The Savage Irony Of Trying To Be Productive - Oliver Burkeman

Chris Williamson 0:00 What is imperfectionism?

Oliver Burkeman 0:03 (laughs) This is my proprietary term, 'cause I think you gotta have a proprietary term for a, a sort of umbrella term for, uh, this whole approach that has sort of been taking... getting clearer and clearer in my mind over the last few years. And I guess it is, the simplest way to talk about it is, understanding your built-in limitations as a human, your finite time and finite talents, finite energy, finite attention, as, um, not things you have to spend your whole life struggling to do away with. But actually like the portal to a sort of energized and accomplished and interesting life. So it's, it's about embracing limitations of all kinds including, you know, the fact that we can't ever produce anything perfectly.

Chris Williamson 0:52 I was gonna say, what's an alternative perspective? Um, um, what do people... What's the opposite of imperfectionism railing against, that can't be beaten?

Oliver Burkeman 1:00 Well, obviously perfectionism is one way of putting it, but I think the... There's a... The problem with that is that people think about perfectionism as meaning something very narrow which is like, you know, "I'm so obsessed with producing perfect work or something-"

Chris Williamson 1:13 High standards.

Oliver Burkeman 1:14 But... Right, right. And I really wanna say that that's one example of something broader which I think is everywhere in, like, productivity advice and personal development culture and all the rest of it, which is that what looks like an attempt to, like, improve and do better and reach new heights, is very often just a kind of psychological avoidance. A way of, a way of, um, a, a way of helping you not have to think about the fact that time is short. That good relationships and an interesting life involve emotional vulnerability. And, uh, you know, that, um, that you can't control the future and, and it's generally a stress-inducing challenge to try. So, you know, all these different ways in which we, we think we're sort of getting more control over our lives, I think very often what we're doing is enabling this avoidance of, of, uh, really confronting what it actually is to key alive.

Chris Williamson 2:15 There is something sort of, uh, uh, mortally hilarious about being a finite human with infinite tasks to do. You know, in my (laughs) ... Like, the, the 21st century memento mori is me thinking about the fact that one day I'll be dead, but my email address will still continue to receive emails.

Oliver Burkeman 2:39 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 2:39 (laughs)

Oliver Burkeman 2:39 So true.

Chris Williamson 2:41 (laughs)

Oliver Burkeman 2:41 Yeah, it's, it's terrifying. I mean, it's terrifying at first. I guess that, you know, the email example is so powerful because it is just the obvious example of an incoming supply of things that is, to all intents and purposes, infinite. Um, and we're surrounded by these, right? There is an infinite, effectively infinite number of things that would be useful and interesting to read. Of places that would be interesting to go. Of, uh, hobbies or business ventures or anything that would be interesting to, to launch and get, and get involved in. Money you could earn, right? None of it has an end point. But we have end points. (laughs) Uh, and, and so I think... And of course we've got... I- it's not just the, the supplies are infinite but the, uh... We have minds that are capable of conceiving of the infinite and of more that, or at least of, of much more than what we could do. So like, you know, you can have 20 completely incompatible dreams for the next five years of your life, there's no problem with that at all. The problem is when you try to bring them into, in, into reality. So I think that's just the thing that I'm always coming back and back around to from a million different angles, it's just like, what does it mean to actually drop into that reality that you're gonna have to choose? And that, uh, most of the things you never get around to doing are not gonna have been, like, tedious second tier things that you should have abandoned. They're gonna have been good things as well but you just didn't get to do them. And arguing that this is good news and really empowering and really in favor of productivity-

Chris Williamson 4:15 (laughs)

Oliver Burkeman 4:16 ... is my, is my, um, my mission and my challenge, yeah.

Chris Williamson 4:19 You say,

Chris Williamson 4:20 uh, "The world opens up when you realize you're never going to sort your life out." What do you mean?

Oliver Burkeman 4:28 I'm glad you brought this up, 'cause I think that is in some ways it's like the governing example for a lot of people. Maybe just kinda neurotic people like me, I don't know. But, uh, of the way in which we try to attain a kind of control over our lives that, that is not actually open to us as humans. So that sense of like... It takes different forms, right? But it could be, "I'm gonna get completely organized. I'm gonna get so productive that I never need to, uh, drop a single ball or fail to meet a demand." Or it's gonna be that, "I'm so talented at what I'm doing that I really feel the confidence of, of, like, knowing what, what, what, what's going on." In work, in relationships, in parenting. There's one that you, uh, never, uh, feel like you, you've got a handle on. And I think... I'm sort of saying like, if, if you pursue life with this idea that you're gonna get to the point where it's all sorted out, you're sort of constantly postponing the meaning of life into the future. You actually end up doing less because you... There's all sorts of things you feel that you can't really fully get involved in until the point at which you've sorted life out. And so in some ways this new book I wrote is kind of like a manifesto for like, "Okay, what happens if we just accept that you're never gonna get life sorted out?" Other people it's like, "The news, the world is... There's too many crises, it's just a really anxious time in the headlines. I wanna wait until that's all calmed down," right? And it's like, what would you, what would happen if you...... abandoned all that and said like, "No, it has to be now. It has to be now that you do interesting and meaningful and important stuff, 'cause this future point of smooth sailing and control is, is never coming."

Chris Williamson 6:12 That's got me thinking about sort of two types of people. There's many types of people, but here's two, (clears throat) a little taxonomy. One being, uh, the people who have not an external locus of control, but, uh, the restrictions on why they can't do things are because of something that's happening out there. It, I, how can I sort myself while the climate is still such a mess-

Oliver Burkeman 6:33 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 6:33 ... or while there's these global conflicts going on, or while we've got this person in power I don't like, or this person trying to get in power that I don't like? And then (clears throat) there's another version of a person who does the exact same thing, but all of their restrictions are inside of themselves. "How can I start doing my life while my to-do list is still all over the place? How can I begin to do that when I'm still at 17, 18% body fat and I don't know what diet I'm going to follow? How can I do this before I..." You know, i- it's the same psychology-

Oliver Burkeman 7:03 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 7:04 ... that many people that listen to this show and are fans of your work, uh, probably chastise others for, uh, y- the externalized locus of control. And it's like you have an internalized externalized locus of control.

Oliver Burkeman 7:19 Yeah. (laughs) A- absolutely, and that's really well put. And it's like, uh, wha- i- if you're, i- if you're waiting, there's something sort of fundamentally absurd for any finite human to sort of, to wait to really show up in life, whatever that means to you, until a point at which you have greater sort of, yeah, like, y- greater control, like you've, you, you're, y- you're in the driving seat of the situation. And so yeah, just to put examples on, I mean, like, absolutely. One of the things that I get from one portion of people who engage in a very friendly way, but slightly critically, with things I write sometimes or, or talk about is, is like, "Well, it's all very well giving this advice about how to handle too many emails, but the problem is that we live in an economy and a society that, that puts people in these impossible work situations. You can't just choose to, to, um, to ignore your emails because, you know, you have to pay the rent." Um, and that's sort of true, but also you've still gotta, y- you know, there, you've still got to make decisions about what you're going to show up for as a finite human, and that might involve, uh, neglecting some emails. And then yeah, on the other side of the equation, it's like people who are very, very in love with that idea that through any manner of philosophies or personal disciplines or the perfect daily routine, they're going to master life on their own and for themselves, which feels like a more independent way of living. It feels like you're much less, um, you know, indentured to w- what political party's in power and at what stage late capitalism is at.

Chris Williamson 9:09 (laughs)

Oliver Burkeman 9:09 But actually it's still sort of giving all the power to, like, future you, who's gonna be so great once you've developed all these habits you're gonna develop. And, um, uh, you know, um, put in place all the systems and achieve the financial independence and all the rest of it.

Chris Williamson 9:27 There's a Sartre quote where he says, "I have led a toothless life, a toothless life. I have never bitten into anything. I was waiting. I was reserving myself for later on, and I have just noticed that my teeth have gone." Oh. (laughs)

Oliver Burkeman 9:43 Amazing. I've never come across that, that line. It's, it's exactly the point. Yeah, yeah.

Chris Williamson 9:49 Uh, yeah, Gwendol Bogle has a similar idea about deferred happiness syndrome that you sort of... Th- this sense, and it's so, it's so common. I remember I used to, (laughs) I used to think this when I spent the summers, uh, in between school. So I played cricket, uh, growing up, like a good British boy. And, um, the season obviously really ramps up as soon as you get into summertime, especially as a youth cricket player.

Oliver Burkeman 10:13 (clears throat)

Chris Williamson 10:14 And I always remember that I would think, "Well, summer hasn't really started yet," and it would be half a week in, and then it would be a week and a half in, and I'd think, "Well, summer really hasn't, uh, it still kind of hasn't started yet." And then before I knew it, I was getting ready to go back to school-

Oliver Burkeman 10:31 (laughs) Yeah.

Chris Williamson 10:31 ... and I was thinking, "But summer hadn't really started yet."

Oliver Burkeman 10:35 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 10:35 And I think that that is a, it's a microcosm for kind of how we see our life. It's this sort of common feeling that your life hasn't yet begun, and that the reality you're in at the moment is some sort of prelude to an idyllic future.

Oliver Burkeman 10:50 Uh, uh, I think it's totally right and I have, you know, obviously I'm writing about stuff and talking about stuff that I am a, a sort of archetypal sufferer of-

Chris Williamson 11:00 Sufferer of. Yeah, I was- (laughs)

Oliver Burkeman 11:01 ... other- otherwise it wouldn't be, uh-

Chris Williamson 11:01 ... about to say that, yeah.

Oliver Burkeman 11:02 ... wouldn't, wouldn't be interesting, uh, to me. But, um, I think we ju- one other sort of point just to get a bit kind of, uh, self-referential and meta about it o- obviously is that it is also possible to, to hear all this, and there are a few books and gurus who talk along these lines, and actually become a sort of a different kind of perfectionistic about seizing the moment and being present, right? I think what we're talking about here, this feeling that real life hasn't quite begun yet, is in some sense almost universal, and very, very natural because it's kind of a, it's a protective mechanism against, like, doing all the feeling and all the realizing that comes from, from being, uh, from seeing what it really is to be (laughs) uh, a human sort of born on the river of time en route to death, you know? It's terrifying and I don't think anyone necessarily is sort of fully reconciled to it. So, it's not that you can sort of snap your fingers and decide, "Okay, now I'm just gonna show up for my life right now." It's more a question, in my experience anyway, of getting better and better at seeing what you're up to, you know, seeing what's happening when you...... get really, really invested in some new, like, habit change project or some new goal-setting technique or something. Not that any of these things are bad, but that if what you're doing is really investing in them because you're, you're en route to the time when life's really going to matter-

Chris Williamson 12:31 Mm-hmm.

Oliver Burkeman 12:32 ... I think that is a problem. There's a life cycle thing to this too, right? It's like, it's a lot easier and more reasonable to think, uh, that most of life is coming later when you're 19 and kind of a little bit absurd. Uh, I can, I can relate when you, uh, when you're in your 40s, right? It's like, that, that's what midlife does to a lot of people. It's like, "Oh, hang on. At a certain point I can't carry on claiming that real life is gonna be-"

Chris Williamson 12:57 Yeah. I'm in the, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm in-

Oliver Burkeman 12:58 "... in five to 10 years' time."

Chris Williamson 12:59 ... mid-August. I can't say that summer's not, not started yet.

Oliver Burkeman 13:02 Right, right.

Chris Williamson 13:03 Yeah. There's, um... (laughs) It's funny thinking about how the, the push that we have, the, the tools that we use to kind of try and bring, uh, life under our control and how many of those end up actually pushing life off.

Chris Williamson 13:24 Um, I do think... I, I've had this argument for a long time. My background was in, uh, productivity when I first started this show. You know, David Allen was coming on and, uh, the, uh, Peter C. Brown that wrote Make It Stick. You know, like, I was fully in the weeds, uh, absolutely Ali Abdaal-pilled. And-

Oliver Burkeman 13:41 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 13:42 (laughs) I, I think that there is an argument to be made for, for insecure overachievers like us. I think there is an argument to be made that you probably need to spend a good bit of time, ideally when you are a bit younger because you can afford to waste it, uh, just learning what a GTD method is and learning about time blocking and learning about kinda the physics of the system. I think that is important in many ways, because once you've learned some of the rules, you can then begin to play with them a little bit. Uh, but just saying, "I have no idea how to manage my time. Now I'm just ge- Like, all of a sudden I can just be kind of this free-flowing thing. I'm just gonna, like, live life, bro." Oh, I get that, but if you'd had a little bit of, um, the basic foundations to this, I think you can get a bit further. So this is my, uh, justification for why everyone should be a productivity bro for six months out of their life, and then after that they can graduate-

Oliver Burkeman 14:36 Yeah. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 14:36 ... to being a, an imperfectionist.

Oliver Burkeman 14:38 Oh, yeah. No, totally. And I think in s- in many ways it's, it's, it's even... Uh, you can make an even stronger case for the, the productivity side of things, uh, than that. I think, you know, I probably have in certain bits of journalism here and there just sort of mocked the, the whole world of productivity culture, but I'm a huge sucker for it myself. Definitely, you know, there are, there are... Uh, uh, it's a bit like Shakespeare or the Bible, right? There are so many bits of GTD and David Allen that we're all using all the time now that nobody realizes that he deserves (laughs) the credit for them 'cause they've just sort of sunk into our, uh, way of, uh, way of thinking. Um, and absolutely. I think the, the problem for me came... The problem for me was always, in hindsight, that I would jump on a new philosophy or a new system and it's almost religious, right? I don't think it's a, uh, I don't think it's, um, inappropriate to say that on some level I would think that this was going to, like, save my soul. I was think, I would think that this was gonna be like my salvation, that it was going to... All the things that were largely unconsciously in, in me about, you know, feeling like an insecure overachiever, right? Feeling inadequate, feeling that I needed to do all sorts of things in order to just be kind of basically okay and justify my existence. I would put all of that onto the new system that was gonna, um, organize my life, and I was gonna get to a point where the system was in place and it was just, like, um, set it and forget it, you know? It's just like, and it's just gonna, it's just gonna run and life's gonna be easy and all these achievements are going to follow without me having to go through the, the sort of, um, inner work. Mm-hmm. And you... That doesn't work. But that's not the fault of David Allen coming up with a useful and interesting way of organizing your projects and your tasks. That's something that we do very naturally. And other people do it with, like, religions or they do it with, um, uh, political movements, or they do it with kind of substance abuse probably on some level. You could, you could see all of these things as being different ways in which we're trying (laughs) to, like, uh, save ourselves from being where we, where we are and who we are as, as finite humans. And it's really great to sort of see through that and then, yeah, carry on using the productivity techniques. No problem at

Oliver Burkeman 17:09 all.

Chris Williamson 17:09 How would you describe insecure overachievers? I fear there's, uh, maybe quite a few thousand listening.

Oliver Burkeman 17:17 (laughs) Yeah. I mean, this is, uh, uh, I think there is a sort of very formal way in which this idea has been defined in psychology, but to me it's just the idea of people who, uh, achieve a lot, uh, you know, get a lot done, are very ambi- uh, ambitious, uh, probably broadly speaking praised or reaffirmed by society in general for, for doing that. Uh, maybe described as driven. Um, but ultimately doing all of that ultimately to try to sort of fill some hole inside, right? To, to sort of... It's the feeling that you're scrambling up towards a minimum baseline (laughs) of being an adequate person as opposed to, you know, "I'm an adequate person. Everything's fine. I'm enough," in the famous phrase, "and now I'm gonna accomplish some things 'cause it's really fun to accomplish them." It's got that much more desperate sense of like, "Ultimately I need to do this or I'm kind of, uh-"... not okay. And I think that, um, you know, I thi- uh, once you start (laughs) thinking in these terms and you just sort of look at politics and look at the world of business and all sorts of other areas, you know, entertainment, the arts, you start to see... I mean, maybe it's unfair of me and I'm just apply- I'm just seeing my, my issues in other people. But you start to see, like, there are a lot of very successful high profile people who it seems pretty obvious are sort of in that, locked in that dynamic. And I think a part of what I'm trying to do in my work and in this new book is like rescue ambition, and accomplishment, and all the rest of it. Not so- I don't wanna say in order to get past my insecure overachievement I just have to kind of like settle for mediocrity and give up and do nothing. I wanna say like, "No, there is a way of, uh, not treating your whole life as a kind of, uh, scrambling towards a basic sense of adequacy-"

Chris Williamson 19:21 Mm-hmm.

Oliver Burkeman 19:21 "... where you are then actually freed up to do a whole ton of cool, meaningful, interesting, impressive things, precisely because you're no longer actually, um, doing it for this other reason." And that, it kind of doesn't work when you're doing it for that other reason, right? I mean, people do get a lot of success but there's always this undertone of dissatisfaction and problems with, like, deep procrastination that come up and-

Chris Williamson 19:45 Desperation-

Oliver Burkeman 19:46 ... all this sort of stuff.

Chris Williamson 19:46 ... guilt, shame.

Oliver Burkeman 19:48 Yeah. All that.

Chris Williamson 19:49 Yeah. Yeah. I've, um, uh, i- intimately, intimately familiar. The insecure overachiever thing, th- I actually f- I didn't know it was a thing outside of your work, but I first read about it through you, uh, and your fantastic, uh, blog, mailing list thing, The Imperfectionist, and, uh, fuck me, I was seen. I was seen.

Oliver Burkeman 20:08 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 20:08 It was for the first time in my life somebody saw me. Uh, I (laughs) was absolutely, like, pierced through the soul. There's a point, I think, just to hammer this home for the insecure o- overachievers that already feel too seen, um, that they don't have fun while they're doing it. I think that's an important element of it, that you go through all of this rigmarole, and effort, and, and, a- a- achievement, worldly, internally, uh, personally, professionally, all of it, and you look back and you're going, "How much fun did you have doing that?"

Oliver Burkeman 20:45 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 20:46 And it was all swimming in this milieu of desperation, and necessity, and obligation-

Oliver Burkeman 20:55 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 20:56 ... and, and fear, and lack, and, and uncertainty. Uh, and at no point did you feel this sort of liberated, free thing and you go, "Well, hang on, what was the point in going through all of this if I didn't even have fun? Like, what literally what was the point?" I'm, I'm aware that there's a difference, strictly speaking, in psychology between happiness and meaning and blah, blah. But really, the moment to moment experience of you doing most of your life's work, whether that is per- personally or professionally, should in some form be fun. And I think that the insecure overachiever is able to imbue even the most fun activity with the least fun frame.

Oliver Burkeman 21:38 Totally. And I just wanna, I'm, uh, I really wanna point out, like, not only have I suffered deeply from this and been in this situation, but, like, on some level I still am. I think I've got a lot of distance on it and a lot of sort of higher altitude on it, and, and, uh, you know, I think I do enjoy my life and my work much more than I once did. But it's like on some level I don't think these things ever entirely, uh, go away. In fact, I think it is perfectionistic to, uh, expect them-

Chris Williamson 22:13 Hmm.

Oliver Burkeman 22:13 ... for them to entirely go away. So there, but, you know, it's like, no, it, it's so resonant for me that, that sense of, like, deficit, right? That sense that, th- that, um, magic superpower ability to turn great things, even just, like, purely enjoyable or sup- purportedly enjoyable kind of leisure experiences, holiday exp- whatever, travel, into that sense of like, "Either am I getting enough out of it, am I using this well?" And I still have this happening to me today with, um, you know, the last book, Four Thousand Weeks, did a lot better than I was expecting. And so, uh, uh, a thing would happen now and again that, like, somebody quite high profile would say something positive about it or I'd get mentioned somewhere in a way that was, like, amazing. And I'm getting better at catching myself, but my f- immediate response to that is like, "Ah, it's amazing." And then, like, two seconds later is the thought like, "I s- I've got to be capitalizing on this somehow." Like-

Chris Williamson 23:11 (laughs)

Oliver Burkeman 23:11 ... I've gotta, like, it's, it's, it's really bad that I don't have these, like, on a nice page of my website, that I'm still trying to redesign my website. It's just like it's, uh, uh, you know, "I've gotta, gotta use this somehow, otherwise, like, who, who even am I?" Ridiculous. Completely ridiculous.

Chris Williamson 23:27 I think... Uh, I see this so much in, in my life as well, uh, you know, if I'm sat by the garden reading, uh, on my Kindle, reading some article, maybe one of yours or, or, or something from Astal Codex X or whatever, I read this great thing about, uh, GLP-1s and the economics of them the other day, and I remember stopping reading and starting to do spaced repetition memorization so that I could recall it on a podcast later. And I was like-

Oliver Burkeman 23:54 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 23:54 ... "I'm not gonna talk about the fucking economics of GLP-1s."

Oliver Burkeman 23:58 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 23:58 Like, just allow yourself to enjoy this nice article as you sit in the sunshine. Just allow yourself to do it.

Oliver Burkeman 24:04 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 24:04 There's this permanent feeling that we're falling behind, that we should be doing more, that we could be doing more, that we need to scramble back up, that even leisure activities, there's this sort of weird puritanical fucking guilt that we have where it's like, "Uh, you, you, you're just enjoying that article? Who do you think you are? Who do you think you are to just enjoy that article?"

Oliver Burkeman 24:25 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 24:25 "How, how terrible of you."But yeah, it's, it, it's something that, like I say, I'm intimately, intimately familiar with, this, uh... And then there's the other side, there's a bunch of different areas. I had- I've got this idea for the book that I'm currently working on at the moment, The Four Horsemen of the Productivity Apocalypse.

Oliver Burkeman 24:40 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 24:41 Um (laughs) , uh, one of them being productivity purgatory, which is that even the leisure activities you do have to serve some sort of purpose. Like, you're not playing pickleball because you like to play pickleball, it's because you've read from an Andrew Huberman blog that if you do social activities for 45 minutes two times a week, that you've got a, a reduced chance of mortality. Um, the dark playground from Tim Urban, which is when you're supposed to be working but doing something leisurely, which means that the leisurely thing isn't enjoyable and you feel guilty about it, and also the work isn't getting done and you feel guilty about that too.

Oliver Burkeman 25:15 Yes (laughs) .

Chris Williamson 25:15 Um, so you know (laughs) , there's just, there's, there's so many places that this shit can come into your life. But yeah, I, um, the, the, the insecure overachiever. I, yeah, that's a, that's a question actually.

Chris Williamson 25:25 So, on your, uh, rehabilitation arc from insecure overachiever to rehabilitating insecure overachiever, what were the, what were the things that you did? Was it, uh, uh, practices? Was it a reframing thing?I, I'm a big fan of, of mantras and philosophies and stuff, but it seems like it's such a fundamental part of people's lives that simply some mental tool that tweaks the way that you look at a particular perspective doesn't, tha- tha- that doesn't seem like it would be powerful enough.

Oliver Burkeman 25:57 No, I, I, I know what you mean, and I think actually not only not powerful enough, but can be really easily co-opted back into the, the same insecurity project, right? I mean, and one of the, one of the things I talk about in the new book, not really picking a fight with James Clear, 'cause he's A, really wise and brilliant, and B, like, how stupid would it be (laughs) to pick a fight with a (...) Sort of, like, hinting that there is another view here which says that actually focusing on developing good habits can be really a distraction from what we need to do, and this is an answer to your question, sorry, the long term. Because, because actually turning anything into a project of habit change, for, for various reasons that we can talk about, you know, um, can really cause you not to just do the thing, right? It can really make it, it can really create these kind of psychological structures in your life where it becomes terrible if you miss a day, or where you're, again, just thinking like, it's, it's only when I've fully embedded this habit that, um, that, uh, I'll really, you know, be a properly functioning human. Or, it's like, you know, I'm gonna meditate for 10 minutes today because I have a plan that within about three months I'll be meditating for two hours every day, and suddenly that is just a huge intimidating long-term thing that will prevent you from just sitting down and just ... The leap of faith that is involved in just meditating for 10 minutes today with no guarantee that you're gonna do it another day or come back to it or make anything regular out of it. This is all by way of saying, I think there are things you can do to, uh, to embrace the, the, the outlook that we're discussing here. But at the very end of the day, I think it's important to be clear about the fact that it is, it is just a sort of long and two steps forward, one step back process of, like, unclenching, right? It is a sort of, it's a, it's a, um, almost like a bodily, uh, gesture. It's a, it's a, it's not a doing of something to get into this mindset. It's a, it's a, it's a being willing to not do something (laughs) . It's like a, a, an untightening of, of your musculature and of your sort of whole attitude to the world. And I've, you know, um, I've written about some ways that you can, I think it, you can, you can encourage that, and we can talk about those, but I really want to say that, yeah, I think in the end, it isn't about tools, and that in my experience, it has been, you know, journaling about it early in the morning for years, and, um, catching myself back in the mindset of not enjoying myself and scrabbling to try to get everything done so that I can feel okay. Catching myself again and again and again. Um, and, and so yeah, really happy to talk about tools and techniques, but I think on some level it's important to see that, that it's just like a, it's a, it's a slow and it feels very uncomfortable at times, slow kind of unclenching of some kind of muscle.

Chris Williamson 29:21 Have you read any Jed McKenna? Are you familiar with that guy?

Oliver Burkeman 29:24 Oh, years ago. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 29:26 Yeah, Spiritual Enlightenment Now-

Oliver Burkeman 29:28 Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 29:29 ... and, and stuff. Yeah, uh, I'm really not very well versed in spirituality stuff at all, and I'm, I'm not convinced that he classes as that. He's, like, the most, uh, straightforward writing spiritual teacher, I guess, that you could find. But he has in, in his book, um, uh, Release the Tiller is one of his cues, and he's talking about how people hold on to the tiller, which is the thing attached to the rudder that steers a ship. And he's talking about how people grip it so hard, they grip it very firmly, trying to get you move in the direction that you want, and his, uh, contention is to release the tiller of the boat and sort of to allow it to go where it goes, as he says.

Oliver Burkeman 30:08 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 30:08 And in your, uh, most recent newsletter ... Again, I keep talking about it 'cause I read it all the time. Uh, uh, in your re- most recent newsletter, you said, "Reality doesn't need you to operate it." Oh my God. So good.

Oliver Burkeman 30:22 Um, I'm quoting Michael Singer. I wanna pop in there and say this is not my, my sort of, um, phrase, but yeah, yeah. And somebody else sent me in response to that a, a, another way of expressing the same idea, which was something like-... let go or be dragged basically, right?

Chris Williamson 30:39 (laughs) That's great. I love that.

Oliver Burkeman 30:41 It's like, those are your options. Um, yeah, I think there are gui- I t- I tell you what there are, 'cause I don't wanna be a person who just says like, "Oh, no, it's just sort of years of, years of slow progress. There's nothing you can do about it."

Chris Williamson 30:53 Hm.

Oliver Burkeman 30:54 I think there are ways that you can navigate day-to-day, like frameworks or kind of questions. And I've written in the past, I think we may have even spoken in the past about the, the one from James Hollis about whether a life choice enlarges or diminishes you. You know, if you're facing some choice, it's like, "Well, if I went down that avenue, I'm, don't know if I'd enjoy it. I don't know if it'd be painful, but I can intuitively connect to the sense of whether it'll be an enlarging direction or not." So that can be very useful.

Chris Williamson 31:22 Mm-hmm.

Oliver Burkeman 31:23 Um, and then also m- maybe this is a little bit, um, broad brush, but it's almost the case that if some practice or some way of thinking makes you feel incredibly sort of uncomfortable, and especially if it makes you cringe, that this is probably something that you, that you need. So for me, and I think for many people, and maybe for people in the audience for this, um, the whole field of like self-compassion and being kinder to yourself is that. It makes you want to just sort of like, "I do not want to read more about how I'm supposed to be kind to s-" It's like... But actually, that's sort of a sign that maybe it is that. So, you know, anyone who has remained following this conversation after I said the phrase self-compassion-

Chris Williamson 32:20 (laughs)

Oliver Burkeman 32:21 ... weeded out the people who are so, who cringe at it so much that they won't even move forward. Then, then you get to the point of like, "Oh, yeah, probably the reaction I have to that idea about being kinder to myself is, (laughs) is quite a useful sign." (laughs)

Chris Williamson 32:35 Yeah.

Oliver Burkeman 32:35 That there's something valid there. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 32:37 Yes, yes. Uh, so getting into the new book, there's

Chris Williamson 32:41 a, I, I've picked out some of my favorite lessons, one of which I think relates to what you were just talking about, the reverse golden rule on not being your worst enemy.

Oliver Burkeman 32:53 Yeah. And I begin, I, I begin each of these little chapters, just quickly, the, the, the structure of the book is that it's, is that it's sort of 28 short chapters divided into four weeks, with the kind of invitation that you, uh, read one a day. Obviously, I can't control how, how people read a book, and I don't think you have to but, but, uh, read 'em one per day. But that's the idea. And so the i- and each one begins with a quotation from someone else that, that, um, really made a powerful impact on me. And that one, on not being your own worst enemy, begins with this quotation from Adam Phillips, the psychoanalyst, who makes this very vivid point that if you, uh, eh, uh, f- for many of us anyway, if you met at a party the person who is like in your head berating you half the time, shouting at you to do more work harder, or like criticizing the results of what you do, that sort of inner, inner critic voice. Like, if you met that person socially, like, you would just think they were damaged, right? You wouldn't give them the, you wouldn't take seriously somebody who comes up to somebody else at a party and just starts ranting at them in that way is, is... They're, they're the problem. But, um... And he says more very interesting things. But, but, but we sort of accept that level of, uh, criticism of ourselves in a way that, that we wouldn't even, you know, you wouldn't show to... It w- it's impossible to think of sort of addressing your friends in the way that I think a lot of us, either verbally or it's almost sort of implicit and unconscious, like address ourselves. And so what I've love about this idea of the reverse golden rule, which comes from the philosopher Iddo Landau, and it's just the idea, uh, that you should, uh, not treat yourself in ways that you wouldn't treat other people. Um, what I really like about this i- is that it's a very, um, uh, palatable form of self-compassion for those of us who want to sort of vomit when we hear the phrase.

Chris Williamson 35:09 (laughs)

Oliver Burkeman 35:10 It's not this idea which you come across in certain social media contexts and elsewhere of kind of treating yourself as this kind of uniquely wonderful and special person who requires both your own and the world's care and stroking. It's none of that. It's just saying, like, you value friendship, right? You're a good friend to people. You like to think of yourselves a good friend to people. It's good that people are good friends to each other. Like, don't just randomly exclude yourself from that basic ethic with which you go through life. If you're the kind of person who likes to think that you're decent to your friends, j- just kind of be decent to yourself as well. Um, w- when it comes to taking a clear-eyed look at how much you've achieved in a given day, or the standards of something that you've done, or how, whether you did your best to navigate some interpersonal thing even if it didn't work out as well as it could have done. You know what I mean? Just that sort of... It's just that basic sense of like bring the way you treat yourself up to the level that you already treat other people. It's a...

Chris Williamson 36:13 Yes, the minimum bar-

Oliver Burkeman 36:14 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 36:14 ... that you sh-

Oliver Burkeman 36:15 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 36:15 ... that you have for everyone else.

Oliver Burkeman 36:16 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 36:16 Yeah, there's, there's, there's something, uh, inescapable and stark about realizing that you treat yourself worse than you treat people that aren't yourself. And even if you-

Oliver Burkeman 36:28 Oh, it's...

Chris Williamson 36:28 ... were born with an identical twin or you and your mother, uh, live to be, uh, live to the same year together and then you spend all of your time together, so on and so forth, there is nobody that you're going to have as intimate of a relationship with...... as yourself. And you're just, yeah, this incapability that the insecure overachievers among us have to just be fucking kind to ourselves. To give ourselves a break-

Oliver Burkeman 36:55 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 36:55 ... to be able to see us, see the actions that we took with a bit of equanimity, a bit of rationality. God-

Oliver Burkeman 37:00 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 37:01 For- it, it, forget even the emotions getting into it, just simply not being irrational always in the direction of negativity and chastising.

Oliver Burkeman 37:09 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 37:10 Uh, uh, yeah. I'd, I'd, I see it. I f- I f- I feel it. I feel it viscerally. Uh, so moving onto the next one. "It's worse

Chris Williamson 37:18 than you think on the liberation of defeat." And you've got this, uh, Eugene Gendlin, uh, quote. "What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn't make it worse. Not being open about it doesn't make it go away. And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn't there to be lived. People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it."

Oliver Burkeman 37:44 That quote still gives me goosebumps. You can't say that by your own writing, can you? But I think you can say it about, uh, uh, writing that, um-

Chris Williamson 37:49 You quoting somebody else in your writing. Yeah.

Oliver Burkeman 37:52 Yeah, yeah (laughs) . Um, I think this, this comes near the beginning and, and that idea that, um, there's something incredibly liberating about seeing the sense in which a situation is worse than you thought it was. I think that's really a kind of organizing principle of the book. Um, and understanding the sense in which that's actually empowering. Not just that it's relaxing, but that it's empowering as well. So, you know, I'm talking there about, to give the productivity example, if you think of your, the challenge of getting on top of all your to-dos and achieving all your goals on a very tight schedule. If you think of that as incredibly difficult, then that makes life very agonizing and unpleasant and a constant slog, uh, towards an imagined future moment of fulfillment. But if you see that it's actually completely impossible, because there's an infinite amount of stuff effectively that you could do and you're not gonna be able to do an infinite amount, that shift from very, very difficult to completely impossible is actually very powerful and positive, I think. 'Cause you suddenly see like, oh, okay, there's no point trying to get my arms around all of this. It's going to be a huge distraction from what I could be doing, which is pouring my finite time and attention into the things that are gonna make the biggest, the biggest difference. And then I sort of take that same idea, like it's worse than you think and that's good news, to lots of other areas like, you know, if you wanna, suffer from imposter syndrome, you might think it's really the big problem is that you've got to, um, uh, spend years getting much, much better at, at what you do before you'll finally feel like you know what you're doing in most situations. Actually, it's worse than that, which is like most people don't really know what they're doing in most situations. Especially if they're new, interesting, uh, innovative things, almost by definition. So, actually you can give up the quest to feel like you know exactly what you're doing. And as a result, you can get on with doing the things you were postponing until you, until you knew what you were doing. Uh, and then just one more example in there is like relationship troubles. I think people are very prone to thinking during sort of rocky patches in relationships and things like that, that they're either in the wrong relationship or like they've gotta do tons of work on themselves to get over their issues. And like obviously that might be true. I, I'm not saying ev- nobody should ever leave a relationship. But it's also true that if you're gonna be in a long-term commitment with another person, then you are just gonna push each other's buttons and not ever fully understand how the other person sees the world. These are just sort of built-in limitations of being human. So it's worse than the idea that it's just your problem. And, and that again is liberating because it's like, oh, okay, I, I was tormenting myself with this expectation that people get to this point of total control or, you know, uh, um, confidence in understanding of everything that's happening. I don't need to torment myself with that anymore. I can actually dive into this experience here and now.

Chris Williamson 41:19 Too much

Chris Williamson 41:20 information on the art of reading-

Oliver Burkeman 41:22 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 41:23 ... and not reading. I think this is probably a challenge that a lot of people deal with.

Oliver Burkeman 41:29 Um, it's really funny to me that at an earlier point in the history of the internet, people thought that w- the whole sort of problem of there being too much stuff to, that you wanted to consume or read or know or learn would, um, would go away 'cause we get really, really good at filtering just the stuff that we were most interested in. And, um, we have got really, really good at filtering the stuff we're most interested in. When social media's working well, that's, that's what it does. Um, and you know, there are all sorts of discovery mechanisms on, you know, Amazon and everywhere else that sort of bring you the stuff that you want. Doesn't make information overload go away because the supply is infinite. So now you've just got a pure fire hose of things that you really want to read instead of, you know, uh, a whole lot of dross around the edges. So the problem, if anything, is, if anything is worse. And I'm making the point there that, um, the only way to relate sanely to this is to understand those information flows as, as rivers not buckets, right? By which I mean rivers of m- stuff that flow by you and from which you pick a few things that look interesting. You let the rest...... uh, go by without feeling guilty, as opposed to buckets like you've got to empty it, right? That if, that if you've, that if you sent 50 articles to your read later app, then your job is to process every single one of them until the inbox is clear. Which I feel... And it's funny, 'cause I sort of, for years I've kind of teased my dad and s- sometimes other people in that generation for seeming to think that like if there's a magazine or a newspaper in the house, like, they've got a, some sort of moral obligation to read every page to check if there's anything they... And I've always just like, "Why are you doing that?" It's just, that's just some sort of weird sunk cost bias that says, "Well, I paid for the newspaper, so now I've got to look at every page." Um, but that's exactly (laughs) what we end up doing with-

Chris Williamson 43:34 Meanwhile-

Oliver Burkeman 43:35 ... with digital-

Chris Williamson 43:35 ... you've got, you've got an obligation to a completely free pocket or instapaper read later list.

Oliver Burkeman 43:40 Right, exactly. No-

Chris Williamson 43:41 That's fucking arbitrary.

Oliver Burkeman 43:42 E- e- exactly, into which far more material can-

Chris Williamson 43:44 (laughs)

Oliver Burkeman 43:45 ... frictional- frictionlessly be shunted down the... can fit in the, the pages of a, of a newspaper. Um, and I think related to that, mentioned also in that, in that section, uh, and it's b- you, your mention of spaced repetition, um, uh, brought this up for me a bit earlier. It's like, there's a huge... There's a very, very widespread idea now, it seems to me, on the, in social media basically, that, that you should, that you should want to try to, um, retain everything that you read. Or that the ideal would be that you could remember all the things that you, uh, that, that you consume. Um, and it interacts interestingly with the whole sort of, you know, personal knowledge management and note-taking and stuff, which I think, you know, there's lots of really useful and interesting stuff being explored in that area. But there is also this kind of weird obsessive control idea, people who get a little bit too into, like, you know, Zettelkastens, and, or, you know, the, uh, I don't know how to define that-

Chris Williamson 44:54 What's a Zettelkasten? I haven't got... I don't know what that is.

Oliver Burkeman 44:56 Yeah, oh, right. Oh, there's... You know, there's this whole world, I'm sure you're aware of the world in general, right, of people sort of using different note-taking apps, Obsidian-

Chris Williamson 45:04 L- external brain type thing.

Oliver Burkeman 45:06 Right, right, right. And yeah, exactly. And, and like that's great, that's a great thing, and I try to do it myself. But, but there's a, there's a way of doing that that becomes this kind of attempt to, like, own, almost kind of like eat (laughs) you know, eh, all the knowledge that you are exposed to. And so another point that I'm making i- in keeping with the sort of rivers and buckets ideas there is that, like, that's not the primary point of reading. I'm all for people taking notes about really interesting things that leap out at them. But your... the benefit of reading, say, a really good book is not to sort of squirrel it all away for some later moment of use, which is the same old problem of postponing everything to the future. It, it's because it... if it's a good book, it will change you a little bit in the activity of, of reading it. And actually, that's something I've tried to sort of guard against in this book. Um, th- i- th- the, the, the, the tendency that I know in myself and therefore I suspect in my readers to wanna be like, "Okay, I'm into this. It's a really good system. I'm gonna take very detailed notes on every page, and then, like, at a certain point in the future, I'm going to execute on it all." And I've really wanted to try to pull the rug out from under that at every opportunity and be like, "No, just do some tiny little thing differently in the next hour and a half," you know?

Chris Williamson 46:35 Mm-hmm.

Oliver Burkeman 46:35 I think that's much more powerful in the long run than any number of hypothetical plans for radical change.

Chris Williamson 46:41 So true. I think about, you know, you'll be episode 840 maybe-

Oliver Burkeman 46:48 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 46:48 ... on the show, and-

Oliver Burkeman 46:50 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 46:51 ... uh, uh, I would guess that at the very least there is one to two pieces of advice per episode, perhaps may- many more on some of the more tactical ones. And, uh, who, who the fuck is able to do that?

Oliver Burkeman 47:04 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 47:04 Who is able to apply 2,000 pieces of advice to their life? And, uh, you know, I, I... recently especially I, I found myself getting caught up as I've become busier, this year as being the busiest I've ever had, and-

Oliver Burkeman 47:18 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 47:18 ... um, I've forgotten some of the lessons that I previously taught myself, which is a particular circle of hell that you can descend into where-

Oliver Burkeman 47:26 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 47:26 ... you've forgotten a lesson that you needed, and you don't need to discover something new to fix it. You need to rediscover the thing that you already tried and then, and then-

Oliver Burkeman 47:35 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 47:35 ... stopped doing. And (clears throat) Tim Ferriss has this idea called the good shit sticks, and I think it's the best way to remember what you learn if it's the sort of thing when reading that forces you to get your phone out and take a photo of it and send it to a friend and go, "Oh my God, dude, I can't believe..." There you go. Like, that's it.

Oliver Burkeman 47:57 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 47:57 So you just raise the, the bar for activation energy or whatever, so that only the things that really hit home are the ones. And it means that it's... Uh, I think that the way that I read sometimes when I'm not reading mindfully is I read as if it's my obligation to keep a hold of the information that's in whatever I'm reading-

Oliver Burkeman 48:24 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 48:24 ... whereas it's not. It is the obligation of the thing that you're reading to make it worthwhile for you to keep a hold of it. It's the other way. It should be the job of the book or the article or the podcast to make you go, "I need to pause that. I need to, I need to stop and sort of look at the sky for a little bit and reflect on what that means to me." Uh, and, uh, working in th- from that frame, that it's on the content to do that to me, uh, l- liberates you, 'cause there's no way that you can do that wrongly. There is no way that you can't do that correctly.

Oliver Burkeman 48:57 I think that's really well put, and I think, yeah, absolutely, it's almost as if when you take a note, the, the note-taking is, is not to try to preserve the thing mainly. It's almost more just like a, it's just some sort of physiological thing that you've got to do because the point was so powerful-

Chris Williamson 49:15 Yeah. Yeah.

Oliver Burkeman 49:15 ... like the, it's got to, this, something, something's got to sort of come out of you in that way. Um, also, uh, there's a writer who I, called Sacha Chapin, who I think is brilliant and who I quote in the book as well, who, um, although I don't think I quote him saying this, uh, he's got a great newsletter on, uh, Substack, um, who makes the point that, you know, if you're reading, uh, if you're trying to take notes on something becau- in such a way as to kind of record everything that the author meant to say or you're trying to take notes on it because you think it, uh, some sense of duty towards consuming all the interest and all the facts that are, that are there or something like that, you're imposing some frame onto it other than your natural, um, spontaneous re- response. And so, you know, what I'd say about that is, like, it's not, it, it, you have no obligation to the author of a book you read, right? It's like, um, the, they may have wanted to convey a certain set of things, but they will be conveying a certain set of things that land with you, and it's those that-

Chris Williamson 50:23 Mm-hmm.

Oliver Burkeman 50:23 ... that are-

Chris Williamson 50:24 Mm-hmm.

Oliver Burkeman 50:24 ... that are worth-

Chris Williamson 50:24 Yeah, that's a-

Oliver Burkeman 50:25 Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 50:25 That's a really good point that, um, different people will take different things away from the same piece of content or the same book or the same article. And, uh, again, assuming that this thing is meant for you, it, it, it should be actually a, uh, enjoyable process for you to go through a bunch of podcasts or documentaries or whatever and not have to get your note-taking thing out. You go, "Okay-"

Oliver Burkeman 50:52 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 50:52 "... look at that."

Oliver Burkeman 50:53 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 50:53 "I was just able to enjoy it for what it was." Now, obviously there can be a world in which you watch it, take nothing, uh, from a practical standpoint away from it, and also it was crap. So that, you know, that, that, that's, that's a bad situation to be in. But, um, yeah, I, I just, uh, I really, really think the good shit sticks. Don't expect... You know, if, if you can just do one thing, it's not the take-away, it's not the notes that you've got-

Oliver Burkeman 51:19 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 51:19 ... written down. It's, what's the thing that's so apt for you that you can't not do it? And you think, "Okay, I'm just gonna try and do that thing." Because one tactic that you, that you try and implement is better than 50 that sat in the ass end of Anki that you're never gonna look at.

Oliver Burkeman 51:36 (laughs) It's totally true. And I, on the podcast front, it's like, I've even caught myself, and I do this with books as well and I'm getting better at it, like, literally not listening to something that I really want to listen to or read something that I really want to read because I feel like, you know, that's something I'm gonna want to really, like, take notes on and focus on. And then you just end up listening to some people arguing about politics or something 'cause it's sort of whatever. Well, I mean, that might be your thing, but if it isn't your thing, you know, it's like a second tier experience from the one that you actually wanted because the one that you wanted involved too much of that kind of work at, um, at, at consuming it properly, you know, which, which, which makes, um, whi- which, yeah, which makes no sense.

Chris Williamson 52:26 Similarly,

Chris Williamson 52:27 "You can't care about everything." On Staying Sane When the World's a Mess, and William James' quote says, "The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook."

Oliver Burkeman 52:41 I wanted to speak in this section to people who do feel that, you know, they have some responsibility to the world that is en- en- wrapped in so many different crises and seeing so many images of so much suffering all the time. Um, you know, part... And I, and I sort of rescue, I want to sort of salvage that instinct from, you know, there's definitely a kind of a, all sorts of, like, wild overreach of what gets called activism these days that I'm as critical of as anybody, but, you know, that basic idea that actually maybe we do have a bit of a duty to be good citizens in a certain way. And if you buy that, I think you have to sort of face the fact that in the attention economy as we live in it now and the way that we, the environment that we live in, th- you've got to... I mean, I, I, the point I'm trying to make, I guess, is, is that if you f- if you're the kind of person who feels like you ought to care about anything outside of your own immediate life, you're gonna be asked to care about everything maximally all the time. Every, uh, campaign group, every media organization is incentivized. Even if they're very honorable in how they operate, they're still incentivized to present what they are campaigning for as the most important thing in the world, the only thing that you should give any attention to. That, uh, I think that even... I think we've got ourselves into a lot of a, uh, quite a tangle with all sorts of things, climate, COVID, lots of things, where, like, I wanna say that these are incredibly serious, real crises that then get into this kind of hyperbole machine that the attention economy is, and everyone gets sorted into, like, maximal panic or denying that it's an issue at all, because again, you know, there's just, you're gonna be asked to care about absolutely everything. And some people just get tired of that and disconnect or get hostile, and other people just drive themselves into a sort of frenzy. And so I'm really just making the argument in that section for the, the idea that it is okay and in fact necessary to sort of pick your, pick your battles and to-... disconnect from an awful lot of what's going on in the world at large. Not because it doesn't matter, but precisely because if you're gonna make any kind of difference, you have to be willing to choose one or two things-

Chris Williamson 55:18 Mm-hmm.

Oliver Burkeman 55:18 ... that you're going to, to focus on. Um, I quote there, um, a great blog post from, uh, David Cain, who runs the blog Raptitude, who, um, sort of has this image of like, um, public concern being, like, something that is sort of distributed like raindrops over, over thousands and thousands and thousands of little buckets and like, what happ- what would happen, the buckets being the different causes we could care about, like what would happen if we s- if we just said, like, "This issue is gonna be the concern of these several thousand people. This issue is gon-" I mean, it's- it's a, it's a hypothetical, but like what if we concentrated our available compassion for things like that and tried to actually make a difference instead of this very performative, very despair-inducing kind of vague attempt to fear, to appear like we're caring about everything?

Chris Williamson 56:15 Let

Chris Williamson 56:16 the future be the future on crossing bridges when you come to them.

Oliver Burkeman 56:23 I think one of the most fundamental ways in which we're limited, even though it's harder to see, is the way we're sort of temporally limited to- to right now. And we spent, and I think, w- any kind of worry and anxiety is basically an attempt to, um, exert some control over- over what happens in the future, which in that sense you can't really do. Obviously you can do things that make it more or less likely that the future will go well for you. And that challenge of like, "Oh, I can't control now what's gonna happen in the future, but I can trust that I will be up to dealing with the things that happen in the future," I think that's an incredibly powerful shift. There's a quote I have there from Marcus Aurelius which is something along the lines of, you know, you shouldn't be disturbed by the future because you'll meet it with the same resources and skills and talents that you, that you have, that you meet the present with. Um, if- if- um, if you were incapable of dealing with the things that life throws at you without dying, you- you would presently be dead, right? So clearly you do have it in you to- to give up that kind of anxious reaching after total certainty about what's gonna happen later.

Chris Williamson 57:46 Yeah. I- I definitely think about that as well. The- th- that was what hit me with the "Reality just doesn't need your help to operate it" insight, which is we... There's this sense that by worrying, that we somehow get to extend out temporally into the future and kind of, uh, it gives us some degree of, it gives us a sense of a degree of control over what's going to happen. Well, if I just worry enough-

Oliver Burkeman 58:20 Yeah. Right.

Chris Williamson 58:21 ... then that thing, it can't come to pass or it'll come to pass in a different way. There's this, you know, even get, i- i- in your totally fucking hysterical moments when you're laid awake in bed at 1:00 in the morning or whatever and you can't sleep, you almost even th- start to think about stuff like, "Well, because I know or because I'm thinking about the fact that it might happen, there's no way that it could happen, because all of the things that I think about that happen don't actually end up coming to pass."

Oliver Burkeman 58:46 Right. Right.

Chris Williamson 58:46 "It's always the things that we don't see that get you. So by thinking about the thing..." And you're like, what do you... I, wh- what- (laughs)

Oliver Burkeman 58:52 This is divination class? Am I like going to start-

Chris Williamson 58:55 Yeah.

Oliver Burkeman 58:55 ... drawing tarot cards in a desperate attempt to control the future? What's going on here?

Chris Williamson 58:59 Yeah. Yeah. No. It's, it's, it's amazing. There's a quote there from-

Oliver Burkeman 59:03 It's deranging. No. Absolutely. There's a, this lovely phrase from Robert Saltzman, who's another spiritual writer, who says that, you know, all sorts of what we do, and a lot of spirituality I think he would say as well, is ultimately an attempt to, um, distract ourselves from the fact that we suffer from, uh, what he calls total vulnerability to events. Um, this idea that essentially literally anything consistent with the laws of physics could happen in the very next moment to you or to anybody, um, always. And we're always engaging in certain kinds of kind of irri- irritable psychological activity to- to make that not, uh, be the case. But it, but it always is the case. Um, my wife has this incredibly vivid memory that has always like, I think, uh... Me- me- it might mean more to me than (laughs) to her at this point but for, of being a teenager growing up in Baltimore having had a childhood where she was really sort of steeped in going to the movies and just really sort of into cinema and film, and- and walking across a bridge, I don't know, just in the middle of the day sometime in Baltimore and suddenly realizing that if something absolutely terrible were to happen to her or to somebody close to, it wouldn't come with, um, like foreshadowing music like in the movies so that you can sort of gird yourself and get ready for it. Just that, you know, that kind of realization? It's like obviously you know it intellectually but then you, "Oh. Yeah. I'd kinda been assuming I'd get some warning." And actually, like, that's not how it works and-

Chris Williamson 1:00:40 You know what I think about?

Oliver Burkeman 1:00:41 ... we're always trying to find ways to buffer that.

Chris Williamson 1:00:43 I- I- (laughs) I think about, uh, similar even more macabre way, um, how many people have died being surprised? You know, that's every... That's, uh, you know, someone's, someone, someone ends up in a- a- a- a random unfortunate passerby, uh, catches a stray bullet in a shootout, uh, between two gangs or something like that. They've never been shot before, maybe they've never heard a gun go off before, and they look down to go...I, I... (laughs) I've been... (laughs)

Oliver Burkeman 1:01:17 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:01:17 And then, you know, they die in surprise. I wonder how many-

Oliver Burkeman 1:01:20 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:01:20 ... millions and millions of people, their last sense was, "Oh, surely not." Like... (laughs)

Oliver Burkeman 1:01:26 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:01:26 You know what I mean? Like, exasperation, uh, "It's not-"

Oliver Burkeman 1:01:29 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:01:29 "... like this, surely."

Oliver Burkeman 1:01:31 Yeah. No, it's, it's, it's, um... Yeah. It, it, I mean, it, it's just... On some level, it's just completely unacceptable to us, right? That that's how-

Chris Williamson 1:01:42 (laughs)

Oliver Burkeman 1:01:43 ... it is. And on no, on no level am I saying I'm completely at peace with it. But it's really useful to, to see, uh, to see what's going on there. I have to say, just in the macabre, um, topic, you're reminding me of, um, a slightly different point, but it's clearly related. When I was working as a journalist years and years ago, I was, I was one of many people in London reporting on the 7/7, the, the, the, the, the tube and bus, uh, bombings. And I remember in a follow-up piece I did about that, coming across this, this idea that some of the people involved in, uh, the rescue operation, some of the senior, uh, medical people, uh, said that if you... It's, it's pretty likely that, um, that at least most of the people who died on that day, uh, never knew anything was wrong. That, uh, you know, or at least, or at least... I mean, maybe not everyone, I don't know about the details of the different, of the different deaths. But, you know, it would be possible to just be going along, and then it's lights out. And, and, uh, actually that being some f- slight form of solace on the part of their relatives, and, and, and friends. But, like, that's sort of even, that's sort of narrowing down even taking away that moment of surprise is just, like-

Chris Williamson 1:03:08 Didn't even know.

Oliver Burkeman 1:03:09 ... "We're here and then we're not here." Yeah. Extraordinary.

Chris Williamson 1:03:13 "Finish Things:

Chris Williamson 1:03:15 On the Magic of Completion," and Sarah Manguso, "When my husband does the dishes, he always leaves some platter in the sink, some surface unwiped. I tried to correct the behavior until I remembered that if I finish everything in my work-in-progress folder, I'm afraid I'll die."

Oliver Burkeman 1:03:32 (laughs) I love that line. Um... Uh, yeah, this is just a, this is a slightly more sort of, uh, I guess tactical, um, uh, productivity-ish, um, uh, day in the book 'cause it's, it's just this idea that, like, there's an extraordinary kind of power in, in finishing things. Uh, there, there's a kind of energy that comes from completing things, even though you wouldn't kind of think that's how it would go. You'd think that, like, slogging to the end of something would, would deplete your energy. Um, and so I'm really making the case for, for finishing things, but also specifically for kind of conceiving of your working life, your working day, as a sequence of, like, finishings. Uh, and, and, uh, changing finishing from being something that you maybe do every few months on some big project to something that you're doing sort of throughout the day, defining end points, intermediate end points obviously for big projects, and, and taking things to completion. And I use this word, uh, deliverable, working in daily deliverables, and, and deliverables through the day, precisely because it's so kind of, you know, LinkedIn, right? I mean, it's just like-

Chris Williamson 1:04:54 (laughs)

Oliver Burkeman 1:04:54 ... it's just such a sort of, uh, sort of, um, soulless kind of corporate idea that, um, that, uh, you, um, th- th- it takes all the drama out for something to say, like, "What's the deliverable here? What's the deliverable here? What's the deliverable here?" And there's, it's actually a really, especially for creative work, I think it's a very powerful way to, um, think about things because it, it's almost like you're falling in line with what it really means to be finite, which is that we are always doing one thing at a time in sequence anyway, whether we like it or not. And by sort of pushing yourself to get to a completion point, even if it's completing 50 words, not-

Chris Williamson 1:05:35 Mm-hmm.

Oliver Burkeman 1:05:35 ... completing the chapter-

Chris Williamson 1:05:36 Mm-hmm.

Oliver Burkeman 1:05:36 ... or whatever it is, I think that's a really powerful way to think about productivity.

Chris Williamson 1:05:40 Treating yourself like a CNC machine that's doing a, a 3D etching into a piece of steel or something like that. "What will be done at the end of this? Well, this is what will be completed at the end of this." Uh, it's, it-

Oliver Burkeman 1:05:52 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:05:52 ... reminds me of your, um, your idea of a done list, which we spoke about last time. And, uh, me and my friend George, we went on the road for about a full month across America and we came up with the idea of a well-done list, which was a, a build off the back of yours. Um, originally, his (laughs) name for it... Fuck, I can't remember it fully. But his name for it was, um, the, "The Case of the Defense in the Prosecution Against the Im- the 10,000-Year-Old Amygdala" or something. And I was like, "Why don't we just call it a well-done list?" (laughs) Oliver's got this cool idea. Um, but it was basically that at the end of the day you would be able to look back and think about the things that you'd done well, what went well today. Not, not just like the gratitude thing, 'cause with the gratitude thing you're always... It always ends up being really fruity and fluffy and kind of

Narrator 1:06:42 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:06:43 ... an une- "I had a great walk and I looked at the sky and I'm grateful for the fact I've got my health and I'm grateful for the whatever." The well-done list was something a little bit different to me. And it was, uh, "I managed to, um, remain cordial today during a difficult meeting despite the fact that I was tired." Like, that's-

Oliver Burkeman 1:07:02 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:07:02 ... a well-done, that's something that's really well done, and it takes into account where you were at the time. And I'm not convinced that that would sit in... The way that you'd write that in a gratitude journal would be, "I kept my cool in a..." And it's, it's always sort of pro-social and something else. The well-done list-

Oliver Burkeman 1:07:18 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:07:18 ... feels a lot more kind of personal to me. But anyway, I, um...

Oliver Burkeman 1:07:22 No, and I really like that. I mean, the way you described it then anyway was just like, yeah, it really interact, it really connects to where you were at, right? So you can be...... like, in bed sick or wake up on the wrong side of bed and you can still, within that context-

Chris Williamson 1:07:38 Mm-hmm.

Oliver Burkeman 1:07:38 ... do that life, the life you got given today well. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:07:43 Well done.

Oliver Burkeman 1:07:44 I think that's ...

Chris Williamson 1:07:44 Yeah, exactly.

Chris Williamson 1:07:45 Rules that serve life on doing things daily-ish.

Oliver Burkeman 1:07:51 Uh, I'm talking here about the idea that it's very easy, as we've spoken about, to let the sort of productivity rules and rules for how you want to run your life become the things that you're kind of looking for for your salvation, not things that you're using as tools to help you enjoy life and, uh, accomplish things that matter to you, but as things that you then sort of are enslaved to. It's that very familiar feeling for many of us, I think, of like, you know, setting up the exciting new schedule system or t- time boxing system or whatever and then, like, two days later being like, "Well, I have to do this? This is- this is so kind of heavy and oppressive. I don't want- I don't wanna have to do this. I want to be free." Um, and so I give some examples of rules that I think, uh, lend themselves to that more, uh, l- serving life kind of frame. And one of them is this idea from Dan Harris, the meditation teacher. I think he maybe would resist being called a meditation teacher. Anyway, podcaster, uh, of, uh, uh, w- who suggests that the right, um, frequency for a meditation practice is- is daily-ish. I think you can apply it to lots of other things as well. It doesn't mean just do it when you feel like it. It's not completely self-indulgent. It's this idea of, like, "I'm gonna be consistent, but I'm not going to be obsessively consistent in a sort of brittle way that causes the-"

Chris Williamson 1:09:20 Mm-hmm.

Oliver Burkeman 1:09:20 "... causes e- uh, uh, too much ..."

Chris Williamson 1:09:22 It weird spirals up-

Oliver Burkeman 1:09:22 "... more guilt and-"

Chris Williamson 1:09:22 And spirals down.

Oliver Burkeman 1:09:24 Right. And you know, everyone knows that if you did something five days out of seven you did it daily-ish and if you did it two days out of seven you didn't do it daily-ish.

Chris Williamson 1:09:32 (laughs)

Oliver Burkeman 1:09:32 But there are s- but there are certain times in life that maybe three would count, four, you know. I- i- i- y- you know, you- you- you know, you know when you're fooling yourself and you know when it's a kind of reasonable thing. And that enables you to actually... I think some of the ways consistency gets talked about these days, uh, is, um, is unhelpful 'cause it implies a sort of rigid consistency that- that- that, uh, that breaks very easily.

Chris Williamson 1:10:01 My favorite is actually from, uh, James in Atomic Habits and it's, I think it's the best takeaway. It's an absolute sleeper of an insight that no one really ever talks about, uh, although I keep on trying to fly the flag for it. Uh, and his rule is never miss two days in a row. And I think that just as a general rule, never missing two days in a row stops one missed habit becoming a new habit, right? One day is a missed habit, two days is the start of a new habit. And just, I- I- I've used this for so... I even used it in reverse to, um, reintroduce caffeine. I did a huge amount of time without caffeine and, um, wanted to keep the sensitivity because it meant that I could have a, you know, just a teeny tiny amount of caffeine and get- get a big boost out of it and I didn't wanna lose that.

Oliver Burkeman 1:10:48 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:10:48 So I, uh, set myself a rule of I only have caffeine one day. I can't ever have it two days in a row-

Oliver Burkeman 1:10:55 Right.

Chris Williamson 1:10:55 ... which meant that if I didn't have it yesterday then I could have it today, but if I had it today I knew I couldn't have it tomorrow. And it created this sort of artificial scarcity that made me think about, "My caffeine use so much more mindfully." I'm aware this is, like, the most autistic thing that I could come up with ... (laughs)

Oliver Burkeman 1:11:11 (laughs) It's like, if it works for you...

Chris Williamson 1:11:14 Yeah. Look, I'm- I'm now back to being a- a- a large sort of caffeine degenerate, um, but even when I want to dial it back down, you know, if someone is, y- uh, fully caffeine pilled, uh, just don't do it two days in a row, I think is-

Oliver Burkeman 1:11:27 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:11:27 ... it really is a nice, uh, a nice (...) .

Oliver Burkeman 1:11:29 And don't take caffeine pills, actually, 'cause that's just, uh, that's- that's what we did at university, isn't it? Just to work like...

Chris Williamson 1:11:34 It's the least enjoyable way...

Oliver Burkeman 1:11:35 I know- I know what you meant. I know what you meant. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:11:36 The least enjoyable way.

Chris Williamson 1:11:38 Three hours on finding focus in the chaos.

Oliver Burkeman 1:11:44 This is this idea that I've, I think in some circles become (laughs) known for I think are the- that if you're doing the kind of work that gets called knowledge work, if you're doing anything creative, uh, anything that involves d- deep thinking, uh, i- it's actually a really good strategy not to aim to do more than about four hours of that, uh, in the course of a day. If you look back, and Alex Pang has written brilliantly about this in his book, Rest, um, you look back at all the routines and daily rituals of so many authors and artists and scholars and scientists through history, it's extraordinary how often three or four hours was how much they demanded of themselves of kind of deep, deep focus. And I found this to be true from experience as well and there's certain research to suggest, you know, it's not just purely cherry-picking anecdotes that, to suggest that there's something about that kind of amount of time. Not necessarily all in one go but in a 24-hour period. What I really like about this is on the one hand it, uh, emphasizes the importance of protecting time for that kind of thing, but on the other hand it doesn't get into this idea of trying to protect 12 hours a day for- for it, uh, these kind of things that I think rarely, rarely, sort of rarely work for people. So what I'm advising there is that if you have the autonomy over your time, it's a really good idea to kind of, on the one hand really be serious about ring-fencing that amount of time to be undisturbed, undistracted, not to have meetings, uh, to be at a time of the day when your energy levels are high, but then also to kind of not try too hard to protect or structure the rest of the time, uh, in a way that will only cause frustration and will sort of, um-... uh, deny you the kind of serendipitous encounters that come from being interrupted and disturbable.

Chris Williamson 1:13:46 Mm.

Oliver Burkeman 1:13:47 So, it's that sort of, um, uh, what- what's the word? I guess, binary approach.

Chris Williamson 1:13:55 Yeah.

Oliver Burkeman 1:13:55 It's like, there is, there's this time, but I'm not gonna worry about making the other time like that, and I think that's a really powerful way to make progress in creative work.

Chris Williamson 1:14:06 I, I think I spoke about this with you last time, that there was no problem that I've ever encountered in my life, until I really, really started to think mindfully about it, where I didn't just assume that the solution was work harder. Like, I just always thought, "Well, it ... More, right?" Or more focused or more intensely or better, uh, as opposed to, you know, I, I've really, like I say, this year has been just so obscenely busy, and this week is the first week that I've thought of, uh, where I've had a little bit more downtime. And I was laid in the, laid in the sauna earlier on. I went to the sauna place obscenely early this morning. And, uh, I thought, "This is so-"

Oliver Burkeman 1:14:47 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 1:14:47 "... nice. I'm coming up with all of these ideas." And I'm, like, just allowing, I don't know, this weird sort of, um, like, exhaust fumes from my brain to just, like-

Oliver Burkeman 1:14:58 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:14:58 You know you, like, how you, you, when you go to sleep, there's these toxins in your brain and it, sleep clears them away. I think that's the reason we need to sleep. And lying in the sauna was like a waking version of that, where I just evidently had loads of bullshit thoughts that just needed to get up, and they could percolate and then they'd, shoo, they're away, and then here's another one and, shoo, and that's away. And, oh, actually, you know, that's, that's something that's interesting, and so on and so forth.

Oliver Burkeman 1:15:21 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:15:21 But yeah, I think the, the, the most bizarre thing about this is, to anybody that scoffs at, ugh, only three hours of deep work a day, how much deep work do you get done most days? 'Cause if I get three hours-

Oliver Burkeman 1:15:33 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:15:33 ... of deep work on a single task done in a day, it is an-

Oliver Burkeman 1:15:36 It's amazing.

Chris Williamson 1:15:36 ... absolute, triple A, gold medal outlier.

Oliver Burkeman 1:15:40 (laughs) No, absolutely. And if you wanna start with 90 minutes or an hour, I think you'll, even then, most people will be amazing themselves. If you can do that daily-ish for a very short-

Chris Williamson 1:15:55 (laughs)

Oliver Burkeman 1:15:55 For a very short while, the, I mean, the cumulative benefits are clear. And on some level, that's not an original point, right? Do stuff, keep going back to it, don't do too much, but keep ... I think the, the point I'm trying to drive home is, like, there's no reason to see it as a shame that you didn't do seven, eight, nine hours, right?

Chris Williamson 1:16:16 Mm-hmm.

Oliver Burkeman 1:16:16 It's like, actually that's part of this process. They both belong in the day, the, the time when you're really focusing and shutting the world out, and the time when you're, when you're not doing that.

Chris Williamson 1:16:28 Yeah, it's the, um, it's the reason why so much of the progress that I made from whatever sort of total toddler I was in my 20s to full-on adult infant I've become in my 30s, uh, was through a, a, a, a really aggressive morning routine. Uh, you know, I had this, uh, uh, very obscenely luxurious, uh, morning routine that was the best part of two hours long, uh, and a- arguably included in the morning routine was lots of things that people would do later in the day, so I, I, uh, you can call it what you want. But I w- my compliance with it was really, really high. You know, for, for years and years, I'd get up, I'd go for a walk for about 15 minutes, and I'd come back and I'd sit down and I'd journal and then I'd do breath work and then I'd do meditation with Headspace or Sam Harris or, or InSite Timer or something. Uh, and then I'd read, and then I'd do yin yoga, uh, mobility, and then I'd cook and prepare my food for the day, and then I'd go about my day. And absolutely, you know, y- tell me that this guy doesn't have children without telling me that this guy doesn't have children.

Oliver Burkeman 1:17:30 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 1:17:30 I'm aware, I'm aware (laughs) that that's, you know, an absolute... That, that's the most bourgeois thing that I could have spoken about doing. It's not flying in a helicopter or getting a jet or going on a cruise.

Oliver Burkeman 1:17:42 Right.

Chris Williamson 1:17:42 It's having a, it's having this unnecessary-

Oliver Burkeman 1:17:44 Two and a half, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:17:45 ... two, two hour, two hour morning routine. That being said, the main lesson that I took away from that was I was doing lots of things that were quite high impact, daily-ish, for a very, very long amount of time, with huge compliance. Like, uh, you know, I would do that five or six days a week, and I did that for, you know, like, four years or something.

Oliver Burkeman 1:18:07 Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:18:07 Like, pa- I've got a stack of journals like this just from how much I did, and I never thought about myself as a journaler.

Oliver Burkeman 1:18:14 Right.

Chris Williamson 1:18:14 But you just realize when you, when you accumulate this stuff over a long enough amount of time, you look back and you go, "Oh my God, look at all of this stuff that I did." And now, as somebody that has, uh, f- uh, is giving himself the excuse that he doesn't have time to have that big of a morning routine on a morning, all of the things or many of the things that I loved about that and the byproducts of it are things I'm missing in my life.

Oliver Burkeman 1:18:34 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:18:34 And the answer's back there. There's that embarrassing thing about the answer that you already need is something not only that you know but something you've done in the past, and then like, "Oh, well."

Oliver Burkeman 1:18:42 Yes, right, right. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:18:42 So, yeah.

Oliver Burkeman 1:18:43 Yeah, yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:18:44 One of the things

Chris Williamson 1:18:45 that I really appreciate about the way that you wrote this book as a, like I say, an, an avid stan of your, uh, Imperfectionist blog, um, was that you included some of my favorite posts that I'd read previously, and "You can't hoard life," I think, is, is probably my favorite post. I was so glad that it, it got a feature in the new book. "You can't hoard life on letting the moments pass." What's that mean to you?

Oliver Burkeman 1:19:12 It's kind of embarrassing to admit that, h- how easy it is, I think to, to not enjoy life even when what's happening is, on the surface, completely enjoyable, the kinda thing that you always wanted to have in your life, um, because of this idea that you've got to sort of really hold the experience or take ownership of it or something. There's this great insight in Buddhism, I think, right, that, that, uh, eh, especially lots of traditions but especially Buddhism, that we make ourselves miserable not only by not having what we want or wanting things that we don't have, but by...... like, like trying to cling really hard to things that we do want and do have. And I s- give the example of being here in the North Yorkmoors where we, where we live now and just sort of having this experience early when we... earlier in the time we were here of being out early on a winter morning with snow on the ground and, like, barn owl flying by, drinking my coffee, pink sunrise in the distance. Just absolutely my favorite kind of landscape and time of the morning and everything. You know, insert here whatever your personal one would be. And catching myself thinking, like, "Okay, this is the kind of experience I want to have." So firstly, I want to make sure I'm really enjoying it, and secondly I want to make sure that whatever I'm doing in my life and my career is gonna guarantee that I keep having this experience forever and ever and ever. And just all these different ways in which, yeah, we're trying to hoard life, is the phrase that I've used there, in a way that is completely opposed to enjoying it. And it comes back to this idea that I've sort of bumped into in different ways again and again in my work and in my life, that you sort of have to be willing to, in some sense of the word, waste time in order to live fully. You have to be able to stand on the side of a hill in a beautiful sunrise in winter in the North Yorkmoors and just be like, "Yeah," like, let it go. It's, like, nice. It's not, it's not, not that valuable in some, in some sense, in order to really be in it. Otherwise, you get into this whole kind of attempt to acquire the experience for... to sort of squirrel it away for, for what? For some future-

Chris Williamson 1:21:40 Yeah.

Oliver Burkeman 1:21:40 ... purpose (laughs) , right? When you can sort of... I don't know. Yeah. I, I don't know why we want to... what, what we think we're holding onto those things for. Except, of course, that, yeah, on some level, it's a sort of a bulwark against, uh... feels like a bulwark against having to... uh, against being finite and against the fact that every moment is just passing by and going forever.

Chris Williamson 1:22:01 Yeah. I, I, I know that exactly. This sort of sense that this is a peak experience, and at... in the moment of the thing that you're supposed to enjoy, you begin to lambast yourself for not having a life where there are so many of these things in it. And you go-

Oliver Burkeman 1:22:18 And you're in a life that's in it, right? Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:22:20 (laughs)

Oliver Burkeman 1:22:20 I, I mean, I don't... I don't know if I mentioned this in the... I don't think I mentioned it in the book, but I was with an old, old school friend of mine who came up here, and we went on a hike in the middle of