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Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Oliver Berkman. He's a journalist, writer for The Guardian, and an author. We often find ourselves caught in a productivity spiral, feeling as though we aren't accomplishing enough, and scolding ourselves when we fall short of impossibly high bars. What drives this constant pursuit of perfection, and is it truly beneficial to continuously seek efficiency?
Expect to learn why so many of us have a ruthless obsession with being productive, the problem with trying to optimize efficiency as much as possible, why control is such a point of tension in our lives, what the relationship between productivity and emotions is, whether there is power in embracing your limitations instead of trying to fix them, why it's so hard to cut ourselves some slack, how we can make writing less difficult, and much more.
I love Oliver's work. He is like the productivity equivalent of a lander botan. Brilliant, self-derogating British writer. It's just, he's fantastic. I really appreciate his insights and I think that they...
They see the human condition very accurately and very purely, and it should make you feel very reassured. I know that I do when I read his work or listen to him speak. It kind of reminds me that I'm not broken for having the
the wants that I have for my life and yet the guilt around having those wants to get more out of my day. And he's great. I really think that you're going to take tons away from this. So if you do, share it with a friend. There will be someone who probably desperately needs to hear this and you could very well help them if you send it to them.
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Why do you think that so many of us have such an obsession with being productive?
Wow. These kind of causal questions, I always feel like you can answer on so many levels, right? So this could be an answer about the Protestant work ethic, about sort of Anglo-American culture and the religious idea that to try to get on the right side of God, you have to spend your life being very industrious.
be like a capitalism. That is a capitalism argument, but it could be a sort of late capitalism argument about how we feel that so intensely today. It could be psychotherapeutic about how so many of us are raised with
some kind of sense that we need to prove ourselves, that we get love from the world through our accomplishments instead of just being ourselves. And then there's kind of more positive and less pessimistic accounts. We live in times when it's possible for all sorts of reasons for relatively ordinary people to do
exciting and interesting and meaningful things that, you know, in a very different era, they might not have been able to. So it's, it's cool to try to figure out how to make sure that happens.
I think about all of those things all the time. The Protestant work ethic was something I was intimately familiar with, especially in my 20s. I even used to feel guilty if something had gone well, but I hadn't suffered enough in the achievement of it. It's a particularly malignant version of what we're talking about. Yeah, totally. That way in which it is easier, it's actually...
easier to have it be hard in a sort of upside down way. And that for lots of us, I expect in this respect, we are similar, me and you and plenty of people in the audience.
It actually feels kind of strange or dangerous or subversive or something to wonder if something could actually be quite easy. There was a comment to a New York Times piece where the comment went viral on social media, which doesn't often happen, where a woman was referring to this concept that she'd come to call maximum economy of ass.
about how um actually it often it's the right thing to do to half-ass things that's where that's where the idea comes from right the idea that you should always be spending as much ass as possible in the in the completion of a task it just makes no sense right it doesn't it's not how it's not how it should work there should be no shame in the idea that if something comes easily to you it should feel easy to do and then you save your your efforts and self-discipline for the things that don't come easy
Yeah, that's a very good point. It's so strange. I wonder how much of it is that. I wonder how much of it, again, you hit on another one of my favorites, this sort of weird value exchange that lots of us have with the world. That if only I make myself sufficiently useful and valuable, then I will be accepted. I remember, this is total sort of bro science reflective stuff, but I think in my 20s what I tried to do was I made myself...
needed to people. I was useful. I was a very useful intermediary, which wasn't the same as being wanted, but functionally it ended up being the same. And maybe I could have mean, but because all I was trying to do was get to being wanted through being needed, I kind of begged the question and I wasn't ever able to connect with people on a deeper level in any case, because of course, all of the relationships or many of the relationships I had were transactional because that was the frame that I'd set them in. And
whatever, existentially, psychologically, this is the same way that a lot of us relate to the world. If only I can be sufficiently accomplished, then I will be wanted and safe and secure and desired by the people around me. I will be accepted. And if I just reach this particular level of status or wealth or usefulness or acclaim or wisdom or intellect or academic achievement or career goal or whatever it might be, then there we are.
No, totally. That's so well put. Of course, I can almost hear a certain commentator critic from the left basically saying, yeah, that's because we live in a world that makes you feel like you're going to fall off the bottom of the ladder of society unless you do this. So there are these real circumstantial pressures to act that way. But what's so striking is that
people internalize it, they collaborate with it. They do it long after. It's self-generated. I'm my own tyrant here as well. No, absolutely. And they do it long after and when they're not themselves in a position where that's necessary. And so you end up with this absurd situation that we have where the ranks of people doing really well for themselves in terms of status, upper ranks of corporate life and other areas of the world are dominated by
what's been called insecure overachievers, right? People who are driven, but driven by a deep sense of inadequacy and are not having any fun, even though they've supposedly won this very competitive race.
Yeah, it's very bizarre. I've spent a lot of time, especially since moving to America, Austin's a hotbed for people coming through. I was at a dinner a couple of nights ago where Elon Musk was there. So I'm floating around people that are at the top of totem poles that other people seem to think are important or whatever. And maybe everyone thinks it's important. I don't know. But in my experience, if you look at those people as they rise up through this infinite ladder,
You're selecting for people, I think, on average that are more miserable than the average person. I think that the higher you get up, what you're selecting for are the pathologies and compulsions and drives that have caused someone to get there.
So again, it's kind of begging the effect is happening before the cause, right? Or like the cause is what's driving people up to the top of that. Yeah, no, that makes total sense. And it reminds me in a slightly different context, because here you're talking about, I think, money and status and things like that. But also just in terms of the old fashioned kind of fame, right? Hollywood, movie, celebrity. I think it's fairly obvious to most of us, if you look closely, that celebrities are those people who have a
who lacks something that non-celebrities have, right? Which is a ability to not need that kind of adulation. It doesn't mean there aren't some very good actors among their ranks and that they end up spreading lots of pleasure and happiness in the world. But like the drive that takes you to the top there is,
I think a lot of the time is filling a void rather than just expressing joy at being alive. Yeah. One of my friends, Alex, says people look to high achievers to try and find something that they have that the normal person doesn't, but they've got it the wrong way around. The people who are the high achievers are lacking something everyone else does have, which is an off button. Right. Yeah.
And I think that's true. And I see it in myself. I'm going through quite a big sort of personal transformation at the moment, trying to feel feelings, trying to sort of focus on emotion and working out where are these motivations coming from within me, like really getting sort of deep down to the core of this.
And the more and more that I see it, it appears to me like... Well, first off, one of the reasons that I wanted to bring you back on is I've been loving The Imperfectionist, which is your newsletter that everyone should go and subscribe to. Oh, thank you.
It seems like much of your work is basically pointing out the ironies and the paradoxes of control and us trying to gain and regain control. And it seems to me that the relationship, the primary relationship is between control and our emotions. Our emotional state is perturbed in some way and control, I don't know, like salves it somehow kind of helps us to not feel feelings so much.
Yeah, that's so well, I think you've just summarized my entire field of interest. We did it. Better than I've managed yet to do. People are always asking me to describe what I write about and stuff, and now I have an answer. I think that, yeah, I think this is exactly it. And there are so many different ways into this, but it's essentially a kind of control that we, the control that we crave is a control that
you don't get to have as a human being ultimately, and that you wouldn't actually want if you achieved it. You can see this in such simple settings. For me anyway, if I think back about amazing highlights in my life to this point, or people I've met who I'm incredibly glad that I met,
in no cases can I sort of attribute that to a plan that I made and carried out. It happened even though I've been obsessed with scheduling and timeboxing and trying to figure out how to run my life for years. It's never as a result of those things that these encounters come. It's always in spite of them. So even just something like that, the way that
half the sort of funniest things that you'll talk about if you get together with old friends or when things went in some sense wrong in with some with some plan that you had there's that old quote almost everything is either a good time or a good story um and that that that really sums it up and there's a there's a really interesting historical perspective here we don't need to go into massive detail but like i was um i was reading a section in a book by a zen teacher called john tarrant um
Well, he makes this really interesting point that like,
In medieval times, you would not have fallen for the notion that this kind of control over your life was possible. Even if you were pretty powerful in medieval times, but especially if you weren't, you'd go through your life and any day there could be a plague or a marauding army or famine, you wouldn't have any understanding of the science of what brought these things about. You wouldn't have been able to predict them. If you'd
If you'd made your life conditional in the way that we do and you said, "Well, I'm not going to start building this cathedral until we've got all these threats out of the way and I feel like I'm in charge of things," then nothing would ever have been done. So I do think there is this sense in which the modern world tricks us, basically, makes us feel like it must be possible
either through digital technology or psychological technologies, self-help and stuff or something, it must be possible somehow to get this kind of handle on our lives. And then you said about trying to get the handle on your life instead of doing stuff. Yeah, I think about that all the time, that basically we, at some point in the last hundred years, humans believed that we had complete control over the environment. And what that led to was a...
unrealistic expectation of certainty and a particular aversion to anything that looks like a perturbment of that.
Whereas, like you say, previously, like, hey, if you don't have germ theory, chop the leg off. Like, you know what? I'm sure that people weren't happy about having their legs chopped off, but like, this is just what you do. Like, do the bloodletting. Get the leeches on me. Like, whatever. Start the cathedral. Who was the guy that did... Is it Gaudi? Is that the dude that did the Sagrada Familia in...
Barcelona. I believe that's the name of the Barcelona Cathedral, yeah. Yes. And that's still going. And he started that in like 1908 or something. And it's, you know, it's taken 150 years to finish or something like that. And yeah, our control and
like solipsism and sort of narcissism and egotism as a society, the sort of collective unconscious of everyone. It's like, yeah, we've got this world thing sorted. We can predict the weather. We can fly around the world. But that degree of certainty has allowed our sights, our preferences to just expand quicker than our ability to control the things they're expanding beyond.
Yeah, exactly. And the effect of all those kinds of developments is to make it seem like the moment of arrival at that level of control is getting closer and closer. And that, you know, apart from everything else, that makes it all the more frustrating when it doesn't happen. It feels unfair. Right. Yeah, exactly. It feels like you ought to be able to have that control. And I don't know if I, in my last book, I sort of tried to write about this, but I don't know if there's been any
done on it, but it seems to me like it ought to be obvious that a certain kind of impatience with waiting in lines or road rage or all sorts of anger on social media when people don't just accept your position on things or your presentation of yourself or something must be worse than
as a result of the fact that five minutes later you can find out the weather 4,000 miles away in a second on your smartphone. That's sort of like, "Look, I'm a god over here, so why don't I get to be a god over here as well?" It's much, much worse than just accepting that you're not a god all around. How have you come to imbibe or accept this tension of control in life? Certain kinds of philosophies have been important to me. Certain
I can happily talk about them. I do just want to say at the beginning though that I think that an alarming possibility, it's alarming for anybody who tries to write about this stuff and pass on interesting advice or something, an alarming possibility is that a chunk of it is just
I'm a bit older than I was. And the older you get, the more these kind of things. The slight worry is that you can only learn these lessons by just living through life. We are kindred spirits here. Before you get into your techniques, I've had this. I wrote it. It's incredibly...
disenchanting as a fledgling productivity guy. You know, the first two years of the show, I was obsessed with productivity, Pomodoro technique and David Allen comes on all of the, everything, all the things, all the things. And then I wrote it down in my notes and then I had to write about it longer. And I said, how much of the personal development that we congratulate ourselves for is just a by-product of getting older.
Like how much, and especially I'm someone that adores agency and intentionalism. And I love this idea that I make things happen. And I certainly do. You know, I've ended up, the last time we spoke, I was in the UK. Now I'm in America. I made that thing happen. That was a real hard orthogonal turn. And I did it. I made the thing happen.
But like real existential realizations and stuff, how many of them just come along for the ride and you're there, you know, sort of whipping yourself or whipping something else into, I do the meditation and I must read the more books and blah, blah, blah. It's like,
It's kind of like when they do studies with drugs and they say, "Well, look at how much better people got when they took the drug." And it's like, "Yeah, but how much better would they have got had they not taken the drug?" It's just a byproduct of time. Yeah, and I think that it's so true. Maybe this is a rationalization, but the place I've ended up as someone who does writing and talking and stuff in this space of hopefully having something useful to say is that actually the
I can be of use to people that I'm a half step ahead of, both age-wise and just maybe in insights because I get to spend my days reading about this stuff instead of only my spare time and thinking about it. I think that there's definitely a situation, and I've been on the receiving end of this too, where there's some insight that is waiting to
to germinate in you. And that can totally be helped along. It can happen some months or maybe a year sooner than it otherwise would have. So I think there's some real
validity there. So yeah, who knows about the causal direction? When I say that I think that reading a bit more into Taoism, for example, was really important for me. Maybe it wasn't. Maybe I'd made the change and Taoism was just the thing I wanted to read about. Retroactively justify whatever it is that you did. Okay, so give us some of the things that you do. Tension, of control that we have in our lives. What are some of the practices or insights that you rely on most?
Well, again, I guess this starts by talking about a circumstantial change, but becoming a parent is certainly one very powerful way of making it clear to yourself that you don't really have very much control. Both that you can't plan a day and then have it unfold exactly as you want,
Also, you are glad of that, at least most of the time, not all the time and maybe not in those first few months.
And also that you don't really need it, right? Because you find ways to start the writing once the day clears up enough for you to get a couple of hours rather than fixating on the notion that you always need to begin at 7.30 and work for three hours undisturbed because that just might not be an option. So on the level of sort of practices for managing my life, I guess that has meant that
I mean, all sorts of things that try to lend some structure but in a very, very flexible way. I'm trying to think of something specific now.
I know it works for some people, but I've largely moved away when it comes to just planning a day of work from any kind of strict time-blocking approach. The challenge then obviously is to make sure that you don't just end up reacting to everything and doing none of the intentional stuff. So I go through different phases with that. Sometimes it's a question of
three tasks that definitely will get done in the course of the day. Sometimes it's just something like, well, I'm going to spend three hours. I wrote this newsletter ages ago where I sort of gave this, um,
a whole name and uh you know you've got if you come up with a rule or a technique you've got to you've got to have proper proprietary first explain later that's the rule branding right so so i i called this the three three three technique and i just said look something i find useful is to think about each day i'm going to do like three hours or try to do about three hours on my main creative work um three different kind of maintenance activities including kind of
you know, working out, including email things that just need to happen for me to keep the, the thing myself, uh, running well. And then three sort of random smaller tasks that have probably been, uh, hanging around for ages and really just need to be done. I think that I don't care about the specific technique. I think what's really, what I've really come to appreciate, I'm not sure how to express this, but is this, is this idea that, um,
I guess it's just the truism that little and often is a good way to address your tasks in life. But it's just this notion that any practice that I can get into that fairly reliably means I'm going to do a very small amount of writing, but almost every day. Anything that means I'm going to actually complete three of these tasks.
urgent or important tasks instead of tell myself I'm going to complete 12 of them. Anything that can lead to that sort of gradual compounding and accumulation is always better than anything else. You see, I think all productivity discussion just sort of ends up tending back towards these kind of truisms, right? It's like little and often consistency is important, but that's not the same as like
uniformity it's not a good approach to consistency to um to to sort of the sort of formulaic rigidity right being willing to see the whole thing as open-ended so that like next week you'll change your systems and that's fine like just um and then another thing that's made a big difference to me fairly recently is uh
taking seriously the question of what I would like to do, what I feel like doing. It sounds terribly indulgent. I still cringe at the idea that I'm speaking this way. But it dawned on me a few years ago that it was really strange and perverse to approach a day of the kind of work that I do as
with with the idea that you couldn't you weren't going to allow yourself to harness the energy and the fuel of like what you felt like doing like you you maybe are you some sort of like very strange productivity pervert are you supposed to whip yourself into submission walk on a bed of nails and then you can do your work while you're doing that you're not supposed to enjoy it you're
Right, right, right. It's so odd. And it's like, you, you, you, you're supposed to use your money sensibly. You're supposed to use your focus sensibly. Like you're not supposed to use your excitement for what you do sensibly. It's very, it's very strange. Um, and, um,
I've mentioned this so many times, but I'll just very quickly say it again. I was really impacted by a blog post that the meditation teacher Susan Piver wrote years and years ago, mainly really just by the title of the blog post, which was Getting Things Done by Not Being Mean to Yourself, where she pointed out, I think brilliantly, how a certain kind of approach that people think of as
like down to earth and non woo woo and just sort of like going for it, which is epitomized by that, you know, Chuck Close quote, um, uh, inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work it very, very easily, at least in the wrong hands, like mine. Um,
turns into this kind of uh yeah this kind of hard driving thing where no matter how you feel you're going to do the thing you said you were going to do with that particular portion of time even if it's just an incredibly inefficient way of getting it done because you know it it's just not what any part of you wants to be doing in that moment there could be another time when you wanted to do that thing and at that time when you're trying to do that thing you could be doing something else which means yeah i don't disagree and i
the just show up and get to work thing I'm intimately, intimately familiar with. I've been listening to a lot of Alain de Botton recently, again, as I try to feel feelings. And he has this beautiful section where he talks about why people cause themselves to suffer more than they need to. He says, you're not suffering because you need to, you're suffering because you've become uncharacteristically familiar with suffering.
And it's like this sort of set point. And it's so true. And I had Matthew Hussey on the show, dating coach, like probably one of the best dating coaches in the world. And he has this, his new book is really, really great. It's basically a personal development book masquerading as dating book. He's got this line about self-compassion, which I'm going to read to you.
I struggle to believe I'm worthy of moments of joy and peace without first putting myself through a brutal schedule, monitoring my productivity levels down to the minute. Perhaps some people apply this earn-your-cookie mindset in ways that lead to healthy achievements. Not me. Mine is a mutation whereby joy and self-compassion are regularly outlawed by an internal tyrant who decides when I've been flogged enough for one day. Just when I'm about to collapse, a voice inside says, okay, give him half an hour of peace before bed, but
but make sure he knows we'll start again bright and early in the morning. And you've got this idea of productivity debt, which is basically the same thing. Yeah, no, absolutely. I think, yeah, that's so well written. I don't just want to skip onto my thoughts, but it's the same idea, right? Yeah, so I'm talking about this sense that I think people have that you wake up in the morning and you've basically got to
put in a certain amount of output, otherwise you haven't really justified your existence on the planet. The best you can do is get back up to a zero balance. That's the best you can hope for. Of course, if you're fortunate enough to be doing things with your work that are
at least meant to be enjoyable and interesting and exciting, then in some ways it's worse because then you get to say to yourself, not only have I got to put in the work, but I've got to do things like realize my potential. These kinds of criteria that are utterly
opaque and you're never going to be able to sit back and say, great, I realized my potential, right? Because that's just a completely open-ended, there's no ceiling to that. So you're going to be able to keep driving yourself forever and ever. I think one thing that might be useful to mention here is that on the general topic of feeling your feelings and self-compassion and all the rest of it is, I think something else I realized a while ago now is that there is a really good
way to navigate whether a piece of advice or a way of looking at the world is something that you might need. And that is basically if it makes you just cringe overwhelmingly and you don't want to have anything to do with it because it's all that kind of, because it seems too new agey or it seems too, um, uh, you know, it's, it's, it's just not,
it's just not the kind of thing you're used to or you want to do. That idea of leaning into the cringe and saying, "Maybe the fact that I find," less so today, "but maybe the fact that I have found talk of self-compassion, that I'm so allergic to it, maybe that says something interesting rather than that I should just leave it aside." I think that's important to say because otherwise
you know, definitely, especially self-help books and things like that, they don't tend to be marketed at the people who won't buy them because they are in...
denial of their need for the thing. Yes, they're written in the language and framed from the perspective and offer solutions in the way that the people who will buy that book will be prepared to take that book. It's not actually going to be harsh truths. It's not actually going to be uncomfortable insights because if it was sufficiently uncomfortable,
no one would buy it, or at least no one that it's aimed at. Right, right, exactly. And just to sort of name the elephant in the room, there's a huge sort of male-female part of this, right? There's a certain kind of emotion-focused self-help, but there's just completely aimed at women and a certain kind of like, you know, get to work and kick life in the ass kind of book that is completely aimed at a male readership. And it's probably the people- They should be reading each other's books. They should be reading the other book, yeah, right. Yeah.
Why do you think it's so hard to cut ourselves some slack like that? Is it a fear that if we do it, we're not going to be, we're not going to be as effective? Is it the fact that we've just got this internal tyrant inside of us, those that have high demands? Is it this required for validation or is there, is there something more fundamental happening when it comes to cutting ourselves some slack?
I mean, I think it's all of the above. I think one aspect of it that I notice in myself, and I think other people as well, is there's this very strange sort of issue with self-trust. There's this very strange way in which I feel like I can trust myself in the moment, and that's why I have to do all this hard stuff so that future me will thank me. I have a whole sort of...
thesis brewing about how we should stop being so kind to our future selves. Um, but, uh, come to that in a minute maybe, but, but, um,
It's like there's some kind of worry that if I didn't focus on something or if I let myself relax now, it might all completely unspool somehow. And six months from now, I'd just have completely forgotten about all my priorities in life. And that fuels the refusal to give yourself some slack. It also fuels just worry, right? If you're just a worrier, like I certainly have been and to some extent still am,
in the mechanism of worrying about stuff is some notion that if you didn't, you might never remember it again or something. So I have done literally things as absurd and basic as put a note in my calendar two months in the future to say like,
Start worrying about this topic again. Oh, scheduling worrying time is the new hot thing. One of my friends, one of my friends schedule every Sunday for 30 minutes. That's when he's allowed to worry about. Hey, I love it. I love it.
So yeah, you put these kind of buffers in and you say, okay, I don't need to worry that I'm going to completely forget about this aspect of my life, which by the way, I never was going to, but that is what is implicit in that kind of hard attitude. Then I can relax on that topic and get on with something else. I do think there is this really odd notion we often have about ourselves that if we
If we gave ourselves an inch, we'd take a mile and it would all be a disaster, which is so strange when you think about it. Because right now, I trust myself to do stuff. So I can assume, can't I, that the me in a few weeks' time will be basically as capable. Yeah, I have...
This really beautiful frame I stole from the same guy I quoted earlier. He was talking about how people commit crimes in order to become wealthy. And he said, do not sacrifice the thing you want for the thing which is supposed to get it. And he was talking about how people sacrifice freedom in order to be able to achieve money so that when they have sufficient money, they can then have more freedom. And I realized that happiness and success is a better example. So I stole his idea and made it better, I think. And I said...
We presume the reason that we chase success is that hopefully when we have sufficient success, we will finally allow ourselves to be happy. But in the process of becoming successful, we make ourselves miserable. So we sacrifice the thing we want, which is happiness for the thing which is supposed to get the thing we want.
which is success. I'm like, if this was some sort of simultaneous equation, which has fallen out of my brain since I went to school, I'm sure that you could cross off on both sides of the equal sign. You could just get rid of success and you would probably be left with happiness somehow. I think about that all the time. I think about that all the time. What are we doing to
What are the unnecessary miseries that I'm putting myself through in order to achieve a thing to create the state that I'm denying myself right now? And, you know, you're right. This fear that, okay, well, if I take my foot off the gas, then what sort of Zen blissed out state will I be in? And, you know, there's practical implications. People need to still be able to turn up to work and do all the rest of this stuff. But like, do you really think you're not going to turn up to work? Like, and if...
Your drive diminishes, but your happiness increases. What have you lost? Right. Like what, what is, and it comes to a question of what is, what ultimately matters at the end of the day? Like, what are you doing this for? Are you doing this for some arbitrary sense of progress and, and success? Or are you doing this for the internal state? And this is why everyone's going to get mad at me on the show because I didn't talk about emotions. Now I'm in therapy and all I want to do is talk about emotions, but it comes back to trying to find an emotional state that you're
happy in. The way I always think about it is we have to keep in mind the fact that if one could be completely happy on an extremely low
income living in a cabin or living in a room above a shop or something. If you were completely happy in that situation, and I wouldn't be, so I'm not saying it's possible, but I'm saying just as a sort of a baseline, if you would be, then that would solve the same problem here, right? If you could just be happy no matter where you were, then that would be a completely viable alternative way of addressing this whole terrain. So with that in mind,
you can then navigate because if one is not a completely spiritually enlightened person, then I guess you can't be happy in that circumstance. You can navigate against that and be like, "Okay, well, to what extent is this actually bringing me towards what will make me happy?"
hear my seven-year-old in the background here proving a point i was rightly so necessity so interruption and not being able to what was that what's that what's that idea that you is it like a useful interruptions or enjoyable interruptions or something what's that term i don't know about the term i have written about this i'm trying to write a bit more about at the moment um
just this really interesting point that I, I guess, you know, coming up high quality interruptions. That's it. High quality interruptions. Interesting. I don't know. I'm not sure that's mine. It is. Maybe it is. It is. You took it from, uh, it was something to do with, uh, Bruce Tift. It was downstream from Bruce Tift stuff. Anyway, take it. It's a, it's a, it's a habit. I'll take it. But I also, Bruce Tift is brilliant and I've probably taken many things from him. I hope I've attributed most of them. Um,
I mean, one thing that...
really struck me when I was going through my sort of very control-oriented approach to time management and trying to sort of schedule the day exactly and all the rest of it, is that although this seems like a good thing to do at the time, it seems like it's a way to focus on what you want to focus on, one of the things it does is it ends up defining many more things as interruptions than otherwise might, and making it worse when
you get interrupted than if you hadn't had this very sort of rigid plan. So, uh, you know, the, the example I gave, and it's funny cause it's like could happen at any second now is that I don't want to
I've got work I need to do, and sometimes that means that I'm not spending time with my son as I might like to do if I didn't have the work, whatever. But if I have a system for getting through that work that defines it as a big problem, if he comes into the room after he gets back from school and wants to tell me about his day at school, something's gone wrong with my planning system there. And this doesn't only apply to parents. If your system for organizing your day
makes it more likely that, um, an interruption, uh, is painful. Yes. Then, then, then it's not necessarily a good thing. Also really influenced by as a great book by a Dutch Zen monk called, um, time surfing, which I've, uh, he's called Paul Lumens. And I've, uh,
written a bit about this. He's got a lovely sort of Zen approach to time management that basically is incredibly intuitive, very much based around not making and trying to stick to plans. But one of his pieces of advice is,
to give what he calls them drop-ins, not interruptions to sort of cover the gamut of welcome and welcome. Well, so much of this is what is the story that you tell yourself when a distraction occurs that puts you away from the thing that you decided was the thing that you were supposed to do. And you're also deciding to tell yourself a story about what this thing that isn't the thing you were supposed to do means about you and about your day. And again, that's an awesome example to...
You can use a son. I don't have a son yet, but I live near a park. My friends know where I live. Sometimes they knock on my door and say, yeah, I'm going to take the dog for a walk on the park. If I have a system whereby one of my friends with a dog suggests a 12 minute walk, and that is something I should castigate myself for. Right. I have a problem with my system. The problem is not my friend and their dog.
Which is not the same as saying that you should definitely go on the dog walk, right? But if you've caused that to be more disruptive on an emotional level than it needs to be, then that sort of comes from you. Loomans makes this argument that once you have been interrupted, whether it's welcome or not - and I think he would probably include
internal interruptions here, like thoughts that occur to you that take you away from what you were focusing on, that you should give them your full attention at that point. And this is so true. I'm sorry, I won't keep coming back to the parenting example, but if I'm really focused on something and I'm interrupted,
by my son, even if at that moment I really do want consciously to say, actually, no, I'm focusing on this now and not switch what I'm doing, the best way to do that
is to stop, look him in the eyes, have a conversation, and then he feels seen. The moment has happened. It's been given its opportunity to work itself through, and then he goes off. If you do the opposite and just like, no, leave me alone, then you'll get interrupted 12 more times. Dismissive thing is not going to work. Yeah. And I think that works also for a feeling. If you're feeling...
anxious about something, right? Stopping and figuring that out and going through it in your mind and taking an action if necessary, and then going back to your work is going to be more effective than just trying to sort of keep it on the other side of the door. I realized that that internal tyrant that Matthew talks about, um, I think comes at least for me, you might, and lots of people listening, I think might resonate with this.
It's kind of like a fear of fragility about ourselves that our ability to make things happen occurs on such a knife edge that we need this complex system of levers and pulleys and frameworks in order to get ourselves to do this thing because of what I think is a fundamental...
in our ability to do things without that. And then that's how we get from I must work hard to achieve a thing to I must suffer because it
it's very you know if you work super hard you suffer but then you bypass the working hard bit and just go to the suffering bit which is me running the nightclubs and being super super successful event and it's sold out and everything was great but i didn't feel like i suffered so i i i didn't think that it was success uh and you you sort of bypass that middle section and um it's a dangerous it's a dangerous dangerous position to get into and again
How much of this is, here is an emotional state that I feel. I have a little bit of fear about the future. Maybe I'm uncertain about what's going to happen with this work project I'm on with. Well, okay, what would happen if you were less afraid about your capacity to complete this thing? Because fear is absolutely a motivator to do it. Everyone that, like me, handed in their university assessments on the morning, having just pulled an all-nighter, knows. But also, like,
Given that we now have much longer time horizons for the stuff that we're working on, maybe there's an easier way to get there. Maybe you can swim downstream as opposed to upstream. I think that's really well put. I think that idea that we think we need all this driving, otherwise...
That's the only base on which we could do it. It's related also to another idea that I do associate with Bruce Tift, who we just mentioned. I guess it's quite an old psychoanalytic thought, really. The idea that a lot of us go through life thinking that there are certain kinds of emotions or experiences that were we to experience.
experience them it would sort of annihilate us in some way it would be like a fate worse than death so for some people this is humiliation or some people it's failure or just mediocrity um being abandoned the opposite of being abandoned being sort of emotionally overwhelmed by people there's something that you feel like it will be a total catastrophe and so you've got to direct all your energies to making sure that you work and live in a way that that doesn't happen um and of course it wouldn't
actually annihilate you there aren't emotions you can feel that would kill you and we know that intellectually um and uh donald winnicott the the english psychoanalyst from years ago had this wonderful insight this phrase said that that the catastrophe you fear will happen has already happened and that um
you know, people who structure their lives around the idea that they must not be allowed to feel failure because then people would withdraw love from them or something like that. It's because that happened to them in their childhood, right? I mean, um, it's, uh, so, so on the one hand, understandable that they're on edge about it, but on the other hand, it proves that it didn't kill them, right? Because here they are. So I think there's a really sort of interesting, this, it's so interesting
ridiculous in a way, to be so fragile or to feel so fragile, to think you're so fragile. And for that sense of fragility to be associated, I think, more often with people who in their public bearings are not vulnerable-seeming. Yeah, look at how competent they are. They're getting things done. They're getting more done than 10 normal humans put together. I've been pretty obsessed with this myth
That life's duties will one day be out of the way and then you can kind of start doing the thing that you like. And I know you've been kind of obsessed with this too. You had this idea from Marie Louise von Franz about the provisional life. Yeah. There is a strange feeling that one is not yet in real life.
For the time being, one is doing this or that, but there is always the fantasy that sometime in the future, the real thing will come about. One of my friends, Gwenda Bogle, has a different version for the same idea, which is deferred happiness syndrome. The common feeling that your life has not yet begun, that your present reality is a mere prelude to some idyllic future. This idyll is a mirage that will fade as you approach, revealing that the prelude you rushed through was in fact the one to your death.
Nice and apocalyptic from Gwendolyn. That's brilliantly bleak. I love it. And that again, as well, is something that, just to return to an earlier topic, that's something that is impacted by the life cycle, isn't it? Because
It's not completely irrational if you're 18 or 22 to feel that the big moments of your life might be in the future. It's still great if you can understand that the present moment is where it's at, but it's not crazy for such a person to look forward. Then basically, you get into your 40s like me. It's
It's a little bit hard to maintain this thought that the real moment is coming in the future. That basically is what the midlife crisis is, I think, in its original Jungian form. It's this understanding that that kind of focus... Not that it was wrong to spend the first part of adulthood
in this very goal-oriented way and very constructing a life kind of way if that's how you've spent it. But there's a point at which that stops being appropriate because-- Well, again, let's bring it back to emotions. What do you know is a successful route to achieving a life which has at least not killed you?
I had this idea of the vestigial pattern bias. Basically, the things that you did when you started doing the thing you now do are the things you hold on to even after they've stopped serving you. So a good example would be the classic solopreneur starts a business and after a while, solopreneur needs to delegate.
and relinquish control, but they found success doing this thing in the start. This is a thing. So they hold onto it tighter and tighter, even though the...
tools that get you from nought to 50 are not the same ones that get you from 50 to 60 or from 90 to 95. And yeah, it's also called the Einstellung effect. It's called path dependency. It's the same reason that we've got a QWERTY keyboard. We do things in a situation, the situation changes, and we don't change our approach. And largely, I think that is a feelings-based, fear-based, emotional-based
grip onto well i this thing which is change is scary and this thing has proven effectiveness previously so i'm just going to if i hold on to that at least i won't be destroyed and i think that's absolutely right it's better than it's it's better than death and um i think that's so true it's reminding me of it that would be such a good tagline it's better than death
It is reminding me of it. Really, I've been through some of this experience with my own writing over the last years, right? Because I think when you come up through school and university and you get very much into that kind of
doing what you're pleasing people, submitting things, meeting deadlines, being dutiful, doing it diligently and on time. I carry that over into a job at a newspaper where, again, there's deadlines all the time and I sort of really, I could grind it out if I had to. And then as I've gone through writing successive books, I've gone through this experience where sort of grinding when you have to has become more and more unpleasant because
until somewhat in the last book and certainly the thing I'm trying to write at the moment, it just literally stopped working, right? It was just like, you know, and I shouldn't say this because I think it might
uh, unnerve my editors, but it, but it's like, there comes a point where it's just like, Oh, that, that just isn't going to work anymore. Um, I'm going to have to write this the way I want to write it and at the pace, do it out of love, bring my whole self to it. And actually, yes, were that to cause some awkward problems with the process of, um, you know, the commercial situation, which it's embedded, I would just sort of have to
deal with them because it's not in my um gift anymore yes uh maybe it even should be on some level but just factually it isn't to draw on the remnants of this kind of student age approach this neutron this dying neutron star which is right right so in a way i'm very grateful
that it stopped working rather than just carried on getting worse and worse and worse because a crisis is a gift in a way, right? You get to be like, okay, I have to change at this point. Otherwise there's no more books. I have a exactly, uh,
symmetrical problem with the gym so I've trained in the gym for 16 17 years now I've spent an awful lot of time in there I have trained very hard on my own for a decade and a bit and in the last three two or three years I got towards sort of my early 30s I just couldn't really push myself
to where I wanted to on my own anymore. And I was like, this is weird. I've never had a problem with it before. I've always had motivation to go and get up and go to the gym. And for me, one of the things that works very well is external accountability, physical external accountability, not just, you know, an app or something. It's like a person that's there. There's my toe curling fear of looking silly socially can be
weaponized against myself to get myself to do things that I kind of want to do, but I might put it off if I don't. So I just got a coach. So I train three times a week with a PT and my love for the gym has now reignited. I'm making fantastic gains in terms of strength and all of the other things I wanted to do. And it doesn't feel like a heavy lift at all to me. It feels like I get up, me and Nick have a chat in between sets. He's logging stuff. He's making sure that I'm doing the things that I said I was going to do appropriately and
And that's the thing. And when it comes to writing as well, I've got this book project that I'm working on too. And my solution for that is, all right, I'm going to get a writing partner. I'm going to pay a writing partner to sit on Zoom with me every day that I'm going to write. And I can't not turn up. And if they're looking at the document, I can't, they're like, what are you doing? Why are you not writing in the document? It's just leveraging what, you know, a particular pathology of mine. Um,
that again, that may evaporate. That requirement of social. Okay, so this is a fuel which is very specific at this very particular part of time. I didn't need it previously to go to the gym, but I do need it now. And maybe that's going to be spent in 10 years time and I can't use that fuel anymore and I'll need another solution. Right. And all of this will be okay because there is no rule that says you've got to figure out the way that this works and then stick with that
decade after decade until you die right i mean it's like you can you can change it whenever the the meta skill is like surfing your own personality changes and and doing what is it that you're trying we're trying to achieve here what we're trying to achieve is the outcome not the process like the the dedication is not to how you do the thing it's to getting the thing done
Yes, and also to something to do with the quality of experience of doing it, I'd want to say. It's not about getting to the end of a book project and saying, like, I did that in this way, or I really, really sweated blood to get this written. And I still run into this problem as a writer. I still run into this thing where you see it in certain kinds of bad writers, actually, where they're really kind of
insecurely displaying how much research they've done to try to reassure you that like they've done a lot of research and i can still fall into this a little bit when i was writing my last book four thousand weeks i went through this moment early on when i thought like i don't feel like i have enough good long stories to tell because there's an idea in contemporary non-fiction that you can't really introduce an idea unless you've told like a ten thousand word story about about somebody winston churchill's approach to blah blah blah right and i was just and and yeah and
I was forced into this position because I didn't feel like I did have them. I had lots of little anecdotes, but I didn't have any of these big stories. I was just like, you know what? I'm just going to say the things that I think are true in writing and see what happens. And of course, that is...
That is, I think, to the extent that the book did well, it did well for that reason, because I was actually just writing about the things that the people who... The book did fantastically well. And for the people that didn't listen to our first one, they should go and get, after they've signed up to The Imperfectionist, they should also go and get 4,000 Weeks. Thank you so much. Thank you. I was really not trying to just get a massive plug in here. I was trying to say that all these thoughts I had about how a thing should be done were completely irrelevant to...
like the people that it was for or what was that. It was all just kind of some notion that if I hadn't spent many, many, many hours doing a certain kind of shoe leather reporting, I think this is the thing journalists fall into, right? It's like the mark of whether your piece is good is whether it looked like you really, really exhausted yourself putting it together. Absolute nonsense. Yeah.
No, I mean, some of the best insights are shower thoughts, right? You can buy, I have in my house in the UK, a waterproof pencil and pad of paper that you can, it's sort of got the suction cup and you stick it on the shower thing. It's supposed to be for love notes. It's supposed to be so that you and your partner can leave each other like cute, cute,
notes in the shower. Sadly, when I was in the UK, I was living with two other hairy assed folks. So we just write abuse to each other and mean comments. That's its own kind of affection. Yeah, they're correct. We were in a relationship. It was a throuple. And it was, it's so interesting to think about that, like,
unnecessary suffering. Again, we just castigate ourselves. Here I am whipping myself in the hot sun. Why am I doing this work? It's in service of God or it's in service of the productivity or the suffering or something like that. Again, to come back to two people I've been reading an awful lot of recently, yourself and Alain de Botton, I think this kind of frank acceptance of
the fallibility of us, the messiness of our thoughts, the fact that things are fleeting, that we will believe one thing one day, that we're uncertain about stuff. It's so, it is very refreshing, I think. It's very refreshing to hear someone not pedestalize that uncertainty as like a humble brag, but just-
accurately depict the fact that this is the human experience and the human experience is kind of messy and we really really don't know and all of us are kind of uncertain and maybe there's not maybe there's some people out there that aren't uncertain but this isn't for them right this is right yeah yeah exactly and that takes another thing as a writer certainly or as any kind of uh sort of content creator i imagine that you have to sort of be willing to say like this is for who it's for and uh and not for other people i think that um no that's such a good point and it's
And it's really important to say, I think as well, that none of that is a recipe for living a more mediocre life or just being passive, or none of this is about saying like, well, it would be nice if we could do great things, but instead we just have to be a bundle of nerves. It's like all this process of, in my limited experience anyway, all of this process of coming more and more to face the reality of how things are is the path to doing better.
the most sort of outwardly impressive or interesting things that you can do in life. Maybe it's not true for everybody, but for me, there's no contradiction between like
that desire to be productive in some meaningful way and that desire to sort of face the flaws and imperfections. Yes, I think the same for me as well. You had this quote which I fell in love with that says, "There are plenty of people who extend far too much indulgence, self-pity and cheap forgiveness to themselves." Just spend five minutes on Twitter if you don't agree. But the good news is that if you're worried about turning into one of them, it's pretty much guaranteed that you won't. Right.
That's what you're talking about. It's like, look, for the people who this is for, there will be, probably not in my audience, they're like an unreasonably reasonable, excessively introspective group of people. But if someone stumbles across this video, they're like, what are they talking about? What do you mean? Like obsession with productivity. I don't know what you mean. The thing just happens. And more power to you. But for the people who it is for,
Yeah. You don't need to worry about being one of the people that doesn't have this problem because by definition you have self-selected to be the kind of person that thinks about it. Yeah, exactly. And just as an aside, I think this is something that's so wonderful about, I mean, I've only, I have this newsletter and obviously do these books. I don't only sort of dip my toe in sort of digital content in a way, but, but I, it,
The numbers game is so wonderful, right? In order to have a fairly successful newsletter and to really feel like I've got an audience, I can reach a minuscule percentage of the theoretical audience for something. And the result of that is that all the people on the planet who are
into this way of thinking, find me, find you. And so I'm always getting emails from people saying like, it's really weird. It's like you live inside my head. How do you read my mind? And I'm always reassured that, all right, I can just write about my weird hangups here because there are, you know,
there are some other people in the world with those weird hang-ups and the internet means that we find each other. Then it's all you need. There may be presumably billions of people for whom the things I'm writing are just completely bewildering, but that's okay. Yeah. I had this insight from years ago. I thought I had depression throughout my 20s. I
And I think I just had a low mood because I was disrupted sleep pattern, a bunch of other stuff. And Alain de Botton's got this line in a video of his where he says, loneliness is a kind of tax we have to pay to atone for a certain complexity of mind. And it made me think about the bell curve of people and that if you're somewhere closer to the mean of
whatever this normal distribution of normal people is, if you're somewhere in there, there will be more people like you. And as you start to move out toward whatever the tails are, there will be fewer people like you. But that's okay. That's still okay because the size of the world and the ability to access them means that that's still way more people than you're ever going to need to be able to do. And your alternative is to
not fully connect with people who aren't you and who don't have the interests that you do and don't think about the world the way that you do or to truly connect with still way bigger of an audience than you need. And this is why I get a lot of questions about, um, what advice would you give to a young podcaster or someone that's starting a YouTube channel? And there's this, I'm sure you've seen it kind of, um,
law, canon, folk wisdom that you need to niche down super hard and you dominate a niche. And then once you've dominated the niche, you broaden out from there. And I think it's fundamentally bullshit. First off, because so many people believe that, that the blue ocean is now not niching down. And the second thing being that everybody is idiosyncratically varied. Everyone is interested in
pickleball and 80s jazz and Brazilian jujitsu and muscle cars. World War II documentaries, they've got this weird concatenation of just stuff. It's this Frankenstein's monster of interests. Okay, so you're not going to be everything for everyone, but you can be quite a good bit of stuff for quite a good bit of people. The most important thing is if you just follow your instincts, it's
Always going to be interesting. You're never going to be held to any weight. This is supposed to be a pickleball podcast. And now you're talking about whatever, whatever. And, and finally, it's going to be impossible for anyone to compete with because they don't know your instincts, right? They can see what they're, what you're doing, but they don't actually know why. And so like all of these things, it worked for me. It works.
Yeah, no, no. And I think maybe another way of saying that is the niche is yourself, right? You are the niche. You are the niche. I like that. You are the niche. It's cool. I suspect it's not original to what I'm saying. Take the memes. And yeah, at a certain point of frictionlessness in terms of digital connectivity allowing people to find each other...
You can just be yourself and be confident that there's a bunch of other people like that. I was reading some advice the other day about email newsletters that said that you shouldn't write beyond a certain word count because surveys show that people...
stop reading after the first hundred words or something. And I just got so angry about it, obviously totally self-interestedly. My things are longer than that, but it's like, no, if you want a 150 word, 200 word email newsletter, instead of a sort of thousand-ish word, which is what mine come out as, that's totally fine. You should be subscribing to a different email newsletter. Everyone's happy. Same thing with podcast length. The advice
I did a ton of research before I started the show. The advice is no longer than 45 minutes because 45 minutes is the max level of someone's commute. And they want to be able to start it as they're leaving the house and they want to finish it before they get to work. I'm like, no.
No, I just, I thought it's not long enough. I do an hour and 10 and that feels like about the right time to bring it into land because that's me. Like that's just an arbitrary number in person. It's about double. It seems to be about two to two and a half hours. I bring that into land there and that's just me. And that's just my thing. Uh, talk to me about this thing that you're doing with the BBC. First off, you very gracious in, in pying off my compliment about your book, but it seems like I'm going to guess that,
you had an outsized impact in terms of positioning yourself from doing that book because Sam Harris has sort of brought you in now as some...
Zen teacher of time management to be used on his app and BBC are now using you for this sort of thing. And there's kind of this, I think, front end of the anti-productivity productivity movement. Cal Newport's kind of been a part of that, but slow productivity, his new one is very much sort of swimming in the wake of all of this. So yeah, what are you doing with the BBC thing? And what's the fallout, what's the blast radius of 4,000 weeks been like?
It's been just so sort of weird in a brilliant way, but like it is so, you know, right back to the topics we began talking about, it is so nothing that I've been able to control or anything that has followed a plan. You are just sort of, um,
you just sort of increase the circumference of your, of who's hearing your message, I guess. And then it sort of turns out that there are some really interesting and people on that circumference or people with big audiences and all the rest of it. So yeah, it's been, it's been quite strange really. Uh,
The stuff for the Waking Up app has been really fun to do because that sort of short audio talk is just a form that I love. That's perfect for me. And that just happened to coincide with their wanting to broaden out. I don't give meditation advice on the Waking Up app. I would not be the right person to do that at all. But to sort of broaden out to
other kind of verticals about life and time and productivity and creativity and all the rest of that stuff. The BBC course is for a platform called BBC Maestro, which you can either buy individual courses on or a subscription and then have access to all of them, including some people vastly more higher profile and famous than me. There's a course on...
thriller writing or fiction writing with Lee Child. I think there's a cookery thing involving Marco P. White, I think. I don't want to start telling you people who are on this platform who aren't on it, but there's like a kind of extraordinary celebrity roster and then me as well.
And that was, again, really fun. It was a different operation because obviously it's video as well. So we were in this extremely fancy property in Cheshire for a few days filming with multiple cameras. I know you know all about filming. High production value stuff. I like it. Hey, I think it's cool. What's that place? What's that super rich place that everyone goes? Oldley Edge. Was it there? I bet it was.
Uh, no, sort of, I'm trying, I'm trying to remember the location. I don't think it actually was, but I don't think the, um, I don't think the area it was in was necessarily, uh, super fancy, but the, just the property was, uh, which is where it all happened was sort of, uh, seemed quite amazing. What do people learn? What is, what is the, what is the course? What are you teaching? Uh, it's this same material, they call it time management, but it's really time management as a finite human being, right? It's really embracing your limitations and trying to sort of
find a way to be productive and creative and sane in the context of time that doesn't involve pretending that it's possible to do absolutely everything that doesn't therefore end up sort of you know eating up all your time trying to stay constantly on top of your email when you should be making real time for the things that move the needle so it's I'm trying to sort of
This is what I do in other things as well. I'm really trying to stress that this hyper, ultra-realistic approach to the fact that our time is limited and that our control over time and how it unfolds is limited as well. Really facing up to that is the path towards actually making progress on things, beating procrastination, making time first for the things that you actually want to make progress on.
rather than that it's some sort of admission of defeat and that you've got to keep chasing this next thing. So it's interesting in the context of a course, I'm really conscious of the fact that I think people can misuse these kinds of courses to kind of procrastinate some more, right? And design their perfect time management system when they should be doing stuff. So it's almost a course aimed at sort of getting people to- Stop watching the course. Yeah, stop watching the course and do things. Yeah.
You're too young, but there was a TV show when I was a kid called Why Don't You Turn Off the Television Set and Go and Do Something Less Boring Instead. And it's basically, that's the idea, right? We've got to take this productivity material and sort of crucify it and burn it. Use it to cause people to do a sort of bait and switch to get people to actually do things. Yeah. A couple of friends in internet marketing have a tagline where they say, sell people what they want, teach them what they need.
Right. So you can bring them in. It's perfectly ethical to bring somebody into the door thinking that they're going to learn to do time management and then kick them out of the building saying, right, now just go and live life. Stop worrying about how much fucking time. My point is that will be good time management in the highest sense as well. There it is. Oliver Berkman, ladies and gentlemen. Oliver, I adore your work. I adore your writing. I love your energy. Where should people go? They want to keep up to date with all the things you're doing.
Just oliverberkman.com is where stuff about my books and where to sign up for the newsletter. That's the main place really. Hell yeah. I appreciate you. Thank you, mate. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure.