Why Optimization Culture Is Making You Miserable

This is a bonus episode of The Prof G Pod — beginning this week, we’re publishing an extra Conversations episode every Tuesday. Oliver Burkeman, author of Four Thousand Weeks and Meditations for Mortals, joins Scott Galloway to discuss why our obsession with optimizing every part of life is making us more anxious, not more fulfilled. He explains why productivity systems and “maxxing” culture tend to backfire, how embracing our limits can be freeing rather than defeatist, and why AI won’t solve the deeper problem of trying to outrun our own finitude. Plus, how to tell the difference between healthy discipline and an optimization mindset that’s gone too far. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 1:37Speaker 00

  Welcome to a bonus episode of the Prop G Pod. Beginning this week, we're bringing you an extra conversations episode on Tuesdays. More time with people who help us think differently about work, life, and what matters. Today, we're joined by Oliver Berkman, a writer and journalist known for his work on productivity, mortality, and the power of limits. We discuss with Oliver takeaways from his books, 4,000 Weeks and Meditation for Mortals, The Tradeoffs Between Living in the Present and Building Towards Your Future, plus why embracing AI shouldn't become the organizing principle of our lives. With that, we hope you enjoy our conversation with Oliver Berkman.

• 2:24Speaker 00

  Oliver, where does this podcast find you?

• 2:26Speaker 04

  I'm in North York Moors in northern England.

• 2:29Speaker 00

  As one, as one does. How did that happen?

• 2:32Speaker 04

  We lived in Brooklyn for a long time. My wife's American. And then in 2021, we moved here, planning to come for a year, and we just stayed. In hindsight, I think we were just a pandemic data point. It felt like a very original life choice at the time, but I think a lot of people did something similar.

• 2:50Speaker 00

  So you have two bestselling books, and they essentially make what I would say is a similar argument, that the way most people chase productivity is backwards and that our drive for control and perfection isn't making us better, it's making us miserable. And we've argued a similar point, that optimization culture is less about improving life than is about anxiety beginning to devour it. How would you diagnose our modern obsession with optimization and quote unquote "maxing" culture?

• 3:20Speaker 04

  I don't think the underlying psychology is necessarily new. I think we have new opportunities to sort of indulge it and go completely crazy with it, but I think that just huge amounts of whatever, of all sorts of things that we do in life can be understood as kind of an avoidance of our, trying to avoid confronting our finite nature, right? Trying not to realize that we have finite time, finite control over that time, finite talents, finite ability to predict the future, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And like I was, as I've written, you know, I was obsessed in a very sort of straightforward way, I think, with productivity for years. I wrote about it in The Guardian, and I was doing it in a kind of a wry, sardonic, British

• 4:01Speaker 04

  way, but I think I was hoping, maybe mainly unconsciously, for, to reach the moment at which like everything was, everything was under control and I could handle all the demands that were thrown at me and, you know, be perfectly efficient in that way. And it took sort of a very long time to, to start to figure out that that was, it was never going to happen. And it was never going to happen for reasons that had like baked into the, the human condition. So anyway, yeah, I think it's a lot worse now because there's so many, and like if we're even going to talk about the role of AI in expanding our sense of what it's possible for a human to do, but that sense that like eventually to be productive in a way that

• 4:46Speaker 04

  matters, and especially if you want to sort of enjoy the process, you have to confront those limitations instead of constantly trying to outrun them.

• 4:56Speaker 00

  How would you describe, or how can someone identify and distinguish between healthy discipline and an optimization mindset that goes overboard?

• 5:11Speaker 04

  It's a really good question. I think it's kind of one of the struggles of my life. I'd like your opinion. I mean, for me, I think it is, I mean, you identify it partly in the effect it has, right? So if it, if it results in that mindset of constantly living for the future, constantly feeling like you're almost at the point of dominance and vanquishing, but you're not there yet, if it makes you busier, which I think sort of control-oriented productivity actually does, for reasons we can talk about if you want, then I think that's a pretty good sign that it's not working. But also the question of the place that it's coming from, like for me for years, and

• 5:51Speaker 04

  still to some extent today, the motive was like, if I can get to this point, if I can work hard enough, handle everything efficiently enough, be sufficiently productive, like then I'll reach the minimum level of being able to feel okay about myself, right? And I think that everyone who falls into this category of insecure overachievers is sort of doing that same, that same thing, trying to, trying to get to the baseline, get up to the baseline.

• 6:24Speaker 04

  On my best days now, it's something totally different. It's like, right, I feel good about myself, things are fine, I don't have to do anything just to feel like I've earned my right to exist on the planet. But then of course I want to do ambitious things and create stuff because it's just more fun than not doing. And I'd rather have some good methods and techniques for doing that.

• 6:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's really, I mean, productivity is, I feel like it's just, we've said, okay, it's the new, it's sort of the peptide or the creatine or the hormone therapy that's been around for a while in our economy. And that is, I fall into the fetishization and the addiction to money that infects all of the U.S. I didn't grow up with it, so I was totally focused on it. And then I saw productivity. I was told productivity was a tool for achieving financial security. What you realize, or I realized as I got older, is that all schooling and most TikToks and most discipline is trying to teach you to prioritize the future. That's it.

• 7:27Speaker 00

  What you do now, sacrifice now to prioritize and create more opportunity in the future. And productivity is one of the things where you, the sacrifice you make now has a lot of impact or power, right? If you're going to work 12 hours a day, work 12 hours a day, smart, optimally, increase your productivity, and you might be this unstoppable force to get to that financial security. I think the hard part is, and I don't know how old you are, but at some point, you've got to say, all right, what happens if I get to the end of my life and I prioritize the future and there isn't more future? I never really took time to take a nap, you know, I never really took time to enjoy taking a nap in the afternoon sometime on a weekday.

• 8:11Speaker 00

  I didn't, I'm, I'm supposed to be on Brian Williams on this Netflix like show tomorrow, and I noticed it's in the England, Argentina, during the England, Argentina game. So I called them and I said, "I'm sorry, I, you know, Brian Williams is important, Netflix is important, but I need to come in late because I wouldn't have done that five years ago, much less 25 years ago." I do think it's important to have a practice around, and all this bullshit around, and I'll bring this back to you, I find that the ultimate, I want to put forward a thesis, the ultimate productivity hack, I'm very focused on happiness now. I'm very cognizant because of some things that have happened to me and the loss of some close friends about the finite nature of life.

• 8:56Speaker 00

  I think this is all going to be over really soon. And so I have, I'm very focused on trying to squeeze as much happiness and purpose out of my remaining years. And one of the things that, you know, when I think about how do you do that? Trying to be distinctly in the moment and have a series of practices and hacks to try and be in the moment. And also around optimization, I find that the perfect fulcrum for me is if zero is sitting on the couch, eating Twinkies and just basically waiting, being lonely and basically just waiting to have a heart attack in your couch at 50 years of age.

• 9:38Speaker 00

  And a hundred is what that Brian Johnson dude is doing, just injecting his kid's blood into him. Or red light there, you know, all that shit, right? I find that about 80 is, I think, the cheat code. And that is, I eat well, I exercise regularly, I have good nutrition, such that on an infrequent but regular basis, I can drink a little too much. I can stay up a little bit too late. I can, I can, you know, miss a meeting. I can go two or three days without working out. I can order dessert because I find that that 20% between 80 and 100 enhances my life.

• 10:23Speaker 00

  That there is a fulcrum and you need to decide where you're going to be on the fulcrum. But I, I, I find a lot of these people become, their optimization becomes obsession. Do you think about a continuum or a scale and then being thoughtful about where you land on that scale of productivity and optimization?

• 10:40Speaker 04

  It's a really interesting way of thinking about it because I think I haven't usually sort of mentally represented it to myself in that way. I'm 50, so you know, it's like

• 10:51Speaker 00

  You're a kid.

• 10:51Speaker 04

  This, this idea that the, all of this optimization should be at 100 because it's going to pay off in the age of peace and plenty later obviously gets like systematically less possible to believe in. It's obviously easy to believe when you're 18, if you're in a fortunate situation. And maybe you should believe it when you're 18 to some extent. Maybe it should be at 90, the, the, the way you represent, or 95, the way you represent the continuum. And obviously gets harder and harder to tell yourself that like all the good stuff is coming in the future. The, the further that you move through life. I guess the only pushback there is I wonder if it like, there is obviously a trade off

• 11:35Speaker 04

  between thinking about the future and thinking about the present. But I, I think, or at least maybe I just hope that there is a way of caring about the future. That is, that keeps its focus on the present, right? You can choose how you work out. You can choose the sort of broader attitude you take to your work, kind of work you do, all the rest of it. In such a way that at least to some extent, you're trying to find present moment fulfillment in those things that will, that will, that will help later. I totally agree that like, you know, the way I've put it in one of the books is like, you know, the marshmallow tests, we, we know all about this, about how deferred gratification is a vital skill

• 12:18Speaker 04

  for a successful life. This doesn't extrapolate forever, right? There's no, there's no benefit to just accumulating marshmallows and, and never eating them. There's no, there's a, if you just live a provisional life, the whole, as you know, the whole of your life until it's over, then you've really missed something, something crucial. I kind of hope that there's a way for the same experience to be both. Instead of only thinking about it as like, I live for the future and then I stop and live for the present, which is maybe not what you meant.

• 12:50Speaker 00

  I want to talk a little bit about data. So I have consciously decided to move a lot of my investments from the public markets to the private markets. One, because I think the public markets are overvalued. A lot of people would argue that's true of the private markets. But something that's been accretive to my mental health is when I have a disproportionate amount of my worth in stocks, I check my stocks 10 to 20 times a day. In other words, there's too much data. And I have absolutely no desire to have a wearable telling me how, I don't want a sleep score. As long as my sleep seems to be okay, I don't want to know when I'm getting good REM and bad REM. Cause I think I'll get, I think it'll create more stress than it relieves. What are your thoughts around the abundance of data?

• 13:34Speaker 04

  It's an invitation to too much attempted control, to be able to see the effects of what you're doing. The example that springs to my mind is about how easy it is for anyone who's like a content creator, understood broadly, to use a term I don't love, to see what people are responding to positively in the, in the audience and to sort of follow that with some public figures into a sort of terrible kind of audience capture situation where you get spun off into weird radicalisms because of how you're being rewarded. But even just for me, like coming up with ideas for my email newsletter or something, it's actually,

• 14:16Speaker 04

  it's not helpful for getting it written, to be tracking too closely what I think people, people want. And it's not helpful for getting a good response from people. Cause I think that there's something essential to the process, which is that it's coming from my intrinsic desire to choose something that I'm interested in, that resonates with people. And I guess the parallel there for kind of personal health metrics and stuff is that, yeah, like you're sleeping to relax or to dream or to enjoy the process of sleeping or to feel rested in the day. It's, it's just a complete distortion of that to turn it into chasing the numbers. I mean, that's just a banal point about targets becoming, distorting the process, right?

• 14:58Speaker 04

  But it, but it's so omnipresent now, we can just sort of completely swim in that kind of, in that kind of feedback. I don't know what the, I'm, I'm no investment expert, so I don't know how it works in that context. I know that the basic advice to people who are not super interested, you know, retail investors is always very much to sell it and forget it overwhelmingly.

• 15:21Speaker 00

  Low cost funds, diversified. Let's talk, let's talk about your book. So 4,000 weeks, for anyone who hasn't read it, what does 4,000 weeks actually mean? And why would you build a book around that number specifically?

• 15:33Speaker 04

  I mean, look, I don't know that the book is specifically about that number. That is the very approximate average human lifespan in the

• 15:44Speaker 00

  Well, that makes sense.

• 15:45Speaker 04

  In the developed world, expressed in weeks. You're gonna, you've got a good chance of getting a few more than, than 4,000. So I'm rounding it to a, to a headline figure. What the book is really about, I think, I mean, it was fun to give it that, that sort of arresting title, but it's not really about the shortness of life so much as the, the finite nature of life, right? So sometimes I get into debates with people about like, are you really saying that when you say embrace your limits, are you really saying you wouldn't like to have another thousand years of healthy life? And it's like, no, not necessarily. I don't, I don't think that's true. I think I would like that. But, but the fact that things come, the fact that life comes to an end, the fact that time is finite, impacts our day to day experience in like so many subtle ways that we don't, that we don't realize.

• 16:30Speaker 04

  It's what makes it there even be a choice about, an important choice about how to spend an hour of the day or a week of the year or, or a lifetime, right? Is the, the fact that everything else must be, something else must be sacrificed. And that in that moment, everything else must be sacrificed. And I don't know, I think the basic act, the, the book goes through all these different, you know, distraction, procrastination, overwhelm, all these things. But the, the basic move in all those contexts is like, it's almost like a feeling, like an embodied feeling. I'm not sure I can express it perfectly in words, just quickly here, but it's, there's like a sort of letting go

• 17:10Speaker 04

  or a falling back into that finitude, a de-avoiding of it. That gives you a kind of real traction on life, like a purchase on things. It makes it much more feasible to let go of all the things you could be doing today in order to allow yourself to focus on one or two that will really move the needle, if that makes sense.

• 17:32Speaker 00

  I love that finitude resulting in purchase. What you just described is a discipline or an approach that's been rewarded or forced on me because of my atheism and that injected a question or inspired me to ask this question. And it's a personal question, I'm going to ask it anyways. Do you believe in an, in an afterlife? You, you're sounding like an atheist. What you just described has, has been washed over me because of my atheism.

• 18:01Speaker 04

  It's such an interesting question. Yeah. I mean, I don't think I do believe in an afterlife in any recognizable sense at all. I, my spiritual touch points are like, I was raised Quaker. I'm half Jewish and I'm really drawn to Buddhism. So I'm very tedious kind of spiritual, but not religious mixture of nonsense. But none of that, as it's come down to me, really has any sort of sense that, that we're not mortal, right? That it's just going to go on forever in a different, in a different realm. I did get one very touching review of 4,000 weeks from a, from a Christian publication that said like,

• 18:43Speaker 04

  this book would be absolutely the organizing book of my life if I were a mortal. But I don't think I am, and therefore it's not, it's not relevant in the same way. I think, yeah, I'm, I don't think that in any sort of linear sense, it makes sense to think about life continuing on, right? And so I think this question remains relevant to anybody who either is an atheist or a religious person who has a sort of more sophisticated or metaphorical or, you know, something else view of eternal life. Yeah. If we sort of in some sense, live forever and ever and ever and ever, I think that would be terrible. And sort of

• 19:21Speaker 04

  Catastrophically meaningless in certain ways, but yeah, I think then I can say maybe if most of these, most of these lessons and perspectives wouldn't apply.

• 19:33Speaker 00

  In your book Meditation for Mortals, your latest book, you argue against implementing systems that promise to optimize people's routines and habits for maximum productivity. Why don't they work and why do so many people believe they do?

• 19:47Speaker 04

  I mean, I'm not sure they can't work, but you know, you'll be very well aware of this kind of broad notion that systems are better than goals as a way of organizing your time. And I think that's probably true, but what I noticed in myself and in some other people as well is that you can really turn system building into the focus of your life in a way that gets in the way of the only real answer to meaningful productivity, in my opinion, which is to like, just do the thing. You sort of, you identify a problem in your life or a place you'd like to get to or a goal that you have, and then you sort of set about becoming the kind of person who would be really good at doing those, those

• 20:31Speaker 04

  things. So, you know, taking the courses, reading the books, developing the skills, you turn it into a long-term project, which is often like a really neat way, I think, of postponing the, the difficult bit or the, or the scary bit. And in all those cases, you could have just done like, taken one action that was, that was gonna, that was, that would be, that would be being that kind of person, right? So just one of the examples in the book, you, you hear that meditation is really great. You want to get into it. It's so tempting to do all sorts of things that kind of have being a meditator six months from now as their goal. And none of them are just spending five minutes doing it today. Not today and then every day for the rest of your life, which is this kind of projection

• 21:15Speaker 04

  into a future again, but just literally today, running the risk that you might never do it again. I think that that is actually a, takes more guts that often than launching in on these, these life-changing systems or, or long-term projects.

• 21:29Speaker 00

  The book opens with a chapter, and I love this, "It's Worse Than You Think." Basically, it basically, it's an argument for radical acceptance. Can you, why start there? And can you talk more about that?

• 21:42Speaker 04

  I mean, I think you have to start there. I wanted to start there because it is that kind of, first of all, let's come crashing down to the ground and then pick ourselves up and see what we can do. Let's, let's step into reality first. And all I mean by that is that in our quest for more control, in our quest to be on top of everything, to be completely the kind of people we think we should be, fix all our personal problems, we, we tend to think of this as a very, very difficult slog, that it's going to take all our self-discipline and the very best systems we can find and lots of time. And I sort of want to argue, it's worse than that. It's completely impossible. But actually, there's huge liberation in understanding that it's completely impossible because then

• 22:23Speaker 04

  you can let go of that and actually start doing some things that, that matter in the, in the moment. So, you know, the most basic example is just having too much to do, the most basic kind of busyness. You've got an incredibly long to-do list. You feel like it'll be very, very difficult to get through it all. It'll take a huge amount of your time and lots and lots of discipline. But actually, it's worse than you think. It's that there's all the space of things that feel like they need doing is always systematically larger than, than the, the space of things you're, you're able to do. And there's just an amazing, first of all, kind of relief in that thought for me, like, oh, okay, it can't be my job to do this because it's not possible. But then crucially, there's also

• 23:08Speaker 04

  like an extra agency. There's a kind of, well, now I, I give myself permission to like get stuck in, as we say in Britain anyway, to, to the things that I'm, that I'm deciding to do. So I think it's, it's really important. It's been really important for me anyway, that kind of, that kind of like, no, certain challenges in life are not really hard. They're, they're impossible.

• 23:38Speaker 00

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• 25:49Speaker 00

  Give us your view on perfectionism, and by extension, imperfectionism.

• 26:00Speaker 04

  I guess I use the word imperfectionism in the book as against a very expansive definition of perfectionism, which is any, any sort of outlook, not just wanting to produce perfect work, which is definitely an affliction I've struggled with, but also any kind of wanting to be a perfect people pleaser, wanting to be perfectly psychologically healthy, want all the, all of this optimization culture, right, as well, tends towards this constantly receding over the horizon vision of perfection. And I think it's important to see that perfection

• 26:39Speaker 04

  in the way that perfectionists mean it, in the problematic sense, doesn't belong to the, the world of material reality. It's another case of it's worse than you think, right? It's not that, it's not that me writing a book that absolutely measures up to the image of it I had in my mind is incredibly hard. And if I think it's incredibly hard, I'm going to drive myself crazy for months and years trying to do it. And maybe I have done that, actually, on reflection. But it's that it's impossible. It's that, it's that in the limited world of the finite, not my mind, but words on pages, it can't measure up to that perfection. And again, it's that move of like, oh, all right, yeah, it's never

• 27:22Speaker 04

  going to reach that standard, and that's why I can be freed up to do it. I'm never going to be sure that somebody somewhere isn't really mad at me. So then I can make sensible choices about which emails to respond to when, without, without that sort of perfectionistic notion that nobody at all being mad at me anywhere is the, is the goal, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

• 27:47Speaker 00

  Talk about the term daily-ish.

• 27:50Speaker 04

  This came from Dan Harris, the meditation teacher, podcaster, although I think he got it from, from someone else. So I don't know where, where it starts.

• 28:04Speaker 04

  Just the notion that consistency, again, another of these tropes that is everywhere in social media and everywhere that like consistency beats inspired bursts of productivity or of activity every time. I think it's true, but I think that it has its own perfectionistic trap, right? The idea of the unbroken streak that then you then call it off forever. Once you break the streak because you feel like the perfect record has been blemished. And I just loved when I first encountered it as a guide to how often to meditate. But I think in all sorts of areas of of life as well, this idea of dailyish, because you actually know that dailyish is not whenever you feel like it, right?

• 28:49Speaker 04

  It's what is it? It's probably four times a week is probably the normal minimum to say that you do something dailyish. But then in certain kinds of very unusual situation, you might allow yourself to make it three times a week. And then when things are going well, could it be six times a week? So you have that kind of, you know, that window for your consistency that is much more sustainable and isn't going to throw everything off just because you you miss it a couple of times here and there. It's related to what you were talking about as well before, about 80% optimal approaches to working out and things like that.

• 29:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, you just described, I've had a love hate relationship with exercise my whole life, mostly love. It's my antidepressant. My father got me doing it when I was a kid. And I used to, when I, when I was younger, I heard every other day. So I was like, okay, it's Tuesday, I've worked out, I've got to work out on Thursday and then I've got to work out on Saturday. And I was like, okay. And then I went to, well, when I got really into working out, I thought, I got to work out every day. And it was just, I scheduled it, I had a trainer. And then that unlock is what you've summarized in a word, dailyish. And that is, I try to work out every day, but I don't beat myself up if I miss a day. And if I'm at home and have free time, I might go six days of the week.

• 30:15Speaker 00

  But when I'm traveling or whatever, you know, life gets in the way, it might be two or, you know, two or maybe three times that week. But it's released me from a lot of pressure around. It's a big part of my life. If I've gone two or three days, I do feel a sense of urgency to get back in the gym or take a run or something. But I forgive myself if I miss a day. It's, it's anyways, it's, it's been an unlock and I like that term, dailyish, I'm going to use it. Can you talk a little bit about young people and quote unquote grind culture?

• 30:49Speaker 04

  My sense, and I'm, I'm not a young person, but my sense from, from watching what's, what's going on there and reading about it and people I know who are sort of immersed in it is that really this is just the, you know, it's the epitome of a lot of the forces we've been talking about in this conversation so far. The idea that

• 31:14Speaker 04

  discipline will, will, will get you there and that more discipline is always better. The idea that there is a very clear there to get to, that, that the sort of ultimate way to be Silicon Valley or wherever is to sort of, is to sacrifice the present completely for, for

• 31:39Speaker 04

  future benefit. And then this kind of really vicious kind of interpersonal competition element to it, which is that clearly, you know, you can never reach the position of being certain that you're grinding as hard or harder than, than, than everyone else. I think that, I mean, just from, I haven't spent a lot of time recently in the Bay area, but just from what I like here and like reports I listen to and watch and stuff, that the, the sense in, in tech especially, that you cannot afford to

• 32:17Speaker 04

  be present in your life, that you are racing to escape the quote unquote permanent underclass in five, 10, 15 years' time or whatever. And then, you know, the way it falls to the rest of us that we just got to some in distinct sense that we're trying to keep up with everything that's, that's happening. I think it fundamentally

• 32:43Speaker 04

  misunderstands the, the, the nature of meaning and fulfillment in life, right? I think that, I think that as soon as you're doing anything to keep up or to grind harder than others, or to get to the place when finally everything is all right. I think all of those things ultimately embody the kind of error about the present and the future that we've been, that we've been talking about. I'm not a grind culture expert.

• 33:06Speaker 00

  What do you think is the most damaging idea that the productivity industrial complex has, has sold us?

• 33:13Speaker 04

  The most damaging?

• 33:16Speaker 00

  Or let's look at the other way, was something that you think is a cheat code or a hack that's worked for you?

• 33:21Speaker 04

  I mean, for me, there are tons of hacks that are really useful, right? So all the way back to the Pomodoro technique and David Allen getting things done. It's not that any of these things or very few of these things are kind of inherently evil. Many of them are incredibly insightful and really useful. The crucial, and I guess this is the, the lie that is sold, right? But the crucial problem

• 33:44Speaker 04

  is the notion that they're going to save you. I think that's the, that's the point. So when I was in that mindset of, when I was in that mindset of, of feeling that I was going to somehow haul myself up onto a level of adequacy and preferably even better than adequacy through sheer discipline and through optimization, every productivity technique just goes into that hopper, right? And then it's just like, oh, it's going to be this that, that, that works or this. And there's always this sense that each time you're abandoning something that was a waste. Maybe this is the silver bullet. And what's changed for me now, and I think what enables people to relate very differently

• 34:24Speaker 04

  to the whole world of productivity culture is that like, almost none of these things are bad ways of organizing your time or lending a bit of structure to your day, once you are not relating to them in that, in that way. So now like the big thing for me, I'm still basically obsessed with like productivity systems and apps and all the rest of it. But I, it's been crucial for me to not, not any longer think that I'm working up to the point where I've found the right combination that is then just going to be smooth sailing forever. It's more like I've just got a slightly weird, sad hobby, which is testing out ways of organizing

• 35:05Speaker 04

  my time and like other people build model train sets or go rock climbing, you know? It's like, and it doesn't have that sense of a, a telos that's got to justify it. So I think that's the important part. Then you're just experimenting and it's fun and you get better at things and you find things that are methods and systems that are better than others.

• 35:24Speaker 00

  Give us your two favorites.

• 35:27Speaker 04

  I'm always using some version of a closed list. That is the simple one that I've written about. You keep two lists. One is a sort of open list of absolutely everything that's on your plate. And then the second is a closed list that might have five, 10 outcomes, near term things you're trying to do. They could be very small things or chunks of bigger projects. And then the simple rule is you work on those and no more come on to that, to that shortlist until you've freed up a slot by, by finishing something. So I've always got something like that going on, can ban systems or have the same logic,

• 36:09Speaker 04

  just anything that, anything that acknowledges and makes visible the pre-existing fact that I am finite and can only work on a handful of things at once and will have to make all the other ones wait. And again, there's that really lovely feeling of purchase that comes from that of like moving something onto that list and then moving it away. And then the other, I guess, that's been the biggest for me is just the discipline. It doesn't sound funny to call it a discipline, but I think it's really important of remembering to ask when I'm deciding what to do next as one of the factors, like what do I, what do I really feel like doing?

• 36:49Speaker 04

  And not to constantly disdain that energy of like desire and be like, no, no, no, I've got a plan. It's got to be this, I've got to squelch all my, because that is just, you know, that's taking a natural love of writing that I have or a natural interest in all sorts of other things in my work or my life and just like stamping on it and saying, you're not allowed to harness that right now because your little plan for the day said, like, you were going over your accounts at this point or something. It's ridiculous. So remembering that actually that's a, a fuel instead of a problem has been big for me.

• 37:27Speaker 00

  Can I give you my productivity hack?

• 37:30Speaker 04

  Yes, please.

• 37:31Speaker 00

  It can be described in one word, others. I'm not that productive personally. I, I procrastinate, I'm easily distracted. I can, I go into a focus mode where sometimes I'll just think about an issue and nonstop. And I think one of my, one of the things that's helped me professionally is I'm obsessed with business and money and so I'm constantly thinking about it. So that's a form of focus, but I don't think of myself as an especially productive person. What I figured out at a young age was it's better to have a company not making money that.

• 38:05Speaker 00

  I find other people, I surround myself with talented people. I try to pay them well or compensate them well, both economically and psychologically and professionally. And I outsource everything I'm not great at, which is 99% of everything. And I'm, you know, Prop G, people think I work exceptionally hard. They're like, I can't get over the amount of content you produce. I'm like, I work 30 to 40 hours a week, maybe now. I used to work 60, at 80, I worked 30 to 40. Cause we have 27 very talented people and I spend a decent amount of that 30 or 40 hours around compensation, organizational strategy, lifting people up, giving feedback.

• 38:48Speaker 00

  But my productivity hack is simple, others. And that is, I find that the earlier you have the resources and the management ability to scale your very narrow vein of hopefully deep talent, that that is the ultimate productivity hack. That the scale, my ability to produce content, the ability to make more money than your average bear is one word, it's others. Thoughts?

• 39:18Speaker 04

  No, I love it. I mean, and you're right, I think, to draw attention to the fact that a lot of what we've been talking about so far is very, does sort of fall for the individualizing, individualistic ethos that dominates our time. There are so many different ways in which kind of falling back into the finite situation of our relationships with other people help as well, right? Whether it is teamwork, as you describe, or even just the peer pressure in people of, you know, having promised things to people by a certain time, or, you know, accountability helps some people, the sense that they're going to be checking back in and that they've got people waiting for them.

• 40:01Speaker 04

  I imagine in a case like yours, there's a real sense of responsibility to those people, right? I mean, when you're sort of a job provider in a certain sense, right? It's like, it's of a good kind, right? I don't mean like a weighty, guilty thing, but it's like, it's something, something not a million miles distant from how good it feels to be responsible for, as a parent. I'm not saying you treat your employees like your kids, but there's something about stepping into the world in the commitments that you make to other people that I think is really positive. Maybe that's not why it's good for you, but it sounds like it to me.

• 40:39Speaker 00

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• 42:54Speaker 00

  We're back with more from Oliver Berkman. We can't have this conversation, it feels like this conversation ultimately leads to a conversation around AI. And that is, there's an open debate around whether AI is going to hollow out large parts of the workforce, specifically the white collar workforce. Where do you land on that? And how do you think, how do you think this debate, or this entire field, relates to your work?

• 43:25Speaker 04

  I mean, I have opinions, right? I don't think that, on the sort of, the economics and the technology of it, everyone does. Those are not-

• 43:34Speaker 00

  We want the absolute definitive truth.

• 43:35Speaker 04

  No, I was gonna make it-

• 43:36Speaker 00

  We want you to solve all our, all the questions around this.

• 43:39Speaker 04

  I was gonna make a distinction between my kind of completely layperson opinions about that stuff. I watched Ed Zitron on your companion Markets podcast not too long ago, and I sort of imbibe a lot of this kind of deep skepticism about where this stuff is going. And Cal Newport is also really good on the sort of realistic limitations of what we're dealing with here. So I definitely sort of tend skeptic in my, like, man-on-the-street opinions. I think the two places where I can say something that is maybe just a tiny bit more than that

• 44:23Speaker 04

  is firstly, this issue of what's been called temporal chauvinism, right? The extraordinary bias that we have towards assuming that whatever's happening during the bit of the history of the cosmos where we're alive is going, is the most consequential, the biggest change. I think there's a huge amount of that going on, both in the maximalist AI discourse and in the, it's going to destroy human civilization, Duma discourse as well. Really hard to step out of that perspective that views, that sort of just starts from

• 45:05Speaker 04

  the assumption, that, a completely unquestioned assumption, that what's happening in your moment of time is the biggest change. I think that's all the most potentially consequential development. And then the other thing is a kind of, another sort of existentialist philosophy kind of idea, I suppose, which is that there is something, I think there's something fundamentally flawed in slipping into this notion that it's your job as an individual in the world to adapt or to keep up with this technology, that you should organize your life around, or

• 45:47Speaker 04

  your career around getting on top of it, not falling behind. And I think that nothing has changed in the fundamental nature of how we find meaning by the advent of LLMs, right? It's got to be that what you do is you figure out what you want your life to be and what values matter to you in your life. You pursue them, and then to whatever extent that seems to make it useful, to learn more sort of AI literacy, to encompass, to incorporate AI in what you're doing, then sure, in the service of those ends, I think there are lots of fields where it's clearly now already indispensable. I think that's probably not true of writing, where I think that renunciation is very

• 46:30Speaker 04

  possibly going to be a more, a wiser strategy. But it's the ordering of the goals, right? It's like, there's so many people who seem to have fallen in, very understandably, economic pressures and messages from employers and all the rest of it, to the notion that their one job now is to sort of scramble onto the top of the heap five years from now. And I think that can't ever be the basis of a fulfilling life. It might be a necessary sort of secondary part of a higher goal, but I think that's the big danger right now, this notion that we've all just got to focus on keeping up.

• 47:08Speaker 00

  So Oliver, you have a son. How has your work impacted your approach to fathering?

• 47:18Speaker 04

  It's funny, because I sold the original book proposal for my, for the 4,000 weeks, the first of the two books we've been talking about, before he was born, he's nine presently. And I sort of had the intellectual, like, it stayed, that idea stayed roughly the same through the book, through the process about finitude and sort of dropping down into the reality of finite time and finite control. But I kind of look back and find it very difficult to believe that I could see that before becoming a parent.

• 48:01Speaker 04

  And I wrote most of the book after a couple of years not doing much, but being a father right after he was born.

• 48:11Speaker 04

  With this new awareness, like, first of all, just on a very basic and kind of selfish level about how kind of a minimum of a third of your discretionary time is immediately completely spoken for, very often much more. So the idea that you're making trade-offs under time scarcity just becomes overwhelmingly more apparent. The degree to which you can control how time unfolds, because, you know, there is this this other being, and I was in a relationship before he came along, obviously, but but that's very, very different because you kind of still

• 48:52Speaker 04

  can create a relationship without a kid in it where you where you do sort of still feel like you're determining how your day unfolds, that that immediately becomes really, really difficult. But, and this is very, very evident, I think a lot of people find in those sort of immediate months with a newborn, and especially with a first child, he's an only child in our case, that all these constraints and these limitations and these taking away of what felt like freedom, even when they're very tiring and sometimes they don't make you happy, but there's something sort of so deeply

• 49:34Speaker 04

  in tune with reality about doing that, about about orienting your life in that way. It's really fed through into lots of other areas of my life, right? That realization that the embrace of limitation is not something to be avoided, it's actually how we engage in reality and how we love other people and how we sort of do the things that that count. So it it's almost like you put yourself in a position where you can no longer negotiate this bit of reality because you can't or, well, you certainly shouldn't walk away from being a parent.

• 50:15Speaker 04

  And and then suddenly, because you're sort of obliged to do it that way, it's sort of it makes you realize that all the other ways in which you were avoiding sinking into this reality were, you didn't need to avoid. And you're better off not avoiding.

• 50:29Speaker 00

  Oliver Berkman is a writer and journalist known for his work on productivity, mortality, and the power of limits. He's also the New York Times bestselling author of books, including 4,000 Weeks and The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking. Previously, he wrote the weekly column, This Column Will Change Your Life for The Guardian. He joins us from his home in, I don't know where that is, Oliver, where is that exactly where you are?

• 50:53Speaker 04

  The North York Moors are a national park in the British sense of that term. So lots of people live in them north of York, about three, four hours outside London.

• 51:05Speaker 00

  Sounds lovely. Oliver, thanks for your time and your good work.

• 51:09Speaker 04

  Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure.

• 51:15Speaker 00

  This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez, Laura Janier, and Asher Schwartz. Our video editor is Bianca Rosario Ramirez. Kami Reek is our social producer. Drew Burrows is our technical director and Catherine Dillon is our executive producer. Thanks for listening to the Prof G Pod from Prof G Media.