027: Time Management for Mortals with Oliver Burkeman

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This is your time. How can we earn twice as much in half the time with joy and ease while serving the highest good? That is our guiding question here at the Freetime Cafe, your home for heart based business. I'm your host, Jenny Blake. Join me for conversations with authors, friends and fellow business owners as we explore ways to free your mind, time and team to do your best work. Now onto today's show.

Hello everybody. I am jumping out of my chair with glee to have Oliver Berkman here on the show. Oliver is the author of the antidote Happiness for People who Can't Stand Positive Thinking which came out in 2012. He was an award winning feature writer for the Guardian where he wrote a long running weekly column on psychology. Always one of my favorites. This column will change your life. Do yourself a favor and go peruse those archives. And today we're talking about his brand new book, 4000 Time Management for Mortals. Oliver, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for asking me. It's a pleasure to be here.

I was so happy to see this book. And I remember when I interviewed you for the Pivot podcast, you had just come out with the Antidote and it was one of my favorite books because it was this like kind of counterintuitive contrarian perspective on how to be happy, which is stop trying to be happy. And I was really excited. I remember after we stopped hitting record, you told me, I think my next book is going to be about time. So I'm wondering, don't you feel like when you set out to write a book, kind of the book conspires to make you learn that thing in your own life somehow? I don't know if I'm explaining this well, but I'm curious what your experience has been since then, tackling such a massive and timeless topic as time.

Yeah, I think that's a really interesting way of putting it. The way I always think about it is that it's like you have to undergo the relevant personality change to get to the point where you can, where you can finish the book. So yeah, you sort of set out.

With a sort of a guiding philosophy that you might understand intellectually and you do a bunch of research, but you can't actually see the thing to completion until you have changed in some way. And in the case of, of this book, this new book, that's to do with, you know, learning to have a relationship with time that isn't all about trying to achieve total control and mastery over it and trying to be so efficient that there's. There's no demand that you can't handle and becoming a sort of completely soulless efficiency machine. I sort of had to. It's like I knew at the beginning, setting out that that was something I had to overcome, but I couldn't finish the book until I had in fact made at least some steps in the direction of overcoming it.

What interested you about this topic in the first place?

I mean, on some level I feel like the topics I pick, I always think, like, how could anyone not be interested in them? How could you not be interested in the idea of how to feel happy about the world and your life? And how could you not be interested in trying to get the most out of your time to build a sort of truly meaningful life? So it doesn't feel hard to come up with a topic that is compelling to me. I think what is true is that there are always things that I have struggled with or am struggling with to some extent. I think probably. I don't know if you agree with this, but like things that come completely easily to you are just not interesting topics for.

That's so true. That's so true. Because you wouldn't even notice. It just wouldn't cross your radar as interesting in any way because it's something in your unconscious awareness like you've. Whatever you. I know that feeling exactly. Like whatever you've mastered, you wouldn't really.

Notice right now when I try to think about what have I always been just completely unproblematically good at? I don't know, spelling. Like I don't want to write that book.

Going to coffee, drinking coffee, that would be one of mine. I know. Well, you said it. You said the requisite personality change. And I find that so interesting because you set out on this hero's journey or creative's journey, I think writing a book because it is such a meaty, time intensive, complex type of task. What surprised you so from the time, I know at the time of this interview you've actually just shipped your final edits, they're off to press. What surprised you in this journey of really trying to understand how to look at time differently, away from the efficiency and sort of productivity hack obsessions that our culture seems to have.

Well, I mean, a few things happened in the world and in my world over the course of writing this that made a huge difference to thinking about it. So in the world in general. The idea for this book preceded the period beginning, I think, really with the 2016American presidential election, also perhaps a little earlier with the Brexit vote in the uk, where world events suddenly started to seem for a lot of people, I think, much more sort of to work their way into their daily lives. It was not really so easy. It felt like in the last few years, and goodness knows, with the coronavirus pandemic, not so easy to just screen all of that out, to ignore the news and focus on your own personal project. So when it comes to. When it comes to the question of how to use time in the most meaningful way, there is this whole dimension of like, what are my roles as a citizen? What are my roles as a. As a person who cares about various political and environmental and all sorts of other issues. Issues outside of my immediate domain. And then inside my immediate domain, my wife and I had a son. So the. The experience of becoming a parent is certainly one that completely rewires your relationship with time. I don't really write all that much in this book about parenting or parenthood because I want it to be relevant to people, whoever they are. But I think there are lessons from that come from that, especially on this sort of master governing topic of how much control over your time. It is, you know, most reasonable and most productive to. To seek to obtain.

Oh my gosh, I was laughing at the part of the book where you talk about the Generally, there are two parenting philosophies.

Remind me the names of them. I remember one's kind of like the be go with the flow. And then the other one's like, be really strict and structured.

Yeah, I think I call these the natural parents and the baby trainers. Right. And this is very, very obvious if you look at the literature in this area. There are the people who say, like the baby trainers, get your kid onto a schedule. You can do sleep training, cry it out, you know, at like any age, practically after a few months, it's all about just like smooth running and getting the household back to normal and you doing your work and lalala. And then there's the natural parents, which. The approach that's called attachment parenting, although I think that's actually a misunderstanding of the psychological idea of attachment. But Anyway, this idea that it's all about, you know, the mother should sort of wear the baby in a sling all through the day. You all gonna co. Sleep together in the same big bed, you're probably gonna carry on breastfeeding until a kind of like really quite eyebrow raising age of the child. And all these kind of, all these kind of things that, that, that make a reference very often in these books to, to either historical indigenous societies or to present day indigenous societies. As if, as if we should obviously be emulating these people who are then very stereotypically drawn. And both of these approaches are obviously they are, this is time management. This is a question of how you use the crucial early years of a baby's life. And I think what really struck me about both of them was how completely focused on the, on the future they were, how completely focused they were on the person that your kid was going to become, which is very, very important. But I think it really speaks to something that goes a lot more broadly through time management. Right. It is about this idea that everything we're doing in how we apportion our time and what we focus on is in aid of some moment in the future, never now. And in fact this moment is never quite reached. It's always on the horizon when you're gonna kind of like cash out the benefits of everything you've been doing. And it's a sort of ultimately, if you take that too far, I think it's a really, really soul destroying way to live.

Very well said. And it strikes me that the, I mean, soul destroying is what it is because we're completely out of our present. It's hard to appreciate things while they're happening. We're working for a future that never arrives. And you say in the book we treat our plans as though they are a lasso thrown from the present around the future in order to bring it under our command. But all a plan is, all it could ever possibly be is a present moment, state of intent. And you mentioned parenting, which I think it's almost like, you know, God gives us kids. Not that I have kids, but I have a dog. But God gives us kids, so, so we learn to stop trying to control everything and control time. And I hear from a lot of parents, they'll say that they learn to say no. They become much more strategic with how they use their time and they learn patience and they learn that they don't have total control as you write in the book as well. And so it seems like these are some of the lessons that we are meant to learn about time and that we sort of reach them in different ways, kids being a big one. But you also talk in the book about this tension that I definitely experience that the more sort of priceless commitments I have in my life, and priceless is even like a crudely capitalist word, but getting married, getting a dog, these responsibilities and loves of my life, there is direct tension with what the experience is like of writing a book with these new commitments, you know, And I, I think back to my solo self and I'm like, oh, she lived alone. She had all day, every day to write. Not that I was ever that idyllic with my writing time. It was always kind of something I had to just really psych myself up for. But I wonder how your experience of writing this book even changed because there must have been such tension with wanting to sit and have these long stretches of quiet while still not wanting to resent your family for merely existing know.

How do you juggle this tension imperfectly? Is the. Is the one word answer to that question?

I think the really important thing that I learned and that I'd sort of like to try to communicate is that what you're doing in those moments when you're really feeling forced to choose between, you know, three or four hours actually making some progress with the book, or hanging out with your incredibly cute newborn baby, these are things that, this is a dilemma that actually we all face all the time. It's just that certain situations, like being a new parent, really make it unignorable. And that's this idea that, you know, every single decision you ever make to spend an hour of your time on anything is automatically a decision to not spend it on all the other things. Right? This is the idea of opportunity cost trade offs. And I think where we often go wrong when we're thinking about time management and productivity is we sort of tell ourselves that if we get the right techniques, if we use the right methodologies and have enough self discipline about it, we can find time for everything that really matters and everything that we get rid of and say no to and turn down that never really mattered that much anyway to begin with. So you're just spending your days on totally on stuff that you really, really care about and you're getting through all the stuff that you really, really care about. And one thing that parenthood makes very clear to you, but I think is true for everyone all the time is like, there will always be too many things compared to what you have the bandwidth to do, including too many things that really Matter. Right. So some of the things you have to say no to, the sort of roles you have to decide to fail at, the projects you have to decide to put on the back burner, they're all going to be good things. They're not. It's not just the rubbish that you can. That you can get rid of. Like, our time is so short. Our time is so finite and our attention is so finite that, you know, anybody who's a creative entrepreneurial, who has a whole bunch of ideas in their head about stuff they'd like to do is, like, by definition going to have far more.

Good claims on their time than they could ever. Than they could ever meet. But if you really resign yourself to that and you sort of totally surrender to that reality, it's actually incredibly liberating because that's when you realize that, like, okay, getting on top of everything, that ship has sailed. I don't need to worry about trying to do that because it is not possible. And then I think you're actually much more energized to just choose a few things that count and focus on them and give them your dedication and your energy. And you're not sort of chasing this unattainable dream that one day you might have everything in working order because it's not going to happen.

It seems like it also speaks to one of the paradoxes of success, that actually if you spend your life pining for some payoff and time, you'll hit peak success in your career, that actually that's when you'll have the most good opportunities that you can't possibly say yes to nearly all of them. So it's almost like this muscle that you're describing to say no and trade off sometimes very good things, it's only going to magnify the more successful any of us becomes. And I have to say that I laughed out loud. I laughed out loud when I got to the part in the book when you say you remind us of the extraordinarily irritating parable of the rocks in the jar, which was first inflicted on the world In Stephen Covey's 1994 book, First Things First. I have heard, obviously, I know rocks in the Jar. I've heard it for so many years, and I've never heard someone put their finger on it and say extraordinarily irritating.

You kind of just said it, but tell us what you find so irritating about this. And the teacher condescendingly showing the big rocks going in first.

Yeah. So the specific version of this, as I make clear in the book, I don't think, is necessarily the exact same as in the original coffee book, but the principle is the same. So the version that I know, just in case there's anybody in your audience who hasn't heard this 85,000 times.

It'S the school teacher or somebody who comes into his class with some. A jam jar and some. A few big rocks and some pebbles and some sand. And he challenges his students to fit everything into the jar. So these students, who are apparently not the sharpest tools in the box, start by putting all the sand in and the pebbles, but then there's no room for the rocks they put in the pebbles first. And the answer, when the teacher finally condescendingly shows it to them, is, of course, that you put the big rocks in first. And if you do that, then the pebbles and the sand will fit around those. And the idea is that if you make time first for the things that really matter in your life, you'll get them all done, and you'll get lots of other stuff done, too. But if you don't take that approach, you will miss out on the time for the things that matter the most. And the reason it's intensely irritating and the reason that I am. I am exasperated with it is because it's a totally rigged demonstration, right? I mean, yeah, if you only bring enough big rocks into the classroom that, you know, are going to fit into this jar, then, like, fine, of course you're going to find a way to fit them all into the jar. I think the problem that almost all of us have in the modern world is that there are too many big rocks. There are more big rocks than you could ever fit in the jar. If what you mean by a big rock is, you know, something that matters, and that takes time. So this illusion that we're going to find a way to fit everything in so that we feel like we're doing everything, we're fulfilling all our obligations, we are staying loyal to all our ambitions, we're doing every, you know, all the different roles in our lives we're sort of excelling at. Like, I think you have to start, as I just said, by, you know, giving that up and then deciding what to do to make the biggest difference in your time on the planet.

So I'm wondering if you can take us to a point in your career where this was happening. I don't know if it was when the anecdote was coming out. I remember how popular it was and seeing it covered everywhere. Or maybe it's after you had your Son, where was there a time where maybe pre aha moment about so many rocks existing where you, you felt pressured or how, how do you even now, when this book becomes an inevitable huge success, what kind of internal gauge do you have to assess? Let's call them great opportunities. Let's not even say that they're just mediocre and obviously easier to say no to. How do you determine these great, let's say career opportunities with even things that might be happening in your personal life or just wanting quiet time? What's your gauge for deciding these types.

Of things so well, I very much hope you're right that this book becomes successful and presents me with so many exciting opportunities that I have to struggle to decide among them. I mean, I think the thing I'd say is that I spent years, and I do write about this a little bit in the book, you know, thinking that if I just found the right techniques, the right productivity system and implemented it consistently enough and with enough self discipline that then these kind of trade offs would go away and that I wouldn't have to make them anymore. And I think that.

It was really just getting tired of my own nonsense. That was a very big help in that regard. I write in the book about remembering sitting on a bench in Prospect park in Brooklyn and just even more stressed than usual about everything. I had to try to manage and fit in order to feel like I was justifying my existence on the planet planet and that my financial security was assured and all of this and just thinking like, hang on, it's never going to work. Like, what makes me think that the 28th iteration of this kind of quest for existential security through efficiency is going to be the one.

That I stick with and that I'm not sort of feeling incredibly recalcitrant about by this time tomorrow afternoon. And so there was a lot of peace of mind in just accepting the sort of the reality of that situation, that there was just no reason to believe that I would ever sort of get on top of life in this way that I think we are encouraged to believe by a lot of different forces in the world. And then, you know, yeah, as I say, I think having a small child around really sort of forces the issue and you have to sort of, you have to sort of make, make a call. I think I've become more intuitive and less rational about making those calls. I do think that, you know, anyone who's in a situation fortunate enough that the opportunities that come their way include things that that really sort of kindle a flame in them that they're really sort of unequivocally excited about. Learning to connect to that feeling and to pursue that is. Is very. Is very helpful. So I don't have any sort of like.

Matrices or sort of hard and fast rules about. About. About what I do and when it comes in. And I'm still completely susceptible to sort of outside pressures in a way that can turn out to be very helpful.

So, like, saying yes to this podcast.

Well, I was. Yeah. I mean, so, you know, who knows? Right, right, right. I. I mean, I. I don't say yes to every podcast I get asked to do. On the other hand, it's sort of good to have things like it's. It's good not to rely entirely on myself, to sort of put myself out there. It's nice to be asked because then this sort of gives a structure to your work that you're going to do some of these things. Because the requests came in from the outside. I was going to say, you know, finishing this book, it took me a long time. There were some good reasons, but maybe not all the reasons were good. And the. The thing that really hurried it on was that the COVID pandemic happened, and various institutions in the culture industries around the world sort of had a terrible time of it, and I was already overdue. And I was like, oh, my goodness, I hope that, like, the whole publishing industry doesn't collapse, and I hope that they don't stay afloat by deciding to, like, end all their contracts with writers who are late with their books. And, you know, this was completely just a sort of outside fire being lit beneath me. It was. But it was the right thing to do, and I'm immensely glad that I did. And it's a little bit weird that I'm sort of grateful to all this appalling stuff that has happened to the world. You know, I still would rather it hadn't have happened, but it did have the effect of, you know, focusing my attention on my limited attentional bandwidth and my limited time, and it hastened the book to completion.

Well, thank you for sharing that, and I'm so happy you brought up intuition, because this is a huge strength, and I talk about it often as a way, a primary way that I run my business. And equally, I've heard in other books and business leaders say, don't rely on your intuition. It will get you lost in the woods and you'll be eaten by bears. You know, or I just read another book. I laughed and I thought of you because I'm kind of deliberately bad at email. We both describe it as a Sisyphean system that in fact, the better and faster you get, there's just more punishment.

Right, Right.

It's like climb back down. Oh, you got inbox zero. It lasts for which I've gotten twice in 10 years. But, oh, oh, just you're back down to the mountain now. Carry the new boulder from the next day. Anyway, I was reading a book yesterday and the book said, if someone is bad for at email, I don't respect them at all. I can't do business with them. They are just a disorganized mess. And this was a business book. And I just thought to myself, okay, nice knowing you. I'll probably never meet you. You would surely think that I'm an ineffective, you know, oh, oh. And this is an insanely annoying quote to me. But it's like in that context he had said, you know, how you do one thing is how you do everything. So if you're bad at email, you just must be a hot mess in real life and you're an ineffective business person. This was truly the message.

Wow.

Right? And I thought to myself, that is hilarious. Because today, instead of doing email, I gave a virtual keynote I prepared for our conversation. I'm talking to you. I have another podcast later. I feel great. I'm in the zone. I'm doing my best work. It's okay not to be good at email today, if not ever, but it's fine. Really hard to kind of decide what to be bad at, like you said, and then. And then not fall into the social pressure of it, Would I? I could see how an earlier self might have read a line like that and felt really bad and thought, oh, no, people aren't going to respect me. They're going to think I'm a mess. They won't want to be my friend or do business with me. It's just like at some point then we must not be aligned. It's not meant to be. It's not in the cards.

Right. I feel like it's. It's self organizing in a way. Right. All the people who think that way are going to do business with each other and all the people.

And they'll evil each other all the time and they'll get instant responses. Yes.

Yeah. I mean, I just think.

It'S this.

There is this sense that many people have and that I certainly have had for a long time in my life that the way to deal with the anxiety of there being more that you feel you should be doing or could be doing than you are doing is to do more and more and more and more and more.

Almost mathematical reasons. Right. Why? If the. If the number of things you could be doing is infinite, getting more efficient at doing them is not going to get you to the end of them. I mean, that's just a. That's definitionally true of infinity. But it's a little bit like, you know, if you. If you're, as I say in the book, if you're climbing up an infinitely tall ladder, then getting really fast at climbing up that ladder does not get you closer to the top of the ladder. It just makes you feel a lot busier. So actually, the thing. One of the things that I've had to learn, and I try to communicate in the book, but I'm still learning, is that the thing that one has to try to do with that anxiety is, you know, get friendly with that anxiety and let go of it through being okay with its presence. Right. Find a path into a more peaceful place by saying, yeah, okay. You know, there are more things than I'm going to be able to do that will always be the case. Trying to do something that is structurally impossible is not a good use of my time. And so it's the discomfort, like the skill you're in the example you give. I sort of want to say that the skill you're.

Developing is. That is not the skill of, like, obeying this guy's instructions in this book, but of being able to read ideas like that, feel a certain amount of discomfort, like, oh, maybe I. Maybe he's got a point. Sit with the discomfort, then decide. Actually, you know what, I'm gonna put that, you know, it's like to be able to encounter all those thoughts and the fact that there are probably some people who are cross about your. Certainly my.

Relatively poor email responsiveness. Right. It's not. It's not that actually nobody minds. It's that it can be okay to have some people in the vast orbit of people that we communicate with in the modern world. It can be okay to have a few people not completely happy with you at all times.

It's interesting how this pans out across cultures and across genders because this is something that I think I've often heard it said is kind of like, easier for men than women to be kind of slightly jerkish about it and not to worry.

Absolutely. But I always want to say, I know, don't care at all.

I always want to say this is a problem for women and women brackets and British men, because I feel like. I feel like I was also trained to sort of apologize constantly for myself and, and try to do anything that I possibly could to avoid conflict. But so I think it's sort of, it's good cultural as well, perhaps.

Yeah. Well, I love in the book you call it an anti skill which is so consistent with the antidote that not the counterproductive strategy of trying to make yourself more efficient, but rather a willingness to resist such urges to learn to stay with the anxiety of feeling overwhelmed, declining to clear the decks, focusing instead on what's truly of greatest consequence. We'll be right back just after this with Venmo Stache.

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For me, you know, it's, it's so funny to see, like, I'm married to an artist just through and through. And he has been known this would drive you crazy because I saw it in the book. He has been known to give me notice 10 minutes before we can cancel an airline ticket. Southwest lets you cancel an hour prior to the flight. 10 minutes notice. Oliver this is what my challenge when I set out to write Pivot. I didn't know, like, navigating change and uncertainty that I'd end up marrying, you know, Mr. Pivot Artist, who there is no plan. That's the only plan. And he's completely unhooked from the matrix. Like maybe checks, email once a month if he feels like it doesn't have any meetings on the calendar. Every day is day day. So it is very interesting for me to kind of look over the fence and just see somebody living that way. And what ends up happening is sure, some things fall through the cracks. He obviously follows through on the things that are important to him. But people start to say, oh, Michael the quirky artist. Even me, I'll respond on a text, oh, ha ha ha. Michael's a day of decider. We can't RSVP or he's not gonna rsvp. I'm in. But he won't RSVP until day of just FYI. And it becomes this quirk of personality that yes, some people, it's just that would be intolerable. But it is kind of fun to see. And I do think gender is involved somehow because the men I know are more apt to like when I've discussed this type of anti skill that you describe, the men, maybe not British men, but the men I know have said, oh yeah, I don't care. This is just how I do things, you know, and that women are a little more of like people pleasing or like me, oh my gosh, lifelong recovering people pleaser and wanting to be polite and not wanting to offend people. And you know, it's. That that's hard. It's hard to let people down or feel like you're disappointing people. And at the same time living like that is totally exhausting in anxiety producing.

Totally. And I think one thing that it's maybe just a connected topic rather than exactly the same, but also being in a relationship with the man and the woman swapped here in terms of their traits, but being in a relationship with someone who is much more laid back about planning for the future.

Let's call it allergic to planning for the future. It's a straight up allergy, Oliver.

I think what I found is that what I've learned from that is that actually in my approach, in my. So I say in the book, you know, I come from a family of compulsive planners. I was raised to think that like the idea booking a flight like just a month before you would you to take it, I mean that is living on the edge.

Give me a hernia.

But one thing I've. I've come to understand about myself in that is that there's actually a sort of lack of trust in this stance. Right. There's a, there's a, there's a, there's a start. There's an aspect of this approach to life that that says I need to know now that everything is going to be okay in the future. And not only that everything else in the world apart from me is going to be fine in the future, but that I am going to be able to handle a certain thing in the future. And what the other kind of person, I think has, among their skill sets, even if it is also an allergy, is the ability to say, you know, when something happens that we need to respond to in a few weeks time or whatever, we'll, we'll have the resources, the internal resources to respond to it then. And it's a much, in many ways, I think it's actually a much more peaceful way to go through life. Right. You make a plan because you do want to be navigating in a certain direction, you want to have a goal in mind. I don't think that you should just sort of be completely aimless. I may have changed a little bit in that respect since what I wrote in the Antidote. But you want to accept that your plan is a navigational plan that belongs to the present moment. It is not a successful attempt to control the future. And then you want to sort of have a certain amount of inner faith that if something goes wrong at a future point, it's at that future point that you'll be able to sort of respond and sort of go with the flow in the appropriate way. And I think what has caused me a lot of problems in my, certainly in earlier phases of my adult life was not really feeling like I was ready to launch anything until I could convince myself of the absurd notion that I knew how it was going to unfold for the, for the next weeks or months.

And it is, it is vulnerable to say, I don't know, I'm going to do this anyway. You cite Carl Jung who said to quietly do the next and most necessary thing. And I love that you brought up faith. Just having faith and self trust that if I do the next and most necessary thing, I will figure out what to do after that. And that there is, I think, a skill of being intuitive and in flow and really seeing where is my energy, where is the energy of even launching a book is a huge effort and of course you're going to make all these plans for it. And yet you and I both know you have no control really over how it lands in the world and how successful it is. Although we'd like to think so you'd like to think that you could put in X amount of effort or inputs and make it a hit. And yet it just doesn't, it doesn't work out that way. So not that it just doesn't work out that these inputs will yield this kind of output with something as ephemeral as how a book lands in the world.

Right. And I mean, I think it applies across the board, really. There's a. I'm thinking now of an analogy that the psychologist Alison Gopnik uses about parenting in her book, which is called the Carpenter and the Gardener, or the Gardener and the Carpenter, but just the idea. And she's talking about. She's talking about parenting, but I think it applies far beyond that. You know, it's not that you just have to let whatever happens happen. It's not that there isn't a very important role for being proactive, assertive, maybe sometimes even aggressive in your sort of engagement with the world. It is that your job is to be a gardener. Your job is to create the. In general, the sort of nurturing soil in which good things can grow, rather than as a carpenter, treating the thing as a project where you're going to sort of plan each piece in advance, construct it all, and it's going to be exactly as you. As you thought it was. So there's totally a very important role for sort of being actively engaged, but it's not one that you can closely link to any specific endpoint. And, you know, more than that, as we also know, like, we could both put enormous effort into our book launches and, you know, even if they were astonishingly successful, we would never be able to say that that was why. It could just be some chance factor that was nothing to do with all that.

That's true.

Preliminary effort. So you can't know, but you can sort of, to borrow something from another domain of sort of Buddhist meditation and things like that, you know, it's an accident whether good things happen in your life, but you can make yourself more accident prone.

Oh, I like that. I always think about the Zen parable, we'll see, which is like, when good things happen, we'll see. And then when bad things happen, we'll see. The story is not over yet. And so the gardening metaphor, it's also accepting seasonality of life in any given year or any given project.

Oh, yeah.

But I, I think we. We expect things to be so linear, time included. Time itself is a linear construct mapped onto a cyclical, seasonal existence in so many ways. And, and, and yet. And so we get disappointed. It's like, oh, I'm not creative right now, or I have no energy right now. Okay, well, nature has four full seasons.

Where things are happening below the surface and the trees haven't blossomed yet. And you live in Brooklyn, so you're near the Cherry Blossom Botanical Gardens.

Oh, totally. Yeah. Yeah. One of my favorite places.

I think one of the most powerful questions that you ask at the end of the book is, oh, and this really stopped me in my tracks. In what ways have you yet to accept the fact that you are who you are, not the person you think you ought to be?

And that is so compelling because I think one of the big takeaways from this book is maybe stop trying to be this ideal futuristic person. Like for me. And I think this might be gender based as well, but weight, you know, growing up, if I was 10 pounds above whatever number I thought the scale should say so another very numerical, arbitrary concept, I would just think I would be completely unlovable. Like, if I weigh 10 more pounds, nobody's gonna love me, I'll never date again. You know, I had this crazy conception of what these arbitrary numbers meant. And still to this day I'll think to myself about, wait, I'll go. I really wish I worked out more. I really wish that I was, you know, back in the shape I was five years ago. And yet, so here I am again, pining for a self that exists in the past or could exist in the future, but most certainly isn't the one that's here today where I did not choose to work out yet today, if at all.

Right, right. And no, it's, it's so interesting because it's like there are all these different multiple kinds of finitude or limitation that it makes me think of, right? So first of all, there is, just to use the weight example, right? There's a kind of weight that no human can be and that, and that attempting to aspire to it is the path to very serious eating disorders. There's the kind of, there's a certain kind of ideal weight in the sense that some, maybe some, some people can be, and it's promoted through the media, but each of us dependent on our sort of skeletal structure and a whole lot of other things may or may not that may be just not something that we, that is on the cards for us. And none of this just applies to that example. And then thirdly, there, it might be that it was on the cards for somebody, but it would require a certain kind of investment of time that you decide is more meaningfully spent on another thing. So at every level there's like, there's a sort of, there's what you would do if you were a God and never had to make difficult choices about your time, never had to run up against any of your built in human limitations. And then there's the range of options that are open to you in your work, in your life and your health. And you know, because you're not a God. It's just a recipe for constant stress and anxiety to be aiming for something that is not attainable. And what I hope I convey in this book is that, is that turning to the reality of the situation is not a matter of, like, it's not a council of despair. It's not about saying you have all these high ambitions for your work or your relationships or.

Anything else, but you just got to give them up. No, it's actually saying, like, if you confront the limits of reality, that's hugely empowering because that's when you can free up the energy and the attention to actually make a difference. It's when you can focus your. Your efforts on successfully completing a few really important things instead of slicing and dicing your attention more and more and more and more. So you never get anywhere on anything. So that sort of deep acceptance of finitude and limitation, I think is the first step to all sorts of things that are just, you know, cool accomplishments. It's not about becoming the kind of perfectly enlightened person who doesn't need to have a successful job or make money or all the other things. You know, it's actually the first step.

On that path that reminds me of one of my favorite spiritual texts after the Ecstasy, the Laundry by Jack Kornfield. It's so good. It's. He interviewed a hundred spiritual leaders, and all of them, even if they had reached these micro moments of Nirvana or enlightenment or Samadhi said, and then I had to do laundry the next day. And then I was still living with my husband.

And they just talk about the human, human side, no matter. So I think enlightenment and it's. Our spiritual quests take on this spiritual materialism as well, as Chuggy and Trumpet puts it. And what you were saying reminds me also on the subject of weight. Janine Roth, in one of her books about money, I'll put it in the show notes, she said, how much of my life force have I wasted trying to please the patriarchy or society or culture to look the way the women on TV and magazines look that look that way in order to sell me things? She's like, how much of my creative energy have I poured into this unattainable ideal when I could have been doing other more creative things? Oh, and that really smacked me because it's like anything we're doing to please society or the culture can have that effect of we have this, like, my dad calls it cannibal capitalism.

Just eat everything in sight or there's no there there. It's like the entire engine of capitalism is more, more, more.

I think it's a really good point that a lot of what we're doing here is, is trying to please a system that doesn't even have, you know, wants and desires and a conscious awareness that it could use to approve of us or disapprove of us. Very often you find when people are trying to please their friends, to fit in with a social circle or to please their parents or whatever else it might be, you know, it's often not at all clear that those specific people would object at all if you pursued a path that was truer to you. Many of them would probably be thrilled for you and others of them are just too wrapped up in their own issues to give you, give you, give so much attention to feeling critical about you.

Oliver, I think you'll appreciate the final question that I ask every guest on this show, which is if you could give listeners permission to drop or do something differently, what would it be? I know that's a big part of your philosophies, the antidote to some of this. What would your permission be around time management for mortals?

I mean, I think the permission is just this big abstract idea, right? It's that it's permission to be finite. It's permission to say that you are never going to get everything done. You are never going to get on top of everything. You are never going to be in a position where you're not dropping a single ball, you're not making a single person feel angry or disappointed. You're not, you're not failing to meet a single obligation. This is structured into reality. It is not your failing. It's not because you haven't found the right technique or applied enough energy. It's built in to being finite in a world of infinite inputs and infinite possibilities and infinite demands. And I think that as soon as you see that and just can relax a little bit into reality as it is, it's just wonderful and it's wonderfully empowering because then you can start doing a few things that really count.

I love that. Oliver, thank you so much. Thank you for being here, for writing another brilliant book. Listeners, if you have not already, make sure you check out 4000 weeks time management for mortals. Oliver, is there anywhere else that you want to send listeners?

That's the main one. You're also very welcome to sign up for my twice monthly email which I call the Imperfectionist, which is@oliverburkman.com I love that.

I know I need to change my frequency to randomly. That's what I learned from Michael because I say weekly ish, but now it's all up for grabs. I love the imperfectionist. Amazing. Oliver, thank you so much.

My pleasure.

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