How To Properly Manage Your Time - Oliver Burkeman | Modern Wisdom Podcast 365

Oliver Burkeman 0:00 As you get really good at getting things done, what tends to happen is that you realize that you're getting really good at getting the unimportant things done, and actually the important things are being pushed back over the horizon just as much as ever. And I think what's going on there is just the more you convince yourself that you can do everything, the less filtering you apply when something comes onto your radar. (wind blows)

Chris Williamson 0:23 Oliver Burkeman, welcome to the show.

Oliver Burkeman 0:26 Thanks very much for inviting me.

Chris Williamson 0:29 What's the unique challenge with time? Do we actually have time?

Oliver Burkeman 0:34 It's so weird. I mean, time is, time is fundamentally, I think, like, unlike any other thing, uh, in a million different ways, and probably also a million different ways related to physics that I hope you're not gonna ask me about. But, um, yeah, I mean, one of the things you're, I think, getting at there is like, yes, the very notion that we even have it to be managing or to be making good use of, or to be making poor use of, the very idea that it's even in our possession in the first place seems very flawed when you stop to think about it, because you don't ever really have... uh, you, you don't have, you don't possess next week or the rest of today. You, you expect it, um, but you don't, um, but you don't possess it in a way that you can sort of set it aside for later. Um, we just get one moment, uh, uh, one moment after each moment, and it's the same for everybody. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:27 What do most people get wrong about time management, then?

Oliver Burkeman 1:30 I think the sort of core, uh, mistake that I've certainly spent, you know, many years of my life making and maybe still make to some extent, and that I'm trying to address is, it's this idea that we can ever get into a position of mastery and contr- full control over time, right? So, so we feel like our... the... what you have to do in this situation of being overwhelmed by activities, obligations, tasks, ambitions, is, is to sort of become capable of, uh, meeting all of these, you know, being sort of optimal- optimally productive and capable of, of handling anything that's thrown at you, and also to feel kind of secure with respect to the, the future, to know that your plans are going to come into fruition. And, and I think that that desire to be in control of time, uh, sort of leads us massively astray because it's not possible. And so in trying to do this impossible thing, we end up actually spending time in really suboptimal ways because we're really chasing that feeling of, like, being in the driver's seat-

Chris Williamson 2:38 Is modern-

Oliver Burkeman 2:39 ... uh, and, and, like, wanting to win the battle, right? And you can't win the battle with time. In the end, time is going to win that, that battle.

Chris Williamson 2:44 Yes, it's a bit of a... Was it King Canute or whatever it was that tried to stop the tide from coming in? It's precisely-

Oliver Burkeman 2:50 Right.

Chris Williamson 2:50 ... the same as him. So is time management anxiety a modern phenomenon?

Oliver Burkeman 2:57 I think the way we experience it today is absolutely a modern phenomenon. I mean, you can look at this in different time scales, right? O- o- on the one hand, if you're going back to the medieval period, I don't think the average sort of English peasant would have had any concept of time as a, as a separate thing, uh, as a, as a, as a thing that was there to be used or wasted or well used. It's... it was just sort of like there was this kind of unalienated, um, way of being in time. It was just the medium in which life unfolded. So to have any kind of anxiety about time, you first of all have to, you know, invent clocks and disidentify from time and see it as this thing that is constantly sort of like a yardstick that's constantly... you're, you're running alongside or something like that. And then I think there's a much more recent thing which is to do with the sort of pace of acceleration and economic competition and all sorts of things just in the last few decades, where that effort to use time in the way we think we need to becomes sort of unignorably obviously impossible, right? I think there's probably a quite a long period after the Industrial Revolution when people are being a bit stressed by time but there's... it feels doable. Like, it feels like you could render your life or your factory, uh, you know, as efficient as it needed to be to stay on top of everything. And I think just much more recently, there's a sense that that sort of... that possibility is breaking down, if you see what I mean.

Chris Williamson 4:33 Is it not just that we're busier than people in the old era were, that we've got more things to do?

Oliver Burkeman 4:39 I don't think it is just that. We definitely feel busier than people did a few decades ago, um, and I think that, um, there's actually a fairly good... there's fairly good evidence that we're not busier by... in a sort of objective sense, in, in the sense of having more, um... having less leisure time. We actually have more leisure time than, than a few decades ago. It just doesn't feel very relaxing. And then, yeah, if you're talking about this time scale that goes back to pre-industrial times or, or you're including kind of some indigenous cultures, perhaps even today, um, then it's like, well, what does busy even mean, right? I mean, uh, their time is full, but this, but this situation of feeling like you have to do more than you can do, which is totally absurd, right? This is a logical, a logical contradiction. You can't have to do more than you can do. Um, I don't think that arises for people in those cultures or at those points in, in history. So that... then it's sort of like the question becomes meaningless the further back you look, I suppose.

Chris Williamson 5:42 That's the conflict, right? The conflict is between what we feel we should be getting done and the amount of time in which we have to get it done.

Oliver Burkeman 5:52 Right, yeah.

Chris Williamson 5:53 And that's the squeeze.

Oliver Burkeman 5:56 Yeah, that's the, that's the real trap when it comes to what we call busyness. You know, I write in the book, like, busyness per se-I don't know if you're familiar with, uh, Richard Scarry children's books, which, uh, which, um, I am, 'cause I've r- uh, read many of them to my four-year-old. But you... The, they're set in a place called Busytown, and all the animals in them, uh, take, like, human jobs, so, like, the firefighters are pigs, and the grocers are raccoons, and all this stuff. And, like, the whole deal is they're busy. But that really brings home that busy can mean something perfectly benign, which is just that you have a lot of things to do and the day is sufficient to contain them. There's no, there's no, um, tension there. That's just, like, being busy. That's a lovely way to live. Um, what we have is overwhelm, right? What we have is the sense that we need to be doing more than we are gonna have the chance to do. And it's a really weird predicament, because, you know, there's this idea in philosophy that, uh, ought implies can, that you can't, um, you can't meaningfully talk about having some duty or obligation, uh, if it's, if it's not possible to fulfill it. Um, it's not my obligation, can't be my moral obligation to save you from a burning building if the burning building is 2,000 miles away and there's no possibility of getting there in time. In the same way, like, it can't be my obligation to get through more activities than it is possible for a human to get through in the course of a day. And yet, that mismatch, that weight of that pressure, that sense that, you know, it is sort of the stakes are high, and that we have to do it and that we can't do it, is a sort of total recipe for, uh, stress. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 7:43 But the belief is that if I just became more focused, more efficient, if I upregulated my productivity system or downregulated my sleep, that I actually could-

Oliver Burkeman 7:54 (laughs) Yeah.

Chris Williamson 7:54 ... fit more in.

Oliver Burkeman 7:56 Right. And of course you can, right? This, this is not a tirade against the very idea of efficiency. If it's taking you two hours to, like, brew your coffee and, uh, get washed and dressed in the morning, like, there are-

Chris Williamson 8:08 My housemate-

Oliver Burkeman 8:09 ... efficiency savings... (laughs)

Chris Williamson 8:09 My housemate was taking two hours to brew... P- probably about, I shit you not, probably about 30 minutes-

Oliver Burkeman 8:14 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 8:14 ... to make a coffee during lockdown, because he's a-

Oliver Burkeman 8:16 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 8:16 ... a physio for a professional sports team who weren't playing, and he was just... Every day, there was fresh sourdough bread and, like, two or three pots of artisan-created coffee every day. It was like, "I've got nothing. It's either this or Xbox." So, yeah.

Oliver Burkeman 8:30 Yeah. I mean, you know, if the value, if the value you're pursuing is, uh, is really good coffee, then maybe it should take you that long. But, I mean, there's no harm in making efficiency s- savings in life. That can be very, that can be very useful. But I think the situation that we're in is... We're in a world of effectively infinite inputs. Um, no limit to the number of emails you could receive or demands that can be made of you, or of, you know, places you want to visit on your bucket list and business ventures you want to launch. It's not all negative, but it is all kind of limitless, and we're limited. Time is finite in a life, in a day. So, yeah, the att- the struggle to optimize to the point where a finite, uh, person can do an infinite amount is, um, is, is doomed to failure. That's, that's not how math works, right?

Chris Williamson 9:17 Yeah.

Oliver Burkeman 9:18 But, uh, but it's, um, but it also keeps alive this feeling that maybe next week, maybe with the right system, maybe with just a bit more self-discipline, you can sort of burst through, uh, to that, to that serene situation.

Chris Williamson 9:31 Having spent a lot of time talking to

Chris Williamson 9:34 people like James Clear and Ali Abdaal, and, you know, these sort of real modern productivity wizards, it, th- there, there always is in the back of my mind a sense of never being done, never being done with advancing the productivity system-

Oliver Burkeman 9:50 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 9:50 ... that... There's an Alan Watts quote that says, "You can become so preoccupied with trying to improve your life that you altogether forget to live it." And-

Oliver Burkeman 9:57 (laughs) Right, right.

Chris Williamson 9:57 ... you can roll that out-

Oliver Burkeman 9:59 That's great.

Chris Williamson 9:59 ... to talk about the systems themselves, so you can sort of become very matter about this. You can spend so much time working on your productivity system to enhance your ability to get more done, that you don't even get round to getting stuff done, let alone-

Oliver Burkeman 10:14 Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 10:14 ... to, you know... So there's, there are-

Oliver Burkeman 10:16 And I've, I've totally been there as well. I mean, like, I, I have... You know. Yeah, absolutely. Yes. The overheads start to sort of take away from any possibility of doing anything else.

Chris Williamson 10:24 Yeah. And I think learning when, when you have optimized sufficiently deeply, when you've downregulated the sleep and upregulated the, the system to a level where you're happy with it... And this is something that so many young guys that, uh, kind of follow a similar track to what I did, you know, 20-year-old guys who start running a business and, and really enjoy it and, and want to do more, and they attach their sense of success and self-worth to how the business is performing, uh, you can get into a spiral of working an awful lot. But you need to set yourself an upper bound, because you will just erode away every single second of your life if you're not careful. You can just-

Oliver Burkeman 11:08 Right.

Chris Williamson 11:08 ... continue to chip away and chip away and chip away at everything. And then you think, "Well, what, what was the productivity in service of?" Like-

Oliver Burkeman 11:16 Right.

Chris Williamson 11:16 ... "What's the end goal of what I'm trying to achieve here?" Presumably, it's a life that's fulfilled and satisfied and happy and comfortable, with sufficient resources, but not so many that I can't spend them. Like-

Oliver Burkeman 11:26 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 11:26 ... over-earning seems just as stupid as under-earning.

Oliver Burkeman 11:30 Yeah. Absolutely. And, you know, there's been some amazing work, um, I'm thinking right now of a book by, uh, Daniel Markovits about how, um, you know, your reward for being a winner in the society that we live in now, so, like, getting to the great, best universities and getting the best jobs, is this sort of pressure to work with crushing intensity, as he puts it, that is kind of, uh, in that respect, uh, not much, not particularly preferable to, um, working with crushing intensity just to keep a roof over your head. I mean, there are, there are other upsides, for sure, but it's like the, it's not like... Like it... The whole point of being wealthy at any point in history until fairly recently was like, so you-... didn't have to work, right? So you could, like, hunt stag and have banquets or whatever. Um, and now the reward for climbing up that ladder in this sort of, efficiency-dominated situation is, is just even more that you, that you have to do. I, I think, you know... I guess this is an observation that goes back to, like, Max Weber and probably before, but what happens is that efficiency becomes kind of self- self-justifying, right? So it become, it becomes the end to which a system is, uh, uh, tailored rather than-

Chris Williamson 12:41 Goodhart's law kicks in very hard, yes.

Oliver Burkeman 12:43 Right. Uh, rather than a way... Yes, exactly. Rather than a way of, um, of maximizing the, the degree to which you're achieving some, some other goal, some other value. And especially, you know, the, uh, the, the, the... In some ways the worst part of this is that it doesn't actually... It- it sort of attracts more input, right? So this is just... This is Parkinson's law, this is all sorts of other observations from all sorts of, uh, different domains. But, like, i- if all you do is make a system more efficient, uh, in the service of nothing other than making it more efficient, then all else being equal, it will attract more and more inputs until it's overwhelmed again, like when they put an extra lane on the M25 or whatever and more cars come. And it will fill with sort of lower-quality (laughs) stuff. So y- your reward for becoming brilliantly efficient is to be busier than before, like, on, on less (laughs) meaningful things. If that's, uh, if that's what you're pursuing in the absence of anything else, yeah.

Chris Williamson 13:41 What should our goal with time be, then?

Oliver Burkeman 13:45 Wow. I mean... I've got all sorts of, like... I can talk about techniques till the cows come home. But I think that the, I think that the really important thing is... It is a kind of inner gesture. It's a sort of, um... It- i- i- it's a, it's a kind of surrender to, to reality and to the limited situation that we're, that we're in. Um, an understanding that, uh, you can't control or dominate or master time. That we're just in time. We, uh, I think, you know, arguably, we sort of are a stretch of time. That's how totally we're just sort of trapped in this situation. And I think we don't like how that feels, so a lot of what we engage in as productivity or self-improvement is actually an attempt to avoid these uncomfortable emotions. But if you can sort of let them percolate through you a bit, uh, the a- actual job of using time well then becomes kind of easy, because that's just a question of spending some of your whatever amount of discretionary time you have on things that you know are the most important things for you to be doing. And I don't... Like in the book, I don't try to give a laundry list of like, "These are the things you want to be spending a meaningful life on." I think most people, when they get quiet and introspect a bit, don't have a lot of problem answering that, that question. The problem is they expect it (laughs) to feel comfortable to be pursuing those things, and it probably isn't going to 'cause it's gonna bring you into contact with reality and limitation in various ways that, that spending all day scrolling through Twitter does not. Um-

Chris Williamson 15:29 What's the role with limitation and finitude here?

Oliver Burkeman 15:33 What's the-

Chris Williamson 15:34 Role of limitation and finitude.

Oliver Burkeman 15:36 Well, it's just completely defining, right? I mean, it's just... It, it, it, it is, it... It- i- it's how things actually are. Uh, the fact that, you know, every choice you make to do something is a choice to not do a million other things with that period of time. The fact that you can't exert very much control or even influence over the future. A little bit, but you certainly can't know that things are gonna go the way you need them to. And so the problem, in a way, is trying to, is trying to cure this situation. It's not the situation, it's the fact that we spend so much of our time and so much, especially much of our energy in self-improvement and, and productivity trying to pretend that this is not the way things are and that we are in m- more control than, than we really are. So, I mean, there... Um, there's a quote which I love and keep coming back to from Charlotte Joko Beck, the American Zen Buddhist, which is, "What makes it unbearable is your mistaken belief that it can be cured," which I think is, like, totally brilliant, because it's like it's not that there's not gonna be difficulties, it's not that there aren't disappointments and losses involved in, in, uh, you know, being alive and trying to make something of your life. It's this idea that we ought to be able to have it not be that way, and we're going to be stressed and anxious and indignant all the way until we finally reach that, that situation which we then never do. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 17:04 Sam Harris had this quote, I s-

Oliver Burkeman 17:06 It doesn't sound very upbeat, though.

Chris Williamson 17:07 No, but I- I think it's correct, sadly. We're finite creatures surrounded by infinite complexity.

Oliver Burkeman 17:14 Right.

Chris Williamson 17:14 There is-

Oliver Burkeman 17:14 And capable of infinite imagination, as well, I think

Chris Williamson 17:17 Correct. Yeah. ... is important here. So not only is there, are there an infinite number of options of what we could do with our time but we can actually envision them.

Oliver Burkeman 17:23 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 17:23 And mistakenly we can believe that we could perhaps maybe do them.

Oliver Burkeman 17:26 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 17:26 If we're able to, to get the right productivity system and t- the, the task management, and, "I've seen that guy on the internet that can type at 260 words a minute. I bet he can get all of his work done. I bet he's able to run three businesses and continue the house moving forward." But yeah, Sam Harris has this, this quote where he says, um, "You're never going to not have problems."

Oliver Burkeman 17:46 Right.

Chris Williamson 17:47 "What? Did you just think one day that you're going to wake up and you would have completed problems?" Like- Yeah. ... like leveling up in a video game and entering into a map where there's no features. No. The, the problems are going to be there. They are a feature, not a bug, of life.

Oliver Burkeman 18:02 Yep. Yep. Right. And they're just generated by, they're just generated by the situation that we're in, right? I mean, what's the definition of a problem? It's that, uh, uh, in the most basic sense, I suppose, it's that, um, you know, the......that something is not the way you wish it to be, and it's there for you to try to turn it into something you do wish it to be. Well, that's always gonna be true, and solving one problem is going to cause another. So, um, yeah. I think it's, I think that's a lot of the tenor of a lot of the popular and sort of definitely sort of more aimed at men, male readers, self-help of the last few years. I'm thinking of the stuff Sam writes, but obviously also Jordan Peterson is the obvious example in this mix. And really, I think a lot of it all goes back down to that book, uh, The Road Less Traveled, which is years old and a lot, and a lot... it's not so, um, it's not so heavy on the sort of masculinity stuff, but it basically comes to the same message and the beginning paragraph is something like, uh, "Life is difficult. Um, this is one of those, those problems that, this is one of the great problems, which means that once it's accepted, it's no longer a problem," or something like that. And it's like, that's the point. Yeah. I- I- I couldn't have said it better, even than the garbled version that I just gave you. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 19:24 What's the efficiency trap then? Is that just becoming more eff- efficient and more produc- productive in an effort to then fill up the remaining time with more stuff to be done, as opposed to using that time to spend on things that are leisure?

Oliver Burkeman 19:39 Yeah. I mean, I just use that phrase. There's sort of two aspects to this. One is th- as we've discussed, right? That, that, um, becoming more efficient in the absence of any other value will just increase your workload and your busyness and, uh, and work will rush in to fill the, the extra capacity you're creating through various different means, you know, and the obvious one is email, right? I mean, if you're really, really good at responding to email, you're gonna get more email because you're gonna get replies and then you have to reply to those and blah, blah, blah. There's also this qualitative aspect, which I sometimes, sometimes call the importance trap. I think, I think I need to be more rigorous in the proprietary names I'm, I'm giving my concepts. Um, it's holding me back. Um, but which is th- this sort of stems from this observation in my own life, but I've (clears throat) many, many people have, have sort of resonated with it since that like, as you get really good at getting things done, what tends to happen is that you get, you realize that you're getting really good at getting the unimportant things done. And actually, the important things are being pushed back over the horizon just as much as ever. And I think what's going on there is just, you know, the more you convince yourself that you can do everything, the less filtering you apply when something comes onto your radar, um, the more likely you are to say yes to anything, either internally, if it's a, a ambition of your own or to a request from someone else, because you never go through that process of like, "Well, okay, what am I gonna neglect in favor of this thing?" And so if you think about it, that just like over time, that just means that your list is gonna fill with more and more things that haven't met a quality threshold. And you will, in the words of Jim Benson, a workplace consultant who I quote in the book, "Become a, a limitless reservoir for other people's expectations." Um, it's just like you'll just end up doing what other people would like someone else to be handling on their behalf. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 21:44 That's an interesting way to look at productivity, that it actually reduces how skeptical or how many scruples you have around the things that you choose to do. If you can get twice as much work done in a given period of time, you can get twice as much of the important stuff done or be half as judgmental when it comes to choosing what you want-

Oliver Burkeman 22:07 Right.

Chris Williamson 22:07 ... to get done.

Oliver Burkeman 22:08 Right. And I think the thing to remember there is that like most... possibly this is a human universal, but most people who, who are like sort of have a bit of dynamism and want to do a few things with their lives that there's gonna be... no matter how, uh, productive you get, there's always gonna be more genuinely meaningful and important things than the capacity will allow. So you're probably not gonna have the bandwidth to start messing with the things that you don't particularly care about. And there's a, a, there's a lovely observation from Elizabeth Gilbert, the, the novelist and writer on productivity and author of Eat Pray Love, uh... underrated book in some quarters and I think it's actually really good. Um, that, uh, you know, we, we, we hear all these bromides about the importance of saying no, and you secretly think that what that means is you have to like start being willing to say no to all the crap that people are asking you to do that, that you don't really want to do. But actually it's way more challenging than that. It's saying no to things that you really do want to do, uh, and that really do matter, and that it would have been really good to spend some time on. It's not that you just get to choose. This is like a little backdoor to continuing this kind of problematic way of behaving is like, "I'm gonna get so productive so that everything that matters gets done, and I'm gonna accept that I'm not gonna get all the things that don't matter done." But it's, no, it's way harder than that. It's not doing everything that does matter.

Chris Williamson 23:35 So if time management's ultimately doomed to fail, what's novel about what you're proposing here?

Oliver Burkeman 23:41 (laughs) I mean, I don't know that it's novel, if you're gonna go all the way back through the history of philosophy. Um, I think, you know, Seneca got there first and Heidegger in a, in a sort of slightly more Nazi way. I don't really need to want to, want to promote, want to promote anything. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 23:59 (laughs) Are you saying, are you saying that Heidegger managed to out Nazi you in this book?

Oliver Burkeman 24:02 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 24:02 I was, I was adamant that this was some sort of treaties towards Hitler.

Oliver Burkeman 24:05 (laughs) This is a, this is a word that gets thrown around a lot, uh, these days. Uh, but, but Heidegger was as, as absolutely canonically a Nazi as it's possible to be and it's very-

Chris Williamson 24:16 Time Nazi.

Oliver Burkeman 24:16 (laughs) No, no, no. Just a Nazi.

Chris Williamson 24:19 (laughs)

Oliver Burkeman 24:19 And it's very difficult because like actually I think, you know, being in time to the extent that I've grappled with it and tried to understand it really gets at something very wise about the nature of time. But then you have to issue all these caveats because he was literally a, a party member. Um-... what's u- unique about my-- what's, what's, what's new about what I'm saying? (laughs) I think it is... Uh, what I'm trying to convey is this notion of a kind of surrender that isn't disempowering. So, it's this idea of, like, it, it's a kind of acceptance, acceptance of reality that is kind of bracing and motivating and focusing. I guess this word acceptance has been... It has a lot of weird connotations, either it feels like resignation, or it feels like, um, uh, s- sort of just overly new age, you know? You feel like books about acceptance are gonna have a little tableau of flowers on the cover, or a pebble or something. But, (laughs) um, but it... There's something quite muscular about it. There's something quite... I mean, Cal Newport, um, who I'm sure you'll be... You and your listeners will be familiar with, but he's... He talk- talks about, uh, facing the productivity dragon, which is his phrase for, like, not pretending that there aren't more things demanding your attention than there are, and facing up to it and making tough decisions, if you have to, about what you can actually do. And there's some- I like that spirit. I like that sort of, um... I like the idea that it's kind of scary on a level or some way to, um, to see how things actually are with respect to time. But the payoff for doing it is that, um, you get to sort of stop using up all your time and attention and energy trying to do something impossible and focus it on doing a few things that, that are possible.

Chris Williamson 26:17 So,

Chris Williamson 26:18 if time is limited, that means that we need to say no to certain things. How can people think more clearly about these sort of trade-offs?

Oliver Burkeman 26:31 I mean, there are lots of ways of implementing this at different levels, sort of per domain of life or per task. I mean, I think one very simple... One of the productivity approaches that really does... that is consonant with all of this is, um, is anything that's, that's sort of based around the idea of doing one thing at a time. So, if you can limit your work in progress, there are sort of... The Kanban methodology is one way of doing this. If you can sort of pick one big goal in each domain of your life and sort of attempt to complete that one before moving on to the others. It's anything that has this spirit of like, "Okay, there's lots of things I could be doing, but instead of giving in to the, the good feeling of like having a finger in every pie, taking care of business, touching every project in the course of a day, and actually not making progress on any of them, um, I'm gonna sort of tolerate that uncertainty that, that comes..." Sorry, "That discomfort that knows fro- that comes from knowing that important things are being neglected in order to sort of focus on, on one thing." And I think that can work at the level of kind of big projects and day-to-day, day-to-day tasks. Um, that's one. I can, I can talk endlessly about ways to sort of implement this basic, single basic, uh, perspective shift.

Chris Williamson 27:56 I like the idea of deciding what we're gonna fail at. Can you dig into that?

Oliver Burkeman 28:01 Yeah. This is an idea I got originally from an author called Jon Acuff, and he just makes this very kind of obvious once it's been pointed out to you point that, um, if this finite situation means that we're going to fail to, um, excel to 100% in every single domain that we can possibly think of, which it does, um, then, then it makes a lot of sense to sort of select in advance, uh, for a given time period, you know, something that you're, some area of life that you're going to, uh, accept your non-excelling in. So, you know, you might, you might decide that... I mean, o- one thing is, you know, I think especially for people, young people at certain stages of their careers, you know, really going all in to work for, on work for a while can be a perfectly legitimate decision and maybe not attempting to have an incredibly rich sort of life outside work with all manner of hobbies and relaxation and, uh, et cetera, et cetera. Or, it could be something as simple as saying like, you know, "I'm, I'm trying to do well in my work and raise a small child. I'm not gonna be the person who has a really tidy house, or, uh-"

Chris Williamson 29:18 Six-pack abs.

Oliver Burkeman 29:19 Right, right, right. Or, as impressive a cook. This is the thing for me, it's just like, once I accept that like as long as I'm... When it... I'm feeding myself and my family basically healthily, it's like I, I think I have to put on hold for several more years from now the moment when I can really wow people with the, with the dishes that I can, uh, that I can whip up. And yeah, fitness, right? I don't wanna tell, tell anyone they should just give up on that, but there's obviously different kinds of goals you can have between like maintenance and reducing your risk of heart disease through to, uh, you know, winning marathons and, and, and being sort of incredibly impressively muscular. So, the point being that you're going to experience certain kinds of, uh, failure in different domains, and that if you do this in advance, you can really focus your efforts. You can make no effort or, relatively speaking, no effort in some other area. If you don't do that, you're gonna sort of spread yourself thinly, not get far enough in each one, and be constantly disappointed that you didn't reach, uh, 100% in, on any given, um, in any given domain.

Chris Williamson 30:24 Yeah, there's two things going on there. One of them is the, uh, internal relinquishing of a sense that I should be doing better by accepting in advance, "Look, this is the hill that I'm going to work on."... for the next-

Oliver Burkeman 30:38 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 30:39 ... six months or whatever, or these are the hills-

Oliver Burkeman 30:41 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 30:41 ... and I'm going to concede that these ones aren't, so I don't have this potentiality gap between where I think I could be and where I am, because I've already conceded, right? I've, I've-

Oliver Burkeman 30:51 Right.

Chris Williamson 30:51 ... wrangled the chaos of the next few months into order by having a plan and by laying it out.

Oliver Burkeman 30:56 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 30:56 But the other thing, which is equally important, is that you're going to be more competitive within the domains that you narrowly choose to try and excel in. Because you are not going to win a marathon by being great at work, and you're not going to be getting a promotion at work by being good at a marathon. However, if you allow yourself-

Oliver Burkeman 31:16 Right.

Chris Williamson 31:16 ... to progress tightly within one domain for a period of time, you can then coast in that. Let's say that you do spend a good amount of time on a training plan and you decide, "Right, I'm going to diet down, and I'm going to get myself to a good level of body fat, and I'm going to get some, some muscle and build my lifts up." That strength will carry itself on far more-

Oliver Burkeman 31:35 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 31:35 ... effectively than if you tried to do... You can get done in six months of focused work what would take three years of disparately focused work. And the same thing-

Oliver Burkeman 31:44 Right, right.

Chris Williamson 31:44 ... goes for... Think about a YouTube thing. The, the Pareto distribution is a hell of a drug, right? Like, it's everywhere. And you-

Oliver Burkeman 31:50 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 31:50 ... think if you want to be in the top 5% of anything, you're going to get disproportionate returns to somebody that's in the top 10% or the top 20%, because it-

Oliver Burkeman 31:59 Yep.

Chris Williamson 32:00 ... it gets super competitive at the top, but the returns are also sort of, uh, they become... Is it logarithmic? Is that the one I mean? No, exponential. The returns become exponential towards the top, so you get far more returns than the tiny, tiny increases that you need to put in. And another thing to consider-

Oliver Burkeman 32:15 Right.

Chris Williamson 32:15 ... and this is something I've been saying for so long to myself, shouting it in my own ears, but everyone else's too, is like, look, the vast majority of people cannot let go of the tether of doing everything at once. This means-

Oliver Burkeman 32:28 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 32:28 ... that consistency and a narrow focus is a competitive advantage. One of the reasons that you can-

Oliver Burkeman 32:34 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 32:34 ... really excel in your industry is because other people aren't prepared to commit to that industry, because they have this same compulsion that you do as well. They have-

Oliver Burkeman 32:42 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 32:43 ... social engagements and a family, and they want to spend money on a car but also a house, and they want to learn to be a good cook, but they want to have six-pack abs, and they want to, da-da-da-da-da-da-da, pick whatever it is.

Oliver Burkeman 32:51 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 32:52 Everybody else has this compulsion too. So by deciding to create some sort of bottleneck, or forcing function, or limiting choice, or whatever it might be, you are selecting yourself out of that pool of other people, you are giving yourself a competitive advantage, and existentially, it's going to be less painful because you're going, "Right, okay, I'm not going to be super fit. I, you know, go to the gym a couple of times a week to just maintain for the next year or six months or whatever. But that doesn't matter, because I chose, I chose this in advance."

Oliver Burkeman 33:23 Yeah, absolutely. I think it's incredibly powerful, and I, yeah, I appreciate the way you unpack that into the two, uh, the, the two different elements that are, that are going on here. And I think, yeah, I think it's... The reason that we don't want to do that, deep, deep, deep down, is this notion that if we are working on everything, we're approaching, gradually, never actually reaching the state of control, 'cause it takes trust, right? It takes, um... To, to put one thing on hold for a while and believe that you're gonna get around to it in a, in a subsequent six-month period or something, it takes a kind of self-trust, a- you need to know that, that when that time comes, you'll, you can switch gears and, and, and do that. Um, and if you come at it from a sort of control-freaky, untrusting, un-self-trusting position, that's when you're like, "Well, I better take care of it all right now." And I think quite a lot of the, sort of, the stuff around, like, morning and daily routines has been quite damaging for this, because it sort of... It is encouraging this notion that you've got to sort of find time in an hour and a half in the morning for 12 different, uh, for 12 different practices. Um, it, it really sort of... Like, I don't know. I think I've really benefited from meditating, but am I finding time for it at the moment? I gotta be honest and say no, I'm doing some other things with, uh, with the time I would be using for that. And, like, I think that's okay. I think that's... And I think that applies to a million different, uh, domains. Yeah, and if you're gonna have... and I know I keep mentioning this, but if you're gonna have small children, they're, they're gonna be the, they're gonna be (laughs) the priority for a good while whether you like it or not.

Chris Williamson 35:00 I think another reason that people like having their fingers in multiple fires, fingers in multiple pies, toes in multiple fires-

Oliver Burkeman 35:08 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 35:08 ... is that it creates an N-of-1 that gives them culpable deniability about why they might not be performing particularly well within a particular industry.

Oliver Burkeman 35:19 Oh, yeah.

Chris Williamson 35:20 So if you are the only-

Oliver Burkeman 35:21 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 35:21 ... skateboarding, cricketing, bodybuilding salesperson of insurance in the UK that also moonlights as a chef, then-

Oliver Burkeman 35:31 (laughs) Right.

Chris Williamson 35:33 ... being a bit shit at all of them almost gets excused because it's like, "Yeah, but no one else is doing this. No one else gets what I'm doing." So there is a little bit of a get out of jail free card there.

Oliver Burkeman 35:44 No, I think that's totally right, and I think that, um... It reminds me of, you know, I think especially in the world of sort of content creation and the attention economy more generally, w- we get confused, don't we, about what, what, what constitutes the r- the, the useful and meaningful form of extraordinary, of being extraordinary and, and people sort of... There's a s- People are incentivized to, like, yeah, to do things that are out of the ordinary or weird combinations and, and, um, uh... There's all sorts of stuff I've read in the past about how the way to find a niche in, in writing or whatever it might be is to just d- seemingly very bizarre sort of combinations of weird stuff and, uh, yeah, have your finger in multiple pies. That rem- I relates to something else that I write about, which is that actually, like, there's, there's, there's real power in the willingness to invest the time in sticking to one.... path and, and sort of go through that period of, of this is the Helsinki bus station theory. I can talk about it if you want, but-

Chris Williamson 36:50 Yeah, yeah, what's that?

Oliver Burkeman 36:50 ... this idea of, like, going through the process of unoriginality to get to the originality on the other side. That's this idea, uh, that, um, goes back to this, uh, Finnish-American, Finnish-American photographer called Arno Minkkinen, where he tells this whole story about, um, how, uh, in Helsinki, all the, all the buses at the central bus station in Helsinki start from the same place, and then, uh, all the routes, lots of the routes sort of overlap with each other through the center of the city lot, so the routes are the same. And it's only when they get to the outskirts that they start to, like, branch off into different places. And I think I probably won't try and go through the whole story here, but the, the basic idea is you... in lots of creative work especially, you have to stick with, um, you have to stick with paths that feel like they're what everyone else is doing, feel like you're just a, an apprentice, feel like they're not what... that you're not sort of making a name for yourself, in order to get to the place at the end of that process that is unique and, and defines you as a sort of unique voice. So, it's another example of, you know, of this extraordinary power that being able to cultivate patience can, can give you, I think, in the... especially in the world we live in now.

Chris Williamson 38:08 Even if somebody accepts everything that we've said as gospel, to-do list anxiety is still going to arise. How can someone who's addicted to the sense of feeling productive learn to let go of that tether?

Oliver Burkeman 38:26 I think, you know, two approaches that may well (clears throat) be familiar to some of your listeners, but that really work with this process. The first is anything, any form of organizing your day that draws on the basic principles of time boxing, right? Anything that takes... Anything that puts time first. So, so, uh, you, you d- decide to work on a certain project or, or to do... or to just do work per se for a certain number of hours, and then you stop. And then you make your choices about what to focus on based on that limitation. You don't say, "I'm gonna get through all of this, and if it takes me till midnight, that's fine." You say, "I'm gonna stop at whatever time. I'm gonna work for however long." And just, like, taking those time... Going sort of schedule first in that way can be very helpful, I think, for s- for some people, 'cause it's sort of... i- i- it's uncomfortable, but it, but it delineates where the discomfort is. And then the big challenge is you have to get up when the timer goes off or when the moment comes. You have to, like, pull yourself away and not expect to feel great about pulling yourself away. And then just another implementation of this that I mentioned is this idea of keeping two to-do lists, right? So you have your unli- unlimited open to-do list that probably has like 3,000, you know, 200 things on it that you, that you need to do, and then another that is limited to, say, five slots. And you move tasks from the longlist to the shortlist. But the rule is that you can't add more than five, so you can't add a new one until a slot has been freed up by completing it. That's just a one very simple example of a self-chosen bottleneck that, um, again, you know, it's not that you're doing less. It's that you always were making those choices, but now they are conscious. And so, you know, then you have to decide, "If I can only w- focus on five things right now, they better be five that are, that are worth my, my time."

Chris Williamson 40:25 Have you heard of Cold Turkey, the app?

Oliver Burkeman 40:32 Yes, but I don't know what it does.

Chris Williamson 40:33 So, it is a good way to ensure that you finish work when you say you do. And Cold Turkey, in it has a function called Frozen Turkey, and Frozen Turkey will-

Oliver Burkeman 40:45 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 40:45 ... lock you out of your own computer at a preset time-

Oliver Burkeman 40:48 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 40:48 ... and there is nothing that you can do about it. So, I have a couple of-

Oliver Burkeman 40:51 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 40:52 ... I have a couple of buddies who've got it set. Um, I, I, I actually think it was part of the (laughs) , uh, part of a very argumentative discussion with their partners around, um, "You, you work too late." "Okay, well, I can do this thing that causes me to be locked out of the laptop." Uh, but they've told me that the degree of furiousness and anxiety during the three minutes leading up to when that happens-

Oliver Burkeman 41:20 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 41:21 ... is a s- is a sight to behold-

Oliver Burkeman 41:23 Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 41:23 ... because they just realized, they're like, "Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit," as fast as possible-

Oliver Burkeman 41:28 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 41:28 ... trying to get everything done, scheduling stuff to be sent for 8:00 PM, because they know that they're not gonna be there. Um, but yeah, I think i- it's so, it's so interesting that, uh, you know, whether you be a knowledge worker, whether you be an entrepreneur, or even somebody that has a more typical job that, that does have bounded time slots for it, we, we set ourselves goals of s- of tasks to be done, not time blocks to be worked in.

Oliver Burkeman 41:54 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 41:55 And I, I mean, I, I do it as well. I, I, I have tasks that, "This is what I'm gonna do today," not, "This is how long I'm going to work on things to do today." And it, it's only-

Oliver Burkeman 42:07 Right.

Chris Williamson 42:07 ... ever going to lead... In a society where you're, you're sort of encouraged, it's a meritocracy and you're encouraged to work harder, it's only ever gonna lead to you overindulging in work.

Oliver Burkeman 42:17 Right. And that's where, I mean, you, you can through... A- absolutely. Um, I've been there and not infrequently still go there. But it's, it's, um... That's why I think practice with various different time blocking approaches... And the, the sort of fully featured Pomodoro technique does this too when you sort of read the, or, you know, go beyond just the idea of 25-minute bursts of work. Um, it is a sort of training ground for getting better at estimating-... how long things are going to take you, or of, sort of putting in the inevitable extra hour, like accounting for one of your time blocked hours with all the things that I know I don't, can't predict, but I know I'm gonna end up having to, uh, that are gonna overrun. Um, so you can get better, but yeah, I don't think it ever becomes perfect, and I don't think it ever goes, the anxiety ever goes away if you're someone who's kind of in any way (laughs) trying to sort of do interesting things in the world. I mean, there may be exceptions to do with very, very scheduled and timetable-based work, which can be, you know, very high-status work as very, as well as low-status work, you know, if it, if it really is strictly on a, on a, on a timetable. But even there, I feel like, you know, my go-to thought there is that, like, surely this must be easier on teachers because of the way timetables work. But I know from every teacher I know that this is not true at all. (laughs) So.

Chris Williamson 43:36 But think about, think about a personal trainer-

Oliver Burkeman 43:39 It's not stressful enough to be a teacher by a long, long shot.

Chris Williamson 43:40 Think about a personal trainer. Like you can't train somebody unless they're in front of you.

Oliver Burkeman 43:44 Right.

Chris Williamson 43:44 Like you, you genuinely can't. But I know tons of personal trainers, and because of access to social media, there's always, "Oh, I could, I could go searching for another client because I've got a, I've got a Friday 3:00 PM slot that needs filling, so." And this is the-

Oliver Burkeman 43:59 Right.

Chris Williamson 43:59 ... this is the justification that we have around social media, that it always-

Oliver Burkeman 44:02 Yep.

Chris Williamson 44:03 ... it always can present itself-

Oliver Burkeman 44:05 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 44:05 ... as utility-derived work, not work-

Oliver Burkeman 44:10 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 44:10 ... work-distracting, time-wasting.

Oliver Burkeman 44:12 Yep. Plus that trainer probably wants to have a whole sort of content marketing arm to their operations, right? So there'll be limitless potential there to write blog posts. Um, yeah. No, absolutely, there's no real, there's no real way around it. I don't know. Lighthouse keepers, maybe they, maybe it works for them to, uh...

Chris Williamson 44:29 Oh, wow. Yeah, perhaps.

Oliver Burkeman 44:30 Just follow str- (laughs) Do, do other, are there even lighthouse keepers today? I don't know.

Chris Williamson 44:35 No, not that I'm aware of.

Oliver Burkeman 44:36 But like there's a very limited number of jobs that are not subject to this, um, this bleed into the whole life, I think. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 44:42 It's kind of like being an animal carer, but it's the internet that you're looking after.

Oliver Burkeman 44:48 (laughs) Yeah. Yeah, which is kinda sad given that you're not, that, yeah.

Chris Williamson 44:55 But think of, think about, think about it as well that because of the internet, you are genuinely permitting any person that has a smartphone, unless you've turned your notifications off, and even if you have, then when you log on-

Oliver Burkeman 45:05 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 45:05 ... and you finally do check, you're actually permitting whatever is 5 billion people that have access to the internet. Every single one of them can make a thing happen that changes the course of your day.

Oliver Burkeman 45:19 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 45:19 There is no way that humans were psychologically designed to be able to imbibe the entire world's news in real time 24 hours a day.

Oliver Burkeman 45:29 Yeah. Totally, yeah. It's a, it's a complete... The, you know, yeah, I always think about this in the context of, like, in, in the context of, like, causes that we're supposed to care about, right? Um, the greatest saints in history, the most compassionate people who've ever lived with the mo- who've given the most of their time to other people were never asked to care about the number of instances of human suffering that, like, just jumping onto Twitter will expose you to. And in that case, you therefore need a kind of slightly almost callous-seeming approach to be like, "Well, it's not that I'm not gonna care about any of this, but I'm gonna pick my, pick my issues. And if I wanna be an activist in some area or, or give money to some cause, it's gonna..." Like, yeah, and that phrase, um, if you're not outraged, you're not paying attention, which always seems like it's so anachronistic now. It's like, no, no, we're all paying attention to everything and permanently outraged about everything.

Chris Williamson 46:24 (laughs)

Oliver Burkeman 46:24 That could be the only way to really efficiently care about something in your life. And I think this probably applies to everything in life, is, is to, is to be okay with not, not caring about, not caring

Oliver Burkeman 46:39 about other things. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 46:40 What's the danger of seeing leisure as an area for self-improvement?

Oliver Burkeman 46:46 Well, I think that's kind of like, it's almost the, it's the epitome of where all this ridiculousness is leading, right? That, that like, not only would you, um, be kind of, sort of on this productivity treadmill in a counterproductive fashion in your work, but that it then comes to colonize your, your, um, your, your time off. And, and this is this, you know... So that sometimes you get it, people talk about it literally as in this idea that you should use your time off to become a better worker. Um, but other times it's, it's just a, it's a subtler thing, right? It's this idea that, like, you're not really using your leisure time well unless you're training for some event, or you're improving a, a skill, or you're doing some, like, program of reading certain kinds of fiction to get through a certain list of them, or whatever it might be. It, it actually, you know, this, this focus on the future, uh, the total expense of the present is a problem in all aspects of life, but it's, it's particularly obviously, um, self-defeating when it's, when it's leisure that we're talking about here. Because, um, yeah, I mean the, it, it means, fundamentally means that le- uh, leisure becomes another kind of, another kind of work. Um, and, uh, it actually gets really hard. I mean, this is my personal experience anyway. It, it's not that, it's not that you don't get the opportunity to rest, it's that you do get the opportunity to rest and then you kind of don't wanna do it when, uh, when the opportunity arises.

Chris Williamson 48:20 Dig into that relationship between the present and the future for me.

Oliver Burkeman 48:25 Well, this is instrumentalization, right? I mean, this is just the idea that on some level we all have to treat time as something we're using now for a future, uh, purpose or, or benefit. And that's not like... You can't, you can't give that up because then you sort of can't do anything. Um, I wouldn't have got this book written, um, you wouldn't record these, uh, podcasts if, if you were only living for the value of the moment itself. You, you, we're always doing these things.But I think all sorts of, um, pressures in the modern world and modern economy push us to completely overinvest in, in that perspective, right? So you're, you're constantly, uh, valuing every moment in time exclusively for that future benefit. And the problem there is pretty obvious. Like, you place all the value of anything you do at a time that's always in the future. You're never really fully present for life, which is another thing that... There's a great Alan Watts quote about that I can't remember in detail right now. But so it's really sneaky because of course it feels very dutiful. It feels like you're being a good person and doing what you ought to be doing in life, uh, when you're doing this. It doesn't feel like you're being a time waster or sort of addicted to social media or something. It feels like you're doing what you ought to be doing, and yet, um, the result is, is that you're never present with your own life.

Chris Williamson 49:49 Isn't there a quote, something to do with cats and, and ki- kittens or something?

Oliver Burkeman 49:56 Oh, yeah. This is, um, John Maynard Keynes t- talking about the purposive man, uh, uh... This idea of, like, the purpen- the person who lives entirely for, for the purposes that he's putting his time to. Um, yeah, no, doesn't, doesn't really love his cat, but only the cat's kittens, and not really the cat's kittens, but really the kitten's kittens, and so on forward to the end of catdom. Um, y- yeah. I mean, that, that puts it, that puts it very nicely, right? It's like it takes away from the present to invest everything that you care about in some future point because the future just, uh... Future just keeps on coming, and you never get there.

Chris Williamson 50:34 One of my favorite Sam Harris quotes... I wanna give this to you and, uh, get your thoughts on it. "As a matter of conscious experience, the reality of your life is always now, and I think that this is a liberating truth about the nature of the human mind. In fact, I think there's probably nothing more important to understand about your mind than that if you want to be happy in this world. The past is a memory. It's a thought arising in the present. The future is merely anticipated. It is another thought arising now. What we truly have is this moment, and this. And we spend most of our lives forgetting this truth, refuting it, fleeing it, overlooking it. And the horror is that we succeed. We manage to never really connect with the present moment and find fulfillment there because we are continually hoping to become happy in the future, and the future never arrives. Even when we think we're in the present moment, we're, in very subtle ways, always looking over its shoulder, anticipating what's coming next. We're always solving a problem, and it's possible to simply drop your probem- problem, if only for a moment, and enjoy whatever is true of your life in the present."

Oliver Burkeman 51:43 That's great. Yeah. Yeah. What do you want me to say? I mean, I, I agree completely. I think (laughs) , um, the part that really interests me is towards the end there, the, the sort of subtle ways in which, uh, trying to be present in the moment is another example of not really appreciating that it's only always now. Um, again, because it implies that it might be possible to be separate from the moment and, and therefore, like, to sort of succeed or fail at being present in it, which, uh, whi- which clearly makes no sense. I mean, I think the... the, the sort of... This is a very... There's some aspects of this that, like, I have understood in the middle of a meditation retreat, but then you lose the moment you're trying to, like, you know, actually live rest of your life. The way... The sort of narrow keyhole between those two domains that has always helped me is, is to understand that, you know, anxious thoughts about what the future holds are also an example of something that you're experiencing in the moment. Um, plans that you have for your day that feel very, very important are, are also thoughts arising in the present moment. And it's not that... You know, it's a gross sort of... Occasionally you get it, kind of crude... You encounter the sort of crude misinterpretation of these ideas that, that we should be stopping all such thinking, and, and that you should only be feeling the physical sensations and perceptual input of being where you are. You know, actually, of course, making plans is really useful, and to a certain extent, anxiety can, can have a sort of motivating (laughs) role if you keep it in check. But understanding or being able to step back again and remember that that is all unfolding now is, is very powerful. Now, I won't pretend to have reached a level of spiritual enlightenment. Maybe, I don't know, Sam Harris would, where I can sort of get the most value out of those thoughts while in that same exact moment knowing that they are nothing but thoughts arising in the moment. Like, I think when I get lost in thought 'cause I'm writing something and I want it to be good, like, I am living in the... I am not living fully in the moment in those, those times. Or, maybe I am. Maybe that's flow, but maybe that's a bad example. But you know what I mean? It's like that... When I'm planning my day 'cause I need it to go a certain way, it's useful to step back and remember that this is just a plan in the present. I'm not sure I'm really thinking that in the very moment of planning. That, that seems like it would require power of presence that I'm maybe still working towards. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 54:29 There's a quote in the book that says, "What we forget is a plan is just a thought." Right?

Oliver Burkeman 54:35 Right. That's J- uh, Joseph Goldstein, um, the meditation teacher, and I think it's, it's such a great... If, if you get it... I'm not sure one automatically gets it from the-

Chris Williamson 54:44 How do you get it?

Oliver Burkeman 54:44 ... from the words, but I'm sure you... Sorry?

Chris Williamson 54:47 How do you get it?

Oliver Burkeman 54:48 What are you saying?

Chris Williamson 54:48 How do you get it?

Oliver Burkeman 54:49 Well, I, I don't know. I do, and I think you do, so I'm just saying, like, I... If, if this, if this quote lands in somebody's mind who's listening and they don't... Say, "Oh, what's the fuss about there?"It's, it's a little hard to, to say, I think. But, but to me, that is just like w- w- I think we sort of naturally think of plans as kind of, um, hooks we're trying to throw over the future to bring it under our control. And that quote, for me anyway, serves as a reminder that a plan is just like any other thought that you're having in the present moment, like the thought that you're hungry or the thought that you wish you hadn't said that embarrassing thing to that person. Um, the thought that your intention for your day is that it'll unfold in a certain way is similarly just a present moment statement of intent. And I think it can be useful and it can be great to write it down so that you can refer to it when you face decision points in the day. But if you think it's more than that, if you think that it's going to somehow, uh, lever you into a position over time such that you're in control, uh, and time isn't, um, then you're just gonna be constantly running up against reality (laughs) in a, in a, in a painful and stress-inducing

Oliver Burkeman 56:03 way.

Chris Williamson 56:04 Yeah, I think that the challenge that people have, uh, that comes right back to what you said at the beginning is that there is a denial of death here, that there is a, a fear of being a finite creature surrounded by infinite complexity. And that the more that I can wrangle that chaos into order through plans, through a productivity system, maybe, just maybe I can get more life in, or maybe I can protect myself from the chaos that's occurring around me.

Oliver Burkeman 56:34 Right. Right.

Chris Williamson 56:34 And if that is the case, then maybe I can almost transcend death. I do think it's very much a rehabilitated, eternalistic thinking, you know-

Oliver Burkeman 56:44 Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 56:45 ... f- far fewer people now are believing that we're going to rise up to heaven or fall down to hell, so how can I assuage this denial of death? Like, w- you know, would Ernest Becker be a productivity guru in 2021?

Oliver Burkeman 56:59 (laughs) Yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a quest for exemption somehow, isn't it? From, from the situation that we're all, that we're all in. And, you know, I, yeah, absolutely. Um, it's, it's, um, I feel it in myself, right? I mean, uh, I don't need to go into the details here, but right now I'm wrangling some situation involving an application for a passport. And, um, it's, it's extremely intoxicating that notion that if, that if certain things could just be confirmed and fixed and known, then it wouldn't just be that this one particular issue could be disregarded, it would be that one had reached, uh, uh, uh, one was back in a situation of sort of not being vulnerable to unfolding events. And then of course, you know-

Chris Williamson 57:43 It's the level of the computer game where you no longer have any problems.

Oliver Burkeman 57:48 Right, right. But of course, if I sorted out this burdensome passport thing and stepped out into the street, there is no guarantee that a grand piano won't fall on my head from a-

Chris Williamson 57:57 (laughs)

Oliver Burkeman 57:57 ... from an apartment higher up, right? I mean, and, and that's obviously a little bit absurd, but, but something else could happen, and indeed something else will happen, so yeah.

Chris Williamson 58:05 What are some good questions that people can ask themselves to help refine their direction for this?

Oliver Burkeman 58:12 Well, I love and always talk about, uh, this question that comes from James Hollis, the, the Jungian, uh, analyst and writer, which is to ask of every big life question that, that you're approach- that you're, um, encountering whether it will enlarge you or diminish you. Um, it can sound a bit kooky at first, but this is as an alternative to, like, will this job make me happy? Will this relationship make me happy? Would I be happier if I left this relationship or did, did this other thing? This question of enlargement and diminishment seems to connect something intuitive that I think most people already know about the path that they're on. They know whether, they know whether the, the, the stresses and difficulties that they encounter in, say, a relationship are the kind of stresses and difficulties that are making them a bigger person and are worth sticking with for the payoff, uh, and are sort of part of growth, or whether they're the kind that sort of make your soul shrivel up and it's clear that, like, you two are just completely incompatible and should go your separate ways. And I think that applies to all sorts of other domains as well. So that, I think, is one of the questions that I, uh, like to bang on about. Um, another one, just to mention, is this whole idea that I think we put off doing a lot of, um, worthwhile imp- and important things, uh, pending some time when we're gonna feel sort of fully qualified to do them. And I think even people who aren't, um, uh, burdened by imposter syndrome in that sort of direct sense of thinking that they are a fraud, they're still very, very easy, I think especially in younger adulthood, to be like, "Oh, well, you know, I'm, I'm not gonna launch this project now or do this thing now, because clearly what I'm going to do is I'm gonna, in five years time, I'm gonna really know what I'm doing." And in the sense in which that is meant, I don't think anyone ever knows what they're doing, and they're all completely winging it all the time. And the only reason you don't hear they're in the monologues of self-doubt is because you're not inside their heads. Um, and it differs, you know, some people probably are too bold (laughs) in launching things that they should, that they should do more preparation for. But I think the overwhelming bias that we have is towards holding back, uh, pending the time when we feel like we know what we're doing and it might be worth, uh, contemplating the possibility that nobody ever knows, nobody ever feels like they know what they're doing.

Chris Williamson 1:00:44 I've got some buddies who have risen up through the ranks of financial institutions, and they were talking about this sort of red pilling of their imposter syndrome-

Oliver Burkeman 1:00:55 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:00:55 ... because they presumed that, you know, when you get into the real big boardrooms, you know, when you're on the-... the 35th floor, and it's floor to ceiling glass, and everybody in there-

Oliver Burkeman 1:01:04 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:01:04 ... is on a million a year, that finally-

Oliver Burkeman 1:01:07 Right, then.

Chris Williamson 1:01:07 ... finally people will-

Oliver Burkeman 1:01:08 Right.

Chris Williamson 1:01:08 ... know what they're doing, and they came out and they said, "It's literally morons all the way up."

Oliver Burkeman 1:01:13 (laughs) Yeah, yeah. Well, I guess that's the, yeah. That's the disdainful way to put it. The other way to think about it is, of course, that we're all morons, in some, in some important sense. Which means-

Chris Williamson 1:01:25 Mm-hmm.

Oliver Burkeman 1:01:25 ... like, yeah, you have as much chance of pulling off whatever you're trying to pull off as, as anybody else. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:01:33 And obviously the seriousness of your book's title, F- Four Thousand Weeks, the reason for that is that that's the length of time of somebody that lives, ish, uh, lives for 80 years, and there's a quote that you open the book with from Douglas Harding, "It's the very last thing, isn't it? We feel grateful for having happened. You know, you needn't have happened. You needn't have happened. But you did happen." And the infinitesimal, tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of a chance that you are alive for this moment, for these 4,000 weeks, that is reason to place a very, very high value on your time, to ensure that the things that you are doing genuinely do matter to you. Not just now, but that you're gonna look back in 10 years, 50 years' time and say, "That is how I wanted to spend my time." That's the degree of perspective-

Oliver Burkeman 1:02:30 (clears throat)

Chris Williamson 1:02:30 ... that we, that we should be taking care of the moment.

Oliver Burkeman 1:02:34 It is. (clears throat) It is. The only thing I wanna say to sort of develop that is, I wouldn't want people to go away from this with the idea that what that means is this kind of white knuckle-

Chris Williamson 1:02:46 Mm-hmm.

Oliver Burkeman 1:02:46 ... attempt to seize the day in a kind of stressful, like, gotta pack every day with the most amazing experiences I can find and, like, spend every weekend BASE jumping, whatever. You know, I, it's not... It's almost like, I, I hope that it, I hope that I can get this perspective where, yes, the stakes are incredibly high because the chances of you being born were infinitesimal. The amount of time you have is not at all long. But there's also something very, I think, relaxing and liberating and empowering about seeing that, you know, precisely because that is the situation, um, the attempt to sort of outrun these limitations, uh, and, and do more than any human could do, and live longer than any human could live, like, you get to drop that, because you already got the gift, which is, like, some time on the planet. So, one way I want to phrase it, maybe, is not like you must do things with your life that matter to you, but that, like, you might as well do, spend your time doing things that matter to you. Like, what have you got to lose, uh, compared to someone (laughs) who never got to be born? So, there's something about this that I hope, that I find relaxing, and I hope other people do as well. Not, not numbing, not, not like, say, spend the rest of your life on a hammock on a beach. But, but relaxing in the sense that the pressure is off, and it's because the pressure is off that you might as well spend your life doing things that really, really matter to you.

Chris Williamson 1:04:32 Oliver Burkeman, ladies and gentlemen. If people want to check out more of your stuff, where should they go?

Oliver Burkeman 1:04:38 Uh, well, the book, uh, uh, Four Thousand Weeks, uh, that's, uh, there. They can go to, uh, fourthousandweeksbook.com, four-zero-zero-zero-weeks-book.com, which is really just a page on my website, which is oliverburkeman.com.

Chris Williamson 1:04:52 I love it. Cheers, Oliver.

Oliver Burkeman 1:04:54 Thank you very, very much.

Chris Williamson 1:04:56 Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that, then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few months. And don't forget to subscribe. It makes me very happy indeed. Peace.