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

Oliver Burkeman is a journalist and an author. Time is something we all wish we had more of and tons of productivity gurus have proposed strategies to stop it from slipping through our fingers. After years of investigating and reporting on cutting-edge productivity for The Guardian, Oliver has arrived at a slightly different worldview of time and how we should manage it. Expect to learn why becoming more efficient often just leads to you getting more useless work done, the fundamental problems which all time management strategies fail to address, how deciding what you're going to fail at is a superpower, the danger of seeing your leisure time as an arena for self-improvement and much more... Sponsors: Get a free gift from Tiege Hanley when you try their skincare range at http://tiege.com/modernwisdom (deal automatically applied) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and Free Shipping from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Buy Four Thousand Weeks - https://amzn.to/3BhqQJR Follow Oliver on Twitter - https://twitter.com/oliverburkeman Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #timemanagement #productivity #efficiency - 00:00 Intro 00:29 Unique Challenges of Time 09:34 The Dangers of Over-productivity 19:24 Solving the Efficiency Trap 26:18 What to Say ‘No’ To 38:07 Letting Go of To-Do List Anxiety 46:39 Forsaking Present for Future 56:03 Productivity as Denial of Mortality 1:01:33 Seeing Life as a Gift - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Oliver Burkeman?

  As you get really good at getting things done, what tends to happen is that you realise 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.

• 0:23Chris Williamson?

  Oliver Bergman, welcome to the show.

• 0:26Oliver Burkeman?

  Thanks very much for inviting me.

• 0:28Chris Williamson?

  What's the unique challenge with time? Do we actually have time?

• 0:34Oliver Burkeman?

  It's so weird. I mean, time is fundamentally, I think, unlike any other thing in a million different ways, and probably also a million different ways related to physics that I hope you're not going to ask me about. But 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, you don't have, you don't possess next week or the rest of today. You expect it, but you don't possess it in a way that you can sort of set it aside for later.

• 1:20Oliver Burkeman?

  We just get one moment, one moment after each moment, and it's the same for everybody, yeah.

• 1:27Chris Williamson?

  What do most people get wrong about time management then?

• 1:30Oliver Burkeman?

  I think the sort of core 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 full control over time, right? So we feel like what you have to do in this situation of being overwhelmed by activities, obligations, tasks, ambitions, is to sort of become capable of...

• 2:02Oliver Burkeman?

  Meeting all of these, you know, being sort of optimal, optimally productive and capable of handling anything that's thrown at you and also to feel kind of secure with respect to the the the future, to know that your plans are going to come into fruition. And I think that that desire to be in control of time 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 like being in the driver's seat.

• 2:37Chris Williamson?

  Is modern-

• 2:38Oliver Burkeman?

  And then like wanting to win the battle, right? And you can't win the battle of time. In the end, time is going to win that that battle.

• 2:44Chris Williamson?

  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 the same as him. So is time management anxiety a modern phenomenon?

• 2:54Oliver Burkeman?

  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? 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, as a as a as a thing that was there to be used or wasted or well-used. It was just sort of like, there was this kind of unalienated 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

• 3:35Oliver Burkeman?

  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 quite a long period after the Industrial Revolution when people are being a bit stressed by time, but it feels doable. Like it feels like you could render your life or your factory,

• 4:20Oliver Burkeman?

  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. See what I mean?

• 4:32Chris Williamson?

  Is it not just that we're busier than people in the old era were? And we've got more things to do?

• 4:39Oliver Burkeman?

  I don't think it is just that. We definitely feel busier than people did a few decades ago.

• 4:46Oliver Burkeman?

  And I think that there's actually a fairly good, there's fairly good evidence that we're not busier by, in a sort of objective sense, in the sense of having more, 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 timescale that goes back to pre-industrial times or you're including kind of some indigenous cultures, perhaps even today,

• 5:16Oliver Burkeman?

  then it's like, well, what does busy even mean, right? I mean, 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, logical contradiction. You can't have to do more than you can do. 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.

• 5:42Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 5:52Oliver Burkeman?

  Right.

• 5:53Chris Williamson?

  And that's the squeeze.

• 5:55Oliver Burkeman?

  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 the Richard Scarry children's books, which which I am because I've read many of them to my four-year-old. But you, they're set in a place called Busy Town and all the animals in them are 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 tension there. That's just like being busy. That's a lovely way

• 6:40Oliver Burkeman?

  to live. 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 ought implies can, that you can't, you can't meaningfully talk about having some duty or obligation if it's, if it's not possible to fulfill it. 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

• 7:24Oliver Burkeman?

  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 stress. Yeah.

• 7:42Chris Williamson?

  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 fit more in.

• 7:55Oliver Burkeman?

  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 get washed and dressed in the morning, like.

• 8:08Chris Williamson?

  My housemate, my housemate was taking two hours to brew, probably about, I shit you not, probably about 30 minutes to make a coffee during lockdown because he's 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. I've got nothing, it's either this or Xbox. So, yeah.

• 8:30Oliver Burkeman?

  Yeah. I mean, you know, if the value, if the value you're pursuing is, is really good with coffee, then maybe it should take you that long. But, I mean, there's no harm in making efficiency 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, no limit to the number of emails you could receive, with demands that could 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 struggle to optimize to the point where a finite person can do

• 9:12Oliver Burkeman?

  an infinite amount is doomed to failure. That's not how math works, right?

• 9:17Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 9:18Oliver Burkeman?

  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 to that serene situation.

• 9:31Chris Williamson?

  Having spent a lot of time talking to people like James Clear and Ali Abdaal, and you know, these sort of real modern productivity wizards, there always is in the back of my mind a sense of never being done, never being done with advancing the productivity system. 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."

• 9:56Oliver Burkeman?

  Right, right.

• 9:57Chris Williamson?

  And you can roll that out to talk about the systems themselves. So you can sort of become very meta 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 around to getting stuff done, let alone, you know, so there's...

• 10:15Oliver Burkeman?

  And I've totally been there as well. I mean, like, I have, you know, yeah, absolutely. Yes, the overheads start to sort of take away from any possibility of doing anything else.

• 10:23Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. And I think learning when you have optimized sufficiently deeply, when you've down-regulated the sleep and up-regulated the system to a level where you're happy with it. And this is something that so many young guys that kind of follow a similar track to what I did, you know, 20-year-old guys who start running a business and really enjoy it and want to do more, and they attach their sense of success and self-worth to how the business is performing, 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

• 11:03Chris Williamson?

  every single second of your life. If you're not careful, you can just continue to chip away and chip away and chip away at everything. And then you think, well, what, what was the productivity and service of like, 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 over earning seems just as stupid as under earning.

• 11:29Oliver Burkeman?

  Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, there's been some amazing work. I'm thinking right now of a book by Daniel Markovitz about how, you know, your reward for being a winner in the society that we live in now, for 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 in that respect, not much, not particularly preferable to 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, it's not like, like 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.

• 12:15Oliver Burkeman?

  And now the reward for climbing up that ladder in this sort of efficiency dominated situation is is just even more that you have to do. 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 tailored rather than

• 12:40Chris Williamson?

  Goodhart's law kicks in very hard. Yes.

• 12:43Oliver Burkeman?

  Right. Rather than a way, yes, exactly. Rather than a way of

• 12:47Oliver Burkeman?

  of maximizing the the degree to which you're achieving some, some other goal, some other value. And especially, you know, the, the

• 12:58Oliver Burkeman?

  The, in some ways, the worst part of this is that it doesn't actually, 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 different domains. But like, if all you do is make a system more efficient, 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 stuff. So your reward for becoming brilliantly efficient is to be busier than before, like on, on less meaningful things, if that's, if that's what you're pursuing in the absence of anything else. Yeah.

• 13:41Chris Williamson?

  What should our goal with time be then?

• 13:45Oliver Burkeman?

  Wow. I mean,

• 13:50Oliver Burkeman?

  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, it's a, it's a kind of surrender to, to reality and to the limited situation that we're, that we're in. An understanding that you can't control or dominate or master time, that we're just in time, we, 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

• 14:34Oliver Burkeman?

  is actually an attempt to avoid these uncomfortable emotions. But if you can sort of let them percolate through you a bit, the 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 ought to be spending a meaningful life on. I think most people, when they get quiet and introspective, don't have a lot of problem answering that that question. The problem is they expect it to feel comfortable to be pursuing those things. And it probably isn't going to because it's

• 15:19Oliver Burkeman?

  gonna bring you into contact with reality and limitation in various ways that that spending all day scrolling through Twitter does not.

• 15:28Chris Williamson?

  What's the role with limitation and finitude here?

• 15:32Oliver Burkeman?

  What's the?

• 15:33Chris Williamson?

  Role of limitation and finitude?

• 15:35Oliver Burkeman?

  Well, it's just completely defining, right? I mean, it's just it is it it's how things actually are. 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 going to 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 productivity, trying to pretend that this is not the way things

• 16:19Oliver Burkeman?

  are and that we are in more control than than we really are. So, I mean, the there's a quote which I love and keep coming back to from Charlotte Jocko 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 going to be difficulties. It's not that there aren't disappointments and losses involved in in, 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.

• 17:04Chris Williamson?

  Sam Harris had this quote.

• 17:05Oliver Burkeman?

  It didn't sound very upbeat, but.

• 17:07Chris Williamson?

  No, but I think it's correct. Sadly, we're finite creatures surrounded by infinite complexity.

• 17:14Oliver Burkeman?

  Right, and capable of infinite imagination as well, I think.

• 17:16Chris Williamson?

  Correct. Yeah. So not only is there an infinite number of options of what we could do with our time, but we can actually envision them. And mistakenly, we can believe that we could perhaps maybe do them. If we were able to to get the right productivity system and 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.

• 17:46Oliver Burkeman?

  Right.

• 17:46Chris Williamson?

  What? Did you just think one day that you were going to wake up and you would have completed problems? Like leveling up in a video game and entering into a map where there's no features? No, the problems are going to be that they are a feature, not a bug of life.

• 18:02Oliver Burkeman?

  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 in the most basic sense, I suppose, it's that, um, you know, that 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 going to 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

• 18:47Oliver Burkeman?

  example in this mix. And really, I think a lot of it all goes back down to that book, 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.

• 19:10Oliver Burkeman?

  This is one of 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 couldn't have said it better even than the garbled version that I just gave you.

• 19:24Chris Williamson?

  What's the efficiency trap then? Is that just becoming more efficient and more 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?

• 19:39Oliver Burkeman?

  Yeah, I mean, I just use that phrase, there's sort of two aspects to this. One is, as we've discussed, right, that, that becoming more efficient in the absence of any other value will just increase your workload and your busyness and, 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 going to get more email because you're going to 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.

• 20:24Oliver Burkeman?

  It's holding me back. But, which is, this sort of stems from this observation in my own life, but I've, 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.

• 21:03Oliver Burkeman?

  Comes onto your radar, the more likely you are to say yes to anything, either internally, if it's an 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 going to 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 going to 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 limitless reservoir for other people's expectations. It's just like you'll just end up doing what other people would like someone else to be handling on their behalf.

• 21:44Chris Williamson?

  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 to get done.

• 22:08Oliver Burkeman?

  Right, and I think the thing to remember there is that like most, possibly this is a human universal, but most people who are like sort of have a bit of dynamism and want to do a few things with their lives, that there's going to be, no matter how productive you get, there's always going to be more genuinely meaningful and important things than the capacity will allow. So you're probably not going to have the bandwidth to start messing with the things that you don't particularly care about. And there's a lovely observation from Elizabeth Gilbert, the novelist and writer on productivity and author of Eat, Pray, Love, underrated book in some quarters, I think it's actually

• 22:49Oliver Burkeman?

  really good, that, you know, 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 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 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 back door to continuing this kind of. A problematic way of behaving is like, I'm going to get so productive so that everything that matters gets done and I'm going to accept that I'm not going to 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.

• 23:34Chris Williamson?

  So if time management's ultimately doomed to fail, what's novel about what you're proposing here?

• 23:42Oliver Burkeman?

  I mean, I don't know that it's novel if you're going to go all the way back through the history of philosophy. 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, uh, want to promote anything.

• 23:59Chris Williamson?

  Are you saying, are you saying that Heidegger managed to out Nazi you in this book? I was adamant that this was some sort of treaties towards Hitler.

• 24:06Oliver Burkeman?

  This is a, this is a word that gets thrown around a lot these days, but, but Heidegger was as absolutely canonically a Nazi as it's possible to be.

• 24:15Chris Williamson?

  Time Nazi.

• 24:17Oliver Burkeman?

  No, no, no, just a Nazi. 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 in unique about my, what's, what's, what's new about what I'm saying? I think it is, 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's, it's a kind of acceptance, acceptance of reality that is kind of bracing

• 24:56Oliver Burkeman?

  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, sort of just overly new age, you know, you feel like books about acceptance are going to have a little tableau of flowers on the cover or a pebble or something. But, um, but it, there's something quite muscular about it. There's something quite, I mean, Cal Newport, um, you know, I'm sure you'll be, you and your listeners will be familiar with, but he talks about facing the productivity dragon, which is his phrase for like, not pretending

• 25:38Oliver Burkeman?

  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, I like the idea that it's kind of scary on a level, on some way to,

• 25:58Oliver Burkeman?

  to see how things actually are with respect to time. But the payoff for doing it is that 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.

• 26:17Chris Williamson?

  So 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?

• 26:30Oliver Burkeman?

  I mean, there are lots of ways of implementing this at different levels, sort of

• 26:38Oliver Burkeman?

  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 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.

• 27:22Oliver Burkeman?

  And actually not making progress on any of them.

• 27:27Oliver Burkeman?

  I'm going to sort of tolerate that uncertainty that that comes, sorry, that discomfort that knows from, 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. That's one I can, I can talk endlessly about ways to sort of implement this basic, single, basic perspective shift.

• 27:56Chris Williamson?

  I like the idea of deciding what we're going to fail at. Can you dig into that?

• 28:01Oliver Burkeman?

  Yeah, this is an idea I got originally from an author called John Acuff. And he just makes this very kind of obvious, once it's been pointed out to you, point that if this finite situation means that we're going to fail to excel to 100% in every single domain that we can possibly think of, which it does, then it makes a lot of sense to sort of select in advance for a given time period, you know, something that you're, some area of life that you're going to accept your non-excelling in. So, you know, you might, you might decide that, I mean, one thing is, you know, I think

• 28:44Oliver Burkeman?

  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 et cetera, et cetera.

• 29:05Oliver Burkeman?

  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 going to be the person who has a really tidy house or Six pack abs. 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 healthfully, it's like, 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, that I can whip up. And yeah, fitness, right? I don't want to 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

• 29:47Oliver Burkeman?

  of heart disease through to, 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 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 going to sort of spread yourself thinly, not get far enough in each one, and be constantly disappointed that you didn't reach a hundred percent in on any given in any given domain.

• 30:24Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, there's two things going on there. One of them is the 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 six months or whatever, or these are the hills, 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 wrangled the chaos of the next few months into order by having a plan and by laying it out. 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

• 31:03Chris Williamson?

  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 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 muscle and build my lifts up. That strength will carry itself on far more effectively than if you tried to do. You can get done in six months of focused work, what would take three years of desperately focused work. And the same thing goes for, think about a YouTube thing. The Pareto distribution is a hell of

• 31:47Chris Williamson?

  a drug, right? Like, it's everywhere. And you 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 gets super competitive at the top, but the returns are also sort of, 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, and this is something I've been saying for so long to myself, shouting it in my own ears, but everyone else is too, is like, look. The vast majority of people cannot let go of the tether of doing everything at once. This means that consistency and a narrow focus is a competitive advantage.

• 32:32Chris Williamson?

  One of the reasons that you can 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 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 pick whatever it is. 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 go to the gym a couple of times a week to just maintain for the next year or six months

• 33:16Chris Williamson?

  or whatever. But that doesn't matter because I chose I chose this in advance.

• 33:20Oliver Burkeman?

  Yeah, absolutely. I think it's incredibly powerful and I appreciate the way you unpack that into the two, the two different elements 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 this state of controls. Because it takes trust, right? It takes, to put one thing on hold for a while and believe that you're going to get around to it in a subsequent six month period or something, it takes a kind of self-trust that you need to know that, that when that time comes, you'll, you can switch gears and do that.

• 34:04Oliver Burkeman?

  And if you come at it from a sort of control freaky, untrusting, unself-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's sort of, it's encouraging this notion that you've got to sort of find time in an hour and a half in the morning for 12 different, for 12 different practices. 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've got to be honest and say, no, I'm doing some other things with with the time I would be using for that. And like, I think that's okay. I

• 34:46Oliver Burkeman?

  think that's, and I think that applies to a million different domains. Yeah. And if you're going to have, I keep mentioning this, but if you're going to have small children, they're, they're going to be the, they're going to be the priority for a good while, whether you like it or not.

• 34:59Chris Williamson?

  I think another reason that people like having their fingers in multiple fires, fingers in multiple pies, toes in multiple fires, is that it creates an N of one that gives them culpable deniability about why they might not be performing particularly well within a particular industry.

• 35:19Oliver Burkeman?

  Oh, yeah.

• 35:19Chris Williamson?

  So if you are the only skateboarding, cricketing, bodybuilding, salesperson of insurance in the UK, but also moonlights as a chef, then

• 35:32Oliver Burkeman?

  Right.

• 35:32Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 35:43Oliver Burkeman?

  No, I think that's totally right. And I think that it reminds me of, you know, I think, especially in the world of sort of content creation and the attention economy more generally, we get confused, don't we, about what, what, what constitutes the useful and meaningful form of extraordinary, of being extraordinary. And people sort of, there's people are incentivized to like, yeah, to do things that are out of the ordinary or weird combinations. And, and 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 the seemingly

• 36:24Oliver Burkeman?

  very bizarre sort of combinations of weird stuff. And yeah, have your finger in multiple pies. That 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 this idea of like going through the process of unoriginality to get to the originality on the other side. That's this idea that goes back to this Finnish American Finnish American photographer called Arno Minkin and where he tells this whole story about how in Helsinki, all the all the buses at

• 37:08Oliver Burkeman?

  the central bus station in Helsinki start from the same place. And then all the routes, lots of the routes sort of overlap with each other through the center of the city. Lots of 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 you have to stick with paths that feel like they're what everyone else is doing, feel like you're just an apprentice, feel like they're not what you're not sort of making a name for yourself in order to get to the

• 37:47Oliver Burkeman?

  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 that especially in the world we live in now.

• 38:07Chris Williamson?

  Even if somebody accepts everything that we've said is 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?

• 38:26Oliver Burkeman?

  I think, you know, two approaches that may well 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 you decide to work on a certain project 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 going to get through all of this. And if it takes me till midnight, that's fine. You say, I'm going to stop at whatever time, I'm going to work for however long.

• 39:12Oliver Burkeman?

  And just like taking those time, going sort of schedule first in that way can be very helpful. I think for for some people, because it's sort of, it's uncomfortable, 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 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 long list to the shortlist.

• 39:55Oliver Burkeman?

  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, 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 focus on five things right now. They better be five that are that are worth my my time.

• 40:25Chris Williamson?

  Have you heard of cold turkey, the app?

• 40:31Oliver Burkeman?

  Yes, but I don't know what it does.

• 40:33Chris Williamson?

  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 lock you out of your own computer at a preset time. And there is nothing that you can do about it. So I have a couple of, I have a couple of buddies who've got it set. I actually think it was part of the, a part of a very argumentative discussion with their partners around. You you work too late. Okay, well, I can do this thing that. Causes me to be locked out of the laptop, but they've told me that the degree of furiousness

• 41:15Chris Williamson?

  and anxiety during the three minutes leading up to when that happens is is a sight to behold because they just realized they're like shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit. As fast as possible, trying to get everything done, scheduling stuff to be sent for 8pm because they know that they're not going to be there. But yeah, I think it's so, it's so interesting that, 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, of tasks to be done, not time blocks to be worked in.

• 41:55Chris Williamson?

  And I mean, I, I do it as well. I, I have tasks that this is what I'm going to do today. Not this is how long I'm going to work on things to do today. And it's only 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 going to lead to you over indulging in work.

• 42:16Oliver Burkeman?

  Right. And that's why, I mean, you, you can through, absolutely. Um, I've been there and not infrequently still go there, but it's, it's, um,

• 42:25Oliver Burkeman?

  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.

• 42:38Oliver Burkeman?

  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 going to end up having to, that are going to 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, 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

• 43:18Oliver Burkeman?

  know, very high status work as well as low status work, you know, if it really is strictly 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.

• 43:36Chris Williamson?

  But think about, think about a personal trainer. Think about a personal trainer. Like, you can't train somebody unless they're in front of 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 3pm slot that needs filling. So, and this is the, this is the justification that we have around social media, that it always, it always can present itself as utility deriving work, not work, work distracting, time wasting.

• 44:12Oliver Burkeman?

  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. 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

• 44:29Chris Williamson?

  Oh, wow. Yeah, perhaps.

• 44:32Oliver Burkeman?

  Is it, do it, are there even lighthouse keepers today? I don't know. But like, there's a very limited number of jobs that are not subject to this, this bleed into the whole of life, I think. Yeah.

• 44:42Chris Williamson?

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

• 44:49Oliver Burkeman?

  Yeah, yeah. Which is kind of sad.

• 44:53Chris Williamson?

  Well, 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 and you finally do check, you're actually permitting, whatever it is, five 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. 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.

• 45:29Oliver Burkeman?

  Yeah, totally. Yeah, it's a, it's a complete, you know, yeah, I always think about this in the context of like,

• 45:37Oliver Burkeman?

  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 most, 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 going to care about any of this, but I'm going to pick my, pick my issues. And if I want to be an activist in some area or give money to some cause, it's gonna like, yeah, and that phrase, if you're not outraged, you're not paying attention, which always seems like it's so anachronistic now. It's

• 46:20Oliver Burkeman?

  like, no, no, we're all paying attention to everything and permanently outraged about everything. That's actually the only way to really efficiently care about something in your life. And I think this probably applies to everything in life is to, is to be okay with not, not caring about, not caring about other things.

• 46:39Chris Williamson?

  What's the danger of seeing leisure as an area for self-improvement?

• 46:46Oliver Burkeman?

  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 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 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 just 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

• 47:28Oliver Burkeman?

  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 actually, you know, this, this focus on the future, the total expense of the present, it's a problem in all aspects of life, but it's, it's particularly obviously self-defeating when it's, when it's leisure that we're talking about here because, um,

• 47:57Oliver Burkeman?

  Yeah, I mean, it means fundamentally means that leisure becomes another kind of another kind of work. And it actually gets really hard. I mean, this is my personal experience anyway. 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 want to do it when the when the opportunity arises.

• 48:19Chris Williamson?

  Dig into that relationship between the present and the future for me.

• 48:23Oliver Burkeman?

  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 purpose 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. I wouldn't have got this book written. You wouldn't record these podcasts if you were only living for the value of the moment itself. We're always doing these things. But I think all sorts of pressures in the modern world and modern economy push us to completely over invest in that perspective, right?

• 49:00Oliver Burkeman?

  So you're you're constantly 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 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.

• 49:43Oliver Burkeman?

  And yet, the result is that you're never present for your own life.

• 49:48Chris Williamson?

  Isn't there a quote, something to do with cats and kittens or something?

• 49:54Oliver Burkeman?

  Oh, yeah, this is John Maynard Keynes talking about the purpose of man, this idea of like the person who lives entirely for for the purposes that he's putting his time to. Yeah, doesn't doesn't really love his cat, but only the cat's kittens and not really the cat's kittens, but really the kittens kittens and so on forward to the end of catdom.

• 50:21Oliver Burkeman?

  Yeah, I mean, 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 future just keeps on coming. You never get that.

• 50:34Chris Williamson?

  One of my favorite Sam Harris quotes, I want to give this to you and 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.

• 51:19Chris Williamson?

  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 problem, problem, if only for a moment, and enjoy whatever is true of your life in the present.

• 51:42Oliver Burkeman?

  That's great. Yeah, yeah. What do you want me to say? I mean, I agree completely. I think the part that really interests me is towards the end there, the the sort of subtle ways in which trying to be present in the moment is another example of not really appreciating that it's only always now.

• 52:06Oliver Burkeman?

  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 which clearly makes no sense. I mean, I think the

• 52:21Oliver Burkeman?

  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 the 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. Plans that you have for your day that feel very, very important are also thoughts arising in the present moment.

• 53:04Oliver Burkeman?

  And it's not the, you know, it's a gross sort of, occasionally you get it, it's kind of crude, you encounter this 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 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

• 53:45Oliver Burkeman?

  know if 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 because 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 because 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 a power of presence that I'm maybe still working towards.

• 54:28Chris Williamson?

  There's a quote in the book that says, "What we forget is a plan is just a thought", right?

• 54:35Oliver Burkeman?

  Right, that's Joseph Goldstein, the meditation teacher. And I think it's such a great, if you get it, I'm not sure one automatically gets it from the

• 54:44Chris Williamson?

  How do you get it?

• 54:44Oliver Burkeman?

  words, but I'm sure you, sorry?

• 54:46Chris Williamson?

  How do you get it?

• 54:47Oliver Burkeman?

  What do you say?

• 54:48Chris Williamson?

  How do you?

• 54:48Oliver Burkeman?

  Well, I don't know. I do, and I think you do. So I'm just saying, like, if this quote lands in somebody's mind who's listening and they don't say, what's the fuss about there?

• 54:58Oliver Burkeman?

  It's a little hard to say, I think. But to me, that is just like, I think we sort of naturally think of plans as kind of

• 55:12Oliver Burkeman?

  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. The thought that your intention for your day is that it unfolds 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 lever you into a position over time such that you're in control and time isn't,

• 55:57Oliver Burkeman?

  then you're just going to be constantly running up against reality in a painful and stress inducing way.

• 56:03Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think that the challenge that people have, that comes right back to what you said at the beginning, is that there is a denial of death here, that there is 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. 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?

• 56:44Oliver Burkeman?

  Yeah.

• 56:44Chris Williamson?

  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, you know, would Ernest Becker be a productivity guru in 2021?

• 57:00Oliver Burkeman?

  Yeah, it's a quest for exemption somehow, isn't it, from the situation that we're all in? And, you know, yeah, absolutely. I feel it in myself, right? I mean, 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 it's extremely intoxicating, that notion 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 was back in a situation of sort of not being vulnerable to unfolding events.

• 57:43Chris Williamson?

  It's the level of the computer game where you no longer have any problems.

• 57:47Oliver Burkeman?

  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 an apartment higher up, right? I mean, and that's obviously a little bit absurd, but something else could happen. And indeed, something else will happen, so.

• 58:04Chris Williamson?

  What are some good questions that people can ask themselves to help refine their direction for this?

• 58:12Oliver Burkeman?

  Well, I love and always talk about this question that comes from James Hollis, the Jungian analyst and writer, which is to ask of every big life question that you're encountering, whether it will enlarge you or diminish you. 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 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.

• 58:52Oliver Burkeman?

  They know whether 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 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 like to bang on about. Another one, just to mention, is this whole idea that I think

• 59:32Oliver Burkeman?

  we've put off doing a lot of worthwhile and important things pending some time when we're going to feel sort of fully qualified to do them. And I think even people who aren't 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 not going to 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

• 1:00:13Oliver Burkeman?

  the only reason you don't hear there in the monologues of self doubt is because you're not inside their heads. And it differs, you know, some people probably are too bold 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 pending the time when we feel like we know what we're doing and it might be worth contemplating the possibility that nobody ever knows, nobody ever feels like they know what they're doing.

• 1:00:44Chris Williamson?

  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 because they presumed that, you know, when you get into the real big boardrooms, you know, when you're on the 35th floor and it's floor-to-ceiling glass and everybody in there's on a million a year, that finally, finally, people will know what they're doing. And they came out and they said, it's literally morons all the way up.

• 1:01:16Oliver Burkeman?

  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 like, yeah, you have as much chance of pulling off whatever you're trying to pull off as, as anybody else. Yeah.

• 1:01:33Chris Williamson?

  And obviously, the seriousness of your book's title, 4,000 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

• 1:02:17Chris Williamson?

  on your time, to ensure that the things that you are doing genuinely do matter to you, not just now, but that you're going to 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 that we, that we should be taking care of the moment.

• 1:02:34Oliver Burkeman?

  It is. It is. The only thing I want to 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 attempt to seize the day in a kind of stressful, like, got to 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.

• 1:03:17Oliver Burkeman?

  But there's also something very, I think, relaxing and liberating and empowering about seeing that, you know, precisely because that is the situation. The attempt to sort of outrun these limitations 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.

• 1:04:00Oliver Burkeman?

  Like, what have you got to lose compared to someone 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, so 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 of the pressure is off that you might as well spend your life doing things that really, really matter to you.

• 1:04:31Chris Williamson?

  Oliver Burkeman, ladies and gentlemen. If people want to check out more of your stuff, where should they go?

• 1:04:37Oliver Burkeman?

  Well, the book, 4000 Weeks, that's there. They can go to 4000weekbook.com, which is really just a page on my website, which is oliverbirkman.com.

• 1:04:51Chris Williamson?

  I love it. Cheers, Oliver.

• 1:04:53Oliver Burkeman?

  Thank you very, very much.