably a little bit before I started writing this book, but it's been a big breakthrough in my writing sort of process, has been this idea not only that I, apparently I'm not spending eight hours a day writing, but that I shouldn't even be aiming at that as some sort of perfectionistic far-off future goal. That two or three hours of focus on something that is, you know, genuinely as hard as writing, it sounds so indulgent, obviously, you know, we're not down the minds when we're sitting at our laptop, sipping coffee. But there's something hard about it, and expecting more than two or three hours of that of myself in any given twenty-four-hour period is sort of unrealistic and the result of acknowledging that and accepting that is more productivity. It's more words. I'm not saying that there aren't people. I think there are people who binge-right successfully, but I think they're in a small minority. If that's you, I wanna know, but I think that for vast majority of people,

keeping the thing that is the most important to you in your work, if you have, again, if you have the flexibility, of course, this is always implicit, keeping it as a relatively modest part of your overall day is really important in stopping it becoming this kind of intimidating thing you then don't wanna do. There was this academic Robert Boyce

who did all this amazing work on the psychology of academic writers. And he found, you know, firstly, that the ones who produced the most made writing a sort of modest part of their lives. It didn't become this kind of huge thing that they were trying to spend all day on. And secondly, and this is a really good little tactic. They wrote in these short periods, maybe at the very beginning getting yourself out of a deep procrastinatory rut, it would be 10 minutes, but maybe it's more like two or three hours for somebody who's in the swing of things. And when they got to the end of that period, even if they were on a roll, they got up and walked away, they stopped, they made themselves stop, even though it felt like moving forward further, would be the best way to cover more ground. And I can go into

why I think that is, it's to do with patience, it's to do with not trying to feel like you've got to sort of hurry the thing to a conclusion. But that tactic alone has helped me to ask my wife if you think it's made me sort of livable with in the middle of book writing. That's a sort of separate question. I'm not saying it's made me completely serene about writing, but that technique of stopping when a time that I had planned to sit down for is up. It's really helped make writing something that I look forward to coming back to day after day, instead of something where you maybe get through eight hours,

you maybe even produce a huge number of words in that time. And then for the next five days, you can't go back to your laptop with the aggregate result that you have not done very much at all over that period. So actually, I just do want to go back to this idea of becoming a better procrastinator because no matter what you do, you may find that procrastination is an issue whether you're right or not. What do you mean by being a better procrastinator? I think there's a good kind of procrastination and a bad kind of procrastination, but there is no such thing as a life of no procrastination. So you can let go of that,

and it's fine. Like, if you're worried that you should be procrastinating, forget it. Because being finite means that there are always going to be a million projects, or maybe not a million, but like there's going to be a whole bunch of projects that you could be moving forward on in principle, but that you are neglecting today this week this month. And if that's the definition of procrastination, then the way to think about that is how do I make the best choice about what to neglect, rather than how do I manage to get to a place where I'm not neglecting anything important and in the meantime beating myself up for all the things I'm neglecting. So when you see that these trade-offs are just built in, I think that that enables you to actually sort of set what, and this is a Peter Drucker called posteriories, right? The opposite of priorities deciding on what is going to not be addressed today, this quarter, whatever,

because you understand that something has to be in that category and the only question is whether you're going to be aware of that or whether it's just going to happen by default or according to some other person's agenda or something like that. So in that sense, I think procrastination is endemic and doing it well means making conscious choices about what to focus on and the much larger category at any moment of what to neglect. Then I think there's the kind of bad procrastination which is totally failing to make progress

on things that you deeply care about that you're one of your sort of number one priorities in life, maybe your absolute number one priority, but not doing it. Again, usually because there's something very comfortable and safe about not actually starting things. You get to feel in control of a project if you haven't started bringing it out into the world where it runs up against the limits of your abilities or the limits of whether anyone else cares that you're doing it or a million other limitations. And so that kind of procrastination where you know, you know that something is central to what you want to do, but you want to keep it pristine.

And that means keeping it pristine, keeping it pristine means not actually making it real. That's bad procrastination according to my highly scientific taxonomy of procrastination. Coming up, we'll talk to Oliver about surrendering to communal time, deciding in advance what to fail at, and the concept of cosmic insignificance therapy. After this. In the book you talk about the rediscovery of rest, what is that to you? What is rest to you? This was a really interesting bit for me to think about and sort of pretty challenging

for me personally to try to explore because I think that one of the effects of a sort of fixation on being productive and using time well in this efficiency-oriented way that is so endemic in the culture of the economy everywhere, is that you start to think that leisure time has to be productive too. You start to think that the measure of whether you are doing something good with your non-work time is whether you're learning a new skill or recovering and recuperating so that you can be good at work the next day or getting fitter and stronger so that you can keep doing lots of impressive accomplishments in your life at some later date. And I just wanted to contrast that to the certainly in the sort of understanding

of rest and leisure in ancient philosophy, but lots of other places too, that it's sort of, it's only true leisure in some sense if it is for itself. If you're doing it because in that moment of doing it, there is some reward in the experience of doing it rather than that it's been become instrumentalized for some other purpose. Because of course, if you instrumentalize every moment of your life, the work and the rest, if you're always measuring the benefits of what you're doing, the value of what you're doing by where it's taking you, there's this fundamental sense in which you're, you, you never live, right? That you, that all the meaning in life is some other time.

And like, again, I'm writing a someone who suffered acutely from this for decades and still suffers from it to some extent today and was trying to sort of write myself out of it, out of this mindset in the book. But I think it's really interesting to realize that in some sense, the things that we'd find these days as wasting time are precisely the things that you do for the pleasure and the moment and the enjoyment in the moment. And that's really screwed up because, like, that's the opposite of wasting time, if you think about it, a bit more deeply, I mean.

So what do you do now that you might have considered wasting time? There are specific things, you know, I write in the book about hobbies and hobbies versus side hustles. So side hustles are really kind of cool because they are instrumentalised and they're about making money or building a career. but hobbies are really kind of embarrassing and unfashionable because I argue because they just are for themselves alone. And so I've really doubled down on just like hiking. This is helps now that we live in the countryside.

This is a very specific thing and I'm very fortunate to be able to do it, but like, so I have, I have doubled down on just sort of being kind of aimlessly in natural environments and it sounds kind of lovely or slackerish or something, but it's not easy, actually, for anyone who's kind of driven, right, to just sort of spend an hour wandering around somewhere, not accomplishing anything, like that's, or not feeling like you're accomplishing anything, that's a hard, it's very rewarding in the end, but it's weirdly hard to do something that sounds so sort of easy. And then the other thing is that it changes the quality of experiences that you are already having, and I'm not any sort of point of perfection with this, but the experience of being a parent of a small child is radically different for me or partly the experience of becoming

the parent of a small child was what triggered the shift, but it's radically different and better to the extent that I can let go of, you know, am I doing things right? Is this moving in a direction that it should move? Is this a healthy activity that we're doing? Is this good learning? Is that benchmarks being met? All of that stuff is just the pure enemy of that relationship being fulfilling for both parties, I think. I agree as a father of a small child, and also somebody who's conditioning all runs toward optimization and maximization, learning to do things for the sake of it. That has been a process for me as well. And I suspect you and I are not alone on this. The cool thing is that kids are generally really good at it, naturally. So that the sort of master key,

when I'm not in this mode and need to try to snap out of my other mode, the sort of master key is just to let yourself be led, so you'll hear what he wants to do, basically. I mean, they're led to this if it just involves lighting fires. I scream fires and hours of screen time. But broadly speaking, it's amazing often that isn't what, like, that is often what's wanted in response to my slightly dictatorial supposedly exciting plans for the day. But if I don't have those supposedly exciting plans for the day. But if I don't have those supposedly exciting plans for the day,

the day that can emerge is very often pretty great. I've seen this a thousand times. Yes, and it's nice to hear you are just articulated and crystallize it. In terms of getting more rest, I believe you also talk about this notion of kind of the social regulation of time or surrendering to communal time, what's that about? This is such an interesting one and it's kind of politically thorny in a way because one thing that I found, as I look more deeply into this, is that both looking at history and looking around the world today, you find that there are these huge payoffs in terms of a sense of meaning in life and happiness

for those communities where people don't have quite so much freedom about when they do certain things, about when they can go shopping, about when they're supposed to be working or not working. And this comes with huge caveats and qualifications about, especially about historical periods where it's been sort of very unequal and unjust, who's had the freedom and who hasn't especially about historical periods where it's been sort of unequal and unjust, who's had the freedom and who hasn't and all the rest of it. But, you know, countries where they have traditions where basically everyone is on vacation for like the same three weeks in August are happier, not just because they have more vacation than Americans get to say, but because it's synchronized, because it's at the same time, and there are some fairly obvious reasons for this, if you kind of think it through, right? You get to be on vacation

with your friends and family. You get to not worry that your email inbox is filling up behind your back while you're at the office. And then, you know, if you want to sort of push the point, you get into various religious traditions of Sabbath, right? In Judaism and Christianity, it's not just that you're supposed to take a day off a week, it's that it's got to be the same day because so much of what we actually end up valuing in how a use time comes from it being shared with other people. There's no real benefit to having all the time in the world if nobody else is able to share it with you in the way you'd like. And yet we know we have this kind of ethos today I would say in Britain and America anyway, that the perfect goal would be like the ideal

would be to have total autonomy over your time. It's even been a little bit implicit in some of the conversations we've been having here that like high privilege and high good fortune is getting up in the morning and it being up to you when you do what. And they're actually huge downsides to this. And the people who take it to the extreme, you know, so-called digital nomads who just sort of pick up with a laptop and go and run their internet business from a beach somewhere. Tons of them are like really lonely because they've taken themselves outside of these patterns and these rhythms that are so important it turns out for our sense of meaning. At the very end of the book, you do get

quite tactical and there are a few pointers in your sort of concluding list that I thought in our remaining moments might be worth dwelling on. One of your pointers is to adopt a fixed volume approach to productivity. What is that? I guess that's my name from perspective that I associate most closely, I guess with Karl Newport, his red book's, A Deep Work and Digital Minimilism. And the way I would describe that is,

is just as an approach to productivity that focuses first on the available time and how much time you plan to give to your work and secondarily to the tasks. So in other words, it is a matter of beginning the day by taking a clear look at what stretches of time you have to give to the work in front of you, and then making choices about what to put inside that fixed volume of time that otherwise is one possible, given that doing everything is not possible. As opposed to beginning the day with a list of like 25 things that you tell yourself you absolutely have to get done today, a list that you won't get through that will be like 20 items longer by the end of the day, probably, plus it'll be half plus 11 at night,

and you'll be sort of completely drained and flirting with burnout. So it's just that idea of looking first at the time that is available, instead of sort of assuming that the time available can always be endlessly either extended or made more efficient. And if you've got the freedom to do it, this is why it's a great idea to sort of work backwards from a time in the day after which you are not going to do any work. You know, if you're in the position to say six o'clock is when I stop, then everything sort of falls into place up to that time in terms of choosing what to do the day much more readily than if you're just sort of racing through trying to get to the end of a list that actually just keeps getting longer. Right. And again, I appreciate you emphasizing the fact that not everybody has this opportunity, but many people do. Another thing you've discussed is serialization.

Right. Again, it's all to do with different people having different amount of room from the new ver here, but again, it's to the extent possible, queuing up your projects, doing one, maybe two, at the same time, focusing on just that many until they're completed, making the other ones, and then only then moving on to the next one. So one way to sort of implement this is to say, you could experiment if you have this possibility

to have like, we just one major goal in each domain of your life, right? Maybe there's only one thing you're gonna try to do with regard to your physical fitness at the moment or your home. And if possible, you might take this approach with your work. I think you almost everyone has to adapt it to some extent with their work as opposed to trying to sort of be led by what feels important and say, well, I've just at the moment, I've just got to focus on all these things because they all feel important. Instead, it's the understanding that like more things are always going to feel important.

Then you have the time to do. And if you try to do them all at once, you'll actually make slower progress because you'll just bounce off from each one. And ever one feels difficult, you'll just bounce off onto the next one instead. And if you can tolerate the anxiety that comes from making most of them wait while you do one or two of them actually in the long run. You'll get through far more of them anyway and you'll do it without this frenetic sense of trying to scramble to the top of an infinitely tall heap of obligations. This notion of tolerating anxiety in order to stave off an even worse kind of anxiety is I really like it. Another thing you talk

about is deciding in advance what to fail at. You have two great little phrases that you use, your strategic underachievement and failing on a cyclical basis. Right. The insight here is just that you are going to make things like that. You're going to fail at certain things at any given time, but you're going to not excel in certain roles at any given time just because there's always gonna be more to do than you can do. And there's a lot of agency and quite a lot of serenity in where you can deciding first and in advance

what those things are going to be. So sort of failing on a cyclical basis is might be the approach of saying, look, I want to be a great sort of employee of this company and I want to be a great parent, but I am the parent of a newborn child, so I'm going to absolutely forgive myself for getting away with the absolute minimum work

for the next, you know, however long it is. Hopefully not 18 years. This is why maybe the cycle should be a little bit, there should be, it should be a little bit shorter than that. And I think likewise, you know, I think it will be totally defensible for a sort of young professional at the beginning of their career to not seek, again, not to seek balance, not to seek this notion that you're doing plenty of things outside of work, maybe going all in on your career and just accepting that you're not gonna sort of develop

various other sides of your personality for a while is likewise something that you can sort of embrace. I give a very, I have given in the past a very sort of trivial example and I know it is a bit trivial, but it's true, which is like, there's a part of me that really wants to be able to cook well and absolutely can't.

And I think I can like, And I think I can put together acceptably nutritious meals for the family, but they are not great. I don't understand most cookery. And I would genuinely like to be a lot better at that, but it just seemed like such an obvious example as my, as I became a father and my work got busier in certain ways.

It's just like, that is so obviously one of those things that is not going to happen. And it's great if you decide in advance that that is not going to happen because then when it doesn't happen, you're not usually disappointed, right? So it's okay to be the kind of person who has just decided that the house is not going to be very tidy, this quarter, maybe this year, or that the garden is not going to be well kept, or that, or even that you're

going to, like, sure, do the basics you have to do to keep yourself physically fit. I don't think you should abandon that entirely, but maybe, like, this isn't the season when you train for the half marathon. And that's okay. And you decided in advance. And then when it doesn't happen, it's like, yeah, it didn't happen because I was focusing on something else. I like that. We have time for maybe one or two more here. Focus on what you've already completed, not just on what's left to complete. Yeah, I love this because I think that, well, maybe again, this is me, but I have spent

a lot of my life feeling like I'm in some sort of existential productivity debt, you know, that I need to get a certain amount done with a certain consistency, really just in order to justify my existence or something. There's a big self-worth element to this in my background. Now obviously if you're in a paid position, you are in a certain kind of productivity debt, you're getting paid to do something and you have to do those things. But this existential layer, I think we can really strive to let go of in one of the ways that I found, so useful was this incredibly simple intervention of just keeping another list, keeping a list of things that I had done with my day that got longer as I completed them, as I completed things, you know, so that it just sort of shifted my focus a bit to the idea of like, well, okay, maybe I don't start the day in sort of existential productivity debt. Maybe I start the day at zero balance, and I'm just adding things to my account, and maybe that's fine.

And anyone listening who's sort of familiar with Christian, especially probably Protestant Christian, ideas here, may recognize in this, you know, it's this idea of like salvation through works. It's this idea that by doing enough, you're going to justify yourself, and you really need to work hard, endlessly hard, in order to be enough and be okay. And the counter-argument to that within the Christian tradition is divine grace, right? It's this idea that you're already fine, you're already justified, you're already saved, you're already accepted, and then you do a bunch of stuff sure because you want to express the wonder of this situation through doing good works, but you don't have to

do anything in order to justify your right to be here. So that is the very melodramatic and grandiose justification for keeping a list of tasks that you have completed. I really like it and I really resonate with this notion of the, as you call it, the existential layer, the worthiness aspect here. There's another phrase, we're not gonna get to all of them by any means because there's so many great little turns

of phrase you've come up with in the course of the book, but there is another one that I wonder if this is what you're pointing at here. You talk about cosmic insignificance therapy. Is that an intervention to cut against this tying of our productivity to our self-worth? Yeah, I guess I think it is. It comes from a slightly different angle, but this is the idea that there might be something beneficial and freeing and uplifting about really understanding how completely insignificant each one of us is, that that isn't

necessarily a recipe for despair and the feeling of like, why do you anything, but is the lifting of a burden that was stopping you doing important and meaningful things with your life. I mean, you know, one risk sounding like inadvert is inadvertently revealing oneself as a megalomaniac here, but I think it is not just megalomaniacs who have this kind of quite burdensome egocentric assumption that the choices they make are really, really important and that it matters incredibly whether they go in this direction or that direction at various choice points in life. And a lie to that, there's this whole sort of assumption that we often sort of have unthinkingly that all of history was leading up to the bit where we happen to be alive, right? And then the pressure's really on because this is the most real bit of time there's ever been

and you've got to use it in a way that is worthy of that. And all of this can be so paralyzing. I think it can really get people sort of stuck in the idea that they've got to, you know, find their one passion and be absolutely exceptional at it or something. And if you think instead, well, like the choice that I face today that feels like a huge dilemma is going to be completely irrelevant, probably to me in six months' time in my life, that's one aspect, but certainly to, you know, civilization in a century or two, I think that can actually free you up, not to say, well, I'm completely insignificant, so what's the point? But, like, this wonderful phrase, like, you might as

well, so then you might as well do the bold thing. You don't need to think about the risk you're taking as Determining the future of the cosmos. You just need to be like well I might as well do the thing that feels like it really matters to me The thing that is a little bit scary, but I think we'll Will be something that I'll always be glad that I did you can just do it because it like doesn't matter as much as you thought it did always be glad that I did. You can just do it because it doesn't matter as much as you thought it did. That's a kind of counterintuitively rousing sentiment

upon which to end this interview. Let me ask one last question Oliver, could you please just remind all of us of the name of your current book, maybe also remind us of some of your previous work and other resources you're putting out into the universe that people might want to access having sat with you now for a little while. Sure, thank you. Yes, the book is 4,000 weeks time management for mortals, anywhere you get your books,

and the previous one I wrote was called the antidote, happiness for people who can't stand positive thinking. These and other stuff is at my website, OliverBurkman.com, and I write this email newsletter every couple of weeks that I call the imperfectionist, where you can subscribe to at that site as well. Always great having you on. Congratulations again on the success of this book and everything you've done, and thank you for making the time.

Thank you very much. I enjoyed this conversation, including the challenging bits. Thank you. Thanks again to Oliver. Before I go, I do want to give you a heads-up on a cool Dharma opportunity. The New York Zen Center's Contemplative Medicine Fellowship is currently accepting applications for the cohort that will begin on July 30, 2022, designed for physicians, advanced practice, registered nurses, and physician assistants. This innovative 12-month fellowship supports fellows in their own place of practice as they integrate and practice living a contemplative life for meeting the challenges of caring

wholeheartedly for themselves, their loved ones, and the world. Take part in this unique opportunity to, as the organizers say, receive the medicine for fear, clarity, courage, and compassion. If you want to learn more about this, go to ZenCare, Z-E-N-C-A-R-E, dot org. I should say that two people who run this program are close friends and have been on this show before Robert Chodokamble and Cotian Paley Ellison, and I think very highly of them and I have along with my wife participated in some of their programs both on the side of being somebody who enrolled and specifically as it pertains to this Contemplative Medicine

Fellowship as a speaker I guess speaker. So go check it out ZenCare.org. Before we go just want to thank everybody who worked so hard on this show. Gabrielle Zuckerman, DJ Cashmere, Justine Davy, Kim Baikama, Maria Wartell, Samuel Johns, and Jen Poient. And we get our audio engineering from Ultraviolet Audio. We'll see you all on Friday for a bonus meditation that is directly related to the subject of this podcast today, or at least one of the subjects we touched on.

It's going to be about procrastination, a meditation for procrastinators, and our teacher, DuJour, will be Jay Michelson, who's straight out of TPH World. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early, and add free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Or you can listen early and ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts. Before you go, do us a

solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash Survey. you