Change Your Perception of Time and Meaning with Oliver Burkeman

If you really think that your life is wasted unless you do something amazing with it, then every decision has this terrible high stakes. It's incredibly stressful, like, got to get this right, otherwise my life is over. No, if you don't need that in the first place, then you can take those risky, bold decisions with a light heart.

What does it take to do the impossible? What does it take to level up your game like never before? What does it take for individuals, organizations, for even institutions to achieve paradigm shift Nothing is ever the same again. Breakthroughs. Our mission is to decode the neurobiology of flow and cognitive peak performance. Access the minds of maverick scientists, groundbreaking innovators, and world-leading experts to understand what it takes to achieve ultimate human performance so you can feel your best, perform your best, and accomplish your boldest goals. I'm your host, Ryan Dorris, and together with bestselling author Steven Kotler, I present to you Flow Research Collective Radio. Oliver, welcome to Flow Research Collective Radio. Really great to have you here.

Thank you very much for the invitation.

Yeah, I've been, been really excited for this one. I absolutely loved your book, which we're going to be talking a lot about. Before we dive in, I just want to give the listeners a quick overview of your bio so they know who they're listening to. You are the author of the New York Times and Sunday Times bestselling book, 4,000 Weeks, which is about embracing limitation and finally getting around to what counts, along with a number of other books, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking and Help! How to Become Slightly Happier and Get a Bit More Done, which may be my favorite title. Very British. Very British. For many years, You wrote a popular column for The Guardian called This Column Will Change Your Life, also a great title. In your email newsletter, The Imperfectionist, you write about productivity, mortality, and the power of limits and building a meaningful life in an age of distraction. I wanted to start, Oliver, by actually reading a quote from your most recent book, 4,000 Weeks. Which is extremely relevant to our audience. I have a feeling a lot of people are going to read it after listening to this. A little bit of a long quote, so excuse me, and then I would just love to hear your breakdown from it. You said, "We recoil from the notion that this is it, that this life with all its flaws and inescapable vulnerabilities, its extreme brevity and our limited influence over how it unfolds, is the only one we'll get a shot at. Instead, we mentally fight against the way things are so that in the words of the psychotherapist Bruce Tift, we don't have to consciously participate in what it's like to feel claustrophobic, imprisoned, powerless, and constrained by reality. This struggle against the distressing constraints of reality is what some old school psychoanalysts call neurosis. And it takes countless forms from workaholism and commitment phobia to codependency and chronic shyness. So with that, I'm curious if there's anything you would like to comment on with respect to that paragraph specifically, and just to segue us into the discussion, if you could give us an overarching breakdown on the core message of 4,000 Weeks.

Guy Spier Yeah. I'm glad you zeroed in on that paragraph because I do think of it as a sort of a linchpin, and I'm not sure it's obvious from reading the book that it is a linchpin. What that paragraph is about, I guess, and I love particularly that Bruce Tift quote about the idea of feeling the things we do to not feel imprisoned by the reality of the situation we're in, it really speaks to this point that I'm very keen to drive home that I think an awful lot of the ways that we behave in our lives, including the ways we try to manage and control time and deal with being overwhelmed by too much work and all the rest of it, they have this sort of hidden agenda. They're not primarily ways to get the most out of life or to achieve our most cherished goals or whatever we might tell ourselves they are. They are actually ways to not have to feel certain feelings that are associated with being a finite human, having very limited time, having to make choices about what you do with your time, having to sacrifice certain totally great potential ways to spend your time in order to focus on other ones. And so I think this goes much deeper and broader than just time management or productivity, but that was one of the lenses that I was focusing on. And I think that that sense of where we go wrong because there are things we don't want to feel is central to what I'm talking about. And the inverse as well, which is that if you can let yourself, even just a little bit, feel those things, It's incredibly empowering. If you can give up that fight a little bit, you're actually in a far better position to spend your life accomplishing the most amazing things that you're capable of, to have the peace of mind that you wrongly think you're going to get by getting into control over your time and getting super efficient and super optimized. Actually, by dropping back down into the reality of what it's like to be one of us. There's a huge amount of empowerment there.

Perfect. Perfect. Yeah, I would love it. In a little bit, we'll talk about your thoughts on the longevity movement as something that is potentially a fight against that. I was intrigued that you mentioned Bruce Tift. I actually have not heard many people mention Bruce Tift and his book Already Free, which came out in 2015. Subtitle is Buddhism Meets Psychotherapy on the Path of Liberation. Personally, is one of my all-time all-time favorite books.

He's a little bit of a hidden secret because I agree, you don't necessarily run into references to him all over the place, but whenever you do run into someone who knows about him, they're like, "Oh, that book was totally like—" Yeah, no, absolutely. He's very important to a lot of people, I think. Yeah.

Yeah. It's an incredible, incredible book. So just to orient the audience a little bit here, could you give us a breakdown of how perception of time has changed throughout the course of history, particularly in the last 500 years or so with the Industrial Revolution, or at least how you describe that change within the book?

Yeah, I think this really goes to the heart of a lot of it because it's really an attempt to get right down to the most basic assumptions that we make about how our experience of time just has to be. It just feels like certain things feel like that they're so basic and given to how we must experience time that they can't ever have been different. And I'm trying to argue that they were different. It's a very speculative case, as I admit in the book. Getting inside the mind of a medieval peasant, as I sort of make an effort to do, is obviously not something that you can, you know, do in a scientific, verifiable way. But there's, you know, there's a bunch of anthropological work done among cultures even now that are less, that have sort of less sort of industrialized sense of time. And there's all sorts of historical sources that lend credence to this. I think at the most basic level, the point is that we have this notion that there is ourselves as you, and then there's time, and it's somehow a thing that is separate from you. Nobody can quite put their finger on what it is, but it's something that you have a relationship with, and it's usually an adversarial relationship, right? You you have to manage time, you have to conquer time, or you are constantly fighting against time or something like that. And I think that at the most basic level, that idea that time is something separate from who we are is kind of what causes all the trouble here. It brings a lot of advantages as well. I don't think the Industrial Revolution or subsequent Innovations could have happened without that way of thinking about time, but it puts you in this constant situation of trying to get a kind of control over time, kind of get a sort of upper hand over time that you won't ever achieve because that's not the nature of— that we can't get out of time. We can't control time in the way that we want to. It's just, it's not open to us. And I think that for all the many terrible things that would afflicted the life of an early medieval peasant somewhere like the North Yorkshire countryside where I'm speaking to you from now, time problems would not have made any sense and they wouldn't have existed. It wouldn't have been the case that you could have felt like you had too much to do in the time available, or that you had to fight against time, or that if you used pockets of time in certain ways, you were wasting it. All of that comes from this move primarily in the Industrial Revolution, to start seeing time as a resource, something that you've got to sort of maximize the value of so that you can sort of buy other people's time. That's obviously crucial to the development of shift work and industrial labor. I think none of that would've made sense in those pre-industrial times. The rhythms of life would've just emerged from the tasks that needed doing. This is a form of life that anthropologists call task orientation. So, you know, You milk the cows when it's time to milk the cows, and you harvest the crops when it's time to harvest the crops. You can't impose a schedule on that. You can't do batch processing of it, like we're always told you're supposed to do with your emails and other things like that. You just have to do it when it needs doing. And as a result, I think people would have not experienced this separation between time and themselves. Time was just the medium that their lives unfolded in. Or if you want to get philosophical about it, as I do in parts of the book, it's almost like saying that to be in this state of mind is almost like saying you are time. You are a stretch of time. It's not that you have a certain amount of time to do things with, it's that you exist as relatively short stretch of time. And I think there is a deep peace of mind in that. Perhaps I call it deep time. Perhaps it's very closely related to flow states, a sense of undifferentiatedness between yourself and the moment that you're occupying, a greater capacity for awe and wonder and fullness of the moment. And At the same time, they had more terrible life-ending diseases than anybody and lived in shocking circumstances. And on no level do I think we should go back to being medieval peasants, but I think that how they would have experienced time specifically would have had certain advantages compared to what was to come.

Steven Pinker, in his book, I believe it's in The Better Angels of Our Nature, quotes a statistic. I might be slightly off on the number, but that 17%, I believe it was 17% of all deaths pre about 200 years ago used to be of violent nature. Someone getting bludgeoned to death or thrown off a building or a bow and arrow going through their head or whatever it is. And so he kind of emphasizes what you're emphasizing there, which is that there are amazing things about modernity, but potentially also a lot of amazing things that have been lost en route to modernity.

[Speaker:WILLIAM GREEN] And I just think it's not a question of saying, let's go back to a completely different way of experiencing time. I don't think it would be possible, and I don't think it'd be desirable. And I think that when people talk about all the wonderful things that modernity has brought, anesthetics in dentistry and all sorts of other things that make life so much more tolerable. One of the things that those creations required was a kind of massive coordination of multiple people's time and labor in a way that requires you to think about time as a resource. But I think it's really helpful to remember that that is not the only story, and that you don't need to exist in this mindset in every minute of your life, and that it's possible to sort of approach, to have a stance with regard to time that is different than that. So it's just a useful reminder that it wasn't always like this all the time.

Could you give us a little bit more of a breakdown on deep time, what you mean by deep time? I am just using that phrase.

I'm borrowing it from Richard Rohr, the Franciscan priest and author, although I don't want to say I'm using it in exactly his sense. I'm really just using that as an umbrella to get at this idea of feeling a sort of oneness with time, not feeling this alienation, this separation, like there's a timeline or a yardstick running alongside your life that you've got to try to fit things into. It also has in it a dimension of connectedness, I think, to other times, in the sense of existing in a sort of long span of history and connection to ancestors and successors to come. I think that a lot of how people talk and think about flow is probably closely connected. There is like ideas like satori in Zen Buddhism, you know, the notion of the sort of collapse of subject and object in a moment of experience. So it's a little bit general, but it is everything that is not this strictly resource-based, quantified, separated, or you might even say alienated, yeah, idea of time that you have to sort of wrangle and get control of and save and hoard and exploit and all the rest of it. It's just what existence is when that's not the way you're thinking about time.

I like the description of time as a resource as being really the key culprit in shifting people's relationship with time. It's a very simple way to put it. And time is referred to so often as a resource that A lot of people don't even have awareness of the fact that there's a way to view or have a relationship to time other than it being thought of as a resource. So that's, I think, a really great point. I'm curious what you see as the role capitalism has played in that. And if you see a way in which the benefits of capitalism can you know, continue without it hampering people's experience of time to such a degree?

Yeah, I mean, this big question of like the deep causes of all our time troubles, I think I'm fairly sort of agnostic about. In the book, I point to certain strands that must play a role, but I don't think trying to figure out the specific causes is is a very fruitful path. So on the one hand, all this— these attempts to master our time, to feel in control, to feel like we're capable of doing all the things that are thrown at us or that we can imagine we might want to do, which I argue is impossible, and that it's much more liberating to see that there will always be too much to do— in, in one sense, that desire to sort of get on top of that is just the sort deep human desire not to have to die. And I think what happens is there's a technological, uh, aspect to this, which is we've probably always been like this, but then once clocks and other ways of measuring time come along, we get to use time in a new way as one of the ways to try to deny this, this, um, to try to, to try to cope with our mortality and deny, and, and deny the fact that we have to die by, by trying to sort of use time in a limitless way, in a way that is sort of a little bit akin to being immortal. If you can do everything in the time you have, that's a little bit like having an unlimited amount of time. So then, is capitalism a consequence of that or a cause of that? It clearly just is a system that has huge affinities with and is helped along by this way of thinking about time because number one, it's a sort of machine for extracting financial value from anything it encounters. And the commodification of time is a way to— it's a whole new resource when you can buy and sell time in that way and extract find ways to extract greater value out of the same portion of time. And then of course, slightly more cynically, capitalism and consumer capitalism especially has this interest in, quote, interest, in keeping us always on this treadmill of trying to get in control of life, trying to break through our most basic limitations, holding out the promise that the next purchase or the next promotion will finally bring this sense of peace of mind through the control of our time and our lives. So there's that as well. I mean, I'm quite hopeful in one sense and drawing on ideas that I know Cal Newport, for example, has written quite eloquently about, that in some ways I'm not a doctrinaire Marxist about about the role of capitalism and in some ways the kinds of work that are coming to the fore in this era of capitalism, just in general knowledge work and work involving the manipulation of ideas and creativity and all the rest of it, that seems to go along more with a sense of deep time and the importance of being able to connect to this other way of thinking. About time and not being caught in this kind of impatient, totally resource-maximizing mindset. You create better things in a world where there's a lot of market value to being able to tell stories well or inspire people or think original thoughts in an academic field or something like that. You're going to do that better if you are not completely locked in that assembly line way of thinking about time. So maybe that suggests that capitalism can thrive and this sort of other way of relating to time can thrive. Because obviously, as you know, right? I mean, flow states are an interesting example of something that is deeply meaningful to experience. And in many lines of work, it's going to pay off if you can get into them more frequently. So it's not like these two things necessarily have to be opposed to each other.

[Speaker:WILLIAM_GREEN] That was one of the things I wanted to actually ask you about. There's two reasons the techno utopian part of me actually feels optimistic about this. The first is that my hope at least is that the innovation that capitalism produces and the technological process or progress that it produces continually makes the kinds of labor that are not conducive to flow and that require a very high level of the commodification of time redundant more and more and more. And so that ideally tedium becomes more and more automated. There's a great quote by a British, I believe he's a British mathematician, Alfred North Whitehead, which is that civilization advances by extending the number of important operations we can perform without thinking of them. Which I think is an interesting one getting at that. So part of me hopes that the engine of capitalism actually makes redundant the commodification of time. And then to your second point, as knowledge work increases and as tedium is automated to a greater and greater extent, what is productive is leveraging what we have as unique human capabilities, creativity, complex problem solving. And in that kind of work, time can't be used in the same way. It's more nonlinear. The knowledge work becomes more nonlinear where in 1 hour on a Tuesday afternoon, you may produce something that was worth the whole of the last 3 months in terms of outputs. You kind of have to change your relationship with time. And then also flow. I mean, we talk about flow as both presence and productivity. In one state or both engagement and output. It both feels incredibly satisfying and fulfilling in the moment, and it is associated with increases in performance. So I'm optimistic about the use of flow as well to give people both the ability to be productive whilst being present simultaneously. Guy Spier Yeah.

And so often these sort of at the most abstract level, these arguments about Capitalism with a capital C seemed to be like, you can just go with wherever your political leanings go. So the situation you just described could be seen as, and I lean a little bit more to this, as capitalism through its development making redundant those forms of time and giving opportunities for this deeper way of relating to time. I can imagine someone saying, "Oh, that was just capitalism." in an advanced state co-opting those deeper, more spiritual levels of life for its own ends, like it co-opts everything. So I guess we have to judge by the output, whether the result in terms of innovation or the result in terms of social welfare is good or bad. So we'll see.

Yeah, exactly. We'll see. We'll see. I feel optimistic. It's been interesting. I am lucky enough to be able to spend a huge amount of time with entrepreneurs and The upfront view that I at least personally get, and this is just completely anecdotal and probably very biased as a sample, but is that entrepreneurs view what they do, even though it is very capitalistic, as similar to art or creation. And there's a huge amount of fulfillment and excitement and joy within these pursuits. [Speaker:GUY_SPIER] Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah, we'll see what happens. I want to shift gears. I want to hit you with another of your own quotes for a moment. This one's another long one, so bear with me here. You say, and this is about cosmic insignificance therapy. You mentioned that cosmic insignificance therapy is an invitation to face the truth about your irrelevance in the grand scheme of things, to embrace it to whatever extent you can, and truly doing justice To the astonishing gift of a few thousand weeks isn't a matter of resolving to do something remarkable with them. In fact, it entails precisely the opposite, refusing to hold them to an abstract and over-demanding standard of remarkableness against which they can only ever be found wanting and taking them instead on their own terms, dropping back down from godlike fantasies of cosmic significance into the experience of life as it concretely finitely, and often enough, marvelously really is. So there's a lot in that that I would love to ask you about. Maybe before we come back to the cosmic insignificance piece, which I think is a huge point, I'm curious if you personally have undergone some level of cosmic insignificance therapy just through the writing and the researching of the book and how for you, your relationship with time has changed. And feel free to, if there are nitty-gritty details, feel free to share those on that as well.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's true. I think I wrote the book as an act of sort of a certain kind of therapy. Cosmic insignificance therapy, for your audience, is just my slightly facetious label for this idea of taking full stock of how tiny we are in the scheme of things, both sort of temporally, longitudinally, and also as an individual actor in the world right now. And Yeah, I think that I write in the book about this sort of moment where I was sitting on a bench in Brooklyn where we lived and feeling even more overwhelmed than I tended to, trying to figure out what combination of time management techniques was going to enable me to get through everything I thought I needed to get through by the end of the week. And just being struck by this sudden understanding that it was impossible, that I was trying to do something that can't be done. And how liberating this was to sort of understand that the only problem here had been the thought that I ought to be able to effectively make 2 plus 2 add up to 5. It's like, that's not something we can do. And the reason that this is so relevant to the cosmic insignificance idea is that I think there is this sense in which we approach our time trying to sort of be gods in some sense, trying to do more than we can reasonably do, set standards of control over the future, demanding a certain kind of control of the future that is greater than we can reasonably expect. And that there's something not only more real about seeing the truth of the matter here, but actually more empowering. And this is the subtler point that I want to make here. It's not that you don't have as much control as you want or you think, and most of the decisions you agonize over today are going to be irrelevant in 10 years' time, let alone 100 years' time, have no effect on anybody. It's not just that that's real and now better fall into resignation or despair about this fact. It's that there's a way of seeing this that lifts a huge burden, that lifts this burden, this impossible burden that we a lot of the time go through life with of thinking that our self-worth somehow depends on doing something that it isn't possible for us to do in terms of the nature of our relationship with time. And I think the bit that you referred to just before, this gets massively emphasized in a culture that takes a meaningful life to be synonymous with a truly extraordinary, remarkable, resonates down the centuries kind of life. And Going on the basis of some work by the philosopher Ido Landau, and I talk about how this is an incredibly cruel standard to put on your life because it rules out all sorts of things that we know have the potential for huge meaning in terms of the very mundane day-to-days of family life or time spent in nature or helping out in your neighborhood in a way that never impacts more than 20 people, but really feels like it matters. Looking after an elderly relative, all these ideas. And it isn't that I think those things are better than changing the world with a new technological innovation. It's that if we get rid of this misleading and anxiety-inducing and distracting idea that only an extraordinary life is a meaningful one, It actually frees you up if it's on the cards for you to be a person who changes history, make a huge impact in some sector of business. It frees you up to do that because you're no longer doing that because you need to do it in order to fill some hole of self-esteem in your soul to be like, "Oh, I'm not okay unless I do something. My life has been wasted unless I do something utterly remarkable. No, your life hasn't been wasted if you cook some nutritious meals for your kid and keep a nice garden and help out in your local community. That's all it takes. And then by all means, if it's something that excites you and fills you with passion and joy, go and start a company that transforms how we act in some area of life. But not because life is somehow wasted if you don't. Does that make sense?

Guy Spier That does make sense, Oliver. That's actually what I was going to ask you about is how to balance the cosmic insignificance view with what I would also argue is a very important view that human potential is fairly boundless and incredible, and that people can have if they so choose, at least in many cases, an impact that does change the world.

Guy Spier This might just be a certain kind of personality that I belong to. It might not apply to everybody. But to me, there is nothing more truly motivating when it comes to making a personal change, launching a project, doing something like that. There's nothing more motivating than the deep knowledge that I don't I don't absolutely need to do it, that my sense of justifying my existence on the planet or something does not require it. I don't need to get up in the morning and think, "Oh my goodness, I've got to get through this to-do list today, otherwise I've been a bad person." No, it's like, "I'm fine. Living an obscure and not particularly remarkable life is fine." And then from that baseline, I feel like I'm free to try out more things and to take risks. Because if you really think that your life is wasted unless you do something amazing with it, then every decision has this terrible high stakes. It's incredibly stressful, like, "Got to get this right, otherwise my life is over." No. If you don't need that in the first place, then you can take those risky, bold decisions with a light heart because you don't need them to work out exactly as you plan or anything like that.

Yeah, that makes total sense. So both perspectives can sit in harmony where you can have the view of cosmic insignificance and also from that place where you're let off the hook, have extreme ambitions or desires to contribute or make an impact, but without the burden of having an arbitrary standard of remarkableness for your life.

And maybe some people who are trying to be sort of huge big shot entrepreneurs will understand that and realize that it's fine that actually what they want to do is work as a gardener somewhere. But then likewise, maybe somebody working as a gardener will decide it's time to launch the next The next Facebook. You don't need this heavy burden. You can do it with a light heart. Yeah.

Guy Spier The other thing I want to touch on is what you mentioned around meaning. It's a really interesting point that meaning in life is often conflated with having a life of fireworks where you're building and creating and jet-setting and doing all these highlight reel level things. I actually did. So I did an undergrad in philosophy, and my thesis was actually in moral philosophy on meaning in life, funnily enough, which is very cliché for a philosophy thesis.

Well, no, I bet it isn't, right? Actually, I bet people don't do philosophy theses on the meaning of life, right? It's like, so they think it's got to be some tiny obscure analysis of linguistic forms or something, right?

Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. The literature on meaning in life and philosophy is to your point, is actually quite niche. And it's also quite— a lot of it, the more recent literature is quite fresh and it all happens within moral philosophy. But there was a couple of distinctions that were kind of core to the thesis and are core to the current thinking in moral philosophy on meaning, which is a differentiation between the meaning of life and meaning in life, with the point being that there's no need for an overarching meaning of life to have meaning in life. And then within the meaning in life, there really are two separate tracks that people go down within moral philosophy. The first is what they refer to as a meaningful life in the analytic sense, which is an objective view of a meaningful life. And then the second one is sense of meaning and the actual experience of meaning in life versus the view of a of a meaningful life from an objective standpoint. So I'm curious what your experience has been with respect to broadening your definition of meaning beyond highlight reel type stuff. Although to be fair, your book's been huge. So that definitely kind of lives up to the fireworks. But yeah, I'm curious how you would advise people to expand their definition and expectations of meaning. Yeah.

I think that's a fascinating— It makes a lot of sense, that dichotomy within the academic philosophy that you mentioned. I think in all honesty, I'm just on the sense of meaning side in that. I don't think I've spent a lot of time thinking about what an objectively meaningful life might be. And I have spent a lot of time thinking about what that sense of meaning is that we know when we get it. And I do think that there's some important reason, I'm not sure what the reason is, but there's some important reason why that has to ultimately be intuitive. In other words, I didn't want to write a laundry list in this book of, "Here are the things you should do to live a meaningful life. Prioritize relationships over money and spend lots of time outdoors." A, we all know that anyway, A, so it's not interesting, but B, that misses the meat of the matter to me, which for me anyway is that felt sense of meaning. I love this quote that I talk about in the book from James Hollis, the Jungian psychotherapist, about asking whether a given experience or choice or path in life enlarges me or diminishes me. If you're considering whether to, I don't know, stay in a particular professional role or a relationship or to make a big change in your life, that question, would this enlarge me or diminish me to go in that direction, is really powerful for me and I know for a lot of other people, because it somehow seems to reach to this level of intuitive felt meaning in a way that what would make me happy doesn't, partly because we're just terrible at predicting, A, what's going to make us happy? The research is clear on that. And secondly, because it gets at this idea that maybe happiness isn't the whole goal of life. So that question about enlargement enables me, for example, to distinguish between two kinds of negative experience that can come along in the course of work, relationships, all aspects of life. The kind of negative experience that that actually does tell you you're doing something you shouldn't be spending your time on, like you should get out of that situation, and the kind that is just an intrinsic part of growing and maturing and getting better at it. And if you just say, I want good experience and not negative experience, you can't distinguish between those. If you say, is there something generative, growthy, enlarging about this path? It's suddenly, people know the answer to this question when they don't know the answer to other ways of of phrasing these kinds of decisions. So I think if I've changed in this respect, it is I get slowly and painfully and haltingly better at understanding a certain kind of difficulty in life to be very close to the center of what it means to live well rather than something that just must be eradicated. And of course, if you try to eradicate it, it doesn't work anyway. You just bring yourself lots of the other kind of difficulty instead. So that I think is really important. And it's summed up in that quote that I begin the book with from Charlotte Joko Beck, the late American Zen Buddhist who says, "What makes it unbearable is your mistaken belief that it can be cured." This idea that problems per se in life are not antithetical to a meaningful life. They're probably central to a meaningful life. It's trying to get to some state where you don't have problems that is the cause of all the real suffering. So that's my take on sense of meaning anyway.

Do you think it is people's desire for more meaning that has made the book so successful? Do you think it's people's exasperation with their relationship with time? What do you think it is that has cause the book to be such a hit at the moment?

Oh, I don't know. I think, yes, I think people do. I think people respond well to the idea that a book about time management could actually take, or at least nominally about time management, could actually take those meaning questions seriously. And there's also this fascinating thing about giving people a sense of permission. People often use that. They talk about two things. They talk about feeling confronted by the book, like it's calling them out for their bad parts of their personality, but also that it gives them permission to focus on, again, not just to relax a bit, which does matter, and not just to stop endlessly striving to try to reach moments and outcomes that just regressing back across the horizon, but permission to focus on things that they already know are where they want to spend their time. I'm totally fascinated by this idea of permission because, like, who the hell am I to give anybody permission? Like, it's not like I, you know, nothing's changed in an individual reader's situation because I've come along and said you can do this. I think it's more to do with pointing to the pointing to the non-negotiable facts of our situation as humans and just saying, look, you do realize that these things are already true. You know that they're already true. And if you just take on board the ramifications of their being already true, the fact that you don't know how much time you've got left, the fact that it isn't very much time, the fact that nobody can possibly do all the things that the modern world suggests we ought to get done, Then you give yourself permission on that basis because it's like, well, I might as well use this time now to do the things that I know would count as having used some of my time well. Why not?

What is there to lose? I'm curious, now that you've had, I don't know how many thousand people read this and you've talked to a lot of people about the book, is there anything that you, if you were able to go back and edit it or tweak it, that you would like to have changed or removed or given more emphasis to?

It's a really interesting question. And on the one hand, the answer is absolutely not, because all I can do, the only writing skill I have, is to give as honest an accounting as I possibly can of where my head is at that moment. So the question almost doesn't make sense because there's tons wrong with this book or arguments that are undeveloped or that clash with each other, but that was the only book that I could have written. Being a bit more down to earth about that question, I think that the thing I'm really fascinated by increasingly now is this question of how do we embody and practice and live into this or any other set of insights about the nature of time. Although I think I understood this as I was writing the book, I think it is even truer, even clearer to me now that just grasping something intellectually is not enough to change how life goes. And it might be that no book can go beyond that because a book obviously is just a collection of ideas expressed in words. But there is this sense of, what do you do next? So the most interesting— lots of people have loved this book. I'm sure lots of people have hated it too, but only a few of them have reached out to me. But the interesting response to me is the little bit in the middle there. It's like, I really get this shift of perspective, but like, now what? And I'm fascinated by that. I'm not sure that there's a clear answer. I'm not sure that another book could address it successfully, but who knows? I don't know. That's where my head is at the moment. Practices, rituals, you know, because everyone's obsessed about habits, for example, and like building— how to build good habits. And I've often found that actually a lot of that approach doesn't help me. You know, it's like there's something about the project of building habits that takes me away from actually embodying a new spirit of living, etc., etc., etc. I could talk for hours about this.

Yeah, one of my all-time favorite quotes is, in theory, theory and practice are the same, but in practice they're not. And so yeah, I'm curious if you had to do, if you had to give your best stab at providing some practices or rituals to take the perspective shift and embody it, what would some of those things be? Is it meditation? Is it, and maybe, well, yeah, you go on that first, then I want to prod a little bit more.

Yeah, well, I mean, I did put this list in the back in the appendix. There's 10 techniques which, you know, it's funny, I saw that very much as just a little extra bit at the end of the book that might be useful to use in marketing the book, something like that. And it's like, people really like that bit where you sort of go through 10, where I go through sort of 10 tools for embracing your finitude. You know, I think they all have a place, right? If you can come at them in the right spirit, then many different approaches to managing your time and to sort of embodying this stuff are very valuable. And if you come at them in the wrong spirit, thinking that you're going to use them to sort of like defeat the human condition in some way, then they're not going to work. But I write a little bit in that bit of the back about ways of working that encourage serial and sequential doing one thing time, limiting your work in progress, which is one of the ideas from the Kanban approach to task management, as I'm sure you'll know. Cal Newport's stuff about, um, sort of fixed schedule productivity and what I call fixed volume productivity, which has to do with first of all deciding how much time you'll dedicate to some kind of work and then deciding which tasks are the most important ones to fit in. To that time, taking the finite time as the foundation and as the given. Maybe you've got 8 hours you're willing to give to work today or something, as opposed to getting up in the morning and saying, 'I've got to get through these 40 things by the end of the day somehow,' which is just a recipe for a sort of fruitless and self-defeating struggle with time. The only reason I don't go around preaching about meditation is because I would feel a bit of a hypocrite because it's not something that I've ever— I mean, I do it and I have done it in a fairly disciplined way, but I don't have sort of ongoing, regular, formal seated meditation practice right at the moment. I think that almost anything can help if it encourages you to stay with that small sense of discomfort that comes from entering into reality and seeing how things are. So one incredibly powerful thing about meditation is just that you basically have to stay there until the timer goes off and you've realized that it doesn't kill you to just kind of be in reality for that time and not to scurry mentally away to something else. I think that's true also of kind of these single-tasking approaches to work. They oblige you to live with the anxiety of knowing that all the other Tasks are not getting done right now. And so I think just practice being okay with mild discomfort is an incredibly— for me anyway, that's sort of the master one of those at the moment.

I like the point about volume first rather than task first. We talk about that sometimes as work compression. Where you fix the constraints of the time allocation provided. And interestingly, you end up indirectly triggering flow through upregulating the challenge skills balance, which is one of the big triggers for flow state is what the challenge level is relative to the task at hand. Because if the time is constrained, the challenge goes up, even if the task is the same. And you also impose an element of risk, even if it's artificial in a sense, by adding a deadline or a time constraint as well. Because if you don't finish it, you don't finish it. And that's obviously not desired. So there's a risk component there as well. I'm curious if you could give us a breakdown, Oliver, just of what your day looks like day to day these days. And maybe you could even speak to some of your specific routines and some of the shifts in mindset that have changed even small things in your routine, like letting yourself spend 15 minutes longer at lunch to just ponder something you read that morning? Or I'm not sure how it shows up, but I'd love a breakdown there.

Guy Spier The one thing, the one absolute central point about my daily routines is that they are in a sort of constant state of flux. And it was actually a genuinely sort of powerful moment for me to realize that I didn't have to pursue the productivity and routines and things like this with this idea in mind that I was going to get to a point where it was going to be, you know, fix it and forget it, whatever, right? That this could be something that always evolved. What I've found— so one thing that is an absolute— that actually Just to push back against that, the one thing that I basically have done every day for decades now is morning pages, is just free-form journaling for 3 sides of a narrow-ruled A5 notebook for 40 minutes or so in the morning. That's something that has sort of taken— takes no self-discipline to do now because the sort of connection between doing it and the rest of the day going well has been so sort of embedded in my psyche. So I don't use it to try to get ideas for writing, but I get them. I don't use it to sort of plan the day, but it seems that it becomes easier to plan the day. I think part of that may simply be a sort of cobweb clearing exercise, but it also, if there's sort of insights and ideas that I'm coming to understand in my own life, that's a good opportunity to sort of embed them instead of just like, you know, it's great if you understand something in like a therapy session or something, but if it's gonna be another week till you think about that again, it's not so useful. And then, you know, in terms of the ways that I try to organize my kind of work, which is very heavily, you know, sitting on my own at the computer thinking about things and writing things, I've tried quite hard in recent years to sort of set targets and outcome, you know, outcome goals for the day that sort of very much— I'm sure there's a better word for this and you're the kind of person who'll know it, but like, that sort of, that are smaller than the amount of time available. That are, for example, I may target doing sort of 3 or 4 hours of of focused deep work on my most important creative projects in the context of a day where that's going to be fairly easy to do. Not the kind of technique, and this has been my sort of struggle with classic timeboxing and timeblocking, not the kind of approach where from the moment I get up, everything has to go exactly right for it to be a successful day. I know that the wiser promoters of timeboxing, again, Cal Newport, most obviously would say, like, no, you can respond to interruption, you can go with the flow, you don't need to sort of see it as a straitjacket. But something deep in me does see it as a straitjacket. And so, I've found it, generally speaking, more fruitful for myself to have these sort of certain targets about quantities of work, but then not to try to fix them rigidly into the calendar. And then just one other thing that I've found useful recently is to sort of be quite explicit about when it comes to habits, you know, if I'm trying to spend a certain amount of time doing something or do something a certain number of times per week, that idea of a sort of rolling average or of trying to do it most days with some kind of very deliberately impressionistic level of target instead of, "I will do this every day," or, "I will do this number of minutes every—" There's something about those goals not being super rigid that helps me actually fulfill them.

I love the morning pages example and what you mentioned earlier about habits as well. I've always found it questionable, the research on habits that says it's 30 days to ingrain a habit or 60 days or 90 days, because the level of a habit being automatized is a spectrum. And to your point with morning pages, with a habit like that, where it's years and years and years of doing it and it's utterly effortless, that is a much deeper level of ingraining and automaticity than after 60 days or 90 days or whatever it is. I'm curious what that looks like for you. Do you do it by hand always? Do you type it? Do you have coffee when you're doing it? What does it look like specifically, that habit?

Guy Spier This has been interrupted certain times through becoming a father, but it's the one thing that I really tried hard to keep make happening, even if even while pulling my weight with the 2 AM wake-ups and all the rest of it. So what happens usually these days is I get up about an hour earlier than I can reliably predict my son is going to get up. Doesn't always work out, but so, you know, it's usually about 5:45 or something that I get up. I make coffee, stretch a bit, sit down with my I mean, if you want the nitty-gritty here, with my A5 Leuchtturm lined, narrow-lined notebook and my Sigma Micron pen. I am a bit obsessive about these things, but I'm sure some people in your audience know what that's like. And yeah, I write in longhand, 3 sides. It's pretty narrow. My handwriting is pretty small, so 3 sides of A5 is actually quite quite a lot of words, I think. And that's it. I mean, the subject matter tends to be more like— I guess it would look, if you saw it, and you never will, it would look more like psychotherapy than like creative writing. It would look more like, you know, working through my issues than coming up with a business plan, that sort of thing. But it could be anything. I'm assuming there's no prompt then. No, no, I've never really— I don't think there's probably not canonical sort of Julia Cameron morning pages in various ways. So no, no, there isn't. It's just literally something usually feels like it needs getting clearer. At that time. And the rare occasions that it doesn't feel like that, it's really good to write anyway because then you surprise yourself. Yeah.

William Green Just two more questions for you, Oliver, and then I'll let you jump because I know it's getting late there. First off, children. How have things shifted on these topics of time and meaning since you've become a father?

Oh, kind of immeasurably. But then in another sense, I think that it's probably true that mostly what parenthood does is sort of throw into relief certain things about time that are true for everybody. So I'm sort of at pains in this book when I am writing about parenting not to make it only relevant to people who happen to have small kids, at home. But nothing will remind you of your finite amount of time you have in a day than suddenly having at least a third of your discretionary time every single day suddenly spoken for for an indefinite period. And also, nothing will attune you, I think, quite as much, that I've experienced, to to the nature of impermanence and the necessity of being in the moment of your life than the fact that, especially in the early years, our son is only 5, but already it feels like there's been 10 different stages that are all gone now except this present one. And so that idea that moving into new areas, doing new things, developing and growing entails a flip side of loss at every stage is that sort of poignancy is incredibly brought home to you because, you know, it was only 2 or 3 years ago that— 2 years ago that I was sort of pushing him in a stroller and that whole thing is gone now and That's true of all of life and of every moment in a certain sense, and it certainly doesn't just apply to parents, but it really brings it home to you. And I write in the book about this terrifying point that Sam Harris makes that our lives are full of things we're doing for the last time without realizing that it's going to be the last time that we do them. And he gives the example of picking up one of his daughters. And that just sort of drove a stake through my heart because it's one of those things where, on the one hand, I cannot imagine that situation in my own life. On the other hand, the fact that one doesn't pick up 30-year-old children, that my 70-something father doesn't pick me up when we meet up, is proof that it definitely is going to happen. And that's just like, wow, that really brings it into perspective. But I think Sam Harris's point, and what I take from it certainly, is that like really every moment of life is like that for everybody. There's something about parenting that puts a finer point on it. And then all the other things like, you know, not being able to exert total control over your time. You better believe you can't do that when you're responsible for —people whose sleep cycles are whatever they're going to be, and moods and tantrums are going to be whatever they're going to be. And you're going to find out quickly that actually not having that control is core to the meaning of the experience. It would be a disaster if you did have that kind of control.

Love that breakdown. That's a great example from Sam Harris as well. The final question is one we usually ask academics, but I'm really curious to get your take. We call it the research genie question, and it's a question about a question. If you could click your fingers and immediately have all of the research done, the randomized control trials or whatever is required to get the answer to any question, what would the question be?

Guy Spier Wow. Yeah, I don't know if— I probably am not able to formulate that in a way that would make sense an academic question. But I suppose, yeah, I mean, the question is, coming back to what we were talking about a little while ago, like, what is the most reliably effective way to cross the knowing-doing gap? It is about, like, what really works in that respect. I'd also like to know if we have free will. I think that would be useful if the philosophers could get onto that. I don't know if it can be handled through, through a randomized controlled study.

So, I mean, Sam Harris, uh, partially thinks it can. Yeah, exactly. So, um, well, listen, thanks so much, Oliver, for, for your time. This was, this was really fantastic. And yeah, appreciate the generosity, uh, and yeah, really enjoyed this, and I know, and our audience will too.

So thank you so much. I've really enjoyed the conversation.

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