The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - Why Don't We Have a 15-hour Work Week?

Episode Date: July 8, 2024

By 2030 we'll only work 15 hours a week, predicted the legendary economist John Maynard Keynes back in 1930. He thought advances in technology and wealth would let us earn enough money to live in a day or two - leaving the rest of the week for leisure and community service.  How wrong he was. We seem to be working more than ever - with technology adding extra tasks to our workdays (like answering emails and monitoring Slack). Dr Laurie longs for more leisure time, but how can she tame her fear of being "unproductive"?  Computer scientist Cal Newport explains how we all got into this mess - and why we still treat modern employees as if they were farm laborers or assembly line workers. Reformed "productivity junkie" Oliver Burkeman also offers tips on how to concentrate our minds on fulfilling and important work - and not little tasks that chew up so much of our days. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. The stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed quite reasonably scared a lot of people. Fortunes were lost, savings disappeared, factories closed, and jobs evaporated. The only places doing a roaring trade were soup kitchens and bread lines. Things looked bad, with no end in sight. But one man wasn't that worried. We are suffering just now from a bad attack of economic pessimism. So said famed British economist John Maynard Keynes. It is common to hear people say that a decline in prosperity

is more likely than an improvement in the decade which lies ahead of us. I believe that this is a wildly mistaken interpretation of what is happening to us. People were having trouble keeping a roof over their heads and food on the table, but Keynes wanted them to look to the far horizon. My purpose is to take wings on the table. But Keynes wanted them to look to the far horizon. My purpose is to take wings into the future. What can we reasonably expect the level of our economic life to be a hundred years hence? What are the economic possibilities for our grandchildren? You might recognize the voice reading Keynes' words. It's my colleague, the economist Tim Harford, from the Cautionary Tales podcast. Tim's very familiar with Keynes' rosy predictions about what life would look like in the year 2030.

Keynes thought that the Great Depression was just an economic blip, albeit quite a painful one. He predicted that thanks to industrial and scientific developments, the economy would boom, and that the standard of living enjoyed by people would improve dramatically. Indeed, he suggested that most people would be so rich that their struggles to make ends meet would be consigned to history. At last, they'd earn more than enough money to pay their bills in just a few hours each week, with the rest of their time freed up to enjoy life. To people in 1930, these predictions must have been mind-blowing. Keynes believed his grandchildren would enjoy a 15-hour work week, with ample time left not just to relax in leisure, but to engage in a host of purposeful activities, like increased kindness

and civic participation. And Keynes thought our whole attitude towards work would change radically as a result. When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. The love of money as a possession will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity. Well, dear Happiness Lab listener, congratulations, because you are currently living

in that utopian time that Keynes envisioned. How are you enjoying your 15-hour work week? To Keynes' credit, we do have a much higher standard of living than our grandparents. We also have smart TVs, dishwashers, microwaves, iPhones, and the internet, fun and time-saving gadgets the people of 1930 could only dream of. But although Keynes was right about our increased incomes, he was wrong about what would happen to our sense of busyness. Rather than living relaxed lives of leisure, people in 2024 are working harder than ever. Americans today work 10% more hours than they did in the 1970s.

Economists have also observed a shift in the last few decades in the usual relationship between a person's wages and the number of hours they work. Historically, people who earned less money tended to work more hours, but that relationship has now reversed. These days, it's higher paid individuals who are spending more time at work. They also report significantly more time stress than they did in the previous decades. If Keynes had lived to see what workaholics we've all become, he'd be very sad. Instead of a utopian work-life balance, our generation got side hustles and career cushioning and time hacks and over-employment and burnout culture. I've been thinking about Keynes'

predictions a lot these days, because lately I've been feeling busier than ever. I'm privileged to have a great standard of living and a job I love, but my to-do list feels endless. I spend a lot of time feeling frantic, fantasizing that any day now I'll finally be able to get through all the stuff on my plate so I can take a breather. But that fantasy day of rest never seems to come. And what's my solution to feeling so, so overworked all the time? It's usually to double down on my busyness. I try to get through my to-do list as quickly as I possibly can. So I work long hours and multitask whenever possible. But this endless quest to optimize my overloaded schedule

usually winds up increasing my sense of overwhelm rather than decreasing it. I end up feeling like everything is urgent and not just when I'm at work. Somehow this obsession with using time well leaks into my leisure time too. In the rare moments I do get a break, I feel anxious that I'm not getting enough productive stuff done. And, as is probably obvious, none of this overwhelm is all that good for my quest to feel happier. So in this episode about the happiness challenges

that I struggle with, I'm going to explore how I and so many others got this messed up when it comes to busyness and productivity. Are we doomed to our relentlessly overloaded schedules? Or can we claim the leisure time that Keynes envisioned as our generation's birthright? Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to be happy. But what if our minds are wrong? What if our minds are lying to us, leading us away from what will really make us happy? The good news is that understanding the science of the mind can point us all back in the right direction. You're listening to The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos. Okay, Wednesday, May 29th. 6 a.m. podcast interview with a person in the UK.

9 a.m. meeting with my lab manager. 10 a.m. brainstorm meeting for my new course. 11 a.m. Zoom podcast recording. Looking through my schedule on an average day, I'm pretty much doing 10 plus hours of work. Oh, and I have to make my husband's birthday cake. What happened to the 15-hour work week that Keens promised us? If you do well in a career or professional area,

you can actually expect to get busier and busier and busier. Writer Oliver Berkman has shared my sense of overwhelm for decades. He always had too much on his plate. And like me, he tried many a hack to tame his overloaded schedule. He even reviewed time management techniques and productivity tools for The Guardian newspaper in a weekly article called This Column Will Change Your Life. Oliver desperately tried anything and everything to get his packed schedule under control. Fancy notebooks to organize your time in, year planners, pens that cost too much money,

you know, all part of an attempt to try to reach this sort of position of feeling completely in control of time. Things finally came to a head one day about 10 years ago. Oliver was sitting alone on a park bench, anxiously ruminating about all his undone tasks, when a scary thought occurred to him. None of this productivity stuff is ever going to work. In an instant, he realized that no matter how much work and self-discipline and time management gear he marshaled, he simply was never going to feel on top of all he had to do. That dream of getting everything he needed to get done done, it was always going to remain out of reach. The reward for good time management is more work.

Oliver christened this painful realization the efficiency trap. Anything you do to try to use time more effectively by becoming more efficient seems to be a fairly general law that what will actually end up happening is that you get a lot more busy and a lot more stressed. The sort of abstract way of talking about it is that if you make a system capable of processing more inputs, then it'll just attract a lot more stressed. The sort of abstract way of talking about it is that if you make a system capable of processing more inputs, then it'll just attract a lot more inputs. A concrete example is email, right? If you get really good at answering email at a really fast tempo, you end up with loads more email because you're getting replies to your replies and you have to reply to

those and you get a reputation for being responsive. And it doesn't just apply to email. If you're in a workplace setting where there's some particular kind of project that needs to be done and you get a reputation for being responsive. And it doesn't just apply to email. If you're in a workplace setting where there's some particular kind of project that needs to be done and you get a reputation for being really fast at completing that kind of project, you're going to get loads more of those projects to complete. So that's the trap of efficiency. It's an attempt to try to get everything done, to get to the end of everything. But because the supply is infinite, it's not actually a good way to build a more productive or fulfilling life. It's just a way to sort of get busier. Oliver argues that this sense of overwhelm has begun to take over our entire modern existence. But we're not only overwhelmed by work tasks, by email, by things that we have to do. We're overwhelmed by potential experiences. We could have bucket list places we could go, things we

could be doing on any given evening, people to date, depending on your context, you know, so there's all these kind of different ways in which there's just more experience to be had in the world. And so I think that leads to a sort of permanent state of feeling overwhelmed. A permanent state of feeling overwhelmed? Yep, that pretty much describes my life these days. And Oliver's tough message is that if you're feeling that way too, it is, at least in some ways, your own fault. I never want to underplay the sort of broader societal and economic reasons for this. But in some sense, we do bring it on ourselves, or we at least collaborate with the situation,

because we're presented with this sort of infinity of things to do. And the very first thing we say to ourselves is like, okay, let's find a way to do an infinite infinity of things to do. And the very first thing we say to ourselves is like, okay, let's find a way to do an infinite amount of things. One reason is that being busy all the time makes us feel kind of important. If you are somebody who has your self-worth wrapped up in your productivity, right? You think that you've got to do a certain amount

or reach some kind of standard to sort of be okay. Then being busy is proof to yourself that you're in demand, that the spigot of opportunities has not dried up, that it's all very much part of feeling that you are doing all you need to be doing to feel good about yourself. I definitely felt called out by this comment. How often have people asked me, hey, how's it going? Only to get my standard response of, oh, I'm just so busy. The frazzled feelings behind that reply aren't fun. But if I'm being honest, I do feel weirdly proud of myself.

We've created a situation that makes busyness into a status symbol. So then, obviously, by definition, you want to make sure that you've got some of that busyness. But there's a cost to seeking out busyness for the sake of busyness. We wind up stuck in a painful psychological state that the journalist Marilynne Robinson has called a sense of joyless urgency. I mean, I think that is just a very, very widespread feeling, the sense that you've really got to get somewhere,

but it's not really the place you necessarily want to be going, and certainly the process of getting there is not what you want to be doing. How did we all get so hooked into this joyless relationship with our busy schedules? Oliver suspects that at least some of the problem stems from how humans have learned to think about time. Going from introduction and widespread adoption of mechanical clocks and then into the industrial revolution, you get this very long, slow process that is characterized by people starting to think of time as a resource.

And once you have this idea that there's you and then there's time and you're living your life sort of lined up against a sort of a yardstick or a measure of some kind, you have to keep up. If you use a bit of time wrongly, you're wasting it. You can try to squeeze more things into that time. And all of this is kind of a spatial metaphor, right? It's all to do with time as containers and little boxes. When you really get right back down to the experience of being in time, it isn't like that at all. We just get this one moment and then the next moment and then the next moment. I think we really need this idea of being able to think about time as a resource for all sorts of things. But it's a little bit crazy, really, when we try

constantly to interact with time as something that it isn't, which is something we can sort of hoard or endlessly fit more things into it. None of it quite makes sense. But there's another way that our thinking about productivity doesn't quite make sense. One that relates to the changing face of modern work. These days, a lot of our jobs are a bit weird. The Happiness Lab will return in a moment. Up until about the mid-20th century, we had really clear, well-defined definitions of productivity. Best-selling author and computer scientist Cal Newport has spent a lot of time thinking about why modern work is so overwhelming. So if you're in agriculture, it was bushels per acre of land under cultivation. You could measure it. It was a number.

You could change how you planted your crops and you could see if that number went up and down. When we got to industrial manufacturing, mills followed by factories, we could do something similar. A factory manager on an assembly line can easily measure, say, the number of widgets or Model T Fords produced per labor hour. People could just tell if everyone was using their time efficiently and contributing to the company's bottom line. All that fell out the window with knowledge work, which really emerged as a major sector in the 1950s. Knowledge workers create useful goods and services not through physical, assembly-line-style labor, but through their thoughts. The modern economy is full of such professionals. Scientists, doctors, writers, professors, attorneys, even podcast hosts. But professionals like these don't end the day

with a bunch of widgets piled up on their workbench. And that means it's harder to assess their productivity. Take, for example, what it would mean to define productivity in my own form of knowledge work, making a podcast. How could I make the Happiness Lab as productive as possible? I could try to take a mathematical approach and define productivity as the number of episodes we make. But should I go with the sheer number of episodes? Maybe longer episodes are better than shorter ones. Or maybe I should count ad revenue per episode or listener downloads. Each of these could be a reasonable metric for podcast productivity. So what should I choose? Similar kinds of questions pervade pretty much all knowledge work.

We do not get a lot of direct feedback in terms of how well is what you're doing right now impacting what we care about. It's free-floating. And things get even more complicated when you ask how you should be allocating your time to achieve whatever free-floating definition of productivity you came up with. The typical knowledge worker has many different things they're working on, and what they're working on might be different than the person right next to them. It can shift. It's more informal.

Also, how we do our work is very personal, which is a real innovation to knowledge work we don't see in other places. Supervising factory workers on an assembly line is easy. You figure out how to best build your widget and you tell your employees, hey, make the widget like this. But none of that holds for a job like podcasting or teaching or programming. Knowledge work is too complicated. It's creative. It's skilled. The individual knowledge workers know more about what they're doing than the people supervising them. So we got to allow the individual workers autonomy. Allow them to have autonomy in figuring out how

they're going to do their own work. But managers did want some way to determine whether or not knowledge workers were putting in useful effort. So they came up with what Cal thinks is a very problematic alternative, pseudo-productivity. So pseudo-productivity is a crude heuristic that says visible activity, that's going to be my proxy for figuring out whether or not you're doing useful effort. So the more I see you doing things, the more productive, in scare quotes, I'm going to assume you're being. This is the dominant way I think we measure effective work. This need to monitor visible effort led to other changes in the knowledge work sector,

ones that had nasty implications for a worker's sense of autonomy and happiness. When the knowledge sector grew as a big sector, and we said, how are we going to literally organize this work? We said, well, let's just do what the factories do. You will come to a building, we'll all gather in the same place. We'll be there for a long shift so that we can just see that everyone is working. That's how I know you're working, because you have to come to this building and I can physically surveil you. That's pseudo-productivity. There's nothing about cognitive work that says the best way to do

this is as many hours as possible or to do it in one contiguous shift. But if our main metric for productivity is visible activity, then it made life a lot easier for the managers. But of course, such surveillance didn't make life easier for the knowledge workers. Pseudo-productivity makes us miserable and has been making us more miserable. It barely worked until about the 2000s. Then digital technology entered the scene and it spiraled out of control. Because now I can leave a trace of me working or not working by doing emails, et cetera, anywhere. Now there's an unlimited supply of work because one of the things the digital age brought to us was zero friction work assignment. I can just, hey, can you handle this sin? Boom, it's off my plate.

This emergence of email and Slack channels and team meetings and group texts meant that workers had way more opportunities to show off their visible activity. And managers quickly took notice. Hey, I haven't really been seeing you in the email chains recently. You weren't at these Zoom meetings. You were slow to respond to the Slack chat. What's going on? Maybe you're not being productive. But managers weren't the only ones to embrace pseudo-productivity. Knowledge workers soon began to internalize this notion. Practices like clearing your emails to achieve inbox zero and being on Slack after hours became almost as important to workers as the projects that made up their true job descriptions, especially since incremental progress on the big projects will always be harder to show off. You don't know if I'm at home or I'm in my office, you're not nearby.

You don't know that I'm working deeply on an article. That leaves no trace. But if I'm jumping onto email threads, that does leave a trace. And so it bias us towards what's going to leave the best trace through the environment of pseudo-productivity evaluation. And this desire to leave some tangible evidence

of your efforts has a terrible effect on the actual output of knowledge work. So one of the consequences of pseudoproductivity is that it gets in the way of the ability to give the most important things you do unbroken attention. How do we get our brain to actually produce value? It's the ability to focus intensely on something. If you want to produce the best things you're capable of using your brain, you don't want to be distracted. I want to focus on this hard thing I'm doing until it's done. Pseudoproductivity punishes that. I've totally been punished by my internalized pseudoproductivity.

I'll be in the middle of writing a podcast script or an academic paper when I'll hear a ding from a text. So I peek at my phone, get distracted, and take longer to finish the task I'm really supposed to be focused on. And that sense of distraction doesn't just bubble up during actual interruptions. Whenever I find myself deep in a writing project, I'll inevitably think, you know, I haven't checked my email in a while. I wonder if there's something important. Next thing I know, I'm deep in my inbox. I've internalized the importance of visible activity so much that I start feeling anxious whenever I'm not engaged in it. And that anxiety gets worse when my bigger projects

fail to produce an obvious output for a while. It feels almost easier to spend my time on dumb, pseudo-productive stuff like clearing my inbox. And now we have whole departments, we have whole teams and organizations producing a lot less valuable work

because we are servicing this crude proxy that doesn't actually get to the core of what it means to be productive. It's completely cross-purposes. But pseudo-productivity doesn't just impair actual work productivity. It also increases our stress levels and decreases our happiness. There's an unavoidable consequence of pseudo-productivity that you're going to get overloaded and you're going to stay overloaded. Saying yes to someone asking you to do something is very important, right? Because that's a very clear signal of activity. We have to get rid of pseudo productivity. We need much more humanistic, psychologically aware, and evidence-based approaches for saying

this is what we mean by productivity in the knowledge sector. Thankfully, Cal has come up with just such an approach, one that he outlines in his fabulous book, Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. Accomplishment without feeling burned out? Sign me up. Cal's idea for slow productivity was inspired by the Slow Food Movement, a campaign in the late 80s pushing back against fast food culture, arguing that people should take the time to grow and cook their own healthy food. Slow Food actually gives us a couple really good ideas for how to form a reform movement. One, it says when dealing with a cultural situation that's displeasing,

don't just attack what you don't like. Give a positive alternative. The second part of their reform program was don't just try to create the better thing looking forward. Make sure that you're also drawing from wisdom that has accumulated in the past. Cal now applies the same approach to fixing our overwhelmed schedules. He turned to knowledge workers of the past, professionals who lived back in John Maynard Keynes' day and even before, to see how they produced their most effective work. Such insights led Cal to develop the three core principles of slow productivity. Doing fewer things at once, working at a more natural pace, and then obsessing over the quality of what you do. Let's start with doing fewer things at once.

Well, when we're doing fewer things, we are relieving ourselves of not just a lengthy task list, but the administrative overhead that comes along with each of those items on our task list. And this is something I think people often overlook is that when I say yes, I'm not just saying yes to eventually how many hours am I going to spend writing the report or doing the committee or whatever it was I said yes to.

When I say yes to something, it's also going to come with persistent administrative overhead responsibilities. It's going to be emails back and forth with people who are involved in it. All right, every Wednesday, we got to like jump on Zoom. And it's going to be cognitive space taken up by the fact that, hey, this thing's ongoing and some part of your brain wants to think about it. So when you say yes to lots of things, even if you're not working on the actual projects at the same time, all of their administrative overhead begins to pile up. And so what happens is the more things I've said yes to, the less time I actually have

to work on things. This hit me like a ton of bricks. When I look at my own calendar, I see days and days broken up with staff meetings and check-ins and random appointments. Cal calls commitments like these productivity termites. They eat up the big blocks of time in our schedule, so much so that little solid foundation is left for the stuff that matters. And this is a negative feedback cycle that can get pretty nasty

because once you have enough of your day servicing commitments but not working on them, you fall behind. And the only way to escape from this spiral is to start reclaiming time outside of work hours and you have to work on the weekends and late at night and early in the morning. Doing fewer things at once is not the same as doing fewer things overall. In fact, you're going to accomplish a lot more per year if you keep your plate much more sparse. But it's not enough to streamline what you work on. You also need to work at a more natural pace. As Cal looked to the great writers and thinkers of the past, he realized they didn't work the way most of us do today.

So when knowledge work emerged, we said, okay, how are we going to deal with this? We said, we'll use pseudo productivity as our metric for effective action. Well, what was the best way to monitor pseudo activity back then? We said, we'll run our offices like a factory. Managers brought knowledge workers into a building where they could be observed. Employees were stuck there for eight hours a day working the entire time. But applying a factory model to writing good computer programs or academic papers or podcast scripts doesn't work that well. So cognitive work is not something that you can just churn out of your mind like a widget as many

hours as you want in a row. It's not like putting steering wheels on a Model T. It needs way more ups and downs. I have to get the right information. I need to think about what I want to do. And then there's periods of great intensity. But then that might need to be coupled with periods where I'm really pulling back. My brain is recharging and trying to find new inspiration. Our brain does not operate like an assembly line, but we run it that way. And now I think we have a lot of misery because of it. Cal argues we need to take a much more humane approach to our schedules. We need to build in the natural variability that thinking well requires. We need to expect that some days

will be filled with more progress than others. And we need to intentionally build in time to recharge without beating ourselves up over it. And Cal has a specific suggestion for doing this, a practice he calls small seasonality. Standard seasonality is what our Neolithic ancestors used to do. The winter, I don't do as much work as the fall when I'm bringing in the harvest,

and you have these variations of seasons. So we can shift intensity at smaller scales. I'm going to take the three weeks in December before we get to the holidays, and I pull back for those three weeks. It's a lower intensity period that's not as big as a season, but it gives me some variation. You could do this at an even smaller scale. I don't schedule meetings on Mondays.

Don't tell anybody this. When someone wants to set up meetings, you can propose all sorts of times. You just never happen to propose a time on Mondays. So now every week you have this first day that has a fully different feel than the other days. But working more naturally also requires taking a healthier approach to your workspace. If our work primarily uses our brain, everything that impacts our brain healthier approach to your workspace. If our work primarily uses our brain, everything that impacts our brain is relevant to our work. So just like if I was an athlete and my work primarily involves my body, other things I'm doing to my body matters. If I'm

sort of doing a bunch of squats right before a soccer game, it's going to matter. But we don't think about this with cognitive work. But the environment that our brain is exposed to impacts how our brain functions. And so when you see that laundry basket at your home office, there's a whole other part of your brain that says, we got to do laundry. When are we going to do laundry? Which means your efforts to write a book chapter, whatever, is going to be degraded. So if you make a living with your brain, you have to separate where you do this brain work from where you live. Location matters.

If you're a remote worker, Cal recommends finding a spot that doesn't remind you of all your other daily pressures. Find a coffee shop or co-working space, even a large closet, anywhere that stops you from seeing and thinking about all the stressful stuff in life so you can focus on your important projects.

And once you're settled down to work, Cal says you need to obsess over the quality of what you do. Obsessing over the quality of what you do is the glue that holds the other two principles together. There's two things that happen once you start caring about quality. One, it justifies for yourself going slower because to do things really well, you have to slow down.

On the flip side, when you get really good at something because you do things really well, you have to slow down. On the flip side, when you get really good at something because you obsess over your quality, you get more leverage and control over your work life and it becomes easier. Obsessing over quality can help reduce burnout in other ways too. Burnout typically emerges when we experience what clinicians call a values mismatch in our work. We want to produce work of a certain standard, but we just don't have the time or bandwidth to accomplish that. When we can't give meaningful projects our full attention and creative energy because we're doing so many other things,

we feel cynical and overwhelmed. But obsessing over the quality of our work prevents that sort of values mismatch. We wind up able to put our full passion and energy into what truly matters. But this ability to focus on what truly matters requires one other important but very painful realization. There may never be enough time

to do everything we really care about. We've got minds that allow us to conceive of an infinite number of things we want to do or could do or should do. And yet we are these sort of animals who can only do so much of it. The Happiness Lab will return after the break. The desperate side of being a productivity junkie is that it is an attempt to sort of not have to confront certain truths about either one's own life or human life in general.

And the fact that, you know, in the case of time management, there just isn't enough time for all the things that feel like they matter. Former productivity junkie Oliver Berkman now embraces all the tenets of slow productivity that Cal Newport described earlier. He does less, tries to work at a more reasonable pace, and focuses on high-quality work. But Oliver thinks there's one more painful truth we must confront

if we want to find the utopian work-life balance promised by John Maynard Keynes. If you're convinced that in the end there must be a time for everything, then you're not going to say no to the right things. You're not going to make the right choices about what not to spend your time on. And as a result, it's just going to be more and more stuff incoming. Oliver explores this idea in 4,000 Weeks, Time Management for Mortals. The 4,000 weeks in the book's title refers to the length of the average human lifespan. Pretty short, right? The important point is just that it's finite. It has an end point. It means that there's no

reason to assume that there will be time in a day or in a life to do all the things that feel to you like they matter. No time in a life to do all the stuff that matters. I get what Oliver is saying here, but I find the realization terrifying. I do think that humans have since the beginning of humanity railed against their finitude. Most of our worst problems with time, the ways we end up procrastinating, distracting ourselves, feeling unfulfilled, feeling too busy, feeling overwhelmed, can be traced back to various forms of this avoidance, right? It's like it's because we want to make ourselves feel unlimited that we try to set up ludicrous productivity systems that are going

to enable us to do absolutely everything. Embracing the idea of a time-limited life can help us come to terms with the fact that we're simply never going to get everything done, which forces us to become intentional about what we choose to do. You don't get to choose not making tough decisions about what you do with your time, but you can make wiser or less wise ones. First of all, ask yourself how much time you reasonably have available and then decide what are the most important tasks to put into that box. So maybe that strikes people as very obvious. But in fact, I think what people instinctively do instead is the opposite. They get up in the morning and say, what has to be done by the end of today? Paying no heed to the question of whether there's

actually enough time to do it. And then you make bad choices. You try to clear the decks. You try to do all the short stuff first and you find you've got no time for the really important stuff. You end up feeling inadequate and dumb because you didn't get through the list. And it's just a sort of recipe for procrastination and psychodrama. So it's really just about saying, this is the time that is available. Given that, what shall I do? Oliver admits to struggling with this level of acceptance from time to time. Luckily, he has smart time management gurus like his wife around to help him. I remember on a couple of occasions asking aloud in her presence whether I really had enough time left to meet a deadline on something that I was working for. And of course, her response is always like, that's the wrong question. You have this time.

The question is, what's the wisest use of that time? All of our time is trade-offs. You're always choosing not to do things. And so the question is just, given this available time, what's the best way to spread my attention and energy? And Oliver thinks one clearly bad way to spend your attention and energy is with constant multitasking. Recognizing your finitude and embracing a limited life means coming to terms with the fact that you're not going to have time to take in every new tweet or blog post or news article. Monotasking requires sacrificing all that. It's strange how difficult it is. It shouldn't be that difficult.

Just not always filling every available attentional channel. It's always going to feel easier to veer away from that challenging, difficult, uncomfortable thing to some pleasant and compelling source of distraction. This is especially the case now because we didn't used to have places to go when we got distracted, but were explicitly designed by very well-paid geniuses to keep us there as long as possible. On the other hand, we are part of the problem, right? I mean, it is not in my experience anyway, that I'm sort of sitting, writing a chapter filled with joy and absorption. And then like, somehow Elon Musk's Twitter comes and kind of grabs me from my desk

and drags me kicking and screaming. No, it's more like I find the task difficult because it matters to me and I'm not 100% confident I can do it and all sorts of emotions are brought up by doing it. On my better days, I can say, that's that thing again. It's not actually that I can't write this chapter or that I've got to go and waste an hour online. It's that writing brings up these feelings for me because I care about it. We also need to avoid those comforting but pseudo-productive activities. A big one for me is my daily practice of clearing the decks. Trying to get through all your email and little stuff and all the bits of paperwork that you'd be doing.

People come in, they feel anxious about all this stuff. There's an itch that needs to be scratched, so you deal with all that first, and then you're supposed to feel very calm and at peace and you can really focus on the thing that matters. I can't tell you how many hours of my working life are spent on this stuff. Just sending off one more unimportant message so I can get closer to inbox zero.

Or doing a bunch of stupid errands just so I can cross something off my to-do list. When I say it out loud, debt clearing is obviously not a smart approach. But it feels so scary to leave so much stuff undone. It's not surprising that we feel anxious. But the wise response to that kind of anxiety is to do what one can to hang out with the anxiety, to tolerate the anxiety, and trying to wean yourself off the practice of clearing the decks in response to it, I suppose. Oliver admits that the strategies he recommends require emotion regulation. But he's come to appreciate how much a more realistic,

more mortal approach to productivity increases what he's able to get done. Some people see it as quite depressing. I think it's incredibly liberating to be like, it is not your fault that you are a finite human. And from that basis, you can then try and do the most meaningful things that you can do. I'm still a long way from enjoying the leisure-filled utopia that Keynes envisioned. But making this show has helped me establish better habits. I've put Cal Newport's slow productivity approach into practice. I started doing less at one time and saying no to more projects.

And I've stopped checking my inbox as the first work task of the day, which gives me more morning hours for the projects I want to work on. And I'm already seeing the benefits. I'm happy to report that my calendar has slowly begun recovering from all of productivity termite damage. And I'll be trying out some small seasonality by taking a few weeks off from the show. But in spite of this progress, I have been struggling more than I expected with one piece of advice you heard today. It was Oliver Berkman's idea that we need to embrace time management for mortals. You see, I don't really like the idea that I'm finite. I hate thinking that I ultimately won't have time for all the important stuff in life due to the

fact that I'm going to die someday. I find the idea that I'm limited to 4,000 weeks utterly terrifying. But could my avoidance of my inevitable demise be doing more harm than good? Okay, it helps if I close my eyes. I am going to die. I am going to die. I am going to die. Could I wind up happier by accepting, maybe even welcoming my own mortality? How is it literally talking about it right now, us together? No, seriously, I hate, hate thinking about it. We'll get some answers and explore the benefits

of memento mori in the next episode of The Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos.