The Wellness Scoop - How to Escape the Productivity Trap

Episode Date: January 24, 2022

We’re joined by writer and author Oliver Burkeman to talk about the productivity-trap; the narrative that keeps our sense of self-worth and value tied to how much we get done and achieve. In his new book, Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver argues that this only results in disappointment and unhappiness, and explores how to cultivate a healthier relationship with productivity to ultimately lead a more fulfilling life.   We discuss: Confronting the mismatch between what we can do and what we think we can do Disarming perfectionism and the ‘when I’ mentality The relationship between productivity and self-worth The catch 22 of getting things done Why the notion of ‘balance’ may not always be the answer The benefit of enjoying leisure activities without any end goal in mind The distraction economy Ways to approach getting what matters done How to cultivate a healthier relationship with productivity Oliver Burkeman: ‘Four Thousand Weeks: Time and How to Use It’ Four Thousand Weeks: Embrace Your Limits. Change Your Life. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Delicious Ways to Feel Better. Each episode explores various aspects of our mental and physical health to help you make the small simple changes to your life to feel happier and healthier and today we're looking at how to escape the productivity trap. I think a lot of us spend a lot of our lives trying to sort of bust outside of our basic human limitations and it's when you embrace those non-negotiable limitations instead that you finally have the chance to get around to what counts. Before we delve into today's episode, I wanted to let you know about our sponsor. And a little note on our sponsor, we only work with brands that I actually use and that I truly love. We will never promote something that isn't totally authentic or something that I don't believe in.

So for the next few months our podcast sponsor is Simprove, a supplements company that I've been using to support my gut health for about five years now. I was buying it for years before I even started working with them and I know that gut health is such a prevalent topic right now and something that so many of you are interested into. The gut microbiome is made up of trillions of bacteria that support pretty much all aspects of both our mental and our physical health from digestion to our immune system, energy production and our mental health and keeping that right balance of good bacteria in our gut is absolutely essential and whilst our diet and lifestyles play a huge role in that, adding in live bacteria can really help too the bacteria in Simprove which

is a water-based supplement can survive that long journey from the mouth to the gut where they're then able to multiply and support the microbiome I truly swear by it and I really hope that you love it too for anyone wanting to try it they've shared a 15% off code with us just use Ella15 which is valid on Simprove.com within the UK and for any existing customers they also have a brilliant subscribers package too. Our guest today is Oliver Berkman, a writer and author who specializes in building a meaningful life. He's written books such as The Antidote, Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking and Help How to become slightly happier

and get a bit more done and now 4 000 weeks time and how to use it it's been turned antidote to the current narrative around productivity as so many of us question the cram in as much as possible philosophy that has dominated the past few decades oliver makes the case that there'll always be more that feels it must be done than you feasibly have time to do in any given day, week or year. And that by recognising this, you can liberate yourself from the enslavement to the mentality. For many years, Oliver also wrote the popular weekly column on psychology for The Guardian, this column will change your life. And today he's here to change our lives. So welcome, Oliver. Thanks for joining us. Thank you very much for inviting me. It's an absolute pleasure. And actually, before we get into the concepts that

we'll explore, I wanted to start with a quote from the book because I think it really sets the tone for our conversation. Productivity is a trap. Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster. Nobody in the history of humanity has ever achieved work-life balance, whatever that might be. And you certainly won't get there by copying the six things successful people do before 7am. I just think that quote is absolutely fantastic. Can you give us in a nutshell your philosophy? Yeah, I mean, I think the idea that I was trying to chase down in this book, and just to be clear, like, I needed it as much as anybody, I was writing this book to, you know, give the

advice that I needed to hear. I think so many of us in all sorts of very different ways live with this notion that soon, like, maybe it's as soon as next week, or maybe it's several years away, we're going to like get on top of our lives and have everything running in perfect working order and be able to deal with all the incoming demands all the ambitions we might have the goals we might have the obligations we might feel from our family employers whoever it's this constant like if i can only just put a bit more self-discipline into it or maybe get exactly the right techniques from a book or a video or something, then I'm going to be in this kind of commanding position over time. And I, you know, we can talk in more practical details, but I think the sort of really fundamental philosophical idea that I'm trying to get across is that's just flawed from the start.

There is a mismatch between what any finite human can do and what we can think we want to do or feel obliged to do. There's just no reason why this finite amount of time and this infinite realm of possibilities should ever match. And if you can sort of admit defeat on that, if you can confront the truth of that, it's actually incredibly empowering because after you've gone through that surrender or a little bit of it anyway, that's when you're free to just you know pick a few things that really matter and focus your time and attention on them without being distracted by this like logically impossible quest to become infinitely capable or productive. I love that it's so well put because there is there is a never-ending to-do list I don't think anyone listening to this would feel differently

but there's not never-ending time as you said, the two just don't match up. And do you think this efficiency trap, as you call it, or a productivity trap is really fueled by this rise in a need for perfectionism and a perfect life? And when I become this perfect person? Yeah, totally. I mean, I think we're talking about two layers of things here. One of them is just like the human condition, right? We're born to be finite and also born to be able to kind of envisage infinite things. So it's baked in. And you can find people complaining about this mismatch in like ancient Greek philosophy. So it's not brand new. But everything in the culture that we live in today and the economy and more, I think, really pushes it to get much more extreme. And I feel like we're on a kind of a threshold in the sense that more and more people are realizing that it's completely impossible. So yeah, perfectionism is another way of talking about the whole idea here, I think, really. Is it perfect control over your time? Perfect

knowledge of how the day is going to unfold? Is it doing things in a perfect way? What we mean by perfectionism on a deep level is something that I think is just, it is literally not achievable. It belongs to the world of fantasy. And so I think there's something really powerful in seeing that the problem here is not that you haven't quite mastered it yet. The problem here is like baked into the human condition. Absolutely. Actually actually i was speaking to a psychologist this week who's doing some work on our next book about making changes in your life and all these habits we want to take up and she was really interesting actually she was saying how so many of us put off making those changes because we think we can't make those changes until we

become that perfect person and we live with that when I mentality that I know you talk about a lot. So can you give us the getting into 4000 weeks? Can you tell us what what does that represent? What's the title? Oh, the title represents very, very roughly the average human lifespan in the West. If you live to be 80, you'll have had a few more than 4000 weeks, basically. The number I mean, I'm glad if it's arresting and it grabs people's attention, but the number is kind of not significant because many people get quite a few more. And obviously, sadly, many people get far fewer. But however many weeks you end up getting, it sounds like a terrifyingly small number. Even if you break records and you live to be like 122,

you'll have had like something like 7,000 weeks. So it's just a reminder that we're dealing here with incredible finitude and limitation. And there is, you know, no point pursuing ways of living that involve beating yourself up for this fact, because it's just, you know, it's just where we are as humans. It feels a bit conflicting, doesn't it, though? Because when you say 4,000 weeks, it sounds, as you said, like an extraordinarily short period of time. And so part of you wants to act on that and jump on that and squeeze in everything that you possibly could and be the best possible version of yourself and then as you said another part of you thinks relax enjoy those 4 000 weeks i totally understand that first response right it's like this is so short i better go like do extreme sports every weekend, I better travel

to 20 different locations in the course of six months, you know, to really kind of suck the juice out of out of life. But I think that's actually ultimately another example of this perfectionistic mindset, right? It's almost the desire to live forever by another means. It's like, okay, I'm not going to get to live forever. So I'm going to do as much as I would get done if I did live forever. It's sort of scratching the same itch. And when you can just let it permeate through your self a little bit, that this is never going to happen, that if you managed to visit 100 places in the course of this year, you would just have been exposed to a thousand more thoughts about more places that you might want to go and that sort of dynamic is is repetitive like getting through stuff actually generates the more

stuff to want to to want to get through that's when you can relax into it because you can sort of stop stressing about trying to make it something that it that it isn't and yet as you also point out really importantly we can then drop at least to some extent this notion that when I finally get my financial security sorted out or my relationship sorted out or when I finally become a parent or when the kids leave for university like that's the moment that everything is going to get in in perfect running order in my life you can sort of you can realize that there's kind of never going to be a moment of truth and And that's kind of brilliant, I think. And I know you've written quite a lot on happiness.

Do you feel like that is a fundamental part of how to be happy as a human? Because I think that's something so many of our listeners, so many people in the world are striving for and really, really struggling with at the moment. Yeah, I mean, I only sort of saw this in hindsight, as it were. But I do think that basically in some way, I'm just sort of poking at the same topic over and over again here, which is how much we have this tendency to kind of your life, something's gone badly wrong. Instead of the idea that negativity is a part of life as well as positivity, there's going to be happy feelings and sad feelings, joyful experiences and terrible ones. And so it turns life into this kind of constant struggle to make life into something it could never be. And the same goes, obviously, with this, you know, the cult of productivity. It says there's something wrong

about the fact that your capacity is limited and you should be trying very, very hard to transcend this situation. But if you turn life into a problem like that, then it just sort of just makes everything much more of a struggle and there's no end to that struggle. I quote an American Buddhist at the beginning of the book, Charlotte Jocko Beck, saying, what makes it unbearable is your mistaken belief that it can be cured. And I kind of totally love this quote because it says to me, you know, the thing that creates most of our sort of real misery in life is the notion that life should not be the way it is, that we should not have more emails in our inbox than we could ever answer, that we should not have more family obligations that we feel than that we could

fulfill. And it's like, well, but we just do. So what's the next step? I love that. I went to talk by Tony Robbins, that huge guru, and he said, and it stuck with me forever, it was years and years ago, to replace expectation with appreciation and I come back to it time and time again I think it's so powerful it's about what you expect from life all kind of constantly and it can I can almost hear people listening saying so are you saying you shouldn't really aim very high and resign yourself to a life of mediocrity and I'm always like saying to these people no absolutely not it's the opposite right it's when you have dropped this kind of hugely distracting notion

that the value of life is going to be sometime in the future when you finally become perfect, that's when you get to really put your energy into doing stuff that matters really, you know, right now. Instead of this weird thing, well, I certainly have got into many times, I think it's quite common of, well, you mentioned it, it's sort of a catch 22, you don't let yourself do things that you could do, and that would be really meaningful to do. Because you're waiting for the time when you're the kind of person who does those kinds of things. I mean, that's just ridiculous. You're never going to become the kind of person who does those kinds of things if you never do them. Totally, or you struggle to be present. I know that's something I've certainly noticed a lot since becoming a parent as well my I've got a one-year-old and a two-year-old and you think I could just sit with

them and play duplo or I could just do that to-do list item send that note or do the laundry or do the dishwasher and it's like you feel this constant compelling need to tick things off a to-do list instead of just being and yeah for me that's been the kind of most eye-opening experience about certainly personally feeling quite stuck in that trap of productivity and constantly needing the empty inbox the tidy desk the tidy house otherwise you're doing something wrong instead of actually just enjoying it and am I right in saying that you actually earlier on in your career were a self-confessed productivity geek? So you were part of this kind of interest in the cult productivity, and you've massively changed?

Oh, yeah, I'm totally know what I'm talking about when I talk about being sort of obsessed by time management systems and schedules and apps for getting more out of the same amount of time. And I wouldn't want to claim that I'm totally unsusceptible to that even today. But I think I've sort of seen through the fantasy behind it. I guess that's what I would say. I might still do it. I might still sort of open a book about how to be more efficient with the background hope that this is going to be the one that totally transforms everything. But you sort of, the word disillusionment has negative connotations, but I think there should be like a positive version of it, right? There's this idea that you see through the idea that any one of these techniques or ways to organize your day or morning routines that you read about,

you see through the idea that that's going to be like your salvation. It doesn't mean you don't do it. It doesn't mean it's not good to spend the first hour of the morning writing in a journal meditating doing yoga whatever it but it takes away this notion that this is going to be the thing that finally sort of allows you to become the kind of person who's who can justify their existence on the planet i think it's often about self-worth right it's like well no your your existence on the planet is is already justified and then by all means write in a journal i totally agree with that I think the self-worth bit's really interesting, because I think it's very easy to feel that you failed if you don't achieve those things

every single day, every single morning, and that you won't get the benefit. And we're quite all or nothing, I think, so many of us as humans. And so if we didn't do it yesterday, there's no point doing it today. Right. So you break your streak of 10 minutes meditation in the morning or something after the first week. And then because you set that expectation, you don't return to it for the next six months. Whereas if you didn't have that expectation, in the case of meditation, specifically, if you'd approached it with the aim of it being what Dan Harris, the meditation writer, podcaster calls daily-ish, you know, if that was your plan to begin with, if it was something more modest, you might well go back to it after a couple of days or something.

Dailyish is a fantastic expression. I absolutely love that. Do you think this escape of that efficiency trap, productivity trap has got something to do with cultivating more self-compassion in that sense? Yeah, I mean, for me, getting a bit sort of personal therapy-ish with it, I think it sort of, it amounts to the same thing in a way. It is that sort of more friendly attitude towards yourself that says like, you're okay as a person if you don't achieve anything today. I mean, even if you've got deadlines and obligations and contracts and whatever it might be and may have made promises to people, you're still justified in your existence if you do none of them. Now that said, why not spend the day doing a few important priorities? That's great. But I think, yeah, I think it's, for me,

it was always this idea that I started the morning in a kind of existential debt of some kind. And if I didn't like pay it off during the day with enough productivity, then I was like sinking deeper into debt. And that doesn't, it just doesn't really make any sense. I mean, there's no, nobody is on that existential level. Nobody is keeping the really make any sense i mean there's no nobody is on that existential level nobody is keeping the books in this way like there's nobody there going to condemn you for all time if they if you haven't been productive enough in a given day your job situation might require that you try really hard to answer a certain bunch of emails absolutely but it doesn't need to have that edge of like do i have value as a human being exactly it doesn't

define your self-worth and I have to ask actually before we move on to the perception of time which I think is fascinating the way you write about that the idea of emptying your inbox every day and making it fill up faster because I think that is something probably every listener is nodding along to and thinking that's me that they're talking about. Well this is a whole bit of this that we haven't really looked at right it's not just that there's not enough time to get through everything. It's that the act of getting through things in many different areas of modern life, especially, causes more things to come into being. So if you get really good at answering email,

and I've definitely been there, I wouldn't say I am at the moment. Firstly, you reply to more people at a faster tempo, and then they reply to your replies, and then you have to reply to those replies probably. Or you get a reputation in your organization as being someone who's really responsive to email. So more people, you know, find it worth their while to email you. And so the reward, as other people have said in the past, you know, the reward for good time management is more work. And probably not even the work that you want the most to be doing, but rather other people's agendas,

things they want sorting out to make their lives easier, which has a role, but you don't want it to run your life. And it's happened in all sorts of different contexts, right? It's not just email, but we have these technologies that make it incredibly easy to do things faster. And what happens is that more inputs are generated. If you didn't know about the experience of modern email, if you'd come from another planet or something, you might think, oh, well, in this civilization, people can answer a message really

quickly. So that must mean and send a message really quickly. So that must mean they have lots more free time to, you know, relax and go on hikes or do gardening. But no, you create a system that it's much easier for inputs to enter and therefore they do and therefore you end up with more busyness than you had before and I think in that I know that quote the beginning touched on work-life balance which is obviously quite a buzzword and I know something that we certainly get a lot of questions on and you trying to dispel the myth you think think that well, work life balance isn't really possible and setting those kind of quite arbitrary, I guess, boundaries around it makes

it more challenging. Can you can you tell us a little bit more about that? Yeah, I mean, I think this it sounds like such a forgiving notion, doesn't it? It's like instead of being relentless in my job, I'm going to find a balance between work and life. But I think how it really ends up landing with people, in my experience, and talking to people anyway, is as an it's like a new level of demand. It's like now you've got to not only keep the ship afloat at home and do your work, but you've got to sort of really kind of excel in both and feel like both of them are going really fantastically. And it ends up really being the expectation that you can be 100% at work and 100% at home, which adds up to 200% and doesn't work, I don't think. And yeah, also, there's just this idea,

again, not the only person to say it, but like, there are seasons of life. And there may be times when cultivating imbalance is right, there may be periods with a newborn baby when hopefully your one is going to get lots of parental leave. But aside from that, there may be times when it's appropriate to get away with as little as you can in work, you know, in order to focus on family. And there may be like times in life for young adults before they have started families, for example, where it's totally appropriate to work incredibly long hours at things that are meaningful to you. So this idea that there ought to be balance at any point, I think just acts as another felt burden, usually, instead of the

liberation that you might expect. Another way of making you feel like you're getting it wrong, basically. Right. Yeah, there's nothing wrong with imbalance, necessarily. There might be in a given situation, but it's not an inherently terrible thing. And you also talked about hobbies, which I thought was quite interesting, and the need to rediscover rest and hobbies just for the sake of doing them, as opposed to them being other measures of productive output. Yeah, I mean, this is really into the weeds of like the stuff I need to hear as well. But yeah, we have this tendency. Once we adopt this incredibly instrumental mindset to time that says, your job today is to get as much

value out of your working hours and cram as many tasks in, it sort of naturally extends to leisure, it becomes very hard to think about time off as being well spent if you're not doing something for future benefit either resting and looking after yourself so you can be better on your on the job or you know just things like always training for 10ks and half marathons instead of just enjoying a run or in my case I definitely spent a big chunk of time sort of going to meditation retreats and things not not really to be present in the moment but because I thought I was on some like quest that was going to end in perfect spiritual enlightenment or something. Again, so you sort of turn all these leisure activities into future oriented ones. And what I think is

so great about the idea of a hobby, which is kind of really unfashionable in our culture, is that it doesn't have that instrumental thing, right? You might get better. Maybe if you enjoy playing the piano, you will get better, but you're not doing that thing in order to get better or to market your talents. And I use the example of hiking for me, which is just kind of incredibly important in my life. But like, I haven't got better at walking since I was about four or five, probably. I'm not going to get to the end of all the hiking. I mean, I will at some point in my life of necessity, but it won't be because I've like done all the hiking

that I plan to do. I've achieved my hiking goal. No, you just do it because it's worth doing in the moment. I think it's so interesting because like side hustles, they're quite fashionable to have. Hobbies are really unfashionable to have. The difference is that one of those has been instrumentalized for profit,

for some future goal, you know, and for money. The other one is just doing it for its own sake. I kind of think it's interesting that the one that's just for its own sake feels almost embarrassing to admit to in our society. It is. We're so terrible at resting. And it's interesting because lots of the conversations we have on the podcast and my own personal interest as well is in the kind of physical health side of it and of course the mental health side.

And I think you see huge repercussions of that, of just effectively burnout, of the fact that you are, I want a better expression, burning the candle at both ends because you've got to see all your friends and all your family. And as you said, you can't just do yoga for the sake of yoga. You've got to become a yoga master or a meditation master

or you've hiked every peak on every continent and we're not very good at just letting ourselves sit and and just be you know and that that points to this clue that i think is so important here which is like if you do decide to integrate a bit more of this into your life and to stop and to rest and to do things for their own sake it's really helpful to drop the expectation that it's going to feel great in the first hour or day or week, you know, because we are completely wired at this point, conditioned to be moving, moving, moving. So, you know, if you decide to sit down with a novel in a cup of tea

at a time when you might otherwise be getting things done, or even to just be present with your small children instead of crossing off items on a to-do list, it's okay that that doesn't feel great at the beginning because everything, every psychological force in us has been shaped to go in the other direction. So of course it won't feel that great at the beginning. You're a podcast listener, and this is a podcast ad heard only in Canada. Reach great Canadian listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements

or run a pre-produced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience with Libsyn Ads. Email bob at libsyn.com to learn more. That's b-o-b at l-i-b-s-y-n dot com. Absolutely. And actually, I think that brings us on really nicely to, you talk a lot about attention and distraction. And I certainly resonate with that, which, as you said,

you're still checking your phone and scrolling to see if there are new emails, even when you have the opportunity to sit and be still. And you talk a lot about how attention is just so fundamental to the experience of life. And I know we've heard that time and time again, that being present is a huge part of feeling a sense of happiness. And you said distraction is motivated by the desire to try to flee something painful about our experience with the present. Can we talk a bit about that attention economy and how, again, it continues to feed the desire to be distracted and

feel like we're achieving yeah totally i think lots of people recognize how important attention is that sheer fact i'm not really adding anything new we don't tend to take it as seriously as we do like our money or our physical health but actually what you're paying attention to aggregated over the course of a lifespan that just is your life right i mean if there's a friendship in your life that you never pay any attention to, then you kind of don't have that friendship in any meaningful sense. Equally, if there's some huge problem in your life that never occupies your attention, then you kind of didn't have that problem and don't need to worry about it. So yeah, the two things I think are really important to say are, I don't think people realise

the extent to which we now live in an economy where there are lots and lots of people, lots of corporations, motivated to grab and to keep your attention, sort of by any means necessary, and not necessarily in ways that are going to help you. What these algorithms tend to do is just to monitor what compels your attention and then provide more of it and more extreme forms of it. it could be wonderful uplifting quotations and pictures of cute animals but it could also be like you know political radicalization and random feuds with people if that's what you prove to these platforms is what grabs you so they just don't have our interests at heart and maybe that's fine but it's worth being aware of and not imagining otherwise but then the

bit that i think is more uncomfortable here is that we still want to think of this as like oh the enemies are at the gate we have to steward our attention and we get distracted by malevolent outside forces whether that is social media or you know a colleague asking questions when you'd much rather just get on with focusing on what you're working on but what i was trying to explore in the bit that you read is that we give in to distraction willingly most of the time if you're working on something important and meaningful to you but hard or you are trying to you know listen to your spouse in a for an important conversation in your relationship or something like that these things are uncomfortable and there's a huge urge in those moments to go and

do something more comfortable like just scroll through your phone and so like if i'm writing a chapter of a book i'm not sitting there in ecstasy and then like evil social media comes and grabs me away i'm getting annoyed and frustrated and intimidated by the project. I don't know if I can do it as well as I want to do it. And so I run away and do something like that feels more pleasant, but is actually totally not useful for the goals I want to achieve in life. And I just think that's really useful to stay aware of, that we collaborate with these forces that want to distract us. And that makes, it's quite empowering to see that.

Because then, you know, when you are working on that bit of writing or when I am and, you know, that feeling comes up, you can just be like, oh yeah, nothing's gone wrong here. It's normal to expect that this would feel difficult because I care about it and the stakes are high and I'm at the edge of my abilities

and I don't know for sure that I can do it. It's normal that that would all feel pretty uncomfortable. And then you can just sort of hang out with the discomfort a bit and not end up three hours later and you were just staring at your phone the whole time. To me, it brings back that conversation of self-compassion because I think we've all sat there, probably do most days, where we think we're maybe not quite good enough to do something.

So as you say, we then hide from it, which is so easy to do. I caught myself doing it yesterday, actually, working on our next book. And I just kept picking up my phone. Every two minutes, there was nothing to see. Literally nothing. Absolutely nothing. But I just scrolled and I scrolled and I scrolled and I scrolled because I was stuck. And it certainly didn't provide the inspiration that I was looking for by any means. And that explore feature piques my anxiety more than anything. anything I can't I don't seem to be able to get rid of it and again I need to keep reminding myself that I'm not failing by not being able to stop the distraction exactly now the self-compassion goes the other way you also don't want to beat yourself up for having spent the time on the phone instead of doing the work but you can just see that what went on there was just a

natural response to a natural lack of certainty that you have what it takes. And that's good, because if you had work where you absolutely know you can do it, that's a different kind of problem. That's kind of meaningless very quickly, I think, if it's totally unchallenging. There's almost a kind of overriding theme in everything you've said so far of just letting go, just letting everything be a bit yeah i think so i think it's i think that's true i think sometimes that gets interpreted in a weird like passive way and that i would want to push back against that interpretation it is letting go it is like seeing that the control you have over reality is tiny compared to the control we kind of feel we are entitled to or might manage to get next

month if we can just organize ourselves a bit better or something. But the reason to see all that, I think, and this is important to say as well, is not just to be like some sort of nihilist who does nothing because what's the point? Because you don't have the control you sought. It's precisely so that you can then be an active participant in reality and do cool stuff and take risks and live life boldly because you're not making everything dependent on this notion of achieving this kind of unrealistic control of reality you're just like well that that is off the table so now what would be the most meaningful or exciting or pleasurable thing to to? Yes, you get a lot more enjoyment about it. And I have to ask, actually, because I think I loved I loved how you mentioned the side hustle kind of glorification, which I totally agree.

But I think multitasking and being able to do that well is again, you know, pretty glorified. Do you think it's inherently quite negative, really? I do. I mean, some qualifications are in order. I don't think that like listening to a podcast while you clean the house or somehow evil because you're using two completely different channels of attention. And it's quite possible to do that. Listen to an audio book while exercising, whatever. I think that multitasking on the same attentional channel. So when we're trying to sort of imagine that in the course of the next couple of hours, we're going to stay on top of your emails, but you're also going to make progress on a creative project and you're going to be available for people calling you, whatever it might be.

That's really kind of dangerous. It doesn't work. What's really happening, however much you claim to be multitasking, is that you're just very rapidly switching your attention between things. And we know from the research that there's huge sort of cognitive costs to that. It's much slower to do an email, a little bit of writing, a conversation, and keep circulating than it is to focus and get a bunch of emails answered, and then turn to the next thing. We do it again, I think it's all the same reason that we do it, which is that it feels good to tell yourself that you sort of touched in on 20 different projects in the course of a day. You feel like you're taking care of business, like you're in command. But what really happens in that situation is that almost always, I think, is that like when

any one project gets difficult, you just bounce off to the next one. So you go around in a circle and you never go through the challenging bit of any one of them. So one of the things I go on about a bit in the book is about trying to adopt working practices that are sort of one project at a time. So you sort of make tasks and projects wait in a queue, even though it feels anxiety inducing to do that, because you're like, well, aren't they urgent too? They are, but you're actually going to do more of them if you can like, serialize them and work sequentially through them. It's not always possible, but it's incredibly useful practice to introduce because it gets rid of this notion where you just sort of jump around between 20 in the course of a day and you feel like you were involved in everything, but you

don't actually get anywhere with any of them. Yeah, I think that's very true. And I think you talk a lot about the perception of time and also then versus now and I think there is probably quite a shared glorification of the fact that things are so fast now and so hectic and and we miss a slower pace and I think again in terms of the kind of pointing of fingers I think quite a lot of those fingers get pointed at modern technology which is an interesting one but you talk about the fact that that's that's not really case. Time has continued to move at the same pace and always will. Yeah, I mean, I think we have a very strange idea about what time is and the way we talk about it, the words we use, you talk about like having time and saving time and time moving too slowly for you

and things like that. But it's just this implacable force, right? Time is just time. And one of the things I go into in the book is what we know, it's a limited amount, but we can speculate about what the time experience of somebody would have been in pre-industrial times who was not reliant on clocks. And I just think it's more basically and fundamentally different than most people can get their heads around. It's not just that life moved slower. It's that there wasn't the sense that there is you and then there is time. And you've got to line your tasks and your activity up against this external yardstick. And maybe time is moving too fast. Maybe you're wasting time. It was much more like time was just the medium in which life unfolded. And life was terrible in those times in all sorts of ways. But in that way,

I think it would have been much more peaceful, because you just did the things that needed doing when they needed doing it made no sense to be like, how can I like, come up with a new schedule for like milking the cows in my medieval farm, like they just need milking when they need milking, it's just like you just move with the rhythms of reality. And I think we've lost that. It's very important that we've lost it in many ways, because there's all sorts of stuff you can't do unless you sort of have this abstract idea of time, and you then start trying to get more efficient. You know, most modern technologies and medical breakthroughs and all the rest of it are dependent on that. But we have lost something. And I think it's worthwhile just kind of keeping that in the back of your

mind that there's another way of relating to time, which we all do experience sometimes and I think it's worthwhile just kind of keeping that in the back of your mind that there's another way of relating to time which we all do experience sometimes I think in nature sometimes or with a newborn baby perhaps or in various other contexts where the clock just doesn't seem to be relevant and it's not time isn't really ticking you've sort of fallen through a portal into a different kind of relationship with time it's good to know that that's a possibility and that how we do things normally today is not the only option absolutely i know for myself personally that those are always the moments you feel happiest aren't they when you're you are just very present in that sense and i think letting go of time and what time it is and how long you've been doing whatever that activity is is so indicative of the fact that

you really are that absorbed in it. It kind of going further into this, you used the big rocks parable, I think to talk about that. And I thought it was a really great metaphor. And I wondered if you could explain it to our listeners. Yeah, whether it's really great metaphor, really terrible one, they'll have to decide because I'm sort of bringing this famous story up in order to in order to critique it a bit but i'm sure people will have encountered this notion it's a it's an old story there's lots of different versions but the basic idea it's a teacher talking to his class or something and he's got a few big rocks some pebbles some sand and a big jar and he challenges them to fit it all into the jar and they try putting the sand in first but then it doesn't fit all the

pebbles and it ends by him sort of saying no look if you if they try putting the sand in first but then it doesn't fit or the pebbles and it ends by him sort of saying no look if you if you put the big rocks in first then there's space around them for the sand and the pebbles and you can fit everything in the jar it's the only way to do it and the idea here is like you've got to make time and prioritize the big rocks in your life the things that really matter and as long as you do that then you'll get lots of other stuff done as well and you'll feel like you're doing what counts. And if you get totally bogged down in the little irrelevant details, you'll never find time for the important stuff. And it's true so far as it goes. But it's totally rigged this story, because the teacher has only

brought into the classroom as many rocks as he knows will fit in the jar. And I think the real problem that we have today is not that we spend too much time on stuff that doesn't matter to get done all the things that matter. It's that even if we prioritize perfectly, there are just too many things that feel like they matter. Because mattering is not like, it's not a property of nature. You can apply that sense of this is really important to 10,000 things in the course of a day, but you're not going to do 10,000 things in the course of a day or a life. So I use it in order to criticize it to sort of say, people talk about the importance of saying no, for example, absolutely agree. But it's saying no to some things that you really care about as well, not just saying no to the irrelevant stuff.

There isn't going to be this situation that if you could just get in charge of your time properly, then you'd never have the feeling that something important was being neglected. But actually loads of important things are always going to be neglected. And it's kind of liberating to realise that because then you can say, well, okay, my job today is just to try to give some time and attention to a handful of the things that really matter the most, instead of this notion that somehow I'm going to get around to everything that matters. Absolutely. I think certainly for our mental health as well, I think the concept of trying to have it all and the myth of that is so extraordinarily damaging, because certainly in my view, it's absolutely not possible. And I think before we move on to what we can do to try and help ourselves, do you think it's fair to say that there really is no perfect

life? There really is no perfect day. There are no exact tips and techniques and tricks that we need to do. We just need to accept that life will move as it will move. We can aim in any way we can, but really, we also have to let go of the expectations around that. Yeah, totally. I think there are all sorts of things you can do, and I will talk about them. But yes, I think perfection, by its very nature, doesn't belong to reality. It might be useful to think about perfection in certain times and to be inspired by it in certain ways, but it doesn't belong to reality so that it's off the table to begin with. If that's what you're seeking out of life, it's really useful to see that it was always out of the question to begin with. Because, you know, even if you can achieve what you take to be perfection in one area of life, it's going to be at the cost of all the other ones that you don't get time for something like that so liberating to see through that i think because then you can really get like roll up your sleeves and get stuck into things that matter instead of

chasing this kind of this phantom easier said than done totally easier said than done but it's the most kind of obvious way to enjoy yourself i think and to feel happier because i know that's that is something obviously it's so relevant to absolutely everyone and I think for everyone listening I'm sure it resonates because you said it's kind of easier said than done this shift in our perspective I think can often make us feel like we are swimming upstream we're doing something that goes against the status quo that goes against what's kind of normally glorified in our present day and probably quite different to what some of our colleagues, friends and families are doing.

On a societal level, how do you think we shift this conversation? I guess it depends what you mean by societal level. There are so many things that, you know, would make this situation better on a policy level, right? So if you provide people with social safety nets and generous parental leave and generous working conditions, the more you do that, I'm sure the more that it sort of releases this sense that survival is dependent on doing an impossible amount. So there's definitely, you know, plenty of stuff at that level. I don't really focus on that

too much in the book. I think the way to think about it in terms of the relationship between the individual and everyone else is firstly, this is not a prescription for becoming incredibly weird and unusual compared to everyone you know, or having a single instant where you change everything about how you do stuff. I didn't, haven't done that. It's to do with the sort of gradual change where you become a little bit more comfortable with the discomfort of maybe not doing certain things, maybe letting certain things slide in order to focus on certain other things. You know, it might be a question of challenging small expectations, like that your house will always

be tidy or that your email response time will always be an hour or two rather than getting to the point where you like might never respond to emails at all or you know might go and live on the top of a mountain in the Himalayas instead of being part of your regular life so you can do it in small ways and then also it's almost this is getting a bit kind of existentialist but I think it's important it's almost irrelevant in certain ways what you're doing on the outside, right? You don't necessarily need to change your life externally in any way at all, although I think it naturally leads you to do so. But it's just this sort of internal shift where you say, I'm not going to go along anymore with this idea that if I met the impossible demands that are being placed on me by society or by myself,

that I would then be happy. Like, I'm just going to loosen up that assumption a bit and attach to it a bit less. I might still have to spend a big chunk of my life doing all sorts of things I don't like doing because that's where I'm at in my life and my job right now. I might not be able to, you know, just walk away from all sorts of responsibilities that I think are annoying in one way or another. But equally, I don't have to be on this crazy internal treadmill that one day I'm going to get so good at them all that life's problems go away. And I think what tends to happen then is that people naturally start making certain changes to their lives, even if it's just small incremental ones at first.

Absolutely. Although I think certainly could be quite scary to do because if you've spent years or decades building something and then you say, and maybe it is just in the example of a hobby. You know, I know I saw that in myself. I started a yoga practice 10 years ago. It became a side hustle, not a hobby. And, you know,

I'm going to do my 200 hour training. Now I'm going to do my 500 hour training. And to be honest, it took away a lot of the joy of actually what that practice was. And, and I actually, I quit, which I, I've never really quit things before. And I quit my 500 hours about six weeks ago. It was just too much and I wasn't enjoying it. And it totally had sucked the fun out of the hobby that I had loved for years and years and years. But it was an absolutely terrifying step because it was a step of saying, you know what, I failed in this. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's one argument for something that I do talk about briefly in the book is almost deliberately, maybe you can't bring yourself to do it for more than an hour a week.

But like, think about the thing that you enjoy, and you're really not good at at all, and have no hope of becoming professional. And the example I give for myself is like playing cheesy Elton John piano rock on my electric piano with headphones, usually so as not to violate the human rights of other people by having to listen to me. But there's something very relaxing and releasing about that because I just know that it is never going to happen that anyone pays me one pound for my music. And that's totally different with writing where somewhere in the back of your mind, whether you're a huge egotist or not, and I might be, but you know, like you want people to think it's brilliant, you want it to be commercially successful, you want to be recognised for your talents on some level that is just off the table when it comes to my

piano skills and that is something really great about that I think that's a really really good way of looking at it so if there were three things that you wanted our listeners to take away from this in terms of starting to change that mindset, getting off that treadmill? What would those three things be? Well, one of them, I guess just the easy way to think about this perspective shift is I think people are pretty smart. I think people listening to this know about some changes that they would like to experiment with in their own lives. And it's not particularly very useful for me to say, like, do this particular thing.

What it might be useful for me to say is experiment with that change in a small incremental way and sort of expect it to feel uncomfortable and see the challenge as learning to tolerate that discomfort if the thing you want to do involves claiming a bit more time for yourself say and you're worried that people are going to react disappointedly or as if you've let them down just sort of expect that this is going to make you feel awkward and guilty and just sort of push into that discomfort a little bit definitely not saying that you should sort of ignore other people's well-being entirely or anything like that but like if you expect a little bit of discomfort, what you almost always find is that it's really tolerable discomfort. It's not actually agony. If it's agony, that's

a warning sign, you probably should take a different path. So just sort of to do things that you already know you'd quite like to do for a little bit of time in your week, and to expect them to feel uncomfortable. And then I guess number two is the idea of like radical incrementalism which i talk about a couple of points in the book that if you're trying to do something different make a change in your life do something interestingly out of step with how you've been doing it it can be really good to not only really lower the demand you're making on yourself so that's the sort of five minutes meditation exercising for five minutes whatever whatever it might be, not only to set the bar that you expect from yourself really low, but to actually be quite diligent about stopping

at the end of that time as a sort of on an experimental basis. So if you're interested in getting into writing, say, find 20 minutes, do it for 20 minutes, deal with the discomfort that arises, and then stop, and then walk away and get back to your other stuff because actually there's something really interesting in that discipline that stops these big new life changes becoming kind of intimidatingly overwhelming they just become small things you actually are much more motivated to go back to them the next day and the next day and that sort of goes along with that thing we were talking about before about only aiming to do them dailyish only aiming to do a few minutes of something. Sure, ramp that up after

a while, but like really try to only do it for a short amount of time. And then I guess related to all this, there's this hazard that I, in the book, call the importance trap that I definitely fell into over and over again when I was more of a productivity junkie, which is this thing where you tell yourself that things that really matter in your life need your time and focus. You need to be well slept. You need to have your ducks in a row. You need to have all the other little bits of your life sorted out so you can focus on

them. And so what happens is you just postpone them forever. You spend the day doing unimportant work because like I've got to get that out of the way before I really focus on this thing that matters. And the same happens, I think, in personal life and activities outside work. So there it's just a question of seeing this issue that you're always trying to clear the decks before you like launch into the thing that matters and just flipping it just training yourself a little bit to spend the first hour of the work day say if you have that level of

autonomy of your work it's training yourself spend the first hour doing something that really matters that isn't clearing the decks letting the decks fill up being okay with that and just getting into this spirit of thinking that if something matters for you as a way to spend your life at some point you are just going to have to that thing. Otherwise, life is going to have passed you by and you won't have gotten around to it. Yeah, and everything doesn't have to be perfect for you to start. No, absolutely. And so finally, our podcast is called Delicious Ways to Feel Better. What is the one thing that you do daily-ish to continue to feel better?

The honest answer to that is that the closest thing I have to a daily practice is the familiar one to some, I'm sure, of morning pages of writing. For me, it's like three sides of a narrow ruled notebook written by hand, which takes me about 40 minutes usually. And I will get up earlier to make sure I have time for that before my son wakes up and things like that because more than anything else and I've experimented with a lot of things that sort of time of just externalizing whatever's in my head seems to be really useful to me to sort of bringing perspective to the day sometimes I'm planning the day sometimes I'm writing about problems.

Sometimes it's just like feels completely valueless, but it isn't because it's like brushing away the cobwebs. So that's the one thing that reliably seems associated with a day going better. I love that. I also, I'm just really holding on to daily-ish because I just think it is because for me, it's a meditation practice, but it doesn't happen every day because some days my kids wake up a bit earlier than expected or sometimes I sleep a bit longer than expected. And letting go of the absolute fundamental need to have done it for the day to be good is just so great. I think daily is just fantastic. So Oliver's book, 4,000 Weeks, Time and How to Use It is out now.

And I really highly recommend it. And so appreciate your time today, Oliver. Thank you. And thank you all so much for listening. We will be back here again next week and another mini episode on Wednesday. Have a lovely day, everyone. Thanks. You're a podcast listener, and this is a podcast ad heard only in Canada. Reach great Canadian listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn ads.

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