Moment 63 - How To Get Any Task Done: Oliver Burkeman

In these ‘Moment’ episodes of my podcast, I’ll be selecting my favourite moments from previous episodes of The Diary Of A CEO. In this moment, Oliver Burkeman tells us about the power of positive, sustainable habits, or as he calls them - 'radical incrementalism'. It's possible that by making just a little change to our daily lives, a change we can really sustain and not just keep up for a few weeks, then the accumulative effects we see over a long period of time can be life-changing. By enabling just little changes in our actions the consequences compound into something truly extraordinary. Oliver's no-nonsense advice shows just how straightforward it can be to unlock transformative positive changes in your life. Listen to the full episode here - https://g2ul0.app.link/oMWiaQcd6qb Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Steven Bartlett?

  In your book, you talk about embracing radical incrementalism. What does that mean for you?

• 0:06Speaker 01

  This is the idea that there are contexts where really being willing to make progress on the basis of little and often, right? Kind of gradual progress to do a tiny bit at a time and not kind of binging on the things you're trying to achieve can be really powerful. Again, I'm sorry to keep coming back to writing as an example, but the the work that I'm drawing on there from a psychologist called Robert Boyce, who studied academics who write and figure trying to figure out like who are the ones who actually get a ton of papers published and a ton of books written? And who are the ones who get mired in like procrastination and paralysis?

• 0:46Speaker 01

  And he found that the really productive people in that sphere were the ones who made writing a modest part of their daily life, right? It occupied like a couple of hours, maybe, as opposed to the ones who made it into this huge thing that then became very intimidating. And they got all sorts of like psychodramas going on with it because it was something they were willing to sort of do for a little bit, leave aside, come back to. And I think this applies to especially applies to anything that is like brain work. But I think it applies to pretty much all all kinds of endeavor, right? There's often a huge benefit in being willing to say, well, I'm going to work on this for a tiny amount of time today. And I'm going to stop, even if I'm on a roll, right?

• 1:31Speaker 01

  When my time is up, I'm going to stop and then I'm going to come back. It makes it something that you can sustain day after day after days. If you do the opposite of incrementalism, right? If you give this, if you give this sort of absolutely center stage in your life, then if it goes well, great. But if it doesn't go well, it becomes this kind of huge intimidating thing. And I've found that, you know, if I'm working on a book, say, really sort of almost embarrassingly small workdays on it.

• 2:00Speaker 01

  Regularly done, day after day after day, so much more productive, like in terms of the actual output.

• 2:06Steven Bartlett?

  What about deadlines though? Because when I wrote my book, I think this deadline of having to send it to the publisher just hung over me and was like forcing me to, okay, Steve, today you have to write three, you know, 3000 words.

• 2:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, deadlines have their role, right? And I, you know, I would have got nowhere without deadlines in newspapers because they sort of kept, they sort of helped me sort of bust through perfectionism and stuff because it was just literally, you know, it's, I did these things on a, I would write these kind of features for The Guardian where I had to like, that the idea came to me or was given to me at like 10:30 in the morning and 5pm, they needed a two and a half thousand word researched article. He'd just be like, okay, I've just got to do it. But in a way, I'm sort of training myself out of that now. And I think that to make, it isn't a, it's perfectly okay and it's fine, but, but it,

• 2:59Speaker 01

  but it isn't sustainable. I think that, you know, that the, to really over the long haul be able to do something like, like writing, I've found requires that I have acquired this ability for sort of dogged persistence rather than, you know, cruising to the, to the deadline.