The One You Feed - Oliver Burkeman on Modern Time Management

Episode Date: March 20, 2019

Oliver Burkeman is an award-winning writer for The Guardian and his book, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking explores the upsides of failure, difficulty, and imperfection – which we discussed in our first interview with Oliver several hundred episodes ago. Each week in his column in The Guardian, “This Column Will Change Your Life”, he writes about social psychology, self-help culture, productivity, and the science of happiness. In this interview, he discusses his take on time management in today’s world.Need help with completing your goals in 2019? The One You Feed Transformation Program can help you accomplish your goals this year.But wait – there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you!In This Interview, Oliver Burkeman and I Discuss…His take on the modern time management worldThat technologies of efficiency don’t seem to bring peace of mindHow your to-do list is never going to go awayThat having emails in your inbox is not necessarily a problemTime management whispers of the possibility of true peace of mindThinking of “a simpler time”How processing through your inbox is like climbing up an infinitely long ladderThat tough choices have to be made when deciding what to do with your time – no matter how many productivity assists you haveHow it’s often easier to spend time on trivial stuff than the big projectsDavid Allen’s book, Getting Things DoneHow no one beats them self up for not being able to jump a mile in the air because they never thought they could in the first placeSimilarly, accepting the real limitations in how much time you have and how much you can get done is incredibly liberating Productivity advice from Warren BuffetThe role social media plays in our expectations about how productive we could or should beHow digital distractions help us numb outOliver Burkeman LinksHomepageFacebookTwitterSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I told my wife because she's like, listen, there's a roadblock. There's something going on with you. I know it. And so when I saw his email, the light bulb just came on. I said, this is what I need to do. And at least try to get past this roadblock. And that's what happened. I saw his email.

I signed up. And the rest is history. I could never complete a project. And I've completed a project faster than I thought. And I didn't throw in the towel. We talked about this today when I was talking with Eric. You know, I want to keep giving up. And he's like, don't walk away from what you've already created. If you want to help getting past your roadblocks like Andy and hundreds of other

clients have, go to oneufeed.net slash transform. We are finite creatures. We have a certain amount of lifespan, certain amount of energy, certain amount of attention in any moment. And that means, by definition, that you can only do so many things. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear.

We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like

why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Oliver Berkman. Oliver is a writer for The Guardian. His book, The Antidote, Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking, explores the upsides of negativity, uncertainty, failure, and imperfection, which we discussed in our first interview with Oliver. Each week in This Column Will Change Your Life, Oliver writes about social

psychology, self-help culture, productivity, and the science of happiness. He's won the Foreign Press Association's Young Journalist of the Year Award, FPA's Science Story of the Year, and has been shortlisted for the Orwell Prize. Here's the interview. Hi, Oliver. Welcome to the show. Thanks very much for asking me. It is a pleasure to have you back on. You were one of our very first guests, and I was touched that you were willing to get on a podcast that was so completely unknown and brand new at that point. And that was a favor that I have not forgotten. So thank you, and I'm glad to have you back. It's good to be here. I don't know what it was, but evidently it was, I guessed

correctly that it would turn into something. Somewhat, yes. Well, let's start like we always do with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking to his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and thinks about it for a second and looks up at his grandfather. He says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life

and in the work that you do. It's funny because I assume you must have asked me a similar question last time and I'm trying to figure out if I have had some sort of transformation since then in what these kind of things mean because quite a lot has happened in my life since then i mean the thing that it draws attention to for me is the question of what it means to feed either of those wolves i think that a lot of my understanding of personal psychology and all the rest of it has been a move away from assuming that feeding the good wolf means focusing relentlessly with your conscious will on on trying to be happy and be productive and uh and uh eliminate and sort of not feeding the bad wolf means trying to pretend that

it doesn't exist and stamp it out and eliminate it, you know. And I think, of course, you know, there's a lot of wisdom in that story. But what I appreciate about it is it doesn't say, like, it's the one that you kind of grab hold of. And I don't know how the metaphor would continue. You know what I mean? It's like actually feeding the good stuff in life doesn't always mean trying to eliminate all the bad stuff. It doesn't always mean kind of fixating on trying to feel as good as you can and things like this. It's something much more to do with a sort of slow

process of nourishing things in the right direction. There you go. Those are my thoughts. Yeah, no, no starving of the bad wolf. No, no locking him in a cage and beating him. the bad wolf, no, no locking him in a cage and beating him. Right. So I've always been interested in you when I read the title of your book, the antidote happiness for people who can't stand positive thinking, you know, I immediately had to have you on the show, because I think we share a lot of insight. And you you tend to take a, I don't think it's an intentional, but but a certainly a little bit more of a contrarian approach to things that in the personal development space might just be common knowledge that everybody's like, yes, this is really important. And you tend to put a little spin on it, which I

always appreciate. And the thing that you have spent some time thinking about lately and writing about, and I'd like to start off with, is really this whole idea of time management and how we really believe so much that if we could just manage our time, everything would be great. And there are huge industries built around this very idea. And I'd like to kind of get your take on the modern time management world. Sure. Yeah, this is very much where my head has been at. I think that there's sort of two ways into this. One is the daily experiential level,

and then I'll do that first. And then if we can, I'll move to my sort of my big philosophy of this. But I think that, you know, we all have this experience, those of us who are into this kind of productivity stuff and time management techniques. And I speak as someone who has grown disillusioned with a lot of that space, but not through inexperience, you know, through very much wanting it to work out. I think a lot of us have this experience that even when you succeed in getting a lot better at organising your time, at producing, getting through more tasks. You don't actually feel less busy. You don't feel less time pressured in an unpleasant way.

And you actually seem to get a lot more stuff coming in onto your plate, but not necessarily in a good way, not always stuff you want to do. So overwhelm doesn't seem to be solved, I suppose is what I'm saying, by getting more and more efficient at processing work. And I think this is a specific example of a general position that we all understand in the modern world, which is that technologies of efficiency don't seem to bring peace of mind like you might expect.

You know, by any sane logic, a world that has jet engines and microwaves and the internet, you know, it should feel much more restful, I think, because, you know, of all those hours that are being saved that previously things took a long time and now they take a lot less time but of course what really happens is somehow this just causes us to all feel more rushed and i think that that's what tends to happen for a lot of people in in time management it's like you're constantly it's this kind of sisyphean struggle you're always just about to get to you know the state of mind like water or whatever it is uh of total total peace of mind on top of everything easily able to deal with everything that comes in to focus on your most important goals but also to deal with all the

admin that life throws up but you're always just about to get there rather than ever getting there and so even when you do get much more productive, I don't think it has the psychological benefits that people were hoping for. And I have some theories as to why. Yeah, I definitely, you know, find that to be true as somebody who has spent a fair amount of time looking at productivity and trying to be more effective, more efficient, all those things. Like there is no more time that comes of it. And, you know, I, I have to, I'm always fighting this sort of internal battle where I have to say to myself, your to-do list is never going to go away. And if it did, there would be a real problem, right? That would be a bad thing. You joke in your article, you know,

problem, right? That would be a bad thing. You joke in your article, you know, or sort of joke, sort of not about this whole idea of inbox zero, right? Like how we think that's so important. And I have to remind myself, like having a bunch of email in my inbox is not a bad thing. Having a bunch of things on my to-do list is not a bad thing. They become bad when I allow that to overstress me. Yes. And I think, you know, there's a very deep insight there, which is that this idea that one day you're going to get to a point where there are no more emails coming in and where there's nothing on your list that you want to do. On the one hand, that's often how we approach these things, right? sort of harassed by the by the number of items on the list and we sort of uh seek to crank our way through them to get to a point in some sort of fantasy space where they don't exist but if you got there that would be as you say terrible i mean that would mean that there was nothing going on in your life anymore that's not what anybody wants so so it is a bit of a paradox that we've

got ourselves into this mode of uh trying to crack through everything when actually if we managed to crack through everything, we might be a bit dismayed. Yeah, you say that time management whispers of the possibility of true peace of mind. in a wider social, political, economic context. But we live in times when fewer and fewer of us, as everyone knows, have jobs for life and trustworthy, implicit contracts between big corporations and the employee that you would be there for your whole career and then very well looked after when you are at a pensionable age

and your family looked after and all the rest of it. That's all being replaced with the gig economy. And in all sorts of other ways, people, I think, feel more and more precarious, whether or not they're actually on low incomes. Even people who are relatively privileged in financial terms, I think, feel more precarious in terms of the idea that that you know it doesn't seem guaranteed that it's going to keep going that way and it's the experience of lots of us who are fortunate not to be poor to still feel like you know everything's a little bit tight all the time in terms of making everything making ends meet because it's just the way the world works even even if the life you're living is a is a good one I think what that kind of climate gives rise to

is this idea that more and more and more it's on you to try to deal with everything, to try to meet the challenge of this situation by transforming yourself into a sort of completely efficient machine who can do more and more and more work to and make more and more money to counteract the fact that everything seems more and more precarious and i even think things that are not directly economic like you know uh worries about the climate and the sense of extreme volatility on the political scene and all the rest of it it all plays into

this kind of idea that you can't really trust anyone apart from making yourself into a kind of omnipotent master of your own life. So the pressure feels kind of is ramped up in that respect. Now, I don't think that it works, but there's a lot of reason why people, why all of us feel that pressure. Right. It definitely is. And as you were talking, I was thinking for a minute, I was trying to think back.

The image that flashed into my mind was, you know, we all talk about a simpler time. You know, I hear this often, like, you know, it was a simpler time back then. You know, 1970, let's just take that as a decade I grew up. And, you know, people look back and that was a simpler time. And, and I sometimes try and think like, what was different? What didn't my parents do with us kids that, you know, today's modern world insists on? Like, I'm trying, and I'm asking this and sort of just occurred to me, like, what, what are the real differences in what we actually did then versus now that made time seem less frantic then? Although I imagine if you'd asked my parents in the 70s, they would have said they were busy too.

Right. And I think that's a really interesting point. I mean, there's a couple of things here. One that you've just reminded me of is, you know, people generally always think that the time when they were kind of 10 years old was a simpler time but that was because you were 10 years old um and you can actually see this in kind of someone has written this i can't remember who i should be crediting here but you know if you look at sitcoms that are set in the past at any point in history they're always set about kind of 40 30 40 years ago when they do these kind of things like that 70s sitcom they did and all these different ones they're always set about kind of 40, 30, 40 years ago when they do these kind of things like that 70s sitcom they did and all these different ones. They're often set at the time when, you know, people who are just becoming big deals in the comedy screenwriting world are, you know, hitting their 40s and sort of beginning the people who dominate the industry and they're just writing about the time when they were uh uh when times were simpler

because they were actually kids and most of their world was was uh simpler as a result of that i think however that things have changed also uh historically in in various ways and i don't think it is that we're necessarily doing more whatever surveys are done about time use you find these very strange results like that, you know, the average American parent today of small children spends much more time with them, especially fathers, than a few decades ago. There's some evidence that housework is less of a chore today, certainly in some countries, than it was several decades ago and yet of course it doesn't feel that way it feels like everything's gone in the opposite direction and i think part of what

that speaks to is that this is a psychological phenomenon that is determined partly by the standards of what we think we ought to be managing to do rather than the amount of stuff we sort of actually find ourselves having to do. Email is an extraordinary example. I mean, obviously, you know, 10-year-old kids hopefully don't have email at any era in history, but it's kind of infinite, right? I mean, if there is no limit to – this is an example I think I used in that piece, and I'm using a bit in the book that I'm trying to write at the moment.

The input side of email is basically infinite. Anybody on the planet can send you an email. If your boss sends you lots of ideas for things he or she would like to be working on, there's kind of no limit to how many can be sent. If you're dealing with customers, there's kind of no limit to how many complaints or queries they can make of you. If you're a journalist, I can promise you there's no limit to the number of public relations people who can send you press releases that they want you to cover. And yet, of course, an individual human's capacity for doing work hasn't changed. That's still, you know, there's still 24 hours in a day and some of those you've got to sleep and some of those you have a life outside work and you only have so much energy so uh you have this

finite capacity and now this kind of in many ways i think massively increasing input side that has no real breaks to it so firstly it's going to feel like there's a much greater imbalance than there was you're going to feel more overwhelmed than previously because of all the incoming stuff. And then secondly, even if you get really efficient at processing it, it's going to be a little bit like climbing up an infinitely long ladder, right? You're going to get faster and you're going to make a better pace up the infinitely long ladder and you're going to feel more rushed and more tired, but you're never going to get to the top because it's an infinitely long ladder. So efficiency in that regard is actually kind of self-defeating. One analogy that I think makes sense of a lot of it to a lot of people is we all kind of know, I think, from lots of different failed experiments, that when they add a lane to the freeway to try to ease congestion it's well known that in lots of contexts what happens is it just entices more people to use the freeway so it

attracts more cars and then congestion remains at the same level that it was and i think that's sort of what's happening with a lot of productivity stuff is you get better and better and better at answering emails but then every email you answer generates a reply, or half of them do. People start sending you more stuff because you're a quick responder to email, and nothing's changed. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor.

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You point out that there's a deeper thing going on here with productivity, you know, this focus on on productivity this focus on getting more done and you say it also functions as a form of psychological avoidance the more you can convince yourself that you need never make difficult choices because there will be enough time for everything the less you will feel obliged to ask yourself whether the life you are choosing is the right one i just drove us just drove us right into deep water there. No, well, I think this is the underlying thing. I mean, even deeper than the stuff about the social and economic climate and everything

is this basic thing that we are finite creatures. We have a certain amount of lifespan, certain amount of energy, certain amount of attention in any moment and that means by definition that you can only do so many things and yet at the same time we're capable of imagining you know you can you can have a thousand projects you'd like to launch you can have a thousand things that people in your life are trying to make you feel obliged to do uh you can have a thousand pressures, whether coming from inside you or from outside you. But the finitude of yourself means that you are going to be making choices and there are going to be trade-offs and you're going to have

to not do most of the things you could do in order to do a few of them. So there's this big challenge of being finite beings who are capable of imagining infinite achievements or feeling infinite obligations and social pressures. And the great thing in a short term, very misleading way about productivity techniques is they make you feel like maybe you don't have to face that because maybe you can just find a way to do ten things in an hour instead of five things. And maybe you can find a way to achieve all the goals that you were thinking of achieving.

And so it's a sort of short-term psychological relief. What actually then happens is you end up diluting your time and attention among too many things and actually there's also another effect which is a little bit mysterious although i have some theories it actually seems like you end up doing more and more of spending more and more of your life on the trivial stuff the more efficient you get it's like there's a very strong impetus to clear the decks and to uh you know cross off all the little items before you go around to the big one. And I speak from many years of being a productivity geek. It seems like

you get really, really good at doing the things that don't really matter and not a lot better or perhaps even worse at getting around to the things that count. Yeah. I mean, you said so much there. I think that's definitely true that it's a lot easier to do things like answer emails that don't really matter that much, create yet another to do list, you know, check this thing off, you know, organize this, organize that, that's all infinitely easier than really doing sometimes the work, the work that we know is important that is in front of us. And I'm a fan, I mean, I'm a believer in, in, you know, to do lists and all that stuff, like being, being organized, but there's definitely, you know, I can see it in myself, there are days where I'd

rather just deal with all the administrative trivia of what we're doing here. Because that's just easier than maybe sitting down and working on something that's more meaningful and harder to do. Absolutely. And I think, you know, if I can name names in a way that is not actually entirely critical here, because I owe him so much, I think many of your listeners will be familiar with David Allen and the book Getting Things Done that was a huge bestseller after it came out a couple of decades ago. And I have, you know, benefited enormously from all sorts of the insights in this productivity manual. A lot of this stuff about, you know, getting everything out of your head and writing everything down and no longer feeling the stress of trying to keep track of things using your mind.

It's just absolutely changed my approach to work in a very positive way. But he's one of several people in this space who advise having what he calls a someday maybe list, where if you have a sort of ambitious thought for something you might like to do, but you've no time to get around to it now, you put it on this list where it just sort of sits out of sight and you don't need to worry about it and I have found in my own life that that kind of taking something that you clearly really care about but that seems a little too big to get your arms around right now and putting it somewhere where you don't think about it is exactly what I need to not do because that is a strategy for you know the moment I feel a bit sort of scared about some potentially really

exciting project to just sort of turn away from it for now and just focus on cranking out you know the stuff that's that's right in front of me and I think what we need is ways of finding, you know, what you actually need is some way of addressing, of turning to the scary stuff now, even if just a little, in a little way, rather than having any sort of avoidance technique that allows you to sort of, you know, think about postponing it

while you just do more of the less important, but easier stuff. That's an interesting take on that, because I have a someday list, although I don't visit it very often. And I've gotten a lot out of his work, I mean, particularly that writing everything down. But he's also the classic example, that getting things done system. You could essentially just implement the getting things done system 40 hours a week every week if you're not careful, right? Like just the very process of implementing all the constraints is never ending. But some of the concepts are so important.

But I think back to that core idea of, you know, I'm just going to read something else you wrote because I think it says it well. It says it well, you know, you can seek to impose order on your inbox all you like, but eventually you'll need to confront the fact the deluge of messages and the urge you feel to get them all dealt with aren't really about technology. They're manifestations of a larger, more personal dilemmas. Which paths will you pursue and which will you abandon? Which relationships will you prioritize during your shockingly limited lifespan? And who will you resign yourself to disappointing? What matters? And I think that is, you know, at the heart of what I think true good time management, like time management used in the right sense, is really thinking about what those things are and making some difficult decisions about what's important, and then attempting to actually live by those decisions. I think that's exactly right.

And I think one thing I'd like to emphasize is that I believe this message is not only true, but incredibly liberating and relaxing. Sometimes when I'm writing this stuff about like how we only have very short lives and we have to make tough decisions, I understand why people think I'm sort of trying to panic them into different behavior. fact that you won't be able to do all the things you can think of that might be worth doing it's just such a huge relief because you can give up that fight that was not because you didn't have enough self-discipline or you didn't have enough energy or you hadn't found the right productivity technique like that is a logical impossibility you are always going to have to not do most of the cool things that you might want to do in order to do and be present for and benefit from a small proportion of the really cool uh things that

you thought about doing and i think it goes not only what it's quite easy to get into the vein of talking about like cool projects people also have a lot of social pressures and obligations and you know they're asked to perform very well as parents and as employees and as community members and as citizens and you know it is okay also to say like you're gonna have to make some choices in that mix maybe you are going to not have a very tidy house because you've decided you're going to read with your kid uh when you could otherwise be keeping the house tidy you know and and once you see that it was always impossible to be everything i think it's a huge weight i experienced it anyway it's a huge weight off my mind because i come to see that i had been subconsciously telling myself i had to

achieve something that uh it's was never possible for any human being to achieve uh and know, it's a bit like an example I use here and there. It's like nobody beats themselves up for not being able to jump a mile in the air because we never assume in the first place that any human being ought to have that capacity. But we do assume that there must be some rule of nature, some law of nature that says that if you find the right way, must be some rule of nature some law of nature that says that if you find the right way you can answer all the emails that you get and do all your duties as parent employee friend uh son or daughter you know etc etc etc and once you realize that's impossible it really frees up a lot of focus for making the most of your time i don't think it's a council of defeat or despair at all. I think it's actually the prologue to really, really being present and accomplishing things in your life.

Right. I agree 100%. The example I think of often, particularly since we're doing this show, is what this show meant to me, right? Because I had to make a decision at a certain point. Like, if this was what I was going to do, there were other things that I was really interested in that I was not going to be able to do. And one of those the most prominent for me was, I'm probably not going to be able to be in a band right now, right? Like that's probably not workable, given the amount of time that it will take to do this and do it well. So there are sacrifices in that. But for me, it's been so rewarding to actually do something and, you know, not to sound obnoxious, but to do it well and to care about it and really give it the love and

attention that it needs versus spreading myself out over, you know, what I would typically do, which was like, well, I'm going to take a drawing class and I'm going to be in a band and I'm going to learn a new language and I'm going to, and you know, and I would get about, you know, uh, you know, six inches down the road on about 20 different things. It's hard on one hand to, to, to go, yep. You know, I can't do all that. But it's also, like you said, it can be very liberating once we accept that, like, okay, that's the truth. That's what I've got to work with. Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, I always feel like I want to stress that this is such a work in progress in my own life. I'm totally constantly sort of prey to that temptation. But I think I get a little bit better at seeing that that's what's happening and then not

feeling so bad about letting certain things go, jettisoning certain things. The point you make about playing a band brings to brings to mind this famous this is related you know this very famous anecdote about of uh productivity advice from warren buffett i think which is this idea that you should uh list the 25 most important goals in your life in numerical order focus on the top five but then the next 20 should be your avoid at all costs list because they are going to be the kind of things that are really alluring to you they're going to be things that kind of have a big draw you weren't deciding whether to do this show or you know spend more of your life filing your taxes or uh you know um repairing things around the house, you know, things that you have to do but don't really want to do.

You were having to choose between things that had a draw. So you are actually going to have to, you know, if you're going to live this philosophy, you're going to have to not do things that it would be cool to do and it would be good to do and you could probably do well. This whole idea that, you know, a lot of the struggle of living an effective life is learning to say no But I think it's Elizabeth Gilbert the author somewhere points out that like we tend to assume that that means Saying no to all the things we don't want to do right actually it means saying no to a lot of those

And also no to a bunch of to a bunch of good things Yeah, and I think that you that fact used to really bother me. I used to feel really torn by that, like that a choice to do one thing meant it was a choice not to do a bunch of other things. And I don't know when, for me, I just sort of dropped the resistance to the fact that that's what that meant versus sort of always hanging on to it. I think the other problem we have is that we look around and we see what appears to be other people doing all of the things that we think we should be doing. So we look at these people and we're like, but they're doing A, B, C, D, E, F, right? And we look at that and, and we judge ourselves against that, but we're almost

always judging those things out of context in, in a way that we were not seeing the whole story. I mean, the most obvious one, and this is, I'm probably going to get myself into, into trouble here, but the, the, the obvious one that shows up to me as somebody like Steve jobs, like he, you know, he's put on a pedestal in so many ways, but he was clearly such an abysmal father. Right? Just Yeah. And so you've you've got this, like, well, what, which do you pick? We have this image of like, people who can do everything. And I think that's combined with this other cultural thing that I see so often, which is that we feel like for anything to have meaning,

it has to happen on this grand scale. And you combine those two things together, and it's really easy to feel like we have got to up our game or we're just failing. Yes, absolutely. And I think that's totally right. And then I think also there's yet another factor, which is the kind of primarily through social media,

though not exclusively, this kind of one-to one to many relationship that we have such that, you know, you may only have a small number of really good friends, but you are in communication with hundreds and hundreds of people. media feeds uh is is not all the days when they're slowly working on some project or even the days when they can't bring themselves to work on it and they're sort of wandering around the house feeling like losers you see from them the highlights of it so you know if i i'm i realize probably i follow a disproportionate number of authors and journalists because that's what i am as well but you know every day my twitter feed is full of people launching books or giving talks about their new book or finishing the manuscript and pouring themselves a cocktail or... At the very least, the hashtag am writing.

Exactly right. And, you know, all those achievements are good and they're great, but that's like a thousand people. And I'm seeing each day one, another of the thousand finish their book. And of course, that's how it works. What I'm not taking account of psychologically is that, you know, many of those people I will not hear from for months and months and months at a time because they are just doing the slow work. You see one person publishing a book and one person giving a talk and another person launching a course, whatever, you know, and you think like, I should be doing all those things, but it's actually a thousand people who are doing

them all. So it's not, it's not really quite the same thing at all. There's so much talk about the dangers that social media can have to our perception of the world. And yet, you know, they're so true. I mean, there are so many and I'm not I mean, I'm, I'm not against any of it. But if we're not careful to sort of filter what we're seeing through a lens of reality, it can be incredibly discouraging. Right, right. Because it is an environment curated, even at its best, it's an environment curated to bring you lots of exciting and interesting things to a degree that is unrepresentative of how interesting or exciting

any one individual person's life is from moment to moment. And then at its worst, it's designed to bring you things that outrage you and terrify you and, you know and make you think like everybody else in the world is not only a higher achiever but is also absolutely terrible person so you know either way it's uh it's not like walking through the concrete world uh where you know you see people in at every different point in their life and doing all sorts of things it's just sort of it's the highlights real or the lowlights reel I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden.

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Anything else on this topic you want to head into and talk about? I mean, the book is sort of pretty wide ranging on this topic of time and our own finitude and this idea that it's kind of our attempts to deny that, that get us into all these scrapes. So I obviously could talk about it for a very long time. I think we've probably covered the main things i think um another aspect that i'm keen to emphasize i just mentioned briefly is you know we talk a lot about distraction and digital distraction especially and this idea that there is a sort of whole world out there now that is set up to try to monetize distracting us from what we wanted to do and i think that's true and i explore some of the ways in that in my book about you can deal with that but i think there's another aspect as well that

we don't look at as much this internal desire to be distracted so that we talk a lot as if the way i talk about being distracted by twitter or something it might be that i was sitting there working on my book and then like the Twitter pinged up on my desktop and made a noise and I went to look at it and it was kind of, you know, it was kind of a purely external force drawing me away from my focus. And that's a real thing.

That is a huge industry design to try to disrupt my focus and I think it's an extremely serious sort of societal issue at the moment. But actually, it's not exactly how it went down right what actually happened was i was working on a paragraph that i was finding hard i was finding i was experiencing unpleasant emotions even if just minor ones from the sort of having to put the effort in to think through what i was trying to say and say it as clearly as possible. And this was causing me a little bit of anxiety or even, you know, fear of a very mild kind.

And it occurred to me or to my lizard brain that it would be more pleasant to spend five minutes scrolling through Twitter, spend five minutes scrolling through Twitter, which unfortunately then because of how Twitter works might become an hour scrolling through Twitter. But, you know, there's this, I think it's very useful to be aware of this inner discomfort that we feel almost specifically when we are doing things that really matter, you know, things that are big enough

to trigger a little bit of resistance, a little bit of anxiety, and how digital distractions are sort of waiting there for us to sort of numb out a bit and give us relief from that. And I'm not even saying that, you know, after a couple of hours of hard work, it's not perfectly, saying that, you know, after a couple of hours of hard work, it's not perfectly just a way to give yourself a break. But I think it's really useful to be aware that sort of distraction is an inside job as well as an external one. Absolutely. I mean, there's, again, to go back to the productivity and time management field, right? There's a whole lot of people who spend a whole lot of time writing about just turn off your distractions and your notifications, which is important if you haven't done that, right? Like, it's a great

place to start. But far beyond that, for most of us is, like you said, we, we wander into the distraction, maybe not as consciously as we might think, right? I realize I, you know, it's almost at this point, there's an almost unconscious grabbing my phone and having it in front of me before I've even really contemplated what I'm doing at all. But you're right, that urge for distraction comes from within. And I think one of the things that's so pernicious for me, and I think probably a lot of people, but I'll just speak for myself, is that it's a couple things. One is that that urge, so there's this desire to distract or have a short break or to turn away. And so technology makes it so easy to do so that I can almost do it over and over and

over again. And then I find that the very path of distracting myself in that way just makes me more likely to need to distract myself. It feeds on itself, whereas a break that has some sort of more edification for me, like going out and spending five minutes walking around outside, doesn't cause me to need five more minutes of walking around outside in the same way that five minutes of Twitter causes me to need five more minutes of Twitter. There's something I've noticed about myself when I am sort of checking the phone a lot, even if it's just email, that there's something that drains me about that. And if I have a day where I sort of that tendency runs wild, I feel scattered and distracted in a way that makes me just need to scatter and distract myself even more. Yes, I think that's totally right. And I think then also that the technology is conspiring with that by finding ways to keep you sucked in. I think what that really points to is a kind of a tricky thing to get one's head around, which is that when it's, that when you take a break, it's sort of deeply wired into us to assume that if you've

been working hard on some piece of writing or something, I mean, I always use examples from what I do, but apply it in different ways to other people's work. When you take a break, you sort of expect it to feel immediately joyous that you're taking a break. It's like a totally wonderful experience. And actually, for a few seconds, social media often does feel that way until the rot sets in about 20 seconds later and you start hating yourself for doing it. But a break that's actually very restorative, getting up from your desk, stretching, going outside, it actually might not feel that good right at first because, you know, the flywheel of your mind has been spinning, spinning, spinning, and you're kind of having to sort of interrupt that you're breaking momentum deliberately and i think it's

worth you know it's very helpful to remember that a really restorative break that feels great after you know when you return to your desk in the first few seconds might actually feel uh boring or almost worse than boring because it's not because it's kind of interrupting everything that has been going in your mind, if that makes sense. It does. I think that's a great point. And somehow we have come, without me even noticing it, to the end of our time. So you and I are going to talk a little bit more in a post-show conversation. And one of the things we're going to talk about is a question you posed, which is why are we surprised that therapy has its downsides? So I am really looking forward to you and I talking about that. Listeners, if you're interested,

you can get access to that as well as a weekly mini episode I do called a teaching a song and a poem by going to one you feed.net slash support and contributing. So Oliver, thank you so much for taking the time to come on. It's been fun to talk and kind of like the first time I feel like I could, you know, this could go on for a long time, but yeah, it was my pleasure. Thank you very much. All right. Take care. Thanks. Bye. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a donation to the One You Feed podcast. Head over to oneyoufeed.net slash support. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really

podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what in the museum of failure and does your dog truly love you we have the answer go to really no really.com and register to win 500 a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition sign jason bobblehead the really no really podcast follow us on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts