How Productivity Ruins Your Life with Productivity Expert Oliver Burkeman
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Oh, by the way, before we get into this episode, I would love to tell you a little bit about Life Notes. Now, Life Notes is a weekly-ish email that I send completely for free to my subscribers, and it contains my notes from life. So notes from books that I've read, podcasts I'm listening to, conversations I'm having, and experiences I'm having in work and in life. And around once a week, I write these up and share them in an email with my subscribers. So if you would like to get an email from me that contains the stuff that I'm learning, almost in real time as I'm learning it, you might like to subscribe. There is a link down in the show notes or in the video description.

This is a really good book.

It's kind of like a productivity book, but it's not really a productivity book. It's more like a philosophical existential look at like the finitude of existence and how we're all going to die and how like the whole productivity guru culture stuff is maybe not the appropriate way to live a meaningful life.

So yeah, really wide ranging conversation. Oliver used to be a journalist, I think still is, a journalist at The Guardian where for 10 years he wrote their column, which was called This Column Will Change Your Life. And he talks about how it started off as a bit of satire, like poking fun at all these productivity gurus. But then what he found as he was doing this is that some of the productivity guru life advice was actually kind of useful and then it kind of became more of a sincere thing. But now he's written this book.

and it's actually sick. The thing I love about Oliver is that he's, it's a very like British approach to the idea of productivity and living a meaningful life. And you know, my, our American listeners will hopefully forgive me for making the distinction between like a very American approach to like hustle and productivity versus a bit more of a kind of low key

chilled out British vibe where it's like, hey, we're all going to die. Let's not take things too seriously. That kind of stuff. So definitely check the book out. Links are going to be in the video description and in the show notes, depending on whether you're watching this on YouTube or listening to this on a podcast platform of your choice. And I hope you enjoy this conversation between me and Oliver Berkman. Oliver, welcome. Welcome to the podcast. Welcome to the program. Welcome to the show. I haven't quite figured out what the terminology is. Because like Radio 4, it's welcome to the program. American podcast is welcome to the show. What do you think sounds more legit? Yeah, I...

I think show is more common now, right? But if it's program, you've got to be spelling it with M-M-E. M-M-E, of course, yeah. We're not going to bastardize the spelling of it.

Thank you for coming on. We are both considered productivity gurus on the internet and broadly. And I was intrigued by how do you feel about that? Uneasy. Is that even, I suppose I must be. I know you are. I'm very uneasy about it. Yeah. No, no. I mean, you are considered one. I suppose. Yeah. It's a strange thing, isn't it? Because you're sort of

Apart from anything else, you're kind of... If you spend a lot of time

thinking about this stuff and practicing it and putting into practice, you run up against its limitations and its edges and you sort of see past it. So it always feels like you're kind of anything that you've sort of put out into the world is always like one step behind what you're trying, where your thinking is at. Yeah, I know what you mean. I've got thoughts on this, but like how did you become a productivity guru? What was the path to get here? Totally accidentally. Now, I mean, I guess the main thing that I've done in this area is writing this for a long time, was writing this column for The Guardian.

which started off like literally, so I did it for more than a decade and it started off as basically just mocking self-help really. Like, I mean, my main motive at the beginning, we called it this column will change your life. And that was meant to be a joke. And I spent the next like decade of my life explaining to people that it was meant to be sardonic. And it started off mainly about like looking at the sort of

mainly the nonsense that was in the sector with a few little gems here and there. I'm afraid it was a kind of a, the journey was one of becoming more sincere, really, because I suddenly sort of, it became more interesting to me, especially with the sort of imagined, and I think real guardian audience of similarly skeptical people, became more interesting to say, not look at these guys

gurus who are being ridiculous. But like, look at this thing that you might think is a bit embarrassing, this topic or this book or this person. There's actually something really valuable hiding in that. That's just actually a much more interesting and frankly, journalistically sustainable thing to do in a column is to sort of point to valuable things instead of just...

tear down how how did you get the gig how does one become the productivity columnist at the Guardian I was totally by accident I was I was working as a feature writer there and I carried on working as a feature writer there and my editor on weekend magazine at the time saw that I was consuming lots of these books with this kind of definitely with this kind of dual motive of like well this is silly but I'm actually kind of really interested and

And she thought, might as well get some journalistic value out of the fact that Oliver has this fixation. So that's how that started. And it wasn't intended to last particularly long, but it ended up doing. And it lasted for 10 years? More than 10 years, I think. Is it still going? No. I stopped it a bit over a year ago. Why did you stop it? Just now.

it just totally seemed like it was finally the right time to do so it was in the run-up to the this book coming out that weird thing where you want to do new things but you feel like you're actually not going to be able to motivate yourself to do them until you've cut the cord of the last thing yeah which i don't want to do i'd far rather get like get all my ducks in a row and make a make a natural uh stress-free transition but i don't think you can do that so that was why as well

Okay. Yeah, that's cool. I mean, so the book that you've written is very, very good. I listened to it on audiobook, but we have a physical version, which I would love for you to sign afterwards. 4,000 Weeks, Time and How to Use It. You've got, oh, a thingy from Derren Brown. Derren Brown is one of my dream podcast guests. Have you read his book, Happy? Yes. Yeah. Yes, it's great. And I've got, but haven't yet read his new one. Oh, the notes on...

about a stubborn universe. I can't remember the details of the title, but it looks totally up my street. - Yes, I pre-ordered it. It's gonna arrive on Kindle at some point, at some point soon, I hope. 4,000 weeks, what's the premise? What's the deal with that?

The title that is very approximately the average lifespan in the West expressed in weeks. If you live to be 80, you'll have what had 4,100 something. I'm not good at math. I definitely sort of rounded it to a, to an imposing number. And, you know, I, I, I'm sort of at pains to point out talking about the title and,

Obviously many people get quite a few more than 4,000 weeks and obviously many people get far fewer Yeah The point is just it's really finite and something about expressing it in weeks makes it really fine if even if you like if you break the current world record for Longevity and live to be like what 125 or whatever you need to do Still only is like six seven thousand or something. It's like oh

something around that. Point is, it's just, you put it in weeks, it's just like weirdly tiny. So what's the, the subtitle is time and how to use it. And I guess when,

When I was like describing this book, because I recommended it in my newsletter a few weeks ago after I listened to the audiobook. I was like, it's sort of like a productivity book, but it's sort of not really a productivity book. And it's sort of like a philosophical exploration of the finitude of existence. And I found myself using this weird like terminology. How would you describe what the book's about? That seems good enough to me. I mean, it's really strange as the writer of something like this. Like, I don't think...

first of all like now I'm going to pick a genre and then write into it I definitely think well firstly what needs to be said but more in a way like what's what do I need to hear like because it it's totally like written for me to figure out what I need to do with regard to time as much as it is to sort of lecture other people about that and I think that

the point you're making there about it maybe being an uneasy fit in different genres reflects the fact that I had got to a point where what I wanted as much as anything else was to understand the right kind of perspective to take not as opposed to

tips and techniques, not that they're not valuable, but that they have to sort of be fitted into a broader like sense of what it is to have a relationship with time. And then as opposed to thinking that the one next technique was going to like be my salvation, which I spent many, many years thinking it would be. So in your 10 years as a columnist for The Guardian doing this stuff, I got the impression you were like testing different productivity techniques and then you'd write about the effect that they had on your life.

Yeah. That was one of the things that was also like writing about new research and new books and stuff, but yeah, that was a big part of it. And so I guess how,

How did that culminate in this sort of more kind of take a step back, more like, again, like relationship to timey approach to a book rather than, for example, writing a book with like 18,000 tips and tricks? The column was a really useful like experimental ground for like trying things out. And then if you look in like in the rear view mirror after you've written the column for a few years, I could see patterns emerging, things that kept making sense to me and all that kept

Really not working and so both for this book and the last one I wrote like was sort of arose from that process You get to sort of test stuff out you get feedback from people Someone says I read your column. Have you seen this book? That's about it and you sort of acts as a I mean this kind of interaction is much more normal now than it was in the when I began this column which is still relatively speaking the early days of the internet for newspapers relatively

But yeah, so that was that was that way of that was how it sort of it sort of started. And yeah, I guess in terms of the substance of the idea that kept emerging from all of that is that.

There is something to do with acknowledging limitations, embracing the sort of certain facts, uncomfortable facts about the human situation with respect to time that are, that is very important if you're going to actually sort of plunge into life and do meaningfully productive things. And then there's quite a lot of sort of unhelpful ways of thinking about time and productivity, including in certain situations.

books and coming from certain gurus that basically just sets you up as being in a war with the human situation in a way that is basically never going to help because if your goal is to try to escape your finitude then good luck with that

So what do kind of the, if, if we stereotype a, I don't know, the, the stereotypical productivity book written by productivity guru, what does that get wrong or sort of misguided or different about product? Like, how do you, how do you think about productivity different to that? Well, I think that, yeah, that's the right question. I think, well, the most, the most stereotypical book is going to imply that you can get a

Everything done that is important to you whether it's ambitions and goals or sort of obligations and demands all of it provided that you render yourself sufficiently optimized and efficient and So that you can sort of pack in More and more and more into the same amount of time using techniques, you know using specific organizational and and work techniques that you won't need to make tough

choices with what you do about your time and that if and that you can sort of achieve a kind of control over your day that is basically absolute and over your life and how things how things unfold in your life that is basically absolute you get a sort of subsection of this stereotypical bad time management stuff that says no you do have to make choices and you have to prioritize but it still implies that like prioritization and saying no and all the rest of it is just a matter of

getting rid of all the tedious things. - Yeah. - So that all the things that matter, you have time for. And I kind of want to say, no, you don't even have time for all the things that matter actually. - We're going to take a very quick break to introduce our sponsor Brilliant. Brilliant is a fantastic online platform for learning maths, science and computer science with interactive and engaging courses that I've been using for many years. But to be honest, I wish I'd had the lessons in maths to hand when I was preparing for my BMAT when applying to medical school. A lot of the time when we're taught maths at school, the focus is on empty memorization of formulas that we can apply in our exams.

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And the first 200 people to sign up by that link will get 20% off the annual subscription to the website. So thank you so much, Brilliant, for sponsoring this episode. So one of the things that really resonated with me was the way you described the rocks analogy. I wonder if you can talk a little bit about that. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Talking of stereotypical bad time management. I mean, OK, I feel like a caveat. One or two people have explained to me since the book came out ways in which it's possible to interpret this parallel parable that are

that are not so ridiculous but in case anyone doesn't know about it so in various different versions but it's like the teacher or somebody like brings in a jar of should i go through this whole thing or is it so well known that this is a waste of uh valuable i think it's worth going through i'm not sure it's that i it's it's it's well known to people to people like you okay just very quickly you decide whether to use it or not a teacher brings a glass jar into a classroom with um some

large rocks some pebbles and some sand and challenges the students to fit all of this into the glass jar and then the students because they're apparently like really dumb start putting the the sand in first and the pebbles in first then they find the big rocks won't fit so the teacher says no no let me show you how to do it and he says so you put the big rocks in first then you can fit the pebbles and then pour the sand in and it all fits and the idea is um if the big rocks are your major priorities in life you've got to make time

For those and you can make time for those and if you do make time for those Then everything else you can fit in around the edges But if you don't put those first, you'll never get around to them at all And I don't think that's a completely meritless point. I just want to say that right now so that you know The estate of steven covey doesn't come like suzy for libel or but but

The experiment is plainly rigged, right? It's set up, the professor, the teacher has only brought as many big rocks in as he knows can ultimately with the right configuration be made to fit. And I think that extending this metaphor, the problem most of us have with time management these days, the main one, it's not necessarily that we're bad at prioritizing. It's just that there are too many big rocks to fit in the jar. In other words, there are too many things that totally legitimately have a claim on your time.

Too many people in your life, business opportunities, demands from the boss, whatever you're setting it, whatever your situation is. There are just too many things that legitimately you could use your time on than you have the time and stamina available for. So the nature of the hard choice involved is different. It's not just like, how am I going to organize my day? It's like...

What am I going to neglect? Because I'm... And what important things am I going to neglect? Because I'm definitely going to be neglecting some important things. Yeah, like, as I was listening to the book, it really gave me a lot of reassurance. Because...

again as a productivity guru i feel like i should have my life in order and you know when the whatsapp messages pile up to like you know 100 plus i'm like oh my god relationships are the most important thing in life i'm letting people down by not replying to them and then i spend hours replying to all the people and then responding to whatsapp messages generates more whatsapp messages similarly to responding to emails just generates more emails yeah um

And, you know, at the same time, I care about the work stuff. I care about like, I don't know, some sort of impact. I care about spending time with my family. And it's like in the past, part of me was just like, you know what? I just really suck at keeping in touch with friends and that's okay. And then another part of me was like, no, that shouldn't be okay. Like, you know, I should use my productivity powers to like actually focus on this thing that's important, like keeping in touch with friends. How do you, I guess, knowing that, for example, there are too many rocks to fit in the jar. How does one go about solving this problem? Well, I think so. There's sort of,

I think the most important point there is that like in a certain sense, you can't. And that's the really important point. And this is not a despairing message. I think it's a really empowering and sort of thrilling message in a way. But like if the challenge and like I show a vibe with what you're saying there about...

feeling that there must be a solution and that all these things really matter they do really matter you don't need to persuade yourself that actually some of them don't matter just to get really sort of existential about it I think there is some kind of urge motivating that and it's almost universal to want to find a cheat code for life or find a sort of you know a caveat in the contract of being human and

And to get on top of everything or in command of your time in a way, in a certain way that is just not actually available to us as finite creatures. Because we have this fundamental mismatch between our capacity to think of infinite possibilities and feel infinite obligations and our finite material, you know, short lives and limited time. So this is like the vague part. And we can totally talk about like more specific and practical things. But the...

I think there's something really powerful in just seeing, oh, this isn't a problem to be solved. This is just the way things are. At the end of life, there will be lots and lots of things you didn't get around to doing that, that,

Totally were legit that there would have been good things to do but that was because you were doing other thing hopefully things that were That were good things to do and you can sort of relax into the discomfort of that a little bit you can sort of You can feel the anxiety or anyway, it leads to anxiety in me that comes from thinking like well You mean i'm never going to get to this point in my life where I have no problems Or feel no no, it's like no you're not that and that would be ridiculous and you wouldn't want to get there actually But it's a separate discussion

You can sort of factor in like price in to your to your approach to life that there are going to be good relationships that you don't nurture interesting opportunities that you don't pursue great books that you don't get to read. It's like once that's if something like that is completely a given it stops being stressful. We don't beat ourselves up for not being able to like jump a mile in the air because nobody expects that in the first place of human beings.

And it should be the same for this kind of stuff. And once you sort of let this whole fantastical edifice crash to the ground and you're just standing in the rubble, you can be like, okay, now,

I've got this many hours today. What would be the most meaningful, exciting, high impact things to do? And it's like, it's, it's hard. And I don't want to imply that I've like totally solved this, this, this issue either. But like, I think that is the way forward. Yeah. How did you come to this? Like realization that in fact, it is not possible to juggle all the things competently. I think the column helps there in like a weird, bad way, because if you test things out for week after week for many years, um,

and you begin to see what it is you're wanting from them which is basically salvation or eternal life or something equivalent to that and it never happens and on the hundredth time round you're like oh maybe there's a problem with the framing of this instead of that i haven't just yet found the technique so that's where being a bit obsessive kind of helps because if you were someone who just tried a couple of time management techniques you might well imagine that the um

the sort of utopian one, you just haven't seen it yet. - Haven't come across it yet. - Whereas I was pretty confident by the end of that decade plus that like it wasn't coming anytime soon. - Yeah, yeah, I guess it's an unusual position to be in where you have actually tried all of the technique. I feel like I've come close to trying all the big ones through making videos about this for the last five years. And I find that every time I reread Getting Things Done, I feel about two weeks worth of like, yes,

capture, clarify, organize, reflect. And, you know, it feels like all the cylinders are firing and it's all good. And then I miss a weekly review and another one and another one. And it's like, you know what? I've had this, I looked at my Todoist, which was the app I was recently trying out.

And it's like, overdue reminder, do your weekly review 24th of October. I was like, I did it for two weeks. And then the reminder just kept on going overdue. And I was like, I know in my head that doing a weekly review is an important thing, getting all my priorities in order, reflecting on the week, et cetera, et cetera. There's something about it. It actually makes it really hard to do. Yeah. And I think, you know, I don't want to pretend I still totally like a new app or new technique. I'm still like, there's still a big part of me that is like excited by that and I'll try it out. And,

Blah, blah, blah. All that happens, and I'm sure you're in this space too, is that you do begin to just like see through a little bit the motivations that you were bringing to it. So it's to do with the spirit in which you adopt a new technique, right? By all means, try out a new technique or go back to getting things done or do anything. But like, it's when you slightly drop this idea that it's going to like save you from the situation. And I've actually had this really interesting...

maybe it's not interesting. It's interesting to me, experience of trying out certain techniques ages ago, finding that they didn't give me what I wanted because what I wanted was sort of this kind of total mastery of time. Yeah, salvation. And then years later, the Pomodoro technique is an interesting example of this. Like coming back to it in this new kind of

disillusioned but in a positive way um from that new perspective and seeing that that's actually a really useful thing to do it's a great interesting way to divide up the day it's like totally useful in for what it is absolutely great but i was bringing something weird psychologically to it before and i think a lot of people do that's my gamble anyway that this isn't just my personal hang-ups and weirdnesses have you come across the midwit meme

No. Oh, okay. I will describe it to you. And on the YouTube video of this podcast, we can put up the midwit me. It's basically like an IQ bell curve with like 100 IQ in the middle. And it's like on the low IQ end of the spectrum, there's like this dude being like,

For example, something like, I just do what I feel like doing. On the other end of the spectrum, IQ 150, there's a Jedi master who says, I just do what I feel like doing. And in the middle, there's the person being like, I manage my time using getting things done. I have a to-do list. I do my weekly review. All this kind of stuff. And I think this so much applies in the world of, and actually almost anything, whereas like in a way by going through the process of becoming a productivity guru, you come out on the other end with a, just a more of an appreciation of like, actually,

keeping things simple is potentially the way forward but it's that is this thorough or something but it's the simplicity on the far side of complexity right i think you have to to some degree you have to go through that middle bit and maybe one way of thinking this book is my attempt to take readers who haven't gone through that through yeah the sort of the sort of thing no it's interesting and one one facet of that just one particular way that plays out i think is in this idea of like what if you

been very helpful for me in the terms of productivity but i think it applies in other areas what if you just sort of what if you gave up the idea that you that there wasn't going to be any single ultimate uh solution here like what if you just sort of accepted that your techniques and approaches were probably going to like change and evolve all the way through your life like you were never going to kind of get the set of techniques and approaches and apps that i mean and that's kind of obvious in a way that that's what how it's going to be but there is that bit in the back of your mind that's like

for some reason this particular new do everything notes app is somehow yeah like in 40 years time is still going to be the market leader it's like i've had that similar sort of journey in

a bunch of other sort of productivity adjacent things. Like in the process of writing the book, I have read loads of books about note-taking and about the process of writing a book. And so like Ryan Holiday has a method that, you know, with the physical note cards and there's a Zettelkasten method, you know, all of these various methods for note-taking. And I've kind of just landed on Apple Notes, just writing things down as like I read them and that resonate with me. And that's kind of what I was doing 10 years ago as well. It's an Ebonite run, I don't like that.

but then through this whole process it's like but but i still feel that there is something out there and that if i if i did have the perfect zettelkasten method where all my notes would link up and all the insights and then generating a book would be as simple as copying and pasting stuff that i've already written over 10 years right um given that you've been writing for 10 plus years and i've written two books does that like resonate at all yeah no it really does and i mean one of the things that i found so

There's a quest for perfect order in that kind of approach to note-taking information.

which is clearly, I think, one part of this overall quest for like total control over the human situation. You know, it's like, and it all comes down to like, you know, not wanting to die ultimately. I was sort of seeing this until I, and then I, after that, after I'd begun to stumble on it in my own mind, I saw it expressed very well by David Perel, that these systems kind of, you kind of need to keep them messy in a way. And to the extent that my system of note-taking and storage of notes is disorganized a little bit,

And it is disorganized. Like that seems to keep it juicier. Like I get more interesting insights and it feels like there's more potential there for new chapters or email newsletters or whatever it is. When you actually get close to achieving the level of total control you think you crave and perfect order, the life kind of goes out of it a bit for me. What do you mean? Well, like...

if I've got a kind of perfectly organized database of notes, like tagged or folded away in an absolute, if I get to that point where it feels completely like it's done, I don't know how else to express it than I just did. Like the life goes out of it. The juice of the ideas is not so clear. If I've got a kind of directory in some app that has, I'm using Ulysses mainly, but which has like, which is kind of,

it's not quite properly ordered. There's, there's, there's kind of notes jostling with other notes that probably should be separated out somehow. Like that's when I see the connections between stuff. So like, I've never quite managed to get on board with the real canonical Zettelkast and stuff where you like link everything in a very, in a very clear way, because the links for me seem to come just from the fact that,

there are two notes next to each other that I, that are not particularly meant to be there. So yeah, serendipity, I guess. Yeah. Like in my, in my quest for the kind of the perfect system to write the book, uh, I was rereading a lot of, um, Austin Cleon stuff around sort of creativity and,

having like an analog workstation and a digital workstation, where the analog workstation is like A3 pads and like notes and bits written on paper. And that felt, it seemed like a very like romantic way of writing a book that, oh, I've got this stuff. And then when I go to my other workstation, then I type things up. And I haven't yet tried this, but every time I do get an A3 pad out, I find that just like scrolling stuff on a piece of A3 paper is actually just way better than, for example, using a very rigid sort of bullet pointy structure on like Notion or Roam or any other note taking app.

Yeah. And I think that almost the, the more abstract issue here is not, it's not the method, but the fact that any method, however good. And I like, I love Austin Cleon stuff, for example, but like the, the, any method, if you take it from that person and it's like, now I must perfectly reproduce it in my own life. It's going to, you're going to give it a rigidity that it almost certainly doesn't have in the, in the, in the world of the person like who originated it. And so I'm constantly changing things.

the supposed process that I have for doing these things. And I kind of feel like I'm always going to be that way. And there might be something good about the fact that that's how it is. I really like that. Like I get so many questions, like, you know, being a, you know, as you know, being a productivity guru, uh, one is somewhat financially and otherwise motivated to continue to try out different apps and to find the best one. And part of that is this thing of maybe there is that perfect app around the corner, but like, uh,

And another part of it is, well, I kind of need content for my newsletter. So, you know, Notion have just released a new feature. Let's like see if it fits into my life. And people will often discover a video I made two years ago where I talked about how at the time I was using Notion to store a list of database for all the things that I've ever read. Being like, oh, you know, I was reading your, I was watching your video about the resonance calendar. You know, how do you specifically deal with this content type? And I'm like, pfft.

Oh, moved on from that three days after I made that video. But it feels a little bit fake to be that person. And so when I was reading this stuff, I was like, I really got a lot of reassurance from it. I'm glad. It's reminding me of a thing. I mean, this is making it a bit more sort of like this is more to do with personal life and relationships, perhaps. But there's a great quote in the book, a psychotherapist called Bruce Tift, who elsewhere, not in the quotes in the book,

has this kind of idea that like what if you took the thing you struggled with the most in your psychological life and just kind of imagined never being rid of it to the end of your days like so if you're like

if you've got social anxiety or you're a bit commitment phobic when it comes to relationships or you're always struggling to try to bring order to your productivity and your work, like what if you just thought about the prospect of like never being shot of this particular idiosyncrasy

And at first I feel like, oh, like crestfallen when I do that. Because I'm like, you mean like I'm never going to get to the perfect time? But then I'm like, actually, it's really liberating. It's actually really liberating to think like, okay, you don't, maybe we're not in the business here of finding a way to like,

suddenly become to justify our existence on the planet maybe that's taken care of maybe maybe you're fine and then if you come up with some adjustments to your workflow that make you even better great nice but like maybe you're not trying to like maybe there isn't some like big existential problem here that your that your notes are in disarray in the book you talk about this and you know in this conversation so far you've alluded to that kind of

something along the lines of the the desire for productivity and control is is ultimately a desire for salvation a fear of death like what what what do you mean by that well this is where it gets so sort of hard to put into words but i think we i think most of us today and i talk in the book about how i don't think this would have been true for like medieval peasants and some other people but like we think of time as something that we're like in a relationship with and there are that's not a given um through the history of reflections on time but like

And so it naturally becomes something that we've got to try to sort of use well, or we could be guilty of wasting, or we want to sort of feel confident that the near future is going to unfold in a certain way. And actually time isn't really like this. So we don't have, it's not, we're treating it as something that ultimately it isn't because we're

You don't really have time you just get given each moment as it comes and you don't know how much more of it you'll have and you can't really put it aside all those things that sort of the language and the metaphor of like physical possessions or my ownership and management right right right yeah doesn't quite work and The blogger David Cain has done some really a raptitude. Oh, yes some really interesting stuff on this it's like so you're constantly approaching your time

with a sort of set of concepts that aren't quite properly suited to what it really is. And I think that's because it's kind of uncomfortable. And ultimately, if you go deep enough, probably quite terrifying to sort of face up to the real truth of the situation, which is that each of us all the time is just completely vulnerable to anything that might happen next. Like you have no control over the future. You can exert influence and improve probabilities, but like you are just on this raft of,

on this whitewater river being borne forward and you've just got to sort of do what you can in that situation and in that context it's really tempting to feel like

no, can't I come up with a way where I'm like, you know, the stretch of the metaphor, like where I can like get onto the river bank and then like control a fleet of ships or something like that. No, you're just like, you're just in it. And that's terrifying. And so I think a lot of what passes for sort of bad time management, but also lots of other sort of weird behaviors that we engage in in life are basically like,

Forms of emotional avoidance right there ways of not facing up to the sort of edgy nervous angsty situation that we're actually in so we we we think the way forward is to is to feel more in control than we than we really are or to distract ourselves and As I say, it's a little bit hard to sort of articulate in words but I think that actually the the better approach in all these contexts is as to the extent that one can is

to actually acknowledge the way things really are and to sort of like go with the fact that you're on the raft on the whitewater and then you can start like navigating a bit more and use what influence you have. Does that make sense? The thing that that reminded me of was, again, to sort of concretize

Please do. For an example from my life where I feel like this really applies. It's that the feeling of writer's block in the sense that I sit on my laptop and I've got three hours. I need to do some writing. And then there's like, I don't know what's going on.

Therefore, the solution is my note-taking system is just not tuned enough. What I need is the perfect note-taking system. And once I have that, then writer's block will disappear. And one of the most reassuring things about speaking to any author, like I've done on the podcast or listening to interviews and stuff, is that that feeling never goes away. And this is supposed to be hard. And this is the work.

And when I kind of internalized that, now when I have that feeling of like, oh, I'm so bad. Like, why would anyone read this, et cetera, et cetera? I think this is fine. All of the people think this. So it's all good. And just embracing that, then...

weirdly helps me make progress and also be less beating up of myself about the fact that i've only made a thousand words of progress rather than the 2800 that and 33 that i had like decided would lead to a million words a year or whatever yeah no absolutely i think that's so that that observation that like that that these things are difficult and you might get lucky sometimes and go into like beautiful flow state but but they are basically difficult um

It reminds me of the opening line of a great old self-help book the road less traveled by scott peck Which is i'm paraphrasing but he starts off saying life is difficult and then what he says something like this is one of the great truths because when you um When you fully internalize the truth that life is difficult. It no longer matters that life is difficult So it's like it's like I feel like that's a different way of saying when you stop treating The difficulty of doing difficult things as a problem to be solved. Yeah

then They're not they're less difficult in a certain in a certain way and the way I would put that through like my stuff in this book is like what's happening when you're writing is You're being brought up against your limitations and your your edge, right? You're doing something that matters to you. The stakes are high You don't know that you can do it to your standards You don't know that it will be well received but you want it to be so all these different things are at stake and so it it's it's unpleasant in a way and

If at that moment you distract yourself with some like nonsense, yeah online or wherever like that's your your

it's obvious why you would want to do that. You'd want to do that because it's because the things are not at stake and it's, and, and you're not worried about whether you can, can do it or not. Another reason I ask is because relationships are allegedly the most important thing in life. And I have always thought like, maybe there's ways to think more intentionally, more efficiently, productively about relationships. And also you've had a kid recently, which is cool. And I'm always like curious about, like, I feel my calendar is overloaded already and I don't have a kid. I'm like,

What the hell do you do when you have a kid? Yeah, I don't really know the answer. I mean, it was only fairly recently now because he's just turned five, which is... Oh, five? Yeah. You've been writing a book for that long? Well, I sort of sold the book proposal, then he came along and then the book was just on hold for like three years and then... Got it. So yeah, nothing will mess with your belief that you can control your...

your time and i'm not i don't want to be i don't want to claim i've figured this out perfectly at all but i suppose the sort of just think about parenting just for a second like the one way of thinking about that is it does just sort of show you something very clearly that was true all along which is that you don't have the control over the time that you thought you did and you don't have the capacity to do everything you were imagining so you know for many years before becoming a parent i

I might think that I was constantly just like one a week or month away from, of self-discipline and applying myself to sort of getting everything totally nailed. And, um, that becomes, again, it becomes a lot harder to continue to believe in that once like 50% of your previously available time minimum, it depends on the stage of parenting, I guess, but like has just been taken away and put to this, to this, um, totally non-negotiable, uh,

thing instead and and so it's like that's quite useful in a way obviously it's not obviously it's not useful from the point of view of one's work to have less time available for one's work but it is kind of it it helps one's own like growth in a way quite apart from the many many

huge delights of just being father but like it helps one's own growth in a way to sort of see the see the truth of the situation a bit more plainly which is like you know there's definitely not enough time for everything sacrifices will have to be made um and to some extent this this effect hasn't been as pronounced for me as it has for some people so i'm slightly annoyed at that but to some extent it also um reduces your distractibility and the work time that you do get because you're just like okay

It's just a few hours now before I'm back on, you know, before school pickup or whatever. So better get to it. And that does, to some extent, that works for me. I am still prone, a little bit more prone to distraction than I would like to be, but...

What are we going to do about that? We are going to take a little quick break from the podcast to introduce the sponsor of this podcast, which is CuriosityStream. If you haven't heard by now, CuriosityStreams is the world's leading documentary streaming subscription platform founded by John Hendricks, who's the founder of the Discovery Channel. And on CuriosityStream, they've got hundreds of really high quality, high budget documentaries covering all sorts of things from science and technology to history and ancient civilizations to food and medicine and meditation and like

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you know what, from next week or from two weeks from now, when the calendar is broadly empty, or, you know, then my life will be sorted. Because all these ad hoc things that appeared this week,

They're not going to appear two weeks from now. Right, right, right. Exactly. Yeah. And you pair that with a tweet I saw the other day. I can't remember who from saying like all my schemes for self-improvement depend on my waking up tomorrow with like five times as much self-discipline than I've ever demonstrated any day of my life to date. So it's both of those. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, we were doing a little goal setting exercise with the team yesterday. We had this whole like business coaching session, quarterly planning and stuff.

And I was like, you know, what's, what's like my number one priority for the next quarter. And it's to write the first draft of the book. I was like, okay. Then I was like, wait a minute. That's like 12 weeks in a quarter. There's 12 chapters in a book. Shit. That's one chapter a week. A chapter is like, I don't know, like 8,000 words, probably 10,000 of the editors are saying we can cut down to like six or 7,000. So am I really saying I'm going to write 2000 words in a day? I like each day.

And I'm like, well, three hours in the morning, it's quite a long time. How hard can it be? And so it's just like, yeah, I will do this thing. But I think it's very much, you know, as we...

as we think about our future selves we give ourselves superpowers yeah like yes i will wake up on time i'll be fully disciplined i will go to the gym like before eight o'clock and then i'll be sitting sat there ready with my coffee to write for four hours solid and not get distracted and not need to do a poo like in the middle of that yes yes right and the the the the reason i mean this is maybe obvious but like there's a lovely quote from henry bergson the philosopher in his book time of free will where he sort of says like there's the reason that

thinking about the future in this way is always more appealing than facing the present is because like anything's possible in the hypothetical future. The limitations of the material world that you're subject to today are not there like in your imagining of next month because you can sort of think like,

oh i'll find a way to do this this this and this or yeah i'll bring more self-discipline and energy to it than than uh than before and it's so it's comforting you get to like you you get sort of squirrel it away in the future so that you don't need to like face the face the truth of the situation right now yeah it's useful to notice when one is doing that i think yeah i think that's the that's the balancing act like that that i found as well in my life without a child um is it's

where I will try my best to set an intention for the day of like, this is the one thing that I want to do. And I will try my best to broadly stick a time block in the calendar for when I will want to do that one thing. Knowing that like, to be honest, if a friend was like, hey, do you want to grab lunch? I will prioritize social life over work generally. And the way I think of it is like, the rest of the things I want to do today are a might to do list rather than a to do list. And

I'm still experimenting, still trying to figure out like what is the, what's like a realistic maximum number of things like I'm allowed to have on that list? Because I think otherwise for me, the temptation is there. I'd be like, oh, well, I'll call my grandma and then I'll call my mom and then I'll call my aunt. And then, okay, so that's the relationship box take. Oh, then I need to message about eight different friends and I need to send thank you cards and Christmas is coming up. So let me send great gifts, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then I need to do all these different things, checking all these videos that are coming out and the list just swells.

Whereas what I've been trying to do recently is just be like, I'm only allowed to do three things on this list. And if after that, I still have more time and I feel like doing like work, then at that point I can freestyle it. But I just never get through just even those three things on the list. And one of the things I really liked about your sort of, like at the end of the book, you have a sort of practical advice-y section for those of us that are like, okay, I like that, mate. Enough philosophy. Let me get to the tips. You talk about things sort of having like a,

a maximum number of things that you're allowed to do something to that effect. Yeah. There's all sorts of different ways of implementing this and you'll be familiar with many of them, but this idea of like limiting your work in progress, this idea of saying that, um, I'm only gonna, this idea of saying like, I'm only going to work on, um,

a small, a fixed number of, of things. And I'm going to complete one of those things before I allow myself to put another item onto that queue. And obviously you can do this at the level of like projects. You could say, I'm only gonna have like one major goal, um, in my work at a time. And you can also do it to some extent at the level of tasks, right? You can be like, well, these are the, these are the three things I'm going to do. And I'm, until I've done one of them, nothing else is coming off that task list. And, uh,

you know, Kanban boards are an obvious way to implement this. And I've got this idea in the book about keeping two to-do lists where you sort of feed items from an infinite to-do list through a very narrow, limited to-do list. And again, it's just all about like saying, look, you're already making choices. Your time is already finite. Whenever you're doing something, you're already saying no to all the other things in that moment. So now just like make it conscious. And, and,

and sort of hold yourself to it and avoid that thing that I certainly am very prone to. I think lots of people are where it feels like you're more in control of things if you just sort of

spread your um attention among 50 of them yeah but actually it isn't because what you're not more in control of you're not making better progress on them because you just bounce from one to the next whenever they get difficult so you just get around exactly yeah um i'm i'm finding this with the book as well which uh one of my my my writing coach says is normal for a first draft where i will get 80 of the way through and then it starts to feel like i need to round off the argument somehow

But I can't be bothered right now. Let me just do chapter eight. And I'm hoping that towards the end of it, then I'll be able to think about this kind of stuff. Yeah, so on the goal setting front, I also keep on trying to find the perfect system for this. Like in terms of like personal goals, one of my theories or my philosophies, shall we say, is that setting, like I don't like it when I set goals that are outside of my control. For example, when I set the goal of,

I want a YouTube video that hits a certain view count compared to I want to make a video I'm proud of. When I think I want to write a book that hits the Sunday Times bestseller list versus I want to write a book I'm proud of. And that's all fine. But that almost feels like it's, oh, well, I'll just do my best and not worry about the outcome.

Which also, which feels a little bit unsatisfying given a bunch of research around the idea of like effective goal setting and challenging goal setting. And the fact that kind of high performance in inverted commas in most fields, you know, it's not like Michael Phelps is just, you know what, I'll just try my best and see what happens. It's like, you know, so yeah. Any, any thoughts around that tension between,

I'll try my best versus I have this specific outcome I'm aiming for, which maybe is somewhat outside of my control. It's interesting. I mean, there's a sort of sub distinction there between there's the goal, there's the things you can control and things you can't control, but then there's specificity or vagueness in the things that you can control. And I do think that like,

things like doing your best and being proud of things like they're really important values in life but i can see how they're not they're not particularly helpful in this setting because it's sort of completely open-ended and so it's not very smart i know right exactly either you you

can either you will end up sort of not doing what you could have done because you say, well, I was my best, so I don't care. Like, and you sort of, you sort of make it easy for yourself or you do what I think I would do and have done in a lot of my early adulthood, which is like, be convinced that trying your best is really important. And then like torment yourself constantly with like, am I doing my best? Is this my best? Can I, you know, and those kinds of open-ended things seem unhelpful. You, on the other hand, if you say, I mean, this is where I feel like quantity based goals can be really helpful, right? If you say like, I'm going to,

put out this number of videos or this number of i'm going to write this many words uh on a on a by a certain point firstly it's specific secondly it's within your control and then thirdly it's kind of

it's somewhat drained of the sort of the qualities of goals are sort of they they go wrong because they're so sort of emotive there's something kind of nice about a very very sort of mechanistic yes goal in that area i don't think it's the whole piece of the puzzle because i do think even though i wrote in my first book about like how positive visualization is largely nonsense and all sorts of things i do think there's clearly a role for kind of

envisioning the having a vision of why you'd like things to be and using it to determine what you do in the in the present but that idea of just being maybe this is like systems versus goals it's that old distinction but it's like it's like the idea of saying like this many words um

or you know just something really sort of that sort of takes out all the all the all the angst from it i think that's really useful yeah well one of the ways i'm thinking about it because i'm i'm i was writing the chapter about this in the book like this week last week um i intended to do this week as well but then time going away like um is yeah like systems i don't know i feel like i feel like all all of this stuff converges on a few central central themes and and

we as productivity writers try to put our own stamp on like a thing which people have been doing for centuries not millennia uh but that aside um what i'm what i really like is is that if i kind of break down my implicit process of goal setting because it's never been like explicit if i if i break down what that looked like what it looked like was step number one setting a kind of destination goal that is within my control like write a book i'm

Maybe in my mind, it's like, it would be really cool if it hits the best seller list. It would be really cool if I get invited on conferences and if I, I don't know, get on a podcast because that would be sick. But like, those are outside of my control. So let me just...

not think about those and just recognize that actually it's a, you know, a preferred indifferent as, as the stoics, as the stoics might, might say. Um, so the, the destination goal is within my control. And then I'll break that down into the kind of journey goals, which is more of the system stuff. Therefore, what I like tangibly need to do is that every week or every day I want to aim to write X thousand words or X hundred words. And again, that is within my control.

And then kind of my step three of this three-step process is for that journey goal that like, let's say I want to write 500 words a day to lower the bar of quality as much as possible. Yeah. I want like, I literally write my to-do list, write 500 crappy words for crappy first draft of chapter two. And I find that putting the words crappy in there twice really makes it easier to be like, okay, you know what? This is actually, it's actually doable. Let's do this. Um,

It makes me think of two other things like Dan Harris, the meditation writer and the podcaster talks about doing things specifically meditation, aiming to do them daily-ish and having this built-in fuzziness. Like, because you know...

whether you did something daily-ish like in a given week, you have a feel like if you did it twice, it wasn't daily-ish, but it, but it reduces this kind of like, Oh, if I break my streak, it's all over. And I might as well spend the next three weeks not doing anything. Um, so I think that's a, that's an important part of that. And then something I've found really helpful. I don't know if this is writing specific, but like might be just specific to writing, but, um,

It's also like not keeping going, even if you're on a roll. So if you say like, I'm going to write 500 words and you write them and then things are going well, you're like, I get another 500 out. It's like actually making yourself stop and walk away. Like that kind of enforced low balling of your, of your aims for the day. And like, that's really, I think for people like you,

I suspect you and certainly for me like that's really hard to do like when the opportunity for a bit more productivity arises and you don't take it yes but there's this amazing old book that I had to like buy as print on demand because it's because it's so hard to get called them how writers journey to comfort and fluency by a psychologist called Robert Boyce and it's like a really in-depth study of academic writers and what caused them to be either productive or non not productive I mentioned him in the book a

one of his big findings was that the writers who made writing into a moderately important part of their lives were did lots more than the ones who made it into a very important part of their lives because then it becomes this kind of intimidating thing and you have sort of all sorts of angst about it and you forget about it for weeks at a time because you don't dare go back into that scary thing and part of that is like you figure out what is your short daily session of writing and

And he said, like, you know, for sort of amateur writers, it might be 10 minutes a day. Even for professional writers, it probably should never be more than like three or four hours. And when it's up, you just you have to stop and like go and do something else, because otherwise you're kind of giving in to an impatient urge to be done with the whole thing that will ultimately backfire on you and cause you to sort of dread returning to the project. That ability to keep important things in.

relatively small in your life. I think it's like, it's really, I'm not saying I'm any good at it, but it's, it's really interesting. I was thinking about this like last night. So I, I got home from here at like 7 PM, 8 PM, something like that. No, like it was, yeah, it was like, it was like 8 PM. I was like, you know what? I'm going to sleep at 10 30. I'm going to get a solid, like eight hours of sleep, wake up at seven 30. Life's going to be good. I was like, so I've got like two and a half hours now. Hmm. What do I do with that time? And I said to my housemate, I was like, right, Lucia, I could do some writing.

or I could play PlayStation while listening to an audio book. What should I do? And she was like, well, you know, Ali, you've worked hard to get to this point. Like, why don't you just play PlayStation? And I was like, all right, cool. And then I had a great session of playing Ratchet and Clank on the PS5 while listening to the evolution of desire on three X speed and audible. And it was so good. I just love the audio book with PlayStation experience. Um,

And this reminds me of something. Do you know Greg McKeown? Yeah. I mean, not personally, but yeah, I really like his stuff. So his newish book, Effortless, tells the story of like two... It's like one of these perfect stories that I don't know how...

100% true it is, but like illustrates the point of like these two expeditions, like the British expedition and the American expedition to the North Pole or something. And the Brits were like, you know, or actually probably the Americans were like, you know, every single day we're going to make as much progress as we can. And the Brits were like, we're going to go five miles and no more and no less on any day. And the Americans ended up dying on the expedition and the Brits ended up just like slow snail, snail mailing their way to just

Even when it's good weather, even when it's bad weather, we're not going to bother going above and beyond, even if we can. And that thing in my mind of 500 words and only 500 words or two hours and only two hours and then stop. And then I'm just not allowed to do any more writing. Right. And yeah. And it's yes, I think it's great. I think. And it's hard, right? Because we just as a culture and I would suspect especially people who are interested in

being productive in that culture like resting is difficult like if i have it doesn't happen very often but if i these days but if i have like

two hours to just do whatever I want and I and I've decided that it would be not appropriate to use that to power through my my work like that's quite challenging it's like it does not things do not obviously suggest themselves to me in that situation it's it's better since we moved to the North York Moors because actually going out hiking in nature is an example of that that sort of holds my attention while clearly being not you know more of the treadmill but like

think people get confused because we've we you hear so much about how important rest is People know that they need rest they feel burned out and then if they ever make it happen in their lives that makes them feel sort of Fancy at first it's not and and so one of the I actually talk about the book, you know It's like you've you've got to be ready. I think if you want to pursue these different ways of relating to time and

for them not to feel totally great in the first like half hour or first day of testing things out because, because we are just completely geared to thinking that time not spent productively is time therefore wasted. Um, and so like the first half hour that you're sitting by the fire with a novel or the first day that you're at a, on a beach for a week's holiday by the beach probably isn't going to feel great.

And actually, if you know that, it's less of a problem because I think it then starts to feel great. Yeah, I think one other thing that I think about on this topic is, you know, this idea of like stopping work at a particular time and how it feels like, oh, but I could get more done if I continue to power through. It's just that like really is, and again, I'm bad at doing this, but when I do, I always feel a little surge of satisfaction.

Just the idea that like, what am I actually optimizing for here? Like, you know, if I think of what I, I guess what I want from my life, what I imagine is a life where I'm doing some reading, doing some writing and doing some teaching and hanging out with the team like once a week and maybe filming a video or a podcast. Like that is broadly the life that I'm leading and finishing my book any faster. And like, I don't know, getting out one extra YouTube video this week.

Like these things that would be the outcomes of me spending more time working. It's like, why? What's the point? Like, who's that for? Right, right. Yeah. When is enough? What is enough? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, what I try and think of is let me...

sort of enjoy each day on its own merit rather than think of the day as a, I guess, a means to an end of having a particular outcome because like, you know, journey before destination and all that kind of stuff. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's, it's making me, yeah, it's so true. It's making me think of a time a few months ago when I was hiking in the middle of a weekday with an old friend and a beautiful part of the North York Moors. It just had come together that we could do this. And, um,

being struck by the thought in the middle of this very enjoyable few hours, literally being struck by the thought, I wish I lived the kind of life where I got to do this. Like, I wish I was the sort of person who could just like,

come and do this regularly and it's like while i was doing it right and so the sense of like having to become a kind of person who is so in control of stuff that you can dispense your time in these different ways perfectly is so powerful that it can stop you seeing that you're like you're literally doing it in that moment so i mean it's not quite the same point you're making but it's this idea that like you've got to become the kind of person who x well no you've just got to do those things a bit and if things if you value things just do them a bit and you're and that's

That's the whole challenge. So like, I feel like this thing, I'm changing the topic, I guess, but like, I feel this whole thing of like,

trying to become the kind of person who is actually a really can often be a big obstacle. It's a mind virus. Are you so, okay. So there is another cartoon that I've been thinking a lot about recently, which is him. He might be familiar with, but we'll, we'll flash it up on the screen and I will describe it for people who are listening on, on audio. It is like a big, like an elephant and like a baby elephant in a zoo.

and a kid is there with his dad and the kid points at the little elephant and says, you know, why is there like a chain around its leg? And the dad's like, oh, well, you know, the elephant is going to escape. Otherwise, you know, this is how they keep it there. And then the kid looks at the big elephant, at the mum elephant and says, why is there just a string around her leg?

and the dad's like well she's realized that she can't escape uh or something like that and it's like often the the the reason i think of this a lot is that often we chain ourselves with our own assumptions even though they're not may not entirely be true and and last night i was having dinner with dan who's my assistant and are like one of our one of our team members um and

I was saying to Dan, you know, I really wish I could get to the point where I could, I don't know, just go to Bali for a week to do like a writing retreat or something. And he was like, but you can, like you absolutely can. You know, this is your team, this is your business. We know that you can work remotely because we've done it. We know you can take Gordon with you so you can film videos while you're out there if you really need to. But like, you absolutely can. And I was like, damn.

Yeah, you're right. I just had sort of assumed that I had less control over my time than I actually did. And in a way, it was... In a way, it's comforting, I think, to think, I will write my symphony tomorrow. Totally. Once life becomes more blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And...

When we face up to the fact that, oh, crap, I actually could just do that. Then it's like, oh, hang on. There's something uneasy about that. No, absolutely. And I think it's important to say, like, obviously, the specific example is not open to everybody. Many people aren't in a position to go on a writing retreat to Bali for a week. But there is...

there is that same equivalent situation. I think we do it to ourselves all the time. It's related to that, it's kind of Jean-Paul Sartre and the idea of bad faith, right? This idea that like,

and it's in Heidegger as well, if you really want to get into the weeds of this, like this idea that we, that we, that we tell ourselves we don't have choices that we do have because it's actually much more scary to sort of face the choices that we do have. And like, no, if you're, you, and you have big, people have big, like you can, people can walk out of relate marriages. They can walk out of jobs. They can, they can,

like Make kind of kind of public statements that are going to get them totally cancelled You know that you can do this like the you say you can't do what you mean is

the consequences of it that you predict are are scary and They may well not be worth it in any given situation But but like these choices are always there there's a lovely quote from the psychotherapist Sheldon Kopp who? Has this whole list of life advice in back of one of his books and the one I always remember is You're free to do whatever you want. You have only to face the consequences right and and

And you can, I find this incredibly empowering because it's like, no, no, you can do almost anything within the bounds of the laws of physics and given my financial and temporal resources.

And some of them would have really, really bad consequences. So I definitely wouldn't do them. Yeah. And some of them would have somewhat bad consequences, like people being disappointed in me or angry or something. And they might totally be worth doing. Anyway, I slightly moved that on. I don't know if it's quite. No, no, I agree. Like, um, a few, a few, I think it was a few, a few months ago now I was, I was, I was, I was here on a weekend just cause this place was nice and I was in the moving house. Um,

And I was really thinking about kind of consequences of things. In particular, I was doing Tim Ferriss' fear-setting exercise on the what's really the worst that could happen, where I had this thought that, ooh, what if I just stopped caring about the view counts on my YouTube channel? And I just didn't let it affect me at all. What's the worst that would happen? Oh, okay. Let's actually kind of think about this and realize that actually...

you know, this is actually probably a good thing overall. And there is very few worst case scenarios here that I couldn't deal with. But I'd spent the last like four years kind of on autopilot, just assuming I had to care about the numbers and assuming that like how well a video does is some sort of factor that should make me feel more or less good depending on how well the video does. And I think it just like comes back to this thing of often

we're operating on these invisible scripts with these invisible shackles where at least at least in my life and in my experience like the things that i would want to do are not the things that actually have consequences that i can't handle it's just where i have made assumptions about oh i probably can't do this yeah yeah yeah no absolutely and i think there's a kind of a comfort as you say but also there's a sort of a false sense of control in worry right there's this idea that like if i

I think the reason that we worry on some level is because we think that we're somehow affecting reality through our worrying. And it's like, well, if I, if I let my hands off the controls, they're terrible things might happen. So I'm going to keep like, I'm going to keep like fretting about it. And the truth is, I think in, it's possibly a,

sort of universal truth or it's mainly just a It's maybe just generally true that like the terrible things that can happen in life like cataclysmic things can happen in life But they're not part of the they're not in the realm of the things that you might be worrying and controlling about right I mean like absolutely terrible things can happen but they will just be like you'll be blindsided by those and Stoicism has some ways to maybe be slightly less blindsided but but like

the things that we worry about, we're worrying about because we think that the worry somehow increases our control over them and it just doesn't. So you might as well not worry about them. Easier said than done. I think basically in every aspect of my life from, at least from the time that I remember vividly, like sort of end of school towards university and beyond,

I've had like every few months when I come across some article on Lifehacker about setting your goals and figuring out what you want. And I do like a, I don't know, visualization thing of like, you know, what do I actually want? Like, what does like a good day look like and stuff? Every time I do that, I just come up with stuff that I think there's no reason why I'm just not doing this now. Like, you know, at one point a few months ago, I decided that, you know, at some point I want to get into learning how to write songs.

I was like, I've got two hours right now. Like what's, what's stopping me? All right, cool. Let's just follow a tutorial on YouTube and, you know, download GarageBand or something and make a start on writing songs. Similarly, when it came to business stuff, when it came to deciding to get the studio space and building a team in person,

I just hadn't really thought about it. I was like, you know, I did one of those exercises where I was like, you know, what does your dream future look like five years from now? I was like, oh, it'd be really cool to, I don't know, have a studio or something where I don't have to have cameras and lights everywhere at home and to come in on a Monday. And, you know, there's a team there in person just like to brainstorm video ideas about and interview people in person. And I was like, damn,

why don't I just do this? Because before the assumption and the invisible assumption I've been operating on was that when you work with a team, they just have to be remote. And when you do a podcast interview, it has to be over Zoom. I think the pandemic kind of really contributed to this. But it was just such my model of the world was how can you possibly hire someone for an in-person job? And I mentioned this to someone, they were like, dude, do you realize that 99.99% of the workforce is in-person rather than remote? I was like,

I don't quite know where I was going with this, but yeah, just the, the, this idea of occasionally coming back to this idea of like, what do I actually want? And thinking, um,

What are the assumptions that I'm making that are stopping me from being there? And why don't I just do it right now rather than next quarter or next year, right? No, I think that's it's incredibly powerful and it just reminds me again of wanting to say like I think that it will feel uncomfortable to do that at first right because that because what you're doing if you decide to spend two hours doing the thing that you've told yourself you want to do one day learn songwriting, you know is You will be sort of stepping more authentically into the real situation of your life. It's not a dress rehearsal. It's here It's now

it's limited you better do these things that matter if you're going to ever do them and that will trigger some there'll be some anxiety or you'll think like oh i'm not really doing it properly now like i don't have what it takes to really get into this now i haven't found the right i've got the right equipment or something you know and you just have to sort of ride that out a bit because like yeah yeah it's oh so uh two two nights ago i was at an ed sheeran concert in in in london uh it was it

It was quite weird getting tickets for it because it was like only 2,000 people in like a tiny church and you had to like pre-order the vinyl of his album before it came out. And I don't have a vinyl player, but I pre-ordered the vinyl of his album anyway just to be able to enter this competition to get tickets. And we got tickets in the end and he said a very, very inspiring story. So he's got this new Christmas song out with Elton John. You've heard it. Absolute banger. I've had it on repeat ever since. And before he sang that song, he told the story of how that song came about. And he said that

For the last few years, apparently he and Elton are mates. So Elton's been being like, hey, you know, we should do a Christmas song together. And he was like, oh, you know, there's all others good Christmas songs out there. There's nothing we can add to the genre. You know, Elton, why don't you do it yourself? Or like, you know, maybe I'll think about a Christmas song in like 2023. And then he said that a few months ago, one of his best friends passed away.

And it made him realize that like, oh my God, you know, the finitude of existence and stuff. And why am I putting off like spending Christmas with Elton John doing this cool project with like my mentor and my friend where we get to dress up as like silly Christmas reindeers and stuff. Why am I putting that off? So let's just do it now. And he said that that realization was what made them put the song out this year rather than three, four, four, four years from now.

I just find that really inspiring of like, you know, actually, you know, the kind of the stuff that you talk about that life is short. And if you want to do something, then often there are relatively few barriers to actually let's just do it now. Yeah. And it's very easy to be like, oh, I will, I don't know, I'll write my symphony tomorrow rather than... Yeah, no, absolutely. I think it's, and I totally agree. Yeah. I wonder if we can talk a little bit about...

the end the practical stuff yeah because i was as i was listening to this i was like oh this would be a really good book to do a video about i was like oh crap i'm gonna figure out a way of like turning into practical advice and then very conveniently in the appendix yeah just use those yeah i was thinking like okay there are 10 main points of this video let's start with the philosophical stuff right shall we go over some of your 10 tools for embracing your finitude sure there's a nice little title for uh for this um so number one you say adopt a fixed volume approach to productivity what's

What's the deal with that? This is just like a general approach to work. And I point out in the book that, you know, Cal Newport is one of the people who's writing most in the most focused way about this stuff. I think where you where you sort of you put front and center your your capacities, your the amount of time you have, perhaps also your energy levels. You think about that first and then you think about fitting what you can into that box in terms of tasks, as opposed to.

absolutely must get through these 15 things today and I'm just gonna have to like Find a way to do it. So an obvious obvious example of this is yeah You you decide that you finish work at 6 p.m. Every day and then that creates sort of That creates a box that's available for work that day and then you think well What's most important stuff to fit into this box that I reasonably can obviously it doesn't get you totally past that problem of them

fitting trying to fit twice as many things into the box as as you actually can do but it but it puts your finitude first and says like okay these are the facts time is limited and

And then how am I going to respond to that situation today and make the best decisions as opposed to, yeah, like I've got to get through this amount of stuff, even if it's like literally, literally impossible that you ever could. Okay. Tip number two, serialize, serialize, serialize. What does that mean? Again, related same sort of idea, but this is sort of more longitudinal. This is this idea of limiting your work in progress. Make it choosing...

making if you've got multiple big projects to the extent that you humanly can doing one at a time finishing one before you move on to the next one and like expecting to that that will make you feel anxious about the ones that you're making wait

but understanding that that kind of willingness to feel that discomfort but to focus in this way is actually just a vastly more practical way to make more progress and that when you do the opposite of that and sort of try to do them all at once really you're just giving into this desire to feel limitless to feel like you're like taking care of business you're the air traffic controller of the world you know and

And it's a nice feeling, but it's actually not the path to getting more useful, meaningful stuff done. Nice. Love it. Oh, tip three, decide in advance what to fail at. And the credit here, as I say in the book, goes to a writer called John Acuff. But this is this lovely notion of like strategic underachievement where you say to yourself, look, life is finite and my capacities are finite. That means that I'm going to be failing at some things that I fail.

might otherwise succeed at that's just maths that's not that's not a criticism of anybody so if you then decide up front what some of those domains are going to be that's actually a much more sort of um uh peaceful and happy way to go through life because instead of instead of sort of getting to the end of the day and feeling terrible that the house isn't as tidy as you wanted it to be or that you didn't mow the lawn or something you'd be like no no

like you already decide for now, for this month, for this period of my life, whatever, I'm going to not be successful at keeping a tidy house. And so that one is off the table. And then you can focus your energies more on things that you do care about. I have, you know, spent long periods of my life thinking, I'm wishing I could get much better at cooking than I am. I'm really not a good cook. I think I can cook nutritious, basically nutritious meals from the point of view of like feeding my

son and then my wife tolerates those nutritious meals yeah and it's like actually realizing oh it's not going to happen anytime soon that i give this the thought and the practice that it needs huge liberation nice yeah i've been i've been saying that for the last like four years you know i really should do cooking this year

And I've just been living off takeaways. And I'm like, actually, you know what? That's actually fine for this season of my life. Right, right, right. As long as the belly doesn't get too large. Oh, we'll skip number four. Tip number five is consolidate your caring. I think one of the ways in which we are sort of induced by the modern world to do more than we can do is to care about more social, ethical, charitable issues than we possibly could. So especially with social media, you're going to find out about

vastly more crises around the world and good causes than you could possibly focus on and you're going to be and everyone's going to say that their cause is the most important one in the world because that's how the attention economy works you never get a fundraising email from a charity that says like this thing that we're focused on is the

third or sixth most important issue facing the world today so can you give us your money it's always got to be the first everyone's in a sort of arms race in that respect so I just think it's really useful for people who are who feel that pull of the duty to like be a good citizen not everyone does but like if you do to think like when you see the truth of this situation that there's more to care about than you possibly could

more than like the greatest saints in history were ever asked to care about because they didn't have global digital communication. That's when you can say, okay, well, I'm going to, maybe I'll pick one, two issues that really matter to me. I'll dedicate some time to activism, some money to supporting them. And then I will like proactively advocate

that the other ones are not my problem. Even though they could be really serious and involve a lot of human suffering. So you could say like, you know what? I'm actually not going to be thinking, worrying about what I can do for climate change, say, because actually the welfare of

is my focus, right? And it's not because the other one isn't really important. It's that like it makes more sense for you to sort of concentrate your limited energies in one and the other one to someone else. Yeah, yeah. I really like that. There's the...

an organization called Giving What We Can that has this pledge that I've taken, that I've made a few videos about, which is that the pledge to donate 10% of your income every year to cost-effective charities. And in this whole like effective altruism and stuff movement of like, hey, how can we do the most good with our resources? There is this idea of that

And yes, you could donate more. It could be 11 or 12 or 15 or 18. And while we're there, why don't you stop working at your job and volunteer at this thing? And while we're there, why not? Like, and the list just continues. And what they found is that, look, you know, we all have limited bandwidth to think about all of these things, which are really, really, really important. And so if we just set a rule for ourselves that, okay, without thinking about it, 10% of my income every year is going to go to

One of the charities that give well to org deems to be the most cost efficient. So against malaria foundation or schistosomiasis prevention or whatever. And recognizing that, yes, that means that there are some causes that will be underfunded. But not overly beating ourselves up about the fact that there's nothing we can do about those causes.

I think that's like a nice way of doing it, which is like kind of this, again, this middle ground idea. Ooh, tip seven, seek out novelty in the mundane. - Everyone older than about 25 has this experience of time speeding up as they get older, right? So that your childhood seems like summer's lasted forever. And then the older you get, the more rapidly time seems to pass, which is kind of really depressing.

And the usual advice on reversing it, that feeling is to like have lots of novel experiences because we process more data. We process from our experiences. The more, the more we remember them as lasting a long time. Um, but I'm sort of incorporating here a point from the meditation teacher, Shinzen Young, who points out that like, if you really focus on, if you, if you get better at training your attention to process more data from whatever you're doing, like that's another way to the same goal, right? So it's not just,

So it's not just that you have to go on like exotic trips all the time. That's great if you can. It's that you can also just like pay more attention to the things you're already doing and you will actually, life will feel more expansive in that sense. Tip number eight, to be a quote researcher in relationships. What's the deal with that? I really benefited from encountering this perspective because it's like, I think if you're,

like trying to exert too much control over life is a problem anywhere, but trying to exert too much control in relationships, um, whether it manifests as like you being a huge controlling jerk or you sort of withdrawing and being a commitment phobe, like they're both sort of two sides of the same coin. It doesn't work because other people are kind of endlessly mysterious and infuriating. And that's kind of like the whole, the whole sort of value and point of being relationships. So this idea that like of cultivating an attitude of curiosity, um,

So in the parenting context, that would just be, you know, can I if I've got like a couple of hours where it's me and my son and solo, can I sort of like ask, like, who is this person? Like, who am I getting to? Who is this person becoming? Like, what's he interested in? What could we what does he want to do that we could do together? You know, as opposed to either like I've got a plan and you've got to follow it, which is a total nightmare with small children or the flip side of that, which would be like, I don't know, you decide what to do.

I'm just here to look after you, which is also kind of like,

kind of asshole-ish so I think that sort of idea of like oh who is this person I'm getting to know and I think it works in all relationships it's really I'm not saying I'm really good at it but it's that sort of openness to whatever might happen instead of trying to have a strong preference for what should happen. Yes I think that really applies in like the dating world as well where I've certainly found that in the past I would go on a date with someone that I like being like oh I really want them to like me and now it's more of a

It's it's there's a little bit of that but now it's a little bit more on the side of I wonder what that's I wonder what this person is like I wonder how we'll connect and yeah I you know this idea of being a being a researcher like being genuinely curious to the experience rather than wanting an outcome and trying to push towards it Okay, so tip number nine is cultivate instantaneous generosity. I love this idea so much. I'm I really am so much a work in progress with it, but but I

Joseph Goldstein the meditation teacher has this has this this practice that if a generous impulse arises in his mind The practice is to try to act on it right away so if you have the thought like I should I'd like to give some money to that charity or I'd like to reach out to that friend and say how much I appreciate them or send someone some email about their work that you that you liked like I

do it then because what gets in the way over and over again is not that you sort of decide, Oh, actually they don't deserve your, they don't deserve it. We should, I should just keep quiet. What, what happens is you, it just gets, it just gets sort of entangled in the stuff of everyday life or in this idea that you're going to become the kind of person I was talking to someone the other day who's, who said like they'd made some,

pledge to themselves that they were going to try and like send one or maybe three i don't know it was like emails of praise to people who they really appreciated like every week or every day or something and of course the effect of that is to stop you just sending one email today because you're like oh i haven't got to the stage yet where i've really got that habit implemented so for now i'm just not going to do it at all whereas of course the thing you ought to do i think and i aspire to do is is to just don't

Don't worry about the kind of person you're becoming. Yeah. Send that one note. That's really good. This is like the exact trap that I fall into when, you know, this morning I was like, oh, I've just messaged this person who's been like a good kind of friend and mentor over the last year. I should get him something for Christmas. Okay, let me add that to my to-do list of

nice things to do so that I can bash those tasks and get them all out. I was like, oh yeah, I'm thinking about my old housemate. I should probably send her a message. You know what? Let's add that to the list so that when I get around to it, then I will just be able to do all this one go. But if instead we switch to the model of if it is something related to gratitude, then do it now, regardless of what is happening.

That will probably lead to a happy life. Yeah, and you'll be that person that you're waiting to become. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Nice. I love it. Okay, that's a very, like, I'm going to change that from like right now. And finally, tip number 10. Don't try even to do that perfectionistically, right? Because that's where it all goes wrong. Daily-ish. And finally, tip number 10, practice doing nothing.

I mean, I think this is just generally excellent advice, but I'm talking in that section about specifically about like non-directive meditation, this approach to meditation where you're not even trying to follow the breath. You're setting a timer, you're sitting there and you're not doing anything. And if you catch yourself doing something, thinking about something, following the breath and wriggling around, you're just like, just stop doing that thing. Keep stopping, keep stopping, keep stopping. Yeah.

It makes you see how Shinzen Yonkou's do nothing meditation. There are books calling it non-directive meditation. Whatever. It makes you see how hard it is to do. And it's probably impossible on some philosophical level to do nothing at all. But this sort of action of constantly sort of letting go of the thing that you're doing, doing nothing is really hard. And I think you sort of,

you can actually get some good cognitive training benefits quite, quite quickly from just a few minutes on a regular basis of really trying to do nothing. And breath following meditation, which is so useful in so many ways, it's kind of not, that's something different. And cause then you're sort of really, you can, there's a temptation to like really bear down on like, I'm going to become super focused, actually doing nothing for a few minutes. It's kind of the scariest thing in the world in a way. Okay. Wonderful. Okay. So we've got a bunch of questions.

about productivity and happiness and stuff off of the Instagram and the Twitter. So I'll just feed those to you and we can have a bit of a chat. Sure. So justgrace underscore says, how do you deal with procrastination?

that old chestnut yeah um well firstly i think everything we've been talking about here is is an answer to that and is an answer that question because i think a lot of procrastination has this perfectionistic motivation like i'm not going to start until i can know that i can finish or i know that i can do it well and so anything you can do to just sort of fall into reality instead is going to help you with um

With that I'm also really charmed by a technique that I came across in a I mean it's got other it Crops up in other places I'm really charmed by this technique that I came across in a book called and the more you do the better you feel By I think David Parker is the author. It's kind of an idiosyncratic Book yeah, but he just has this method of

he calls the just one thing method where you literally like write down on a on a piece of lined paper a thing you're going to do do it cross it out write another one immediately below it do it cross it out continue yeah it's really bizarre how this should possibly work given especially for those of us who have all our complicated kanban boards and all the rest of it but it's kind of like this is a powerful way to get yourself out of a rut it's just a sort of

narrow your time horizon down to like what is one thing that i'm gonna do do that thing cross it out yeah keep making the list longer yeah this is basically my method except that it's it's like genuinely just that one thing which is like you know the whole kind of what's the what's the most important thing i need to do today um my other my whole theory on procrastination is basically i think procrastination is a problem with getting started and

distraction is the thing that comes later once you've gotten started yeah and so

to beat procrastination, we just want to make it as easy as possible to get started. So like setting a goal within our control, making sure it's just what we've got. It's easy enough to kind of make the time for it. Lowering the bar as much as possible to embrace that it's probably going to be a bit crap, but like we do it anyway. And kind of even sometimes convincing ourselves that we're only going to do the thing for two minutes. Because once we've gotten started, then at that point, it's so much easier to keep going. It's actually just sitting down and starting to write the first words or whatever that feels like the hardest part.

Um, midwife's Ibby says, how can we think about time in a more healthy way? Like not in a race to the finish line kind of way. Again, I sort of want to gesture the whole conversation, the whole book. Yeah. But, uh, you know, I think that just seeing, just, just seeing the fact that the way we relate to time is, is not the only way, not the only way it's ever been done. Um,

about this notion that crops up in various philosophers that maybe it makes sense to say not that we have time but that we are time that we are this kind of little period of time from birth through to death and then you can't really be in a war or battle with that then because you've sort of

you're thinking about it completely differently. It's just, it's just the medium in which your life is unfolding. If the question was seeking a more practical answer than that, then I apologize. I think the answer in a more practical vein is, is just, you know, all the things we've been talking about to be incremental, to focus on one thing, to set the goal at an attainable level, all these things just sort of,

reduce the reduce the momentum of that race to the finish and bring you back to just doing the thing that you're doing right now nice love it um syra mahmoud underscore says what are your thoughts on the four-hour work week i'm assuming she means the book rather than the yeah i mean it had a big impact on me now i was a little bit rude about it at one point when i was uh writing this column uh

because I was a little bit rude about every successful productivity, but, but I think, you know, the, the sort of business money-making side of that was not something that I was, that particularly was my, was my thing, but the stuff about the Pareto principle, the stuff about like figuring out that like 80, that,

20% of the effort you put into things, 20% of the people that you deal with deliver 80% of the value, 20% of the, and 80% of the problems that you have come from 20% of the projects you're involved in that sort of thing. And those kind of, that was, I mean, it was like getting things done. I think it was like a really, really important, um,

sort of formative text in thinking about these things in this new way. You know, I don't think, to the best of my knowledge, Tim Ferriss does not claim that he works for four hours. And, you know, so I don't think anyone's getting to an actual four-hour work week. One of his recent podcast episodes was...

The audio for the presentation he gave at South by Southwest in 2007, just before the book came out and someone had found like the high quality audio of it. And it was just so interesting to hear like 15 years later him

from 15 years ago described the ideas in the book, which was all around the Pareto principle, this, you know, eliminating stuff. And I think, yeah, yeah, just really good. And I think for me, one of the books that had probably the single book that's had the most impact on my life. Yeah. Not for me, it was less from a productivity standpoint and more from like actually the business passive income lifestyle. And the other thing I remember from there is the idea of not deferring like the mini retirements idea is that that is totally like in tune with what I'm trying to get out here in the sense that it's about like not deferring

not endlessly deferring the moment of value in life to some point across the horizon, but taking it now for like going and doing that thing for a week instead of, instead of it always being in the future. Nice. Um, muck on one five, seven, six, one says, how did it feel to write the book? Was there any sort of regret that you had about your life while writing it?

Interesting. I mean, the process of writing the book was the process of kind of coming to understand what I believed about these things. So it was a sort of a therapeutic act. And I was I was sort of transformative in the sense that, like, I couldn't write it to the end until I'd kind of slightly become a different person. So it was very, very important for me. It was not just a question of like I'd figured these ideas out and now I was going to generously write them down.

for other people it was like this was the act of making big strides in my own sort of understanding of of all of this i'm not sure it's quite the question about regret looking back on it i would say if the question is do i regret anything about the process of writing the book which i'm not sure it quite was but then you know there were times in that process where i was

not a pleasant person to live with because I was so anxious about it or I was so deep in the ideas or I was so unsure if I could carry it off and things like that you know

And then, and then I think you become slightly sort of moody presence around your house. And that's, I don't think that was, so I think I made a lot of sacrifices to get this book written, but kind of my wife did as well a little bit. And she maybe didn't sign up for them in the same way that I had. So, uh, yeah, I want to ask you much more about that at lunch, like the whole process of writing a book. Um, anyway, uh, Noah Shod you underscore says, how do we stop the fear of missing out? Um,

factoring in our lives. Again, I really, I'm sorry, but I do think this is a perspective shift rather than a cool technique. And the perspective shift is this. The problem is not that the question is not how do you avoid the fear of missing out? The trick is to see that missing out is just completely guaranteed on an epic scale. Like,

even in eras before our own but especially in this one the mismatch between the time that you have and the time you'll have to take advantage of various opportunities and the number of those potential opportunities is just it's so crazy that like missing out is the basic situation in life you'll like if you do like three really cool things today there were an effectively infinite number that you didn't do so like that's great actually because then you can be like okay

That ship has sailed. Missing out is happening. Now, which of the infinite number of things that I could in principle do, shall I actually do? I think that's a really...

It's really helpful to sort of, and then you, then, then you can almost get to, in fact, I think you can get to the state of actually taking a sort of active joy in the fact that, um, that you're missing out because it becomes an affirmation of the things you do choose. If you just, if I decide to, if I feel like I sort of have to stay at home at night and give my son a bath and put him to bed, there's room for resentment. But if I see that like,

I could have done various things and I chose on some level to do this one. I mean, choice is a little awkward in parenting because you sort of like had to happen, but there is choice involved. If you can see that you're sort of willingly missing out on other things because missing out is inevitable, then you can sort of really become more absorbed in the thing you choose to do.

do yeah it's like the difference between uh have to and get to exactly right right yes seeing life seeing life as a to-do list you have to get through versus a menu that you're that you're choosing get to choose from yeah yeah i really like that and i guess like i guess recognizing this is important in in other areas of life as well for example one thing that alain de botton often often talks about when it comes to romance is that if we marry someone

And we think that we're never going to be attracted to anyone else ever again. We're just setting ourselves up for failure because of course there are a zillion people around the world that you could be attracted to and you probably would be attracted to. But the fact is that you've chosen to spend your life with this one person and embracing that rather than trying to go against it or thinking that it shouldn't happen is kind of this idea of kind of the joy of missing out. Yes, I am choosing to miss out on these other potential, you know, dalliances or whatever the phrase is. Yeah. Yeah.

All right. Adua Tajwa says, what is the midpoint of being comfortably busy, but not too busy in your mind? That's really interesting. In the book I write about, I think this might pass many people in the audience by, but I write about Richard Scarry's children's books. Were they part of your childhood? Richard Scarry is an American illustrator who wrote these books called part of a series called Busy Town.

And they're just like these great super detailed spreads of like city life, but all the people in them are animals. So like, you know, the grocery is run by a family of pigs and the firefighters are raccoons, I think. And it's all, and they're all, the whole point is that everyone's really busy. But the kind of busy that they are is not, is that they have tons to do. And you just get, and like you get the sense from how they enjoy their business that they also think they've got about the right amount of time to do all these things, right?

They're not overwhelmed. He didn't call it Overwhelmed Town, which would have been a kind of weird title for a series of children's books. And I think that I bring this up, even though it's a cultural reference that might pass most people by, because there's something really beautiful about that. It's not bad to be busy. People, you know, elderly people sometimes talk about like,

being busy as as a positive in their lives you know it's like how are you doing well it's good i'm keeping busy you know there's lots of lots of things going on it's like the midpoint is being active in the world is great having a whole ton of things you want to achieve is great thinking that you're going to achieve more of them than it is going to be temporarily possible for you to achieve that's where you you go over that um that boundary so um you know

filling life with activities is a great thing. I don't think that necessarily having nothing on your to-do list would be a desirable state at all. Yeah, I think the way I think of this is sort of like...

climate rather than weather in that on a given day i might be very quote busy like jumping from one meeting to another to another thing to another thing having breakfast lunch dinner and coffee with different people all in one day and that would be exhausting if it happened every day but it's quite exhilarating once in a while yeah and so if i i like to sort of casually think about you know the these last couple of weeks how how has my calendar felt how has my schedule felt

And if that's like broadly-ish, yeah, reasonable. Then that's fine. Because I think there is a trap of overthinking. Like, oh, on this day, I felt particularly overwhelmed because of ABC. It's like, oh, I mean, seasons of life, seasons of the week. Like, it's all good. Yeah, right. And there's a very great tendency to think, like, if a day goes...

If a day goes stressfully, oh no, is my life going to be like this every single day for the rest of my existence? And likewise, that if a day goes really well and balanced in a balanced way, like, oh, I've got to make sure every single day is like this for the end of, to the end of my existence. Yeah. Not helpful thoughts. Yeah. It's kind of like the weird, weird analogy, but like when it comes to posture for sitting and stuff,

you know, everyone obsesses over finding the perfect posture, but in fact, the perfect posture is the next one. And like just changing your posture every hour is by far the best thing you can do rather than getting the perfect ergonomic chair, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Uh, and I think similarly with this sort of stuff, like,

actually as long as there is some balance like oh what you don't what you probably don't want is a you know very very very rigid schedule where every day is the same there is it's nice to have some level of messiness in it yeah that's kind of what brings the life into it um and just being a little bit more like oh pencil sketch about it rather than inking it in yeah i guess yeah um okay question we got a question from twitter from aparna gurudwan

How do we decide what matters? As we make most of our decisions based on our current understanding of the world and we can't predict the future, how do we know that what matters to our present selves will matter to our future self? I mean, I think the first thing to say, I'm such a downer, is that you can't know. So, you know, we're all in the situation of like feeling our way from one moment to the next.

But this is where I get to mention one of my favorite questions, which I also mentioned the book from the union therapist, James Hollis, who recommends that people ask of certain life choices they're facing, but I think you could apply it here. Does this choice enlarge me or diminish me? And it's a kind of a weird phrasing, but it's as an alternative to like, will this make me happy or unhappy? Right. There's this, there's something about the phrasing of this question that sort of

I think that most people even if you don't know whether what you're doing right now with your life is is like as making as happy as you could be Even if you don't know if it's the right thing or not according to some value system You've inherited you kind of can answer the question like am I am I on a path of enlargement at the moment? Am I sort of in some sense like growing? Yeah, and what's so helpful about that to me is that like there's lots of times on a path of Meaning and enlargement that are not going to be fun. Yeah, and

So you could, you know, if you're experiencing certain kinds of tensions and difficulties in a relationship, like this question helps you divide between the kind of difficulties that are like, oh, this is a toxic relationship. You need to get out of it. And those which are like, yeah, like,

becoming closer to somebody in a relationship is tough and it has interesting difficulties and you become a bigger person as a result of them. And like, you've got to be able to distinguish between those two kinds of difficulties in life because one kind you want to get rid of, but the other kind is like totally crucial to, to, to growth. And that question, like,

you know whether the job you're in at the moment is like hard and challenging and not always fun but it's something that is taking you somewhere you want to go versus like it's just making my soul wither by the day and I need to change radically you know yeah I guess let's say and again maybe this is similar to that rocks thing but if you're on if you've got like multiple options and they all feel enlarging in some capacity

Um, like, like for example, I guess kind of thinking selfishly, I could decide that I want to take the American medical exams and do residency in the U S and do

do practice medicine and that would be enlarging in some capacity I could decide to apply for an MBA at Harvard or Stanford and that would be enlarging in some capacity I could decide to actually focus in London and grow the team and that would be enlarging in some capacity decide to double down on the book like there's all these different options for like for things where all options are feasibly reasonable and feasibly enlarging like really life is not like long enough to do all of the things any thoughts

Any thoughts there? Wow, yeah. Like partly I want to like deliver advice to you here. And then the other part, I'm just like, no, I know exactly how you feel like about in a different context. It's like, it's not easy. Well, firstly, like one response to that is just to say, great, then it's fine. It doesn't matter which you choose. Yeah, that's a good point. They're all going to be enlarging. And then the other would be that, you know, if you imagined yourself in those different paths and you maybe, you know, went to a,

Quiet place outdoors somewhere and journaled about them for a bit Would they all stay in that way or would you would you start to be able to distinguish the degree to which other? people's or parental or societal agendas were were Influencing one or another because like one thing that's so interesting about the specifically medicine right is that this is a this is a This is a career that attracts very large numbers as far as I can tell of two kinds of people number one people who find it very

and profoundly meaningful to be doing what they're doing in medicine. And the other one, people who are like trying to please their parents who really wanted them to be doctors. Or like society that recognizes doctors as a good thing. So that's kind of really interesting. Like which side of that are you on? Yeah, that's so fascinating. How does one get over an unproductive rut? I am going to repeat myself here because the answer is that just one thing thing, I think part of the answer anyway. It's that idea of like,

Just drain all the if you can drain all the angst out of this just like what is a single thing? There's a quote actually it's in it's in Jordan Peterson's book 12 rules for life And so I've mentioned it occasionally and like people get cross because he's a very divisive figure But he says this very non divisive thing at one point which is you know, um

What is one thing that you could do and would do right now to add a tiny bit more order to your life? And this is where they're sort of like making your bed. Yeah. Um, cult comes from like figure out that thing, do that thing, reward yourself for doing that thing, rinse and repeat. Um, I think that's really helpful if you're absolutely kind of paralyzed, if it's, you're really in the kind of like not doing anything at all kind of rut.

If it's a more sort of long-term rut, I think, again, then something that is really helpful in the same vein is to, of a creative rut, which was a question, I think, right, like, is to sort of take the creativity question out of it. So, like, if you're feeling like, I can't, I haven't got any inspiration for my creative work,

then I think it's really powerful to just get quantitative about it and be like, I'm going to produce X number of words or one picture per however long and to sort of turn it into quantities and take out the kind of, if you're feeling uninspired, I think seeking to feel inspired is not the way forward. Just like turning it mechanistic into something you can do for a couple of weeks while you wait for inspiration to return is probably the answer. Yeah, yeah. I think also like I'm reminded of a...

I think Seth Godin was saying this to Tim Ferriss when Tim was like, oh, Seth, I'm not writing anything. I feel unproductive. And he was like, well, show me your bad writing. And he was like, well, I haven't done any. It's like, well, that's your problem. Where I think often a rut of some description is in, is somewhat on the spectrum of perfectionism of like, you know,

I only want to do this thing if it will, if it will be good enough. That's like, well, just do a bad version of it. Like do a bad version of cleaning your room, do a bad version of reading a book. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm also thinking of another thing. There's a lovely blog post that I go back to again and again by, um, Susan Piver, the Buddhist teacher who, and it's, the headline is something like getting things done by not being mean to yourself. And it, and it, um, it, it relates to this, it relates this experience she had of sort of really wanting to be the person who like lived by that credo of like, um,

amateurs wait for inspiration and the rest of us just get down to work and how that turned for her into this kind of aggression towards herself and that actually sometimes if you weren't going to do anything anyway because you're in such a rut then you might as well ask the question like what would be most fun to do today because it's not going to be worse than sitting doing absolutely nothing and feeling miserable yeah

Yeah, I often find this in the evening sometimes where it's like, I can choose to be dissatisfied with what I've done for the day, or I can choose to just simply choose to not be dissatisfied with that. I just do something fun. Often it's just a conscious choice of like, do I want to continue to tell the story to myself that beats myself up about this thing? Because either way, it's not going to change how much I've done. Right, right. No, exactly. What is going to change is how I feel about myself, which is all that matters. And I sometimes like, I sometimes argue this point with my mom where she says, you know,

oh, the only reason you're saying that is to make yourself feel better about yourself. I was like, well, yes, that's the point. I wouldn't tell myself that story. But yes. Anyway, final question from Twitter. I guess the question is in two parts. One, is it worth underscore times five in Buran says, is it worth pursuing something that matters to me, but isn't sustainable to do, but might be in the future? I can sort of think, I can sort of imagine context where that might

Apply right you yeah, you kind of there might be things you really want to do You don't think you can make them pay for example, and they're really important to you But maybe one day you could make them pay. Yeah, I mean I mean

um yes yeah i mean i i think i think it's i think it's worthwhile to do things that matter that's virtually a tautology and and you know one way to think about that is not to define mattering as and i do get into this section but i don't define don't set a don't set a definition of mattering that is so high that almost everything worthwhile in life fails by comparison against it so for some people that's like

don't, some people like don't think that they can be novelists if they can't be Tolstoy. And some, so it's that sort of like, you know, historic level kind of mattering, but other people might say like, you know, what's the point in spending the next two years doing X? Because I don't think I can, I don't think it's feasible to spend the next 40 years doing X. Well,

There might be reasons to not do that depending on your sort of highest goals for your life, but that's not a good reason to decide that something doesn't matter. Yes. It can matter to do for a couple of... It can matter seasonally. Absolutely. It can matter for a couple of years and then you move on to something else and it mattered. Because otherwise, again, you're just sort of storing everything up to this like alleged deathbed moment. Yeah. No, I think... Is everything great now? I think this is a trap a lot of people fall into, which is... And I certainly do as well, which is the...

if I cannot do this forever, there's no point doing it now. Like, oh, I don't want to start a YouTube channel because I'm not going to be a YouTuber in my 50s. Like, well, okay. That's not a good reason to not start a YouTube channel. Maybe there are other reasons, like you're scared or you don't see the value of it or whatever. But like, I don't see myself doing this 30 years down the line is absolutely not a good reason. Similarly, when it comes to

you know, one thing we're talking about with Gordon, who's been a personal trainer for 12 years, is can we do like a sort of body transformation for me over a period of maybe six months where, you know, work out four times a week, eat super healthily, try and, I don't know, get on the cover of Men's Health Magazine just for the bants. And it's not sustainable, like obviously, but that's fine. It doesn't need to be. It's a bit of fun to happen in the short term. And even then it will probably, if it happens,

which it will it's going to promote like healthy eating and it's going to promote some good habits yeah recognize it yeah which yeah and like what is life other than like some episodes of things that you do until you're not doing them anymore right so you might as well make them meaningful ones in the moment yeah yeah absolutely um and finally what are your thoughts on the idea that oh okay so there was this tweet that came out a few days ago i suspect the person who wrote the tweet did it

Like knowing that this was going to rile people up the wrong way. Okay. And lots of people have become riled up the right way. So I'll just read the tweet. That's the use of Twitter. Yeah, quite hot take. The easiest way to put yourself behind in life is going traveling for months on end in your early twenties to quote, find yourself. It's an absolute success killer and puts you behind the majority. Why waste the key years of your life meant for building and getting ahead?

So that's the tweet, which lots of people are dunking on because it's just obviously bad. And I guess this person wants you to also dunk on that. Like, what are your thoughts on the fact that exploring yourself is like a success killer and want to get ahead in life? Get down to business. Yeah. Found Theranos. Yes. Be on your way. Exactly. Well, the first thought I have about that is that like, it's obviously nonsense from a certain perspective, which is the perspective I know most naturally want to take.

There might be industries where that is like true relative to that industry. Like, I don't know. And I wouldn't want to like give people terrible advice because I don't know their industry. I can, I'm sure there are like places where the path of advancement is structured in such a way that that becomes true for that industry. I think it's pretty true in medicine. Right. You spend your 20s like striving for this thing such that you can then enjoy life in your 30s or 40s.

So first you have to see that it's relative to that industry. So the question is, does success in that industry matter to you more than anything else and matters to you more than exploring and finding yourself in your twenties? And it might do. Um,

And then if it turns out that that was the wrong path, you can always go and explore and find yourself in your 40s. I mean, like, plenty of people do that. But no, I mean, it's obviously not, it's a comment that, you're going to tell me now it's made by some, like, close friend or somebody I want to like me or something. No, not in the flesh. I don't know who that tweet is from. It's all good, random. That, like, it's an observation that takes as read precisely the thing that we're,

like what should be debating here, which is like, what is a meaningful life for you? It's, it assumes that professional advancement in the industries where this applies is the thing that matters the most. And then it says, well, don't do this other thing. It's like, maybe if you're someone for whom, what matters, um,

Sifts out that way, but if you're not then it's kind of ridiculous So I think it mainly just shows that that kind of very specific advice then offered to literally everyone Yeah, as if it were applied to them all is just is is is crazy I did I don't really know if we've if we kind of touched on this But do you have a theory on how to how to figure out what actually matters to us big question? Yeah, I mean well the enlargement and diminishment stuff that we talked about is a part of it and then I was very

conscious and deliberate writing this book for example of not wanting to offer a laundry list a lot wanted to be like Oh Relationships time spent in nature getting enough sleep, you know, it's like either people know all that anyway, or it's gonna be lost in the many way Right, whatever, you know, so I can't help you with that And I'm not necessarily a sort of great Exemplar of it either. I do I think basically I

Most people certainly my real experience of this question is just in terms of how it how it goes in life It's not a question of like you you spend a week at a retreat and you figure the answer to sound you never return to it Lots of books that I remember criticizing in my early days in the color the garden column You know, they give this idea that you're gonna it's like first of all figure out your like a cool life Yeah, once you've done that and you're like hold on a second. I

yeah like and i think that seeing it as seeing these things as part of as a as a as a part of the journey that is always there on the journey right so i think like i think it's helpful to think of the process of being alive and moving through life as the process of clarifying what a meaningful life is for you um instead of this i mean i'm not saying it can't help sometimes to like go and spend two days coming up with a vision statement but like that

that's going to then change and have to adapt within, within days. Presumably. I think that idea that you're going to sort it out, that we all have a single stable purpose, and then you've got to just spend the rest of your life executing on this insight you had. I just, I don't know anyone for whom that worked that way. And it certainly didn't for me. Yeah. Great. I've tried all these exercises and they're just like, some of them have, have, have been useful, but in the sense that, um,

They just give clarity and they encourage us to ask the sorts of questions we just wouldn't normally. Right. But I think, I just come back to that, like a tightness of gripping metaphor that you said earlier, which is that gripping too tightly to a vision statement or values or anything like that. It's not that the values are the problem. It's that the tightness of gripping is the problem. Yeah. And we relax our grip and be a little bit more chill about it. Yeah. Yeah. And it's great to put time and thought into...

you know, your plan that is just a statement of intent in the present moment. It's thinking that your plan is anything more than that. Yeah. There's a problem. Nice. So we normally wrap up with a series of just some quick fire questions. The question number one, what piece of advice would you give to your younger self? The feel of this is very easy. I'm trying to phrase it right. I mean, it's basically, it's basically something like you don't need to struggle so hard to like justify your existence on the planet.

Nice. A little bit candid. That's good. I love it. Who has had the biggest influence on your career? That is a really hard question to answer. I think that two editors at The Guardian, Ian Katz and Meripy Mills, probably had the biggest opportunities they offered me or things they saw that figured out that I could do under their guidance probably made the biggest difference. But

they're also like the very first people who got me my very first start before that. And then my parents, like I could answer that question a million ways. What is one tip for someone looking for success? Wow. Um, yeah. Uh, um, uh, focus on one thing at a time. Nice.

What does the first and last hour of your day look like? Whole day as opposed to working day. I've talked about my first hour, get up about 5, 5.30ish, drink coffee, write in my journal. Last hour is sort of stumble around in a bleary-eyed state, sort of closing down the house and having sort of probably read to my son and then...

sort of reading or listening to podcasts until I fall asleep. It's not very interesting. That's good. It's the truth. Yeah. The productivity gurus. What's one physical thing, maybe under a hundred pounds or thereabouts that has added disproportionate value to your life? Well, the tiny little digital kitchen timer that I think was 20 pounds that I carry everywhere and have in my bag right now is certainly, I do use that for like sort of various things.

ad hoc time boxing operations. So that's at that price point. - Instead of your phone? - That's probably true.

yeah i just it's it's separate yeah it's like my phone can be put away while i'm focusing it buzzes yeah i it doesn't have doesn't lure me into other things it's it's single single task technology i'm really i'm really yeah you talk about that and i'm really as well um at a different price point it's not under 100 but it just relates i'll just mention it if you're interested i i have this um

this tablet called remarkable oh do you like it i i'm loving it no way i tried it for a few weeks and went back to the ipad like why why do you like it uh it's just yeah it's just so quiet you know it's like mentally quiet it's just like i'm not going to click away to other things it's just paper except it has a few benefits and a few downsides compared to paper but like that and it's just like it's physically a pleasure to it is nice to write to write on yeah

Maybe I should dust off my Remarkable 2. No, maybe it's not for you. Because I do really like the Kindle for that, like, as opposed to reading on a phone or an iPad just because there's zero chance of getting distracted. Yeah. And the only thing I could get distracted by is another book, which is...

a good distraction right exactly you end up sort of like searching the kindle store in order to not focus on the book you're reading but that's okay that's it fine um what book other than your own would you recommend to anyone at a certain point in life i would recommend a book called finding meaning in the second half of life by james hollis who i've mentioned although um

there may be people in the audience here who are like, it's a bit of a midlife kind of second half post 40 or post marriage. Uh, well, I mean, midlife in the union sense, uh, it can be anything from like about 35 to 70, I think when, when that sort of moment comes. So like, you know, it's probably not for people in their early twenties, though. James Hollis has written things that could be for definitely could be for everyone. Um, I'm just trying to think if there's a, if there's a book that, uh,

Yeah. So what's something you'd recommend to me? Like you've had a look at my bookshelf. We broadly read the same stuff. Yeah. Is there anything kind of a bit off the beaten track? Like maybe that didn't hit the New York Times list that you found really interesting. Let me think. I will get there. I'll just need to, you'll need to cut out the bit where I'm just sitting here looking up into my brain. It seems like you read a lot of philosophy stuff, which I haven't read. Like I feel like I need to start reading a bunch of this stuff because it all is, is, is all the stuff that we read about just a thousand years ago.

Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, and certainly the Stoics in the original are really, that's not a problem to read. Heidegger, I kind of made a show in the book of how difficult it was to grapple with Heidegger. I do not recommend that people, like, go and read Being in Time just for...

because that is so crazy. On the writing front, it's not a new observation at all, but Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott is a really, really good book about writing. Sound like you haven't heard of it. Wow, we can introduce it to a new generation. Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird, Instructions on Writing and Life.

Oh, sick. All right. I'll get that on Kindle right now. I guess the next question is more like applies to entrepreneurs, but I guess in your case, you are basically an entrepreneur. If you lost everything, let's say you got canceled, you lost all your money, lost all your following, didn't have the books, didn't have the publishing deals, what would you do to rebuild? I guess it would depend how canceled I was because, you know, the thing that I would do...

based on my skills and contacts right now is i would reach out to various editors for whom i've written things in the past and see if they wanted me to write but if i've been if the idea is that i've been cancelled so much that none of them will talk to me yeah or that it's kind of in this hypothetical version you're kind of starting from scratch right yeah you don't have anything other than the skills that you've developed right yeah that's interesting on one level i sort of have

explored all these different areas and I feel like I know quite a lot about quite a lot of different areas but on another level there is one skill that I have which is like talking to a bunch of people reading a bunch of stuff and turning it into pieces of writing so I think I would have to like so I guess how is the idea of the ideal answer sorry to make a heavy one no of course is the idea that you're going to say you're going to find a totally different profession where the same things apply or is it just that you like start again because I think I probably would have to just like write stuff yeah I mean that makes a lot of sense for it to

I guess the question is sort of aimed at sort of people in their probably early twenties or late teens who are trying to figure out what to do with their lives and want to find like a path to, I don't know, salvation. I mean, I think, you know, I think I'm fascinated. I don't think I'm not saying I could do it. I'm kind of fascinated because I think I'm probably too self-centered, but I'm fascinated by the career of, by the careers of like,

Psychotherapists, psychoanalysts, people like that. I think that would be very, very interesting. I could probably be an academic of some kind, but I'm not sure I'd want to be. I'm really lamely answering this question. I don't know is the answer. How hard would it be to get... How hard is it for someone to be a professional writer these days? If that makes sense as a question.

I mean, it depends on what you mean. If you mean, can you make exclusively make a handsome living solely off the income from books themselves? Then that's a very small number of people, I think. Or it's people who are so frugal that they're able to make their book advances spread out over multiple years. But I guess as a writer, there are other business models. Right. No, no. And if you mean, you know, if you mean have a book, get an advance for the book.

build an audience, do certain kinds of paid work that you wouldn't have got in the absence of the book. Like, I mean, there are more of them and I'm one of those people, I think now, um, probably more than I am a freelance journalist in terms of the day-to-day content of my work. But if people think it's like you sell, you sell like millions of books and you make huge amounts of money on each one, like none of that applies, uh, except maybe to like, you know, five people on the planet. Yeah. It's like, I think, I think it's kind of how

being a youtuber yes there are five people on the planet who are making stupid amounts of money off the back of their youtube channels but there are plenty more who are making stupid amounts of money off the back of the youtube channel plus the other things that obviously of that and just thinking more intelligently about the business model and maybe making a course maybe writing a book maybe like sort of doing the other stuff that becomes available as an offshoot off of sharing something you enjoy and building an audience around that thing i think if i if i lost all the things i would probably just

do that again because it's a skill like and it just takes some time and it's kind of fun and so yeah yeah yeah again i'm responding to the thought experiment by questioning the premises of the thought experiment which is an obnoxious thing to do okay what feel free to question the premise of this but uh what quote or mantra do you live by there isn't just one that i'm thinking of every single day but the ones that spring to mind

partly i've mentioned james hollis does this choice enlarge me or diminish me uh shell and cop um you're free to do what you want you have only to face the consequences and um uh a question that i think i i i'm borrowing from a conversation i heard sam harris talk about he wants his is once having where he was moaning about his problems in his work or something to somebody and she responded like hold on do you think you're

Are you under the impression that one day you're going to get to a stage in your life where you don't have problems? So some formulation of that, it's like, no, the problems are, I quote my wife now, but like sometimes when I'm complaining about the problems that are keeping me from getting down to the meat of my job, she'll say, based on her own understanding that she learned in her own work, like, no, no, the problems are the job. And like, that's a very freeing thing to realize that like,

you're not going to get to the point of without problems. That's not a mantra. Wow. That's a long mantra. 350 word mantra. Yeah. The problem is that the problems never really go away. They just change in their like glamorousness. Right. And you get to choose some really great ones if you're lucky, but there's still problems. And finally a journey or destination that I've got to question that dichotomy. Okay. I, you know, I, I don't accept the distinction between,

What do I mean by that? I'm not sure what I mean by that. Let's just say journey. But I think that there's something of the destination in every moment of the journey. There you go. Join my cult. I love it. All right, Oliver. Thank you so much. This has been an absolute joy. It's been a pleasure. Anything you'd like to plug to the audience? We will have links to the book, guys. Read it or get it on Audible. Because you...

read the audiobook narrated by me the book is available all the places you'd expect to buy books um and then at my website oliverberkman.com there's more stuff and you can sign up to my email newsletter which i call the imperfectionist oh it's nice it's a good name

Thank you. I love it. All right. Thanks Oliver. Cheers. And thanks for listening everyone. We'll see you later. All right. So that's it for this week's episode of Deep Dive. Thank you so much for watching or listening. All the links and resources that we mentioned in the podcast are going to be linked down in the video description or in the show notes, depending on where you're watching or listening to this. If you're listening to this on a podcast platform, then do please leave us a review on the iTunes store. It really helps other people discover the podcast. Or if you're watching this in full HD or 4K on YouTube, then you can leave a comment down below and ask any questions or any insights or any thoughts about the episode. That would be awesome. So yeah, thank you very much for listening. I'll catch you hopefully in the next episode.