The Liz Moody Podcast - How To Stop Making To-Do Lists & Use Your Time For What Actually Matters With Oliver Burkeman

Episode Date: May 10, 2023

Productivity researcher Oliver Burkeman shares his best tips for managing your time, being more present, & doing more of what actually fuels you.  everything that’s wrong with productivity as we know it how to give your to-do list a makeover to be more productive and in line with your goals and values what we get wrong about what brings us pleasure (and what to do instead) why resting feels so difficult + how to get better at it the single best way to use your time off what it means to “pay yourself first” and how to actually do it a genius way to create more free time (even if you feel like you have none) tips for figuring out how to use your time in ways that will help you avoid regret at the end of your life why you should take your vacations when everyone else is, according to science  why you should stop pursuing work/life balance and so much more!  For more from Oliver, check out his latest book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals and learn more at www.oliverburkeman.com.  To join the Healthier Together Podcast Club Facebook group, go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/healthiertogetherpodcast. Take advantage of Healthy Convo Co’s Mother’s Day sale! Go to healthyconvo.co and use code MOTHERSDAY for 15% off your entire order.  This episode is sponsored by: LMNT: go to DrinkLMNT.com/Liz a to get a free LMNT sample pack with any order.   AG1: visit athleticgreens.com/healthiertogether and get your FREE year supply of Vitamin D and 5 free travel packs today.  Paleovalley: head over to paleovalley.com and use the code LIZM for 15% off. Seed: go to seed.com/lizmoody and use code LIZMOODY for 40% off your first month. Healthier Together cover art by Zack. Healthier Together music by Alex Ruimy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, friends, and welcome back to the healthier together podcast. I'm your host, Liz Moody, and I'm a best-selling author and long-time journalist. This podcast is all about helping you live your healthiest happiest life, whether we're uncovering the hidden elements to happiness, getting doctor-recommended tips for healthier microbiomes, or learning how to confidently set the boundaries that we need to free up our time and energy. And yes, those are all real episodes, so if any of those topics sound good to you, scroll on back in the archives.

Today I am so excited to welcome Oliver Berkman to the podcast. Oliver is a well-known author and journalist who writes about social psychology, self-help culture, productivity, and the science of happiness. His recent book, 4,000 Weeks, is an international, mega bestseller. You've definitely seen it everywhere. And with good reason, because it's a completely unique and needed take on the productivity world. The title refers to the fact that on average, we have 4,000 weeks to live in our entire lives. and the book and this episode is really about recognizing that fact and working towards making that truly shockingly limited amount of time as satisfying and meaningful as possible.

If you've ever felt like you go through life checking off the boxes of a seemingly endless to-do list and you've wondered, is this what life is supposed to be about? This episode is going to be so helpful. It's philosophical but also incredibly pragmatic with thoughts that will rock your world and then real techniques that will help create change immediately. We get into everything that's wrong with productivity as we know it, how to give your to do-do list a makeover to be more productive and in line with your goals and values, what we get wrong about what brings us pleasure and what to do instead, why resting feels

so difficult and how to get better at it, the single best way to use your time off, what it means to pay yourself first and how to actually do it. A genius way to create more free time, even if you feel like you have none. Tips for figuring out how to use your time in ways that will help you avoid regret at the end of your life. Why you should take your vacations when everyone else is, according to science. Why you should stop pursuing work-life balance. How the 3-33 method will help you get the right things done every day.

And so much more. I would love to hear your thoughts and your biggest takeaways as you're listening to the episode. So definitely screenshot and tag me. I am at Liz Moody on Instagram. I feel like every single person on the planet needs to hear this episode. Our time is truly the most precious resource that we have, and so many of us are using it in ways that do not serve us or our goals at all. So please share a link with someone in your life who needs this reminder. Texting a quick link to a friend, a family member, or a coworker is the best way to support the podcast, and it is so, so appreciated. Also, if you have been loving the podcast lately, I would really appreciate a quick rating or review on a podcast.

Apple Podcasts or Spotify. I read every single one and they help other people find the podcast, but also decide whether or not to listen to it. So they make a huge difference. It takes less than a minute, I promise. Just go to the main healthier together podcast page. It's the one that lists all of the episodes and you will be able to do it from there. Okay, let's get right into it with Oliver Berkman. Oliver, I'm so glad to have you here on the podcast today. I'm such a huge fan of your work, such a huge fan of your book. And I would love to just kick it off by talking a little bit about your personal journey with productivity. I would love to hear a little bit about the approaches that you've tried and where you're at at this moment. Thank you very much for inviting me on to

this conversation. Now, I've been on a long journey with productivity, and in many ways, I think this book is the other side of the end of that journey in a way. One of the things I did for many years was writing a column for the Guardian newspaper here in the UK, a weekly magazine thing, where I got to, among other things, test out a whole bunch of systems and philosophies and techniques. And one of the interesting things about that was realizing after maybe the hundredth attempt to find the perfect killer productivity system that was going to let me feel completely in command of everything in my life, that like maybe there was something dubious about this quest because I was very fortunate in that way. If you're busy doing some

more sensible job than writing about productivity, you might only get to test out four or five methods and you might therefore still think that the silver bullet was around the corner. And I got to that point of realizing that the silver bullet wasn't around the corner and I had to think differently about what it was I thought I was trying to achieve with all these attempts to get my life in full working order. That was really the background to this. And this book I just wrote 4,000 weeks, as with all books of advice, I think, it's advice the author needs to hear. And I was just trying to work out some form of relationship to time that just wasn't so damn adversarial. It just wasn't based on fighting

all the time. That's the backstory. I would love to hear a little bit about why are we fighting time? What's wrong with productivity as we know it? Why are we approaching time management wrong. There's lots of ways into this and my mind always wants to go to the most abstract philosophical like, well, you see, Liz, it's the fear of death. Let's talk about the fear of death. Yeah, let's do it. It basically always is the fear of death. In all sorts of different ways, we rail against the fact that we are finite. It's not really about death per se necessarily, but it's about the fact that being a finite human means that there will always be more that we could meaningfully do with our time than we'll actually be able to do with our time. It means we're always going to have much less control

over how our lives unfold than we might ideally choose to have. And I think an awful lot of conventional productivity and time management advice, it's kind of enabling, right? It's basically a way of enabling you to carry on believing that you might not have to. to make tough choices with your time, that you might not have to accept that there will always be more to do than you can do. That you might not have to accept that pursuing your highest ambitions means disappointing some of the people in your life and all of this. They're actually sort of tools of psychological avoidance. And they help us keep alive this future fantasy that maybe in a month or six months or a year, this beautiful time is coming when we can handle everything

that's thrown at us, pursue all our ambitions, disappoint nobody, never drop a ball, never make anyone cross with us. But you never get there, I would say, because that's not the kind of place that finite humans get to go. And I guess the biggest challenge I'm facing with the stuff I talk about in this book is to try to persuade people that taking the opposite view, looking your finitude in the face, understanding that it's not going to be possible to do everything, all of the of it, that this is actually really good news, right? It's like it's not depressing at all. It's the precondition to really being able to live intensely. I think it's really important to be clear that facing reality in this respect, maybe in all respects, is never a bad thing. And it's never a matter

of resignation or despondency. So once we face that reality, how does that positively benefit our circumstances, especially on like a day-to-day level? Let's say I accept the fact that I have have a very finite amount of time on this planet. How does that change what I wake up and do today? It's a great question. I'll start a little abstract and try to really zero in on the concrete by the end of my response. I write in the book actually about having this experience of sitting on a park bench in Prospect Park in Brooklyn, where we lived at the time, and really anxiously feeling overwhelmed by the stuff I felt I had to do by the end of that week and trying to figure out what combination of the Pomodoro technique and time boxing and all the rest

was going to get to the point where I had done all the things that I had to do. And just being struck suddenly by this thought like, oh, oh, it's impossible. Oh, I see. It can't be done. And feeling something like a huge burden lifting from my shoulders in that moment. Because if you really, really understand that something you've been driving yourself to do, something you've been making your self-worth dependent upon achieving. If you really understand that it's impossible instead of just really, really difficult, then actually that's a liberation,

right? That's the moment in which you say, look, it's not that I'm lazy and ill-disciplined or that I haven't found the right technique. It's that our situation, humans in our modern world, is such that it always makes it feel like you have to do more than you ever could do. And if you can see the sort of insanity of that on some level. It's very freeing because your inner critic can't really beat you up for failing to do that. It's a bit like beating yourself up for not being able to jump three miles in the air. We just don't expect humans to be able to do that. What this means on a day-to-day level, apart from just endless benefits of cutting yourself a bit of slack, is it enables you to look at your to-do list and to treat it less like something you've absolutely got to

get to the end of because you understand that in some sense that's not on the cards. And more like a menu, right? More like a question of saying, what can I do today that is the best use of my time, that makes the biggest difference to myself and to the world, that I'll be happiest to have said I spent my time on looking back at the end of my life. It's the difference between I'm going to disappoint nobody versus saying, like, well, who are the most important people not to disappoint? And maybe I have to live with the fact that other people are going to be a little bit impatient or wonder why I haven't responded to their messages. It enables you to really focus your time and your energy and your attention, all these finite resources, on things that really matter. In my case, for example, it enables me

to say, look, writing books and writing stuff is where I get the meaning and also create the value for what I do. So instead of trying to tell myself that I'm first of all going to get all the emails answered before I turn to that on a daily level, I know. all the emails are never answered. That's not a thing. So what I do instead is that frees me up to focus on the writing for a few hours. And then, yeah, I turn to the emails and give them my best shot, but not with some illusion that I'm going to get to the point of like, I have vanquished email. At one point in the book, I feel like you had a strategy where you had like an entire list of everything you could do, but then you only let yourself pick three things a day.

Yeah, that's a great thing. This is one example of a broader kind of a approach called limiting your work in progress, where you deliberately create this bottleneck, where you only work on a certain number of things at a time. The method you're talking about, a very simple version of this, you have two to-do lists. One of them is open. It has anything and everything that's on your plate. It could be 400 items long, right? But it's just to record everything that is coming into your life. And then the second list is a closed list. It has a fixed number of slots on it. Three, which you mentioned, that's pretty hardcore. You're you could go bigger, right? Ten is probably a little bit more forgiving. And you feed tasks

from the long list to the short list. So you fill up those 10 slots with 10 things. And the rule is that you can't add any more until you've freed up a slot by doing it. You're sort of making all but 10 of your potential tasks wait outside the door while you do these. And people say sometimes, well, I just can't afford to do that. Like I've got to do all these things today. And my response is just like, no, this isn't about indulging yourself by doing less. You will always be only doing a few things at a time. All we're talking about here is making it conscious, making a wise choice about what to neglect for now, rather than this pretence that you can never not neglect anything. And of course, if you try not to neglect anything, you do like two minutes work on

20 different projects in the course of a day and you don't make any progress on any of them. So it is actually not just kinder, but I think more productive to work in this way. Yeah, it's such a good point that we are always prioritizing whether we are consciously aware of it or not. And becoming consciously aware of it is one of the probably most helpful things that we can do to use our limited amount of time we have in this planet in the way that's going to feel the best at the end of the day. Yeah, I totally agree with that. And I think again and again, all I'm doing in the things I write and talk about is, is saying, like, let's just notice that it is like this already, as opposed to, why don't you

do this radically different thing with your life? Let's just a little bit stop deceiving ourselves. Maybe total non-deception is impossible, but let's turn a bit more towards how things really are and the discomfort of that and see that when you can let that into your life, it's actually really freeing. It's really liberating. The more you're living in reality, the more you can really do cool, meaningful stuff and make a difference. You also talk about the things that we define as pleasurable are actually less fulfilling than we would expect. Can you explain a little bit about why that's the case? Yeah, it's just a sort of eternally baffling. I have to learn it afresh, apparently, every single day.

There are obviously plenty of activities that just constitute veging out that might seem appealing and, you know, probably have a role in life, but that aren't really what we want to be doing with our lives. And then plenty of difficulties that one encounters in work, relationships and elsewhere, which are actually just part of growing and becoming a more mature and skilled person in those domains. One of the things that explains the epidemic of distraction, along with the technologies that we have these days, to distract ourselves more effectively, is just this fact that it often does feel uncomfortable to do stuff that you care about, right? To work on a creative project that matters to you and you're not sure if you can pull it off evokes various negative feelings to have a very important conversation in your

relationship that might spiral out of control and leave you very upset or the other person very upset. Like that's a bit scary. Of course it's more fun to just like scroll through your phone looking at like celebrities having fights with each other or something. So it's kind of not a surprise that we often don't want to do the things that we want to do, paradoxical as that sounds, it's because the things that matter in life bring us up against our edges in that way. It's more pleasant to avoid them. Do you have any advice for switching that? Like consciously doing the things that will be more fulfilling, will be more meaningful, even if in the moment they don't feel as good? The perspective shift is important, right? When I'm writing and I come up against what feels like

writer's block or not knowing the way forward, it helps me enormously to remember like, that's just what doing hard things feels like, because it's pretty rare that that discomfort is actually physically overwhelming or dangerous to your health. It's usually just like a very mild kind of discomfort and an annoyance that it's not easy. And reminding myself that that's part of the course is really helpful. But I think it really, really helps to understand that you only have to work on anything like that for five minutes, arguably just for one moment, right? All you ever have to do is the very next thing. You're not really responsible for any part of your life except this one right now. People sometimes talk about just doing it for 10 minutes or something as a way to

get started, but in a way you only ever do things for 10 minutes, right? You just do them in strings of 10 minutes back to back. You still only ever just do a few minutes of anything you're ever doing. I'm talking about work relationships. It's a little different, I guess, but the biggest work things I've ever done, book writing, I never did more than a few words at a time, right? By definition. Like, how could you do that? So it's really just a question of whether you're living in conscious connection to that or if you're still trying to tell yourself that you've got to try and get your arms around everything. I think it does apply to relationships too. You have to do what feels right and be the best person you can be. Now, not for the rest of your life or even for the rest of the day. Like making it into these bite-sized chunks to make it feel less daunting. That's right. But I always slightly rankle at that kind of phrasing because it implies, see if this makes sense. To me, that implies that like, really, it's a big task, but we're going to pretend for now that it's just a little task.

Actually, it's always just a little task, right? It's always just the next moment. I used to attribute this phrase about doing the next right thing to Carl Jung, but people recognize it mainly from Frozen 2 as well, where Anna sings a song on this principle. You only ever have to do the next right thing. Even if you're the kind of person who has these kind of incredibly complicated planning systems and vision systems for how you're going to spend the next year or five years of your life, in reality, you're just putting that into practice moment by moment. and I find that to be a really liberating thing. There's a lovely quote from the novelist E.L. Doctoro who said that writing a novel, but I think this applies to all of life, not just writing.

Like writing a novel is like driving a car in thick fog or maybe in a storm. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. And I think that is true about so many things that we do in life. I think it is too. One of the other parts of pleasure that we're sort of not talking about, we're talking about using that awareness of our time to take on those harder things. But I think a big part of pleasure that I struggle with is the resting side of pleasure, the actually enjoying leisure time for what it is and using my time off in the best way. Do you have, first, any wisdom about why that feels so difficult and then maybe advice on how to overcome that?

I resonate with this completely. I'm definitely in the category. That doesn't come naturally. And I think more and more of us are in that category. We're in this odd situation where lots of people's lives don't give them an opportunity to rest. And then when they get one or the people who are lucky enough to have the opportunity, kind of don't want to do it. You feel antsy and anxious and like you want to be doing something and not just relaxing. I think at the heart of this is this very strongly instrumental attitude that we have towards time, especially in the the modern world, and especially in the Anglo-American world, that the real value of a minute or an hour is whether it's getting you somewhere towards your goals. That's one, people end up not resting as a result of that, but the other thing they end up doing is instrumentalising their leisure. They don't really want to stop working, but if they're going to stop working, then they're going to use that spare time to train for a 10K or a marathon, or they're going to set very clear fitness goals and going after them or learning foreign language, something like that. And I'm not against any of that, but I do think that it's just worth like reminding ourselves

if you go back to the beginnings of what leisure meant to ancient Greek and Roman philosophers, the whole point of it was like it's for itself. It's the height of being alive to just be able to like be here and enjoy being here and not feel like you've got to justify being here by way. or going, basically. One of the things that really helps here is adjusting your expectations a bit, realizing that if you're a driven person who's always feels like they've got to be moving and doing things, when you sit down on the couch with a novel because you feel that that's missing from your life and you think you should do it, or you go on a beach vacation, the first part of that

time is not going to feel good. You're going to feel awkward and, like, you ought to jump up again. And there's a lot to be said for learning to ride out that initial restlessness. I'm a work in progress on this front for sure, but I have plenty of experience now. If I take a few days vacation and you Americans do this even less than the Brits. But when I do that, I try not to be too despondent about the fact that the first day feels not very restful because it's a going against my condition preferences. It doesn't take very long after that. to enter into a different state of mind where it's obviously incredibly valuable to have taken that time and to have rested. And, you know, I think a lot of people don't want to rest because

they feel too many obligations to other people in their lives as well. And they think my family, my workplace, whatever, needs me too much. It's worth remembering that, number one, you don't help other people by burning out on the country. You help them more by conserving some of your energy. And secondly, just that, like, in the end, life does have to be about something that's happening now, right? Because if it's always only about something that's happening in the future, if it's always about getting somewhere else, and then one day it's over, that's kind of a depressing thing because you've sort of moved all the value of life into the future, and then the future never arrives because it's always the present. If you want even more concrete

advice it would be to take up a hobby. And I don't mean a side hustle, right? Side hustles are fine, but you need a hobby that you're not attempting to turn into a business, that you're not attempting to get anywhere with. What's your hobby? I have a few in circulation, but we live now in this really beautiful rural area of Northern England. And so it got to the point where, like, if I was going to claim to love hiking, it was just absurd that I wasn't. and going on a lot of regular hikes. And hiking is a great example to me of a hobby in a way because, like, there are health benefits

and I suppose there are skills you learn in a way, but not really. I mean, mainly it's just to go out and be out in that landscape for itself. That is something that does have health benefits, but it really is for itself. Then the other thing I write about in the book is, like, hobbies that you're not even very good at

can be quite liberating because there's no pressure to turn them into anything else. I write in the book about playing bad piano rock on our keyboard here that we have in the house. And I really love it. I'm not sure my wife and son love it that much. But part of why I love it is that I'm just never going to earn a cent from doing it. With writing, I'm like, okay, pressure's on. I want this to be good. It's my income. Critical responses matter. And I love writing, but that's quite fraught. There's nothing fraught about me hammering out Elton John songs on the Yamaha keyboard cover.

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It's 10 out of 10. There's menopause classes with leading doctors. There's script writing with Mindy Kaling. Literally, you name it. They're on masterclass and it is such a good way to get off your phone but have something that like not quite as long or hard to get into as a TV show or a movie and that it just keeps you entertained and interested. And you are learning. There are over 200 classes from the world's best all for just $10 a month when billed annually. And you get unlimited access to every class

on the platform so you can learn at your own pace whenever you want on your phone, your computer, or even in audio mode like a podcast. If you're looking to stop scrolling and start consuming entertaining content that makes you feel excited and helps you learn, learn, Masterclass is it. And the best part, every membership comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee so you can start learning risk-free. Right now, our listeners get an additional 15% off any annual membership at Masterclass.com slash Liz Moody. That's 15% off at Masterclass.com slash Liz Moody, masterclass.com slash Liz Moody. The number one rule of habits is to make the things that you want easier and the things that you don't want harder. Yet so many of us want to eat healthier,

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This new year, fast track your way to eating well with Marley Spoon. Head to marlyspoon.com slash offer slash Liz Moody for up to 25 free meals. That is right, up to 25 free meals with Marley Spoon. That is marlyspoon.com slash offer slash Liz Moody. So remember to get the offer in there. Marley Spoon.com slash offer slash Liz Moody for up to 25 free meals. So just to be very clear about why hobbies are a good answer. antidote to this, the skewed sense of how we're using our time, essentially. Is it because it takes us

out of productivity mode? It takes us out of viewing our value within the context of our accomplishments because we're not trying to accomplish anything. So then we are putting the value of our time and the value of our presence into something else entirely. I think that is absolutely part of it, right? It is the idea that a hobby on some level has to be done for the pleasure of doing it. I don't think that means you can't get better and learn a skill. Somebody who's learning to play the piano well in their spare time is still pursuing a hobby. There is something non-instrumental about hobbies, almost by definition. I think that's also why it's almost a little bit embarrassing.

Because we live in the society where you're supposed to be really busy, your time is supposed to be jam-packed, you're not supposed to have the space for this? Right. And also because you're supposed to, the things you're doing are supposed to somehow like cash out either in money or in fame or in some kind of end result that really matters. Part of what most people end up classifying as their hobbies is that the end result doesn't really matter. And general hobbies are really on the way and people are replacing them with attempts to make money out of their side pursuits. and that's important too, and often they need to do it, right? I'm not beating up on that. A lot of people are involved in various different corners of crafting understand something about this, right?

Deep in their bones, whether they've thought about it consciously or not. It's like there is just a pleasure in doing the thing. And sure, there can be a pleasure in getting better at it as well. But on some level, it's about now and this. And it's a way of resting while having something to do instead of this kind of rather idealistic notion that you might just be able to sit in your garden doing absolutely nothing for an hour and rest that way. That is a big ask for modern people. That's so interesting. We can't go from 100 to zero. We need to kind of like find something that makes sense within the society that's programmed our brains almost. Absolutely. And listen, I think it's entirely possible to work.

very long hours and to treat that work as something that is intrinsically fulfilling in itself. People do that. People very committed to their jobs, people who found a vocation or a calling. So it's not really exactly the activity that you're doing. It is ultimately this question of the spirit in which you're doing it. If you're only living for a time when the value is going to all sort of finally cash out, then I want to say that you're not quite living as fully as you could. And that's sort of like when I finally mindset that you talk about in the book, right? I found that so fascinating because I do find myself doing that. I feel like if I put in the time now, if I make a certain amount of money, I do have this vision of like a future self that I'm holding up.

And I'm like, oh, she's laying by the pool, reading books, eating fruit and just like having the time of her life. But then in the times when I find myself doing that in my current life, I'm like not enjoying it in any way. I think that there is this idea of how do you balance this notion of the work you have to do now to create the future that you want to create and living for a future versus living in the present? It's a real challenge and I think ultimately the aspiration here has to be that they sort of merge, right? That they become the same thing. I think we generally know intuitively whether we're doing the kind of, of future focused thing that is also intrinsically rewarding, or the kind of future focus thing,

which is like, I just have to do this before real life can begin, before meaning can really be part of my life. And again, it's kind of not the same question as whether it's fun or not. That's so interesting to me. Things can be really not fun at all, but feel engrossing in the moment and like they're aimed at something meaningful in the long run. The obvious example, people always bring up here is parenting. There's all sorts of aspects of looking after a newborn baby that are not intrinsically super fun. There's that great book about the psychology of parenting called all joy and no fun. But there's a different connection to what's going on there that most people doing it would say they understand that it's a deeply meaningful experience. In the

end, it has to be intuitive. You kind of know whether the things you're doing at the moment are enriching ways of spending this time or whether they're just based on this when I finally idea that you sort of hate what you're doing but you're trying to put away the money to do something else later on. Of course, if you're doing a job that you really don't like, but you consciously have figured out that is the thing you have the least worst option for you right now in order to support goals you have like feeding your family or living in a certain city or whatever it is, that's meaningful too. Then you've connected it to a why that I think gives it meaning. I don't want to sound like one of these lifestyle gurus saying you should just like

walk out of a job you don't like. People can't always do that. What you can do is understand why you're doing it for you. And if there isn't a good reason for that, then you probably should walk out of it. But if you're doing it because the situation in which you find yourself means that is the best way to serve goals that you find meaningful, like supporting family or supporting yourself, then that gives it meaning. It still sucks that we have a society where lots of people have to do jobs they don't enjoy, but on a personal level, connecting it to that Y makes it meaningful in the moment, I would say. Can you talk about the idea of paying yourself first when it comes to time? I got this phrasing of it from Jessica Abel, the creativity coach and graphic novelist. Most people know

about paying yourself first in personal finances, right? It's just this straightforward notion that when you get some money, paycheck, whatever, you should put some of it aside for savings first and then live off the rest instead of spending the two weeks or the month, spending what you need to spend and then hoping that there'll be some leftover at the end because there's never any left over at the end. You'll live up to your means. And it's just a really interesting observation that the same basically applies to time. There's never going to be this moment in the future when everything is out of the way and you finally have all the time you need to focus on the projects or the relationships or the leisure activities that you care about the most.

Paying yourself first is just a matter of understanding that you have to just do some of that thing that really matters to you now, today, this week. Not necessarily a lot. Maybe you. Maybe you really can't do it for more than a few minutes, but you do have to sort of do it and understand that the thing to learn how to do with all that anxiety you feel about how much is on your plate is not to get so hyper-efficient and productive that you eradicate the anxiety by completing all the things. Not possible. It is instead to learn to get better at tolerating the presence of that anxiety and saying, okay, noted, but meanwhile, I am actually going to go and, you know, try and write this short story, go and spend time with this person I care about, go for this walk in the

hills. It was a big switch for me to realize that the correct response to my sense of like, there's so many people waiting for me to do things. Oh, no, it's terrible, is to be like, okay, I'll give that some time today, but first I'm going to give some time to the things that seemed to me to be the most important. And somebody's going to be impatient about not getting a reply from me. But that was always the case anyway. I have two questions about that. One, what would you say to the person who says, and I think a lot of the traditional productivity books are targeted to this person. This person says, I literally don't have that free time. If I pay myself first, something will fall away that was critical, that was important. My baby won't get fed or my boss

won't get this email from me and I'll be fired. Something like that. And they're trying to get all the productivity hacks in place to carve out that little bit of free time for themselves. What would you say to that person? It's a really good question. First of all, I don't think that paying yourself first is necessarily about leisure time. It is about making time. for the things that matter the most for you in your life right now. And there are situations people can be in where it really is the case that answering their bosses every email on a one minute response time is the thing that matters the most to them. I think that's rare. People don't do enough thinking about whether it really matters the most to them,

whether the trade-off that they're making in order to do that is a trade-off they are actually willing to stand behind. But it can be the case, right? And I don't want to pretend that there aren't people in those kind of situations. Firstly, I think that people are a little bit too ready to assume that they are in that non-negotiable situation when they're not. But secondly, if you truly are in a completely emergency-governed situation where either your child depends on sort of you're being absolutely available or your job is such that I'm not going to eat and have a place to rest your head if you don't do all. these things, then that is the situation you're in, and it's a pretty bleak, cold comfort to say it,

I recognize, but then that is the most important thing for you to be doing in that moment, along with, I would say, doing whatever you can to alter that situation, at least the one about the terrible job. Looking after a very needy newborn baby is its own challenge, but it's just the way it goes. I think it's always possible to come up with these sort of hypotheticals, which really, really challenge any notion that you're going to give time for yourself. You're going to make time for yourself in your life. But I also want to say that in most of those examples, they're so extreme that actually it sort of is the wise choice in those situations to focus on those kinds of tasks. What I really would challenge anybody to do is to really ask themselves whether they are really in that situation.

If you're really convinced that you don't have like half an hour to yourself in the day, it's not for me to say, you know, I don't know you, the person asking this, maybe it's true. But a lot of the time it means I don't feel good about using that half hour for myself. I don't feel like I want to because it seems indulgent or I feel guilty or I can't settle down enough to use that half hour to read a book or something. So I just think there's a lot of scope for really interrogating whether one is ever really in that situation. Yeah, it's about getting almost like a right-sized sense of importance for a lot of things. And I find myself doing that with my job.

We're all like last week, the podcast, we had like a little snapper with the podcast edit. And our podcast went up like three hours late. And I was freaking out about it. And I was like sending all these emails. And it went up three hours late. And it truly didn't matter. I think I got like a few messages about it. And I was like, oh, it'll be up in a few hours.

And they were like, great, I'll listen to it in a few hours. I do think that especially with our work stuff, sometimes it feels like life or death. I've had the experience too of friends who have given so much of their souls to a company and then been laid off and been like, wow, I thought I was indispensable here. I thought I was giving this my all. And then you're just out. And the company goes on fine without you. And I always think that those are the moments that you're just like, oh, my gosh. gosh, my sense of what matters is so skewed.

That's a really well-made point. And it just sort of makes me realize as well that we bring a lot of strange childhood psychology to these situations as well. And this will differ from person to person. But a lot of people invest bosses and manages above them in the org chart with a kind of parental, a feel of being parents and people that they still have to please and get the approval of for a particular reason. And of course, what a psychotherapist, a psychodynamic psychotherapist would say is that it's sort of rational for a small child to feel that they've got to have the

approval of the people who keep them alive. It's not rational anymore to think that life or death usually hangs on whether your boss is pleased with you. Again, maybe at the very edges of poverty and low-income work, that might be true. But for a lot of people, even if they want to stay in their boss's good books, that sort of existential level that it would be catastrophic is something from an earlier time. And then, by the way, any of us who are not working for a single boss, but like the audience business, as you are and as I am, have this terrible tendency to then try and invest the audience with this power. But that's not even a single person. That's like a lot of people and the better you do, the bigger the number of people it is. Well, at some point,

you do just have to accept that you're in charge of your life in this. And that if some people are outraged or disappointed by your podcast not appearing at the precise time, it's not that you disrespect them. It's just that at some point, you have to be making these decisions and running this life of yours rather than investing your self-worth in ever larger numbers of people. But that can be really scary too, because then you're just like, well, gosh, if it's not up to other people, that it's up to me. And I have to decide what I think is valuable, what I think of my. self. Do you have to imbue yourself with that responsibility, which is really scary and hard too? No, totally. It's totally hard. I hate it. But it is ultimately like the only way to live, I think. I'm just thinking about certain kinds of very heavily sort of politicized people in the podcast space and others are famous for this phenomenon called audience capture, where when you get a bit more radical about whatever position you occupy, you get so much reinforcement that you get more radical. and people like lose touch with themselves completely because they're just trying to please other people. It's a big ask to stay authentic to yourself, whether your audience is millions or your audience is your boss, you know, or your family.

But you do sort of have to keep trying. Do you have any pragmatic advice for being authentic to yourself? One of the things that's coming to mind is being quite serious about this whole idea of intention. And at an earlier stage in my adult life, I endlessly tried and failed to sort of make very rigid schedules about how I was going to live my life and the things I was going to do. And even before I had a family, like every single day, this would go wrong. Because apart from anything else, like, my mood wouldn't be in tune with what I said I was going to do at that point. And that kind of attempt to be who I thought I wanted to be, like doesn't work. And as I began to see that crumbling, there's a temptation to go into some equal and opposite reaction where you sort of say, well, okay, I'm just going to try and completely go with the flow.

This may be reversed for other people. Some people get brought up with the message that they've got to go with the flow. I got brought up with the message that like if you really made a good plan, you could do whatever you needed to do. And when that didn't work and I sort of thought, well, maybe I just need to go with the flow. and then that doesn't work either because you're not being true to yourself. You're just sort of letting yourself be pushed around by reality. So eventually I think you come to this thought that bringing some fairly strong intentions for who you want to be in life and where you want to get to in life.

But doing that in a way that is flexible and fluid and allows you to exist in a world of people who all have their own issues and all have their own plans for the day. and exist in a world where your own moods fluctuate up and down. To me, there's something important there in terms of the quest for authenticity. It's like knowing the compass that you're navigating by without letting that turn into some sort of white knuckle attempt to force the hours of the day into the boxes that you drew up in your bullet journal or whatever. I love that. Okay.

And then my second question was, when we're paying ourselves first, let's say we're taking that half an hour for ourselves before. we dive into our to-do list, there is often that anxiety where our mind keeps drifting back to our to-do list where we can't enjoy the time that we have set aside to pay ourselves first. Do you have any tips to combat that feeling and to actually be present in those moments? And actually, I think a lot of your book is about like, we have way less time than we think. We're using the time that we have in a way that's not actually helping us live the lives that we want to live and we're not being present in the same. in the time that we have.

And so I'm curious, like, yeah, how can we start to, on a day-to-day basis, combat some of those things? For me, it has all been about being willing to feel the discomfort that is associated with those things, really feel it, feel it where it arises in my body, which is, for me, often in my stomach, and not trying to sort of eradicate that and run away to my head and convince myself that everything's great, but just be like, yeah, it does feel like that, but if those feelings are given their space, it's an old cliche of meditation and stuff, but it's true.

Like if those feelings are given their, those sensations are given their space, they do tend to dissipate of their own accord. There are definitely much more concrete techniques. I tend to carry a little timer around with me to do certain things, including certain kinds of fun, non-work things for, certain amounts of time so that I can tell myself like, okay, this is just like, it's just for a few minutes or I'm going to put a one hour limit on how much time I spend in my inbox so that it doesn't end up taking over the whole day. So there are kind of weird little geeky things like that.

But I think that the really important part of it is just like being really forgiving with yourself about the fact that like we are built and conditioned by everything in our environment to try to do more try to get on top of more, try to be more efficient. And so there's something subversive about this. There's something that is a kind of resistance. And so you need to kind of be okay with that and not just feel completely great and empowered at all moments that you're engaging in it.

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I really deliberately resisted writing this book as a kind of like, here are the things that you should do to live a meaningful life, partly because I don't think it is universally true of anything, but also because the ones that are more universally true are kind of like, you know them. Like, you do not need me to tell you that spending time in nature and in forming deep relations with family and friends and being in awe-inducing settings. Like, we know this There's like 5,000 magazine articles every day about these things. Something that I've found really useful is this question from James Hollis, the Jungian psychotherapist, who suggests asking of any life choices you're considering making

or just of your life as it is currently, does this enlarge me or diminish me? The question of whether it makes you happy or sad, right? That's a disastrous question to ask. Will this choice make me happy in life? We're terrible at predicting what's going to make us happy in life. some of the things that make us happy in life aren't even that meaningful, just a quagmire. But asking if it enlarges you or diminishes you is really, I find really helpful because it connects to an intuitive level at which you can see that there are some kinds of problems that you encounter in a relationship, say, or in a job, that do tell you like you're in a terrible relationship or job and you should get out. But there's a whole other kind that are part of growing and becoming a better partner or a better person in that job.

And that enlargement diminishment question really enables you to distinguish between those. Because as James Hollis says, usually you know the answer. And if you don't, you can ask yourself it a few more times and eventually the answer arises. And I find that very helpful for being able to know whether something that I'm engaged in is a good thing to be spending my time on. It's really weird. We all have this experience I expect of either being in a crisis or helping a friend who's going through a crisis and there being nothing good about the situation, but still having that feeling like I'm in the right place. There isn't any question that this is how I should be using this time. I have this reputation of being good in a crisis with some of my friends and relations. And it sounds like a huge compliment. I think all it really means is that the rest of the time when I have multiple. options. I'm a total kind of indecisive neurotic mess. And what's so great in a weird way about those crisis points is that all that stuff goes away. You're just doing the thing that you were here to, you know, depending on your belief system, I know, but it feels like you were, this is why

you were put on the planet to be able to be doing this right now. And we can just aspire to a little bit more of that in everything we do, I think, without trying to kind of artificially create emergencies and crises in our lives. Just that sense of like, okay, this might not be fun. It might even be terrible, but I'm doing the right thing with my time today. I feel like I'm really good in a crisis because I've struggled with anxiety forever. So by the time you get to a crisis, like by the time the pandemic happened, I was like, I have envisioned a global pandemic for 15 years. I had lived in that world in my head for so long. I was like, oh, welcome. Welcome everybody to where I've been living.

I'm just resonating with this really deeply because I hadn't thought of it as the same point, but I think it kind of is the same point. And this can sound like a really callous thing to say in the context of the pandemic to anyone who has been deeply impacted or bereaved by it. But like, when it first came into view, my sort of natural anxieties went into overdrive.

And when it started unfolding, and no matter how terrible the news got, and people were really panicking at how terrible the news was in those early stages, it was always kind of finite. It always fell short of the absolute fantasy of apocalypse that I turned out I'd had in the back of my mind all my life. So I would be like, that's terrible, but it's within the realm of the finite. Yeah. Everything in your head is always 50 times worse.

And I feel like by the time you bring it into the real world, you're like, okay, at least there's something I can do here. it's processable in a different way. I loved all of the self-reflection questions that you shared in your book. There was one that really stuck out to me that I want to read, which was, in what ways have you yet to accept the fact that you are who you are, not the person you think you ought to be? That one just like hit me like a ton of bricks. And I'd be curious for you to share a little bit about why that type of question is important

to ask ourselves in order to get this proper sense of how we should be spending our time. I think the desire to change who you are or to become someone different than who you are, of course it has a very, very wonderful and wholesome side to it. But it also has this fairly obvious side that comes from finding yourself wanting in all respect, feeling that you don't really have the full right to exist until you've changed in a certain way. And there are a certain aspects of our personalities, it's not that we should never try to challenge them, it's that we should say, I'll probably be challenging this on some level for the rest of my life. There's something very freeing about that. Bruce Tiff, a brilliant psychotherapist who wrote a great book called

Already Free, and who I do quote in my book, he has this sort of related reflection exercise where he suggests taking the trait that you like the least in yourself, the thing that you just are always trying to change, transform, get rid of, and ask. Our sense, and ask, asking yourself what it would feel like to know that on some level that was always going to be a part of your personality to the very end of your life. And I have encountered people who are horrified by this, but the majority response to this is like, oh, great. I don't have to spend my whole time trying to eliminate the fact that I'm kind of an anxious person or I'm kind of prone to procrastination or I lose my temper a bit when I'm tired. And the crazy thing then is that you're actually freed up to live a life that is less constrained by that trait because you're no longer building your life around its elimination.

Just to give one personal example for me, there's many traits that I want to change in myself, but I'm always a bit sort of thrown by changes of plan and things happening that were not the way I had envisaged the day. And if you're going to be in a family and there's a six-year-old, this is going to happen. It's not reasonable or realistic to be like, this is our plan for the day. Now follow it to the minute. But it helps me to be much more flexible about that to accept about myself that I'm always going to find it a little bit bumpy in those moments. That that's just sort of me. Then I actually become less rigid about it.

So it's a kind of a weird, ironic situation where you overcome this trait in part by just sort of accepting that it's always going to be a part of you rather than driving yourself crazy trying to reach a certain other kind of ideal. And it is strange, isn't it, how often the ideals that we have for who we should be are radically different than the people we actually are. Well, and especially in terms of productivity, it made me reflect on how many things I'm like adding to my to do list to essentially try to become a different person rather than live my best life. Right. I do think that this desire to sort of create good new habits and to become the kind of person who does certain healthy and nourishing and productive and creative things can really get in the way of just doing those things, right? So there's this strange phenomenon where the thought that you're

going to from now on meditate every day can actually stop you just meditating today because it feels like this whole thing, it's quite intimidating, looking at all those sessions stretching off into the future. Maybe you should wait until you've got all this urgent work stuff out of the way before you start. It all gets very fraught. And so there's often something to be said for saying, okay, I'm going to just do it for 10 minutes. Now, not as the first instance of a infinitely recurring series, right? But just today, I have had the experience of walking in this beautiful countryside where we live with an old friend and being struck by the thought like, wow, I wish this was my life. And it's like, no, it is. You're doing it right now. Stop trying to tell yourself you've got to

be able to guarantee that you'll be doing it every day forever. Oh my gosh. That resonates so strongly. I want to share one thing from your book. You mentioned like we all know the things that make us happy, like spending time with community, et cetera, but something that really stuck out in your book that I haven't heard before is that we actually enjoy our time off if our community also has time off. and you meant that on a small level, but also on a larger level. I thought that was fascinating. I used to work from home. I still work from home. But at one point when I was working from home, I would take Thursdays off with my husband because he also worked from home and we'd work a weekend day. And we thought we'd like hack the system because the subway would be empty and we could go wherever we want and stuff like

that. And it was so interesting to reflect on that time with the science that you shared in the book. So can you share a little bit about like why we enjoy our time off more when our community has time off? Yeah, I mean, I've been there too, and to some extent still am, right, in thinking that my sort of wonderfully independent, flexible working methods enable me to, like, beat the system. Some of it just comes from reflecting on one's own life, but there is this fascinating research, I think it was Sweden, that people in that country were not only happier when they were on vacation, but happier, as it were, to the extent that other people in that country were also on vacation at the same time. There was a sort of a synergistic effect of people being on vacation, that it was more than the sum of its parts. It sounds pretty mysterious, like what's going on there. But actually, when you stop to think about it,

there are all sorts of reasons why this would be the case. If you work for an organisation and you live in one of these cultures, like some European ones, where everybody's off for the same weeks in August, well, then you don't need to worry about getting behind on projects that other people are working on. You don't need to worry about emails piling up. You don't need to worry about people trying to steal your job while you're away.

If what you want to do is spend time with family and friends, which is a lovely thing to do with vacation time, it's much more likely that they're going to be free too. We're always running into this problem as a British American family that the school vacations don't match up. It sort of goes wrong. You go on holiday and you want to go and visit friends back in the other place and then all their kids are at school. And so in all these different ways, there's just this benefit from synchronizing our time.

And I think it happens on the level of the day as well. In Swedish workplaces, they have this tradition called the FECO. It's basically a coffee break, although they're quite proud of it. And if you call it a coffee break, they get a bit insulted. But it happens at the same time. It's not that you're forced to have your coffee break at 3pm with everybody else in the same office, but it's a very strong sort of peer reinforcement. And what happens, I was there for a few of these is people all get up from their desks and they go to various common areas and the CEO mixes with the janitor.

And like, it's really useful for communication in the organization. But it's also just really fun and enjoyable to be in sync in that way. I can go on about this. But the basic point that I'm making in that section of the book is like it's worth sacrificing some of your dream of total sovereignty over your time. in order to fall in with these rhythms that really matter. And you can do things on your own. People like declare a single day a week when they're not going to be on their devices or something like that. I'm not saying it's a bad thing. But the thing that made ideas like Sabbath's work in the kinds of societies that practiced them religiously, as it were, is that they all

happened on the same day. It was everyone taking Saturday off or everyone taking Sunday off. It wasn't like just taking a day a week off. It was lining up in the same way. Yeah, interestingly, I feel like you can also harness it on the other end in some ways. Like, sometimes I feel like I get my best work done on Saturdays because everybody else is off. So, like, you can take advantage of being like out of the rhythm and you can take advantage of being in the rhythm as long as you kind of understand the impacts of the rhythm. Absolutely. I think that's really, really well put. As an early riser, I still believe on some level that I'm stealing a march on the world by working earlier than anyone else.

Even though I have to go to bed earlier than everyone else. It doesn't really work out. At the end of your book, you share a nod to the traditional productivity books, but you call it your 10 tools for embracing finitude. Is it finitude or finitude? Finitude. That word exists, though, right? I did not invent it, but it doesn't get used very much outside of academic philosophical discussion. So maybe I'm sort of popularizing it or something.

And the idea is if we acknowledge the fact that we live a finite life, how can we live our best within those constraints? I would love if you could share one or two of your personal favorites of those tools. To start with a very concrete productivity, organizing the workday kind of thing. I'm a really big fan of what in that section of the book I call fixed volume productivity. And it owes quite a lot to Cal Newport's ideas and his idea of fixed schedule productivity. The basic idea here is simply that to the extent that you have autonomy, over your workday, and some people don't, but to the extent that you do, to start by deciding how much time you're going to give, either to work or to certain kinds of work, and then to

ask what you're going to do with that time, as opposed to what we usually do, which is to say, like, okay, it's Tuesday. These are all the things I've just got to get done today somehow, and then kind of blast through it. Instead, you say, well, look, realistically speaking, I've got, say, three hours to give to deeply focused, undisturbed at work when I'll have a lot of energy, and maybe four hours to give to the other kind of work, right? Maybe it's more, maybe it's less. That doesn't really matter. Then you've sort of established these containers.

And Cal certainly would say they should be specific time blocks on a calendar. I don't quite do that way. But the point being, you've got a clear understanding of the kind of volume of time that is available. And then you say, well, okay, given that I've got three hours that I can give to sort of deeply focused work, what's the most important three hours of stuff from my list of a thousand things that I'm going to put into that time? And of the 95 pressing life admin tasks, what are the 10 that I can actually do in this period of time that I could give to that and so on in work and outside of work? And that really sort of obliges you to face the fact of making trade-offs and to face the fact that you're finite. It works against this very dispiriting tendency to just make a really long list, start it, and then find that you've added more things to it by the end of the day than you crossed off it.

It's a way to sort of fall into reality and a way that then will cause you to get more done. It's more productive as well as more realistic. And that relates also to the question of the two to-do lists, which we were to tell. talking about earlier, this idea of creating limits on the work that you're focused on at any given time. The other one I really like is this idea of deciding in advance what to fail at. I find this quite a liberating idea, and this is inspired by an author called John Acuff. The idea here is to say that in any given season of your life, there are things you're not going to excel at just because you are a finite human. And if you want to excel at,

anything, you're going to have to not excel at some other things. So you've got a choice. You can either try to excel at everything and then be incredibly dismayed and disappointed when it turns out you can't, or you can make a proactive decision in advance and say, you know what, for the next while, I'm not going to have a super tidy house, or even I'm just going to do the minimal exercise that I need to keep me fit rather than having any ambitious fitness goals. Or people with newborn babies, I think are fully justified in deciding that they're going to do as little as they can get away with in their professional lives for a year or two. Or just smaller things. Like I have an ambition to be good cook rather than just a serviceable producer of nutritious daily dinners.

And I am the latter, right? But I'm just, there's nothing impressive about my weekday cooking. But you know what? That's a great example for me of an ambition to let go of for now. because I don't actually care about it that much. It would be quite a big deal to really focus on it. And therefore, I'm not dismayed that I've made no progress in that quarter because I sort of deliberately assigned that to the area of like things that are not for now. So I think that's a really useful strategy again, just to sort of figure out what things you're not really

committed to and fully let them go for the time being. It's a nice opportunity, too, to reflect on all of the shit that society tells us we're supposed to be like thriving at and doing so great at that might not actually matter to us. Like you said, you're like, well, if I cared about being a good cook, perhaps I would have done that by now, but you care about giving yourself nutritious food and that's fine. That's like a-okay. Absolutely. And you're touching on this way in which these ideas of like work-life balance that feels like they ought to be so great and liberating actually just end up being demands that you're excelling. 100% in multiple areas of life outside work and inside work. And that's not how percentages work. No. Can you just leave us with one homework assignment? If somebody is listening, they're feeling burnt out by their email inbox, by their to-do list, by their family responsibilities,

what's one homework assignment, one first step that they could take towards living a better life? I can think of several, but the one that I sort of have to say, because it's most in keeping with what I've said. and I do believe it the most really, is to reflect on one thing that is an important part of life to you, but that you're not doing at the moment. And that could be a creative pursuit. It could be nurturing a relationship. It could be a recreational activity. Could be any number of things. And just actually do that thing for a moment of time today. Not next week when everything's out of the way. Not for five hours, not for 20 minutes every single day at six o'clock in the morning, just once and right away. great things do grow from that kind of approach, but also then you will have spent that

moment of your life doing something that mattered to you, even if you forget this technique the next day and never come back to it for the rest of your life. I still struggle with this, but it's this notion of like, don't necessarily read more advice on how to do a certain thing. Don't necessarily try to focus on clearing your schedule to allow yourself to do lots of that thing. Just do a little bit of it and don't give yourself the excuse of waiting. And each moment matters, like not an additive, way for what it is. Each moment matters. I love that. If you call a friend and spend half an hour talking on the phone and then you never again manage to be a good friend to your long distance friends, like that's better than never having done that half hour because it matters in and of itself.

I love that. Can you tell us a little bit in your own words about your book and anything else that you're working on that you're excited about? My book that we've mainly been discussing here is called 4,000 weeks, time management for mortals. It's out in paperback in the US shortly. I'm working on another book. It's broadly about the idea of action, about crossing the gap between knowing what we know we ought to do or want to do and actually doing it. But it's in the early stages. And then at my website, Oliver Bergman.com, you can subscribe to my email newsletter called The Imperfectionist, which I send out every couple of weeks. Amazing. Well, that book sounds really cool. I'm excited. to read it and have you back on when you noodle it out.

I hope it's not too far in the future. Well, thank you so much for spending your very precious time with us here today, Oliver. I really appreciate it. It's my pleasure. Thanks very much for inviting me. I wanted to add in one quick thing that I learned from Oliver after this interview, and I thought it was a genius and really simple method. It's from his newsletter, and it's called the 333 approach.

Basically, it's a way to set up a daily schedule to help me. some of the goals that we talked about in this episode about making the most of your limited amount of time on the planet. So every day, you spend three hours on your most important current project, and within that, you define a specific goal for what progress looks like on that day. And then you complete three shorter tasks that might just take a few minutes, but you've been avoiding them or they're urgent to-dos. Oliver includes calls and meetings in this category two. Finally, for your third three, you do three maintenance activities, which are things that need daily attention to keep your life running smoothly, whether it's a healthy habit or

clearing out your inbox. That three-hour chunk, though, first of all, there's a lot of research that shows that we're only capable of working deeply on something for about three to four hours. So you're going to take that capability and use the three-hour chunk to move you toward the things that matter, while at the same time you're not letting all the little things that constitute our daily life slip away. I really love this approach in the context of this episode. and I'm going to be giving it a go myself. I will let you know what happens. I also loved the question of will this choice enlarger diminish me. I'm going to be using that as a guiding principle. I honestly can't stop talking about so many of the things that Oliver shared in this episode. It kind of reshaped how I am viewing almost every moment of my time and every interaction I have. And when I flop down on the couch to scroll social media, it's changed. It's put this new lens on the way that I view the world at large. And I'm so curious, to hear what you think about it as well. Please share a link for this episode with anyone that you think would benefit.

There is so much talk about productivity hacks on social media today. I think everyone could use at least a dose of Oliver's really different approach. And if you're new here, welcome, hi, hello. I am so glad that you're here. Make sure that you're following the podcast on whatever platform that you like to listen on. Just go to the main podcast page. It's the one that lists all of the healthier together episodes. you will see the word follow under the logo on Spotify.

And then there's a little follow with a plus sign button on the top right of that same page on Apple Podcasts. That way, all of the new episodes will show up right in your feed so you will never miss out on one. And trust me, you do not want to miss out because we have some incredible episodes coming up, including one all about taking your power back, even when society is trying to push you down. And one all about sustainable, healthy weight loss. So make sure that you're following so you do not miss out. Okay, I love you, and I will see you next Wednesday on the next episode of the Healthier Together podcast. I very rarely get genuinely excited about skincare, but this is one of the most innovative products that I have come across in years, and I am so obsessed with it.

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