The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Moment 63 - How To Get Any Task Done: Oliver Burkeman

Episode Date: June 24, 2022

In these ‘Moment’ episodes of my podcast, I’ll be selecting my favourite moments from previous episodes of The Diary Of A CEO. In this moment, Oliver Burkeman tells us about the power of positive, sustainable habits, or as he calls them - 'radical incrementalism'. It's possible that by making just a little change to our daily lives, a change we can really sustain and not just keep up for a few weeks, then the accumulative effects we see over a long period of time can be life-changing. By enabling just little changes in our actions the consequences compound into something truly extraordinary. Oliver's no-nonsense advice shows just how straightforward it can be to unlock transformative positive changes in your life. Listen to the full episode here - https://g2ul0.app.link/oMWiaQcd6qb

Quick one. Just wanted to say a big thank you to three people very quickly. First people I want to say thank you to is all of you that listen to the show. Never in my wildest dreams is all I can say. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd start a podcast in my kitchen and that it would expand all over the world as it has done. And we've now opened our first studio in America, thanks to my very helpful team led by Jack on the production side of things. So thank you to Jack and the team for building out the new American studio. And thirdly to to Amazon Music, who when they heard that we were expanding to the United States, and I'd be recording a lot more over in the States, they put a massive billboard in Times Square for the show. So thank you so much, Amazon Music. Thank you to our team. And

thank you to all of you that listened to this show. Let's continue. In your book, you talk about embracing radical incrementalism. What does that mean for you? This is the idea that there are contexts where really being willing to make progress on the basis of little and often, right? Kind of gradual progress to do a tiny bit at a time and not kind of binging on the things you're trying to achieve can be really powerful. Again, I'm sorry to keep coming back to writing as an example, but the work that I'm drawing on there from a psychologist called Robert Boyce who studied academics who write and trying to figure out like,

who are the ones who actually get a ton of papers published and a ton of books written? And who are the ones who get mired in um like procrastination and paralysis and he found that the the really productive people in that sphere were the ones who made writing a um a modest part of their daily life right it occupied like a couple of hours maybe as opposed to the ones who made it into this huge thing that then became very intimidating and they got all sorts of like psychodramas going on with it because it was something they were willing to sort of do for a little bit leave aside come back to and i think this applies to especially applies to anything that is like brain work but i think it applies to pretty much all all kinds of endeavor right

there's often a huge benefit in being willing to say well i'm going to work on this for a tiny amount of time today and i'm going to stop even if i'm on a roll right when my time is up i'm going to stop and then i'm going to come back it makes it something that you can sustain day after day after days if you do the opposite of incrementalism right if you give this if you give this sort of absolutely center stage in your life then if it goes well great but if it doesn't go well it becomes this kind of huge intimidating uh thing and i've found that you know if i'm working on a book say really sort of almost embarrassingly small work days on it regularly done day after day after day so much more productive like in terms of the actual output deadlines though because when i wrote my book i think this regularly done day after day after day, so much more productive,

like in terms of the actual output. What about deadlines though? Because when I wrote my book, I think the deadline of having to send it to the publisher just hung over me and was like forcing me to, okay, Steve, today you have to write three, you know, 3,000 words. Yeah, I think deadlines have their role, right? And I, you know,

I would have got nowhere without deadlines in newspapers because they sort of kept, they sort of helped me sort of bust through perfectionism and stuff because it was just literally you know it's i did these things on a i would write these kind of features for the guardian where i had to like um that the idea came to me or was given to me at like 10 30 in the morning and 5 p.m they needed a two and,500-word researched article. He'd just be like, okay, I've just got to do it. But in a way, I'm sort of training myself out of that now, and I think that it's perfectly okay and it's fine, but it isn't sustainable.

I think that to really really over the long haul be able to do something like writing I've found requires that I have acquired this ability for sort of dogged persistence rather than, you know, cruising to the deadline.