August 5, 2026 • 36 mins
There's a particular kind of tightness that creeps in when the world feels unpredictable. We tidy the to-do list, tighten the routine, optimise one more thing, all in an attempt to feel a bit more in control.
Oliver Burkeman has a word for this: clenching. And he reckons it's squeezing the life out of us, even when it looks a lot like productivity.
In this episode, I sit down with Oliver Burkeman, New York Times bestselling author of Four Thousand Weeks and Meditations for Mortals, and former writer of The Guardian's This Column Will Change Your Life, to talk about his forthcoming book Aliveness and what he calls unclenching, learning to loosen your grip on certainty rather than white-knuckle your way through it.
We get into flexible goals, why urgency is so often someone else's agenda in disguise, and how to stop tying your self-worth to your latest achievement.
If you have ever hit a goal and felt the satisfaction evaporate within minutes, this conversation will change how you think about ambition altogether.
Oliver and I discuss:
- What "clenching" is, and why our instinct to grip tighter in uncertain times actually backfires
- The insecure overachiever trap, and why hitting a goal rarely feels like enough for long
- How Oliver's open list, closed list approach stops you drowning in fifty half-started things
- Setting a "no later than" time instead of a strict start time, and why looser goals often get more done
- Why urgency is so often someone else's agenda in disguise, and how to tell when it is genuinely yours
- What Oliver actually does with the emails he has not gotten to yet
Key quotes
"If you have this feeling of aliveness, even the most difficult challenges are copeable with, and if you don't have this feeling of aliveness, even the most impressive accomplishments are kind of worthless."
"You will do enough, because you will do everything that it's within your capacities and your energy levels and your talents to do, and that just by definition will be all that you could ever have done."
Connect with Oliver Burkeman on X (Twitter), LinkedIn and his website. Check out his latest book Meditations for Mortals and look out for his upcoming book Aliveness in 2027.
If you want more from Oliver, listen back to our earlier conversation on time management, a great companion episode to this one: (https://www.amantha.com/podcasts/want-to-make-time-for-the-things-that-count)
My latest book The Energy Game is out now. You can order a copy here: https://amzn.to/48ID29
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
If you have this feeling of aliveness, even the most
difficult challenges are capable with.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
And if you don't have.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
This feeling of aliveness, even the most impressive accomplishments are
kind of worthless.
Speaker 3 (00:12):
That was Oliver Beckman, and I am wondering whether you
can relate if you ever hit a goal, felt genuinely
proud of yourself for about five minutes, and then very
quickly reset the bar higher without even noticing you've done it.
Oliver calls this insecure overachiever psychology, and I can very
(00:36):
hard relate now if you haven't come across Oliver. He
is a New York Times best selling author, and four
Thousand Weeks, which is one of my favorite of his books,
is one that I have shoved into the hands of
countless people. Oliver has also spent years writing The Guardians
this column will Change Your Life, and he's currently locked
(00:59):
away avoiding his inbox to finish his next book, so
I felt pretty lucky to compel him out of his
book writing cave. In today's episode, we get into what
he calls unclenching, how to stop white knuckling your way
through uncertain times, and why he thinks ambition and self
(01:20):
worth don't have to be tangled up the way most
of us have them. We also talk about having flexible goals,
which is an idea that I absolutely love, and also
why urgency is usually other people's agenda in disguise, and
what Oliver does in response. Welcome to How I Work,
(01:47):
a show about habits, rituals, and strategies for optimizing your day.
I'm your host, doctor Amantha Imber. I want to start
with Aliveness, because this is your new book that you
have been writing and avoiding any form of things in
(02:09):
your inbox it would appear for the last few months,
because quite frankly, I can't believe we're talking. Tell me,
I want to know what problem is a Liveness solving
for me and all your many many readers around the world.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
Thank you. I am still working on this book. I
have to be honest.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
I'm not speaking to you now because it's all triumphantly complete,
but because I value talking to you and I'm making
an interruption in the process of writing it. But it's
essentially advice on kind of how to proceed, how to
put one foot in front of the other in these
completely ridiculous times in which we live. Not just sort
(02:52):
of coping and not feeling too depressed about the state
of the world, but hopefully kind of thriving and having
an interesting time and being productive in a meaningful sense
and enjoying yourself and all those things, and just sort
of responding.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
I suppose to this sense.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
I don't know if you feel it too, that in
recent years it has become harder and harder to sort
of think of your own life as existing separate from
history with a capital H.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
It's all these different.
Speaker 1 (03:18):
Things, and so many people so anxious all the time
about the whole state of everything. Me too, by the way,
But I wanted to try to address that in a
constructive way.
Speaker 3 (03:27):
I know that you're midway through the book writing process.
So if I were to say, Oliver, tell me, how
can I be more alive? How can I embrace a
liveness more than I am right now? Like, what practically
should I be doing differently?
Speaker 1 (03:42):
My basic thesis I suppose in this book is that
we naturally respond to kind of volatile, uncertain, scary times
by a variety of approaches that I sort of group
under the deliberately unpleasant word clenching. We try to make
ourselves feel safer or more cured or better equipped. We
(04:02):
seek more of a feeling of control to try to
deal with the fact that things feel so chaotic and
out of control. But this has the effect of kind
of actually squeezing out the very kind of aliveness and
vibrancy and energy that I think is ultimately what makes
life worth living. So in all sorts of different ways,
my book is supposed, I suppose as a guide to
(04:23):
kind of what I would call you could call unclenching
if you want to carry on using this unpleasant terminology,
or sort of relaxing into reality right as we find it,
not constantly trying to achieve a great sense of control
or to hold it at bay, or to kind of
ban yourself from the Internet or optimize yourself so that
you're better equipped to deal with it, not constantly trying
(04:45):
to keep up. We get this message all the time
at the moment with AI right about not being left behind,
I think that's a terrible stance with which to approach life,
and instead shifting again, it's a perspective shift more than
it is a set of techniques sort of kind of
confronting the truth that reality is always completely uncertain and volatile,
and the future is always unknowable, but recognizing and sort
(05:08):
of learning to recognizing yourself that that's something that you
can cope with because it's what you're always coping with, actually, right,
the human situation of total uncertainty. You've done pretty well
so far, so there's not necessarily any need to worry
about coping in the future, and that from that place
of sort of relaxing into reality, it becomes a lot
more straightforward to sort of take action on the things
(05:29):
you care about, to feel calm and sane in the
doing of them, to address some of the world's crises,
if that's part of your set of values for life,
and then through all of that to kind of enter
into a greater sense of this kind of still rather mysterious.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
To me state that I and other people as well
call a.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
Liveness, this sense that if you have this feeling of aliveness,
even the most difficult challenges are copable with, and if
you don't have this feeling of aliveness, even the most
impressive plishments are kind of worthless.
Speaker 2 (06:02):
That's the essence of it.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
I'm still working it out, though, so you know, if
there are any sort of loose sense here that's because
I'm still trying to figure them out.
Speaker 3 (06:09):
I'm curious around the term relaxing into reality, which I
think for so many people is so hard. I mean,
the world can seem so bleak on so many days.
And I know you're a parent. I think your son
is about ten years old give or take.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
A few months a night, so pretty good going.
Speaker 3 (06:29):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, yeah cool. And I've got a
twelve year old daughter, so you know, similar ish age,
and I think it can be quite depressing as a
parent if you really just take in what is going
on with the world. So how do you relax into reality?
Speaker 1 (06:44):
This is an idea that goes way way back in
all sorts of philosophical and spiritual traditions, right, This idea
that in some quite subtle way, we default to avoiding
fully feeling our experiences, fully feeling our emotions for perfectly
understandable reasons any time in history, and especially in the
current times. But that when you do that, when you
(07:05):
find ways to sort of hold reality at bay or
not quite acknowledge that the reality that you're in, it
feels like protective and defensive, right, it feels like it's
going to make you better, but actually what it does
is it sort of disconnects you from reality. It makes
those feelings more scary, because the more you sort of
don't go there, the more you dread going there. And
(07:28):
so a lot of practices have something to do with
just sort of noticing and feeling your feelings and not
necessarily immediately responding or reacting to them, but seeing that
you can cope with them. Just realizing how totally uncertain
reality and especially the future would always have felt to
(07:48):
anybody at any moment in history. I always like the
example of kind of, you know, the Medievals, because I
think it feels just about distant enough from us now
to have a real sense of mysteriousness about it. But
you know, to live in a world where plague, famine,
war could completely obliterate your life at any moment. Not
that that isn't a reality for a lot of people
(08:09):
on the planet today, but it isn't for me. And
so to sort of take account of how all human accomplishments,
all family raising or work or writing, art, music, science,
everything has always been done in this situation of kind
of absolute insecurity, I think can be really consoling and
(08:31):
sort of edifying in a way.
Speaker 2 (08:33):
So part of what I'm trying.
Speaker 1 (08:35):
To do in this section of the book is to
kind of at least bring back the possibility that maybe
the kind of the crises and uncertainties that we face,
there's no reason to assume.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
That these are things that human beings can't cope with.
They can be very serious, right.
Speaker 1 (08:52):
I don't think this requires one to say, oh, it's
all fine, like, don't worry about it. But there are
all sorts of reasons and all sorts of whys, insights
from philosophers have times gone by and the like for
us to think that actually that the thing we're really
freaking out about there is not some utterly new kind
of threat, but is that we're sort of suddenly seeing
more clearly how it always is to be a human being.
Speaker 3 (09:15):
Something I want to ask you about, Oliver, is that
I feel like so much of the work that you've
done over the last few years has been almost I
guess like anti productivity guru, anti self development advice, where
I know, you know, for a period of your life
you were like deep into it and using all the
(09:36):
productivity optimization strategies in the world, yet you're still so
successful at what you do. Like I look at, you know,
the success of four Thousand Weeks, which I think for
many people it would, and it's certainly one of my
favorite books that I've read in the last decade, And
I wonder, how do you detach yourself, like, because you've
(09:58):
got this new book coming out into the world in
twenty twenty seven, and as a writer, it's like, you
want the book to do well. You want any book
that you pour your heart and soul into to do well.
Yet I feel like in your work there's also this
trying to detach your self worth from your achievement. So
(10:19):
how do you reconcile that when you're working really hard
on a book and you obviously want it to be
as successful as possible, yet you're trying to detach yourself
I guess from how well that book does in the world.
Speaker 2 (10:32):
I think this is such an interesting question. I'm sure
you've got thoughts on this as well.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
Right, I'm incredibly grateful for how successful four thousand Weeks
was and has been, but it made writing the book
after that, Meditation for Mortals and this one challenging in
a different way, right, Because anyone who's got that kind
of so called insecure overachiever psychology that I believe I
may not be the only person on this in this
(10:56):
conversation to be familiar with. When you reach a goal
and you do something impressive, get a good result in
a school exam or something, right, you feel really happy
for about five minutes, and then you realize that that's
the new minimum standard that you've got to meet in
the future for your self worth to be maintained. So, yeah,
it's really complicated. And my earlier times of being sort
(11:16):
of obsessed with optimization, productivity techniques and all the rest
of it were I see now pretty clearly an attempt
to try to find the system that would enable me
to guarantee that I would knock it out of the
park every time and could therefore feel like a basically
adequate human being. Right, So it's totally screwed up. It's
like the minimum standard adequacy is actually one hundred percent something.
(11:39):
It's you know, or to do better than everyone else
or something like that. And it's not that I don't
have that in me anymore. Right, It's that, like anything
like this, you sort of become more conscious of what's
going on and more able to step away from that.
You become sort of disillusioned in a positive sense of
the term, by your own older forms of operating sort
(12:00):
of can still notice that they're there, and that on
some level I'm desperate for approval and wanting to have
everyone say nice things. But then it doesn't matter in
the way it did because I kind of see what
I'm up to. And then beyond that, I feel like,
in some ways the thing that I've always been trying
to do is to kind of rescue, salvage some notion
(12:21):
of ambition from all that insecure self worth mess. Right,
I feel like this is one of the big questions
in my life. Is it possible to want to achieve
loads of cool things in the world and do them
and enjoy doing them in a state of not being
anxious about doing them, a state where you are doing
(12:41):
them because not in order to try to feel okay
about yourself, but because you do feel okay about yourself,
and actually your personality is one of those that wants
to do a bunch of this stuff. Sometimes, I've seen
social media postings from people here and there who talk
about how the more kind of conscious and the more
they have faith in themselves and feel great in themselves,
the less ambitious they get. And I think that's a
(13:03):
thing that happens to some people. And I definitely think
it's the case that lots of people are ambitious are
trying to sort of fill a void in the way
that I've been talking about. But I kind of want
there to be a way to, you know, write books
and hopefully reach a lot of people with those books
and all the rest of it, because that's like that
happens to be something that I think I'm quite good at,
you know, I think that's true. I think one of
(13:24):
the I think there is such a way, and I
think that there's nothing about detaching from all these kind
of self worth related productivity things that means that you
have to end up just sort of doing nothing, you know,
just sort of floating through the world passively. I don't
think that follows at all.
Speaker 3 (13:40):
I really struggle with that. Like I love your advice.
I love your books, you know, and everything within them,
and I also am a massive recovering productivity advice junkie.
I think you are far further on the journey than
I am. And something I find myself struggling with at
the moment and reflecting about a lot is that I've
(14:03):
got my new book, The Energy Game, coming out in
two weeks here in Australia, and I look at my
to do list and I know your advice with the
to do list, and we really need to limit the
active things on the to do list. I have not
taken this at the moment, your wonderful advice about that.
(14:24):
And instead, when I look at the section of my
list in notion that is all around book publicity, pre
order marketing, etc.
Speaker 2 (14:33):
Etc.
Speaker 3 (14:35):
I feel really overwhelmed and I doubt myself, and I
kind of oscillate between I got to do more. I've
got to do more. I got to get a new
personal best with the amount of pre orders that I
can drum up for The Energy Game compared to the
last two books, and then I kind of go to
the other extreme. I'm like, stop putting so much pressure
(14:56):
on yourself, Amantha, Like you're driving yourself insane. And I wonder, Oliver,
what wisdom would you give to me? Going between these
two extremes and feeling a little bit stressed about it,
I feel like.
Speaker 1 (15:10):
I resonate so much right and as I said before,
like I don't think any of my journey has been
about leaving any of this behind.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
It's about sort of noticing it, seeing.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
It, and laughing at oneself in a friendly manner and
doing things a little bit differently, which is actually the
whole game, I think, and I think it's much.
Speaker 2 (15:29):
More powerful then.
Speaker 1 (15:30):
You know, I could try to sell you now on
some complete new system and you could hypothetically get really
excited about it and go off and have a complete
fresh start and wipe your notion files and do a
whole new and that would just be more of the same.
So when I talk about limiting your work in progress,
when I talk about not trying to do a thousand
(15:52):
things at once and then becoming very depressed because you
don't have the capacity to do a thousand things at once,
I think.
Speaker 2 (15:57):
This is true.
Speaker 1 (15:58):
But I think it's very flexible approach in terms of
the temporal horizon that you're working on. Right, So, when
you're looking at your whole life and you're thinking about like, well,
I'd like to write several books with the next few
years of my life, but I'd also like to do this, this, this, this,
and this, that's the time to be like, okay, that
whole other goal of you know, becoming a professional graphic
designer or something that maybe has to you know, go
(16:19):
on the back burner for an extended period.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
But when it just feels like there's like fifty things.
Speaker 1 (16:24):
That you could do to promote a book, I think
the really important thing there is to know which sort
of three or four or five of them you're working
on right now and what the outcome would be that
would enable you to say that that stage of that
thing is done, but not necessarily that the other ones
have to be abandoned completely. So this is where you
know in four thousand Weeks I talk about this very
(16:45):
simple open list closed list approach where you make one
list that has like every single thing you can think
of that you'd like to get done, and then you
create a second list that has say five to ten
slots on it, and you put outcomes on those slots,
like send ten outreach emails to this kind of person,
or add this page to your website, whatever it is,
(17:06):
and you don't allow any more items onto that list
until you freed up a slot by completing one of them.
So you're effectively sort of artificially adding a bottleneck to
your workflow, although you're not really because as a finite
human being. You are the bottleneck. So you're just sort
of being honest about the situation that pertains. And what
(17:26):
happens then is you see you kind of you have
to make a wise ish decision every time you're moving
items from the incredibly long list to the closed list.
Speaker 2 (17:35):
And that's the moment to which much more intuitively.
Speaker 1 (17:38):
I think you find yourself saying, well, Okay, I'm not
going to spend twenty minutes launching this whole new arm
of this project that would take days.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
I'm going to actually make.
Speaker 1 (17:47):
Concrete progress to the next step on this one that's
already up and running, and that is really promising. Or
it might even be unconscious, right. I don't think you
necessarily know that, but it just feels like, Okay, if
I've only got five things that I can work next
to do with promoting this book, it's obviously going to
be these ones and not these ones. And not only
does that sort of bring some order to the sort
(18:09):
of infinity of it, but.
Speaker 2 (18:11):
It also feels like traction. Right.
Speaker 1 (18:13):
It's like you do things and they begin to have
an effect, and you get some feedback about them, and
they go out into the world. Because the big risk
when there's fifty things you do is you sort of
jump around between them all. Each time one feels a
bit difficult, you decide you're going to move forward with
another one instead, and so you go round around in
a circle and never make the critical progress on any
of them. And then not to go on and on,
(18:35):
but just one other thing like this all comes in
a context. All this stuff about how to manage your finitude,
you know, comes in a context of saying like, you're
never going to feel like you did enough in a
project like promoting a book. And there's something incredibly powerful
about understanding that you're never going to feel like you
did enough because you can conceive of so many valuable
(18:55):
and useful things to do, so many more than you'll
have the time to do. I've always found, anyway, something
incredibly liberating about that recognition. Right, it's not because you're
a bit of a loser that you won't get to
the point of having done enough. It's because that is
baked in to who we are and what our situation is.
And so another way of putting it is that actually,
(19:17):
you will do enough because you will do everything that
it's within your capacities and your energy levels and your
talents to do and that just by definition, will be
all that you could ever have done, which.
Speaker 3 (19:33):
Is very reassuring. It's kind of like the equivalent of
iron enough, right thinking that, which I find very very reassuring.
Coming up next, Oliver talks about the flexible goal he
calls a no later than a time and why setting
it looser than you'd think is actually what gets you moving.
(19:56):
He also talks about why urgency is usually other people's
agenda into guys, and what he does when a client
says they need something from him right now. If you're
looking for more tips to improve the way you work
can live. I write a short weekly newsletter that contains
tactics I've discovered that have helped me personally. You can
(20:18):
sign up for that at Amantha dot com. That's Amantha
dot com. I want to talk about flexible goals because
I know that this is something that you apply to
your life, and I've read some coll examples like instead
(20:39):
of going I'm going to start work at eight am
every morning, you will say I'm starting by ten am
at the latest. Can you tell me about these flexible
goals and what made you start setting them?
Speaker 2 (20:54):
Yeah, let me talk.
Speaker 1 (20:54):
I guess specifically about that example of a no later
down time, which is how I or think about that.
I went through a long phase of my earlier adulthood
essentially trying to use my conscious brain, my frontal cortex
whatever to impose on reality how I wanted things to unfold.
So it's like, you know, very strict time boxing. There's
(21:18):
an example of that, I'm going to start and do
this from eight o'clock to nine point thirty whatever, and
then this other thing from nine thirty to eleven. And firstly,
of course, that very often doesn't work because there are
clashing priorities, things get in the way, somebody I care
about responding to wants my attention, you know, and you
(21:38):
can't factor in all the things that might happen. And
then the other problem is that even when it does work,
there's something that I've always experienced. It's very lifeless and
straight jackety about that. It's like, now that I have
this plan, I don't even want to do it because
I feel like I resent the jerky's telling me to
do it, even though that's me, you know that sort
(21:59):
of Now I just have to sort of plod through
the day that I have set up for myself. In
other words, I want there to be some role for
inspiration and what I feel like doing. I want to
be able to harness that kind of sense of what
I would like to do instead of always having to
stamp it out in favor of what I've decided I
should do. And you know, sometimes there are shoulds in life,
(22:21):
and people have different jobs where sometimes they have to
do certain things, and I have deadlines, and you know,
you can't just do it exactly as you want. But
within the discretionary room for maneuver that I have, I
don't want to be making it harder to do what
I feel like doing or to you know, go with
the flow of my inspiration and desire and things like that.
So I'm switching now the example of that flexible car.
(22:43):
I'll come back to the no later that time. But
one way that you can sort of take account of
that is to say that, you know, it's the difference
between saying I'm going to be working on this project
for these two hours and this other project for the
next two hours, and instead it's a question of saying, well, okay,
these are the five projects that I intend to work
on at the moment. And I'm going to treat them
as a menu and pick what feels appetizing at any
(23:05):
given moment. And people are very worried that then they
won't pick the important but dull seeming one. It's amazing
how rarely that happens if you actually trust what you
want to do, because it turns out that you are
the kind of person who wants to keep your commitments
and get your taxes filed and all these things right.
It's not appetizing necessarily, but it's very low opinion of yourself,
embodied in the idea that if you did what you wanted,
(23:28):
you'd only do the indulgent things. So that's one example
of saying, well, okay, I would like to exert my
will and my intention to some extent and say that
I'm going to be focusing on these five things at
the moment, but I'm not going to turn that into
something that kind of imprisons the other parts of my
intuition and feelings of pleasure, or that sets up this
(23:48):
fight with reality where I get furious and irritated because
the whole world isn't just conforming to my wishes. And
so with the no later that time, I don't do
it all the time, but when I do do it, it's
like if you set a time time that you can
easily manage to start work rather than one that's going
to be a constant struggle. Firstly, you're going to get
the satisfaction of sticking to it. Secondly, you're going to
(24:08):
get the satisfaction of like beating it loads of times.
If you're usually free to start work at nine, and
you say eight forty five, then you're constantly sort of
antsy at school drop off and you're getting as fast
as you can from the school gates at the desk,
and it's like, no, just say nine and you can
probably manage that, and even better, say nine thirty, and
you probably do it at nine fifteen and feel immensely
(24:30):
virtuous at getting that extra fifteen minutes, which, on some
level just shows what a silly thing all of this is. Right,
It's like it's playing tricks on yourself with your mind.
But that's what we're doing in the first place, when
we're kind of shoulding ourselves into oblivion. So yeah, these
are some of the examples of what you're talking about.
Speaker 3 (24:47):
It's so funny. I was thinking of school drop off
when you were talking about the no later than rule,
and I was just reflecting that so often I will
be doing school drop off, and I will have this
what is essentially a false sense of urgency, because typically
the first couple of hours of my day I don't
have meetings. I'm doing deep work. Therefore I'm not beholden
(25:10):
to anyone other than myself. Yet I feel like, oh, quick, Frankie, quick,
get ready for school, so we can leave, and so
I can be back by eight thirty on the dot,
so I can start my deep work and get a
full two hours in or three hours or whatever my
day is looking like. And I can imagine instead just
going well, I will start no later than nine am,
(25:33):
and just how relaxing that would be. That would completely
take the false pressure essentially that I'm putting on myself
to just go well, that's fine. That's fine if Frankie
is just taking a time and dawdling and we're a
little bit late for drop off, and then I'm a
little bit late coming home, and maybe I'm not at
(25:54):
my desk until eight fifty instead of eight thirty, and
it actually doesn't matter.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
I love that.
Speaker 3 (26:01):
I want to talk about urgency because I've heard you
say that urgency is other people's agenda, but sometimes urgency
is real, Like I think you know, on the parenting example,
if the school is calling me saying Frankie is unewell
and you need to pick her up right now, that
(26:21):
is my urgent problem to deal with. That is not
someone else's agenda, although arguably it's Frankie's agenda and the
school's agenda. How do you think about urgency when you
have clearly got your priorities for the day. What happens
when urgent things come up?
Speaker 1 (26:35):
I wrote a newsletter what's called urgency doesn't exist. And
I'm being slightly facetious because I have always had it's
in the nature of my particular issues and hang ups
and screw ups to be made very anxious by other
people's agendas and constantly feeling like I'm I can't relax
until they've been dealt with. So in a way, I
was pushing back against that and saying like, well, okay,
(26:56):
either you care about using the next portion of your
time on some thing or you don't.
Speaker 2 (27:01):
And you might care about it because you love the experience.
Speaker 1 (27:05):
And you might care about it because you need to
earn some money, and you don't love the experience, but
you love what the money enables you to do for yourself,
for your family, and something's the time sensitive. That's true,
there are things that it makes more sense to do
now the next week.
Speaker 2 (27:18):
But even so, the way we talk about.
Speaker 1 (27:20):
Urgency as this kind of emotion or get developing a
sense of urgency, it always lands for me as trying
to sort of hound yourself into action or acting out
of anxiety. So to part to answer your question, I
suppose I do think it's useful to distrust urgency and
to sort of connect to some reason to want to
(27:41):
do something other than it's urgent. And then when it's really, really,
really urgent, I think it crosses a threshold and it
just in a sense it isn't a problem, even though
it only happens when things really are a problem.
Speaker 2 (27:52):
Does that make sense?
Speaker 3 (27:53):
It does. And because I have people placing tendencies and
I believe that you do as well.
Speaker 2 (28:02):
I think so yeah, I think that's a fair thing.
Speaker 3 (28:05):
And when say, a client of mine at Inventium needs
something urgently in inverted commas, I want to please that
client and I will abandon my own priorities, and I
will take on their agenda as my new agenda because
I want to please. And so I'm wondering how do
(28:28):
you manage that in your own life when someone is saying, Oliver,
I need this now, because I feel like, certainly with
the length that it has taken to get this podcast
in to be scheduled, that you're really good at prioritizing
your own goals. And I don't mean that facetiously. I
(28:50):
mean that very genuinely.
Speaker 1 (28:53):
I've several times now in the last few years people
say to me like, I apologize profusely for not getting
back to them sooner, and they're like, oh no, and
that just shows you're living your philosophies.
Speaker 2 (29:01):
And I'm like, oh, okay, it seems to be. I
do struggle with this.
Speaker 1 (29:04):
I don't want anybody to think that I'm sitting there perfectly, calmly,
you know, ignoring emails.
Speaker 2 (29:09):
I do feel burdened by them.
Speaker 1 (29:11):
I think that what has happened for me, and like,
you know, a certain amount of it, let's just be
completely candid, is like four thousand weeks did pretty well,
and it does sort of affect certain like if I
had only ever sold like five books in my life,
I would feel a very great need every single time
anyone was in any way interested in talking to me
(29:32):
to sort of rush and give them exactly what they wanted.
Speaker 2 (29:34):
And so I do have a little bit of way
to throw.
Speaker 1 (29:36):
Around or something which is a vaguely obnoxious way of
talking about it. But there is like a sense of, well,
hang on, I'm probably going to get a few more
inputs and requests for my time and attention that it's
in my interest to give. So you sort of have
to learn to handle that. Though again, I wasn't ignoring
you because I don't think you're important. I was ignoring
you because I was overburdened by things and I was
(29:57):
very aware that your email was sitting in my in
box and look here, I am right. So I think
what it comes down to this is maybe sound a
bit abstract at first, but let's see if we can
turn it into something more practical. There are totally legitimate
contexts where like somebody else's agenda should become your agenda.
Right if a client of yours has something that they
consider to be urgent and you consider it to be
(30:21):
a central value of your life, to be running a
business where you serve clients well, then on some level
that is just a completely legitimate part of your agenda.
It's the question of distinguishing that from the overlay right
where you've got some ancient psychology where the client is
like your mum or dad or something right in a
(30:43):
sort of deep symbolic, unconscious way probably and you sort
of feel like it. It's like force measure right, It's like, okay,
as soon as somebody else wants something, everything else is
by the wayside, and you can replace that. And I
think I have gradually replaced it with a sense of
weighing things in the balance. It's like, it matters what
(31:03):
other people think and want, and it matters what you want,
and one of the set of things you want is
to do right by certain people, and it all gets
weighed in the balance, and there's no reason for that
to be done in a state of panic or anxiety.
Speaker 2 (31:18):
Again, not that I have managed perfectly.
Speaker 1 (31:21):
And so the request comes across the transfom to you,
and it's potentially open to you when the request like
that comes in to do anything from drop everything else,
because it's your agenda to want to make that client
feel like they've been completely responded to, all the way
through hypothetically to completely ignoring it, and everything in between,
(31:45):
including sending a nice note saying I'm going to get
to this tomorrow or whatever it might be. And none
of those is intrinsically bad. It's a question of how
that factors into your set of goals. I think we've
got lost a bit at some time, maybe in the
sort of productivity conversation. This isn't about being selfish, because
a large number of ordinary, nice, hopefully good people, like
(32:07):
I hope we are are going to have as some
of their own goals, like being genuinely helpful and courteous
and kind to other people.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
That sort of people serving I.
Speaker 1 (32:17):
Suppose, as opposed to people pleasing, right, And then you've
got to understand that, because you are limited in finite
that's sometimes not going to involve immediately saying yes my dreams.
What I would do is I would acknowledge swiftly every
single invitation I get to be on a podcast, and
then I would, as I basically do, I think, choose
(32:38):
to say yes to the ones, not necessarily just the
ones that I think are going to like serve me
in some cynical way, but also ones that might just
be a good, enjoyable experience, and then occasionally also some
that are kind of it's more like good karma. It's like, Okay,
I want to help that person out or something, and
all these different values can coexist, and all of them
are in some sense your values rather than oh no,
(32:59):
somebody else has said something, and deep in my own
conscious they remind me of my dad, who's orders I
always had to obey or whatever. You know, it varies
from person to.
Speaker 3 (33:09):
Person, Oliver, I'd love to know for someone listening that
is like that all sounds really interesting and really helpful,
and they were thinking, Okay, I'm going to do one
thing differently tomorrow practically, what do you think that would
be best served to do?
Speaker 1 (33:27):
I hear this question and I want to kind of
subvert it a little bit, because the old productivity ek
in me and maybe also in you once, like, Okay,
what's the daily practice, Like what's the thing that if
I do it's in my morning routine every day, it's
going to start causing this whole thing to fall into place.
And that's fine. You know, do morning pages, meditate, These
(33:50):
are all good things that are going to bring you
into a more conscious relationship with what's going on in
your mind, and it can only help.
Speaker 2 (33:57):
But what I really want to say is the one.
Speaker 1 (34:01):
Thing to do is not some sort of new habit
or practice that I've told you about, but it is
just to pick something that you know would make you
feel more alive, would bring your life now slightly more
into tune with the kind of life that you have
as a vision for your life, and just do that
(34:21):
thing for twenty minutes, you know, and actually do it.
Because as I've written and probably talked to you about
before in the past, actually a lot of the way
that these good habit kind of approaches can get in
our way is that they become alternatives to just doing
the thing right. It's all about preparing to be the
kind of person in a year or two who has
(34:42):
a really great social life, or who puts themselves forward
in business context. Pick something that you know belongs in
your vision of your life as you would have it be,
and just do it kind of, however badly, and however briefly.
Speaker 3 (34:55):
I love that. What a fantastic answer and subversion of
the question.
Speaker 2 (35:01):
Oliver.
Speaker 3 (35:01):
I'm so grateful that you have chosen to spend the
last hour with me in amongst the huge workload that
I imagine is upon you with I assume and emerging
a deadline for Aliveness. I cannot wait to read it
when it comes out next year. I always love our chats.
Thank you so much for just putting so much great
(35:23):
thinking into the world.
Speaker 2 (35:24):
Oh, thank you, and likewise, no really enjoyable conversation. I'm
grateful for it. Thank you.
Speaker 3 (35:29):
Oliver's new book, Aliveness is not available yet, but it
will probably be out next year, in twenty twenty seven.
And if four thousand weeks changed how you think about time,
Aliveness is set to change how you think about feeling
alive inside of it.
Speaker 2 (35:47):
Now.
Speaker 3 (35:47):
If you would like more from Oliver in the meantime,
highly recommend going back and listening to an earlier chat
that I had with him about time management, as I
think it's a really good companion episode to this one,
and I'll link to that in the show notes. And
if this conversation was one that you found helpful, make
sure you hit follow so you don't miss what's coming
(36:07):
out next on How I Work. How I Work was
recorded on the traditional land of the Warrangery People, part
of the Cooler nation,
If you have this feeling of aliveness, even the most
difficult challenges are capable with.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
And if you don't have.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
This feeling of aliveness, even the most impressive accomplishments are
kind of worthless.
Speaker 3 (00:12):
That was Oliver Beckman, and I am wondering whether you
can relate if you ever hit a goal, felt genuinely
proud of yourself for about five minutes, and then very
quickly reset the bar higher without even noticing you've done it.
Oliver calls this insecure overachiever psychology, and I can very
(00:36):
hard relate now if you haven't come across Oliver. He
is a New York Times best selling author, and four
Thousand Weeks, which is one of my favorite of his books,
is one that I have shoved into the hands of
countless people. Oliver has also spent years writing The Guardians
this column will Change Your Life, and he's currently locked
(00:59):
away avoiding his inbox to finish his next book, so
I felt pretty lucky to compel him out of his
book writing cave. In today's episode, we get into what
he calls unclenching, how to stop white knuckling your way
through uncertain times, and why he thinks ambition and self
(01:20):
worth don't have to be tangled up the way most
of us have them. We also talk about having flexible goals,
which is an idea that I absolutely love, and also
why urgency is usually other people's agenda in disguise, and
what Oliver does in response. Welcome to How I Work,
(01:47):
a show about habits, rituals, and strategies for optimizing your day.
I'm your host, doctor Amantha Imber. I want to start
with Aliveness, because this is your new book that you
have been writing and avoiding any form of things in
(02:09):
your inbox it would appear for the last few months,
because quite frankly, I can't believe we're talking. Tell me,
I want to know what problem is a Liveness solving
for me and all your many many readers around the world.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
Thank you. I am still working on this book. I
have to be honest.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
I'm not speaking to you now because it's all triumphantly complete,
but because I value talking to you and I'm making
an interruption in the process of writing it. But it's
essentially advice on kind of how to proceed, how to
put one foot in front of the other in these
completely ridiculous times in which we live. Not just sort
(02:52):
of coping and not feeling too depressed about the state
of the world, but hopefully kind of thriving and having
an interesting time and being productive in a meaningful sense
and enjoying yourself and all those things, and just sort
of responding.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
I suppose to this sense.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
I don't know if you feel it too, that in
recent years it has become harder and harder to sort
of think of your own life as existing separate from
history with a capital H.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
It's all these different.
Speaker 1 (03:18):
Things, and so many people so anxious all the time
about the whole state of everything. Me too, by the way,
But I wanted to try to address that in a
constructive way.
Speaker 3 (03:27):
I know that you're midway through the book writing process.
So if I were to say, Oliver, tell me, how
can I be more alive? How can I embrace a
liveness more than I am right now? Like, what practically
should I be doing differently?
Speaker 1 (03:42):
My basic thesis I suppose in this book is that
we naturally respond to kind of volatile, uncertain, scary times
by a variety of approaches that I sort of group
under the deliberately unpleasant word clenching. We try to make
ourselves feel safer or more cured or better equipped. We
(04:02):
seek more of a feeling of control to try to
deal with the fact that things feel so chaotic and
out of control. But this has the effect of kind
of actually squeezing out the very kind of aliveness and
vibrancy and energy that I think is ultimately what makes
life worth living. So in all sorts of different ways,
my book is supposed, I suppose as a guide to
(04:23):
kind of what I would call you could call unclenching
if you want to carry on using this unpleasant terminology,
or sort of relaxing into reality right as we find it,
not constantly trying to achieve a great sense of control
or to hold it at bay, or to kind of
ban yourself from the Internet or optimize yourself so that
you're better equipped to deal with it, not constantly trying
(04:45):
to keep up. We get this message all the time
at the moment with AI right about not being left behind,
I think that's a terrible stance with which to approach life,
and instead shifting again, it's a perspective shift more than
it is a set of techniques sort of kind of
confronting the truth that reality is always completely uncertain and volatile,
and the future is always unknowable, but recognizing and sort
(05:08):
of learning to recognizing yourself that that's something that you
can cope with because it's what you're always coping with, actually, right,
the human situation of total uncertainty. You've done pretty well
so far, so there's not necessarily any need to worry
about coping in the future, and that from that place
of sort of relaxing into reality, it becomes a lot
more straightforward to sort of take action on the things
(05:29):
you care about, to feel calm and sane in the
doing of them, to address some of the world's crises,
if that's part of your set of values for life,
and then through all of that to kind of enter
into a greater sense of this kind of still rather mysterious.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
To me state that I and other people as well
call a.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
Liveness, this sense that if you have this feeling of aliveness,
even the most difficult challenges are copable with, and if
you don't have this feeling of aliveness, even the most
impressive plishments are kind of worthless.
Speaker 2 (06:02):
That's the essence of it.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
I'm still working it out, though, so you know, if
there are any sort of loose sense here that's because
I'm still trying to figure them out.
Speaker 3 (06:09):
I'm curious around the term relaxing into reality, which I
think for so many people is so hard. I mean,
the world can seem so bleak on so many days.
And I know you're a parent. I think your son
is about ten years old give or take.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
A few months a night, so pretty good going.
Speaker 3 (06:29):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, yeah cool. And I've got a
twelve year old daughter, so you know, similar ish age,
and I think it can be quite depressing as a
parent if you really just take in what is going
on with the world. So how do you relax into reality?
Speaker 1 (06:44):
This is an idea that goes way way back in
all sorts of philosophical and spiritual traditions, right, This idea
that in some quite subtle way, we default to avoiding
fully feeling our experiences, fully feeling our emotions for perfectly
understandable reasons any time in history, and especially in the
current times. But that when you do that, when you
(07:05):
find ways to sort of hold reality at bay or
not quite acknowledge that the reality that you're in, it
feels like protective and defensive, right, it feels like it's
going to make you better, but actually what it does
is it sort of disconnects you from reality. It makes
those feelings more scary, because the more you sort of
don't go there, the more you dread going there. And
(07:28):
so a lot of practices have something to do with
just sort of noticing and feeling your feelings and not
necessarily immediately responding or reacting to them, but seeing that
you can cope with them. Just realizing how totally uncertain
reality and especially the future would always have felt to
(07:48):
anybody at any moment in history. I always like the
example of kind of, you know, the Medievals, because I
think it feels just about distant enough from us now
to have a real sense of mysteriousness about it. But
you know, to live in a world where plague, famine,
war could completely obliterate your life at any moment. Not
that that isn't a reality for a lot of people
(08:09):
on the planet today, but it isn't for me. And
so to sort of take account of how all human accomplishments,
all family raising or work or writing, art, music, science,
everything has always been done in this situation of kind
of absolute insecurity, I think can be really consoling and
(08:31):
sort of edifying in a way.
Speaker 2 (08:33):
So part of what I'm trying.
Speaker 1 (08:35):
To do in this section of the book is to
kind of at least bring back the possibility that maybe
the kind of the crises and uncertainties that we face,
there's no reason to assume.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
That these are things that human beings can't cope with.
They can be very serious, right.
Speaker 1 (08:52):
I don't think this requires one to say, oh, it's
all fine, like, don't worry about it. But there are
all sorts of reasons and all sorts of whys, insights
from philosophers have times gone by and the like for
us to think that actually that the thing we're really
freaking out about there is not some utterly new kind
of threat, but is that we're sort of suddenly seeing
more clearly how it always is to be a human being.
Speaker 3 (09:15):
Something I want to ask you about, Oliver, is that
I feel like so much of the work that you've
done over the last few years has been almost I
guess like anti productivity guru, anti self development advice, where
I know, you know, for a period of your life
you were like deep into it and using all the
(09:36):
productivity optimization strategies in the world, yet you're still so
successful at what you do. Like I look at, you know,
the success of four Thousand Weeks, which I think for
many people it would, and it's certainly one of my
favorite books that I've read in the last decade, And
I wonder, how do you detach yourself, like, because you've
(09:58):
got this new book coming out into the world in
twenty twenty seven, and as a writer, it's like, you
want the book to do well. You want any book
that you pour your heart and soul into to do well.
Yet I feel like in your work there's also this
trying to detach your self worth from your achievement. So
(10:19):
how do you reconcile that when you're working really hard
on a book and you obviously want it to be
as successful as possible, yet you're trying to detach yourself
I guess from how well that book does in the world.
Speaker 2 (10:32):
I think this is such an interesting question. I'm sure
you've got thoughts on this as well.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
Right, I'm incredibly grateful for how successful four thousand Weeks
was and has been, but it made writing the book
after that, Meditation for Mortals and this one challenging in
a different way, right, Because anyone who's got that kind
of so called insecure overachiever psychology that I believe I
may not be the only person on this in this
(10:56):
conversation to be familiar with. When you reach a goal
and you do something impressive, get a good result in
a school exam or something, right, you feel really happy
for about five minutes, and then you realize that that's
the new minimum standard that you've got to meet in
the future for your self worth to be maintained. So, yeah,
it's really complicated. And my earlier times of being sort
(11:16):
of obsessed with optimization, productivity techniques and all the rest
of it were I see now pretty clearly an attempt
to try to find the system that would enable me
to guarantee that I would knock it out of the
park every time and could therefore feel like a basically
adequate human being. Right, So it's totally screwed up. It's
like the minimum standard adequacy is actually one hundred percent something.
(11:39):
It's you know, or to do better than everyone else
or something like that. And it's not that I don't
have that in me anymore. Right, It's that, like anything
like this, you sort of become more conscious of what's
going on and more able to step away from that.
You become sort of disillusioned in a positive sense of
the term, by your own older forms of operating sort
(12:00):
of can still notice that they're there, and that on
some level I'm desperate for approval and wanting to have
everyone say nice things. But then it doesn't matter in
the way it did because I kind of see what
I'm up to. And then beyond that, I feel like,
in some ways the thing that I've always been trying
to do is to kind of rescue, salvage some notion
(12:21):
of ambition from all that insecure self worth mess. Right,
I feel like this is one of the big questions
in my life. Is it possible to want to achieve
loads of cool things in the world and do them
and enjoy doing them in a state of not being
anxious about doing them, a state where you are doing
(12:41):
them because not in order to try to feel okay
about yourself, but because you do feel okay about yourself,
and actually your personality is one of those that wants
to do a bunch of this stuff. Sometimes, I've seen
social media postings from people here and there who talk
about how the more kind of conscious and the more
they have faith in themselves and feel great in themselves,
the less ambitious they get. And I think that's a
(13:03):
thing that happens to some people. And I definitely think
it's the case that lots of people are ambitious are
trying to sort of fill a void in the way
that I've been talking about. But I kind of want
there to be a way to, you know, write books
and hopefully reach a lot of people with those books
and all the rest of it, because that's like that
happens to be something that I think I'm quite good at,
you know, I think that's true. I think one of
(13:24):
the I think there is such a way, and I
think that there's nothing about detaching from all these kind
of self worth related productivity things that means that you
have to end up just sort of doing nothing, you know,
just sort of floating through the world passively. I don't
think that follows at all.
Speaker 3 (13:40):
I really struggle with that. Like I love your advice.
I love your books, you know, and everything within them,
and I also am a massive recovering productivity advice junkie.
I think you are far further on the journey than
I am. And something I find myself struggling with at
the moment and reflecting about a lot is that I've
(14:03):
got my new book, The Energy Game, coming out in
two weeks here in Australia, and I look at my
to do list and I know your advice with the
to do list, and we really need to limit the
active things on the to do list. I have not
taken this at the moment, your wonderful advice about that.
(14:24):
And instead, when I look at the section of my
list in notion that is all around book publicity, pre
order marketing, etc.
Speaker 2 (14:33):
Etc.
Speaker 3 (14:35):
I feel really overwhelmed and I doubt myself, and I
kind of oscillate between I got to do more. I've
got to do more. I got to get a new
personal best with the amount of pre orders that I
can drum up for The Energy Game compared to the
last two books, and then I kind of go to
the other extreme. I'm like, stop putting so much pressure
(14:56):
on yourself, Amantha, Like you're driving yourself insane. And I wonder, Oliver,
what wisdom would you give to me? Going between these
two extremes and feeling a little bit stressed about it,
I feel like.
Speaker 1 (15:10):
I resonate so much right and as I said before,
like I don't think any of my journey has been
about leaving any of this behind.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
It's about sort of noticing it, seeing.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
It, and laughing at oneself in a friendly manner and
doing things a little bit differently, which is actually the
whole game, I think, and I think it's much.
Speaker 2 (15:29):
More powerful then.
Speaker 1 (15:30):
You know, I could try to sell you now on
some complete new system and you could hypothetically get really
excited about it and go off and have a complete
fresh start and wipe your notion files and do a
whole new and that would just be more of the same.
So when I talk about limiting your work in progress,
when I talk about not trying to do a thousand
(15:52):
things at once and then becoming very depressed because you
don't have the capacity to do a thousand things at once,
I think.
Speaker 2 (15:57):
This is true.
Speaker 1 (15:58):
But I think it's very flexible approach in terms of
the temporal horizon that you're working on. Right, So, when
you're looking at your whole life and you're thinking about like, well,
I'd like to write several books with the next few
years of my life, but I'd also like to do this, this, this, this,
and this, that's the time to be like, okay, that
whole other goal of you know, becoming a professional graphic
designer or something that maybe has to you know, go
(16:19):
on the back burner for an extended period.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
But when it just feels like there's like fifty things.
Speaker 1 (16:24):
That you could do to promote a book, I think
the really important thing there is to know which sort
of three or four or five of them you're working
on right now and what the outcome would be that
would enable you to say that that stage of that
thing is done, but not necessarily that the other ones
have to be abandoned completely. So this is where you
know in four thousand Weeks I talk about this very
(16:45):
simple open list closed list approach where you make one
list that has like every single thing you can think
of that you'd like to get done, and then you
create a second list that has say five to ten
slots on it, and you put outcomes on those slots,
like send ten outreach emails to this kind of person,
or add this page to your website, whatever it is,
(17:06):
and you don't allow any more items onto that list
until you freed up a slot by completing one of them.
So you're effectively sort of artificially adding a bottleneck to
your workflow, although you're not really because as a finite
human being. You are the bottleneck. So you're just sort
of being honest about the situation that pertains. And what
(17:26):
happens then is you see you kind of you have
to make a wise ish decision every time you're moving
items from the incredibly long list to the closed list.
Speaker 2 (17:35):
And that's the moment to which much more intuitively.
Speaker 1 (17:38):
I think you find yourself saying, well, Okay, I'm not
going to spend twenty minutes launching this whole new arm
of this project that would take days.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
I'm going to actually make.
Speaker 1 (17:47):
Concrete progress to the next step on this one that's
already up and running, and that is really promising. Or
it might even be unconscious, right. I don't think you
necessarily know that, but it just feels like, Okay, if
I've only got five things that I can work next
to do with promoting this book, it's obviously going to
be these ones and not these ones. And not only
does that sort of bring some order to the sort
(18:09):
of infinity of it, but.
Speaker 2 (18:11):
It also feels like traction. Right.
Speaker 1 (18:13):
It's like you do things and they begin to have
an effect, and you get some feedback about them, and
they go out into the world. Because the big risk
when there's fifty things you do is you sort of
jump around between them all. Each time one feels a
bit difficult, you decide you're going to move forward with
another one instead, and so you go round around in
a circle and never make the critical progress on any
of them. And then not to go on and on,
(18:35):
but just one other thing like this all comes in
a context. All this stuff about how to manage your finitude,
you know, comes in a context of saying like, you're
never going to feel like you did enough in a
project like promoting a book. And there's something incredibly powerful
about understanding that you're never going to feel like you
did enough because you can conceive of so many valuable
(18:55):
and useful things to do, so many more than you'll
have the time to do. I've always found, anyway, something
incredibly liberating about that recognition. Right, it's not because you're
a bit of a loser that you won't get to
the point of having done enough. It's because that is
baked in to who we are and what our situation is.
And so another way of putting it is that actually,
(19:17):
you will do enough because you will do everything that
it's within your capacities and your energy levels and your
talents to do and that just by definition, will be
all that you could ever have done, which.
Speaker 3 (19:33):
Is very reassuring. It's kind of like the equivalent of
iron enough, right thinking that, which I find very very reassuring.
Coming up next, Oliver talks about the flexible goal he
calls a no later than a time and why setting
it looser than you'd think is actually what gets you moving.
(19:56):
He also talks about why urgency is usually other people's
agenda into guys, and what he does when a client
says they need something from him right now. If you're
looking for more tips to improve the way you work
can live. I write a short weekly newsletter that contains
tactics I've discovered that have helped me personally. You can
(20:18):
sign up for that at Amantha dot com. That's Amantha
dot com. I want to talk about flexible goals because
I know that this is something that you apply to
your life, and I've read some coll examples like instead
(20:39):
of going I'm going to start work at eight am
every morning, you will say I'm starting by ten am
at the latest. Can you tell me about these flexible
goals and what made you start setting them?
Speaker 2 (20:54):
Yeah, let me talk.
Speaker 1 (20:54):
I guess specifically about that example of a no later
down time, which is how I or think about that.
I went through a long phase of my earlier adulthood
essentially trying to use my conscious brain, my frontal cortex
whatever to impose on reality how I wanted things to unfold.
So it's like, you know, very strict time boxing. There's
(21:18):
an example of that, I'm going to start and do
this from eight o'clock to nine point thirty whatever, and
then this other thing from nine thirty to eleven. And firstly,
of course, that very often doesn't work because there are
clashing priorities, things get in the way, somebody I care
about responding to wants my attention, you know, and you
(21:38):
can't factor in all the things that might happen. And
then the other problem is that even when it does work,
there's something that I've always experienced. It's very lifeless and
straight jackety about that. It's like, now that I have
this plan, I don't even want to do it because
I feel like I resent the jerky's telling me to
do it, even though that's me, you know that sort
(21:59):
of Now I just have to sort of plod through
the day that I have set up for myself. In
other words, I want there to be some role for
inspiration and what I feel like doing. I want to
be able to harness that kind of sense of what
I would like to do instead of always having to
stamp it out in favor of what I've decided I
should do. And you know, sometimes there are shoulds in life,
(22:21):
and people have different jobs where sometimes they have to
do certain things, and I have deadlines, and you know,
you can't just do it exactly as you want. But
within the discretionary room for maneuver that I have, I
don't want to be making it harder to do what
I feel like doing or to you know, go with
the flow of my inspiration and desire and things like that.
So I'm switching now the example of that flexible car.
(22:43):
I'll come back to the no later that time. But
one way that you can sort of take account of
that is to say that, you know, it's the difference
between saying I'm going to be working on this project
for these two hours and this other project for the
next two hours, and instead it's a question of saying, well, okay,
these are the five projects that I intend to work
on at the moment. And I'm going to treat them
as a menu and pick what feels appetizing at any
(23:05):
given moment. And people are very worried that then they
won't pick the important but dull seeming one. It's amazing
how rarely that happens if you actually trust what you
want to do, because it turns out that you are
the kind of person who wants to keep your commitments
and get your taxes filed and all these things right.
It's not appetizing necessarily, but it's very low opinion of yourself,
embodied in the idea that if you did what you wanted,
(23:28):
you'd only do the indulgent things. So that's one example
of saying, well, okay, I would like to exert my
will and my intention to some extent and say that
I'm going to be focusing on these five things at
the moment, but I'm not going to turn that into
something that kind of imprisons the other parts of my
intuition and feelings of pleasure, or that sets up this
(23:48):
fight with reality where I get furious and irritated because
the whole world isn't just conforming to my wishes. And
so with the no later that time, I don't do
it all the time, but when I do do it, it's
like if you set a time time that you can
easily manage to start work rather than one that's going
to be a constant struggle. Firstly, you're going to get
the satisfaction of sticking to it. Secondly, you're going to
(24:08):
get the satisfaction of like beating it loads of times.
If you're usually free to start work at nine, and
you say eight forty five, then you're constantly sort of
antsy at school drop off and you're getting as fast
as you can from the school gates at the desk,
and it's like, no, just say nine and you can
probably manage that, and even better, say nine thirty, and
you probably do it at nine fifteen and feel immensely
(24:30):
virtuous at getting that extra fifteen minutes, which, on some
level just shows what a silly thing all of this is. Right,
It's like it's playing tricks on yourself with your mind.
But that's what we're doing in the first place, when
we're kind of shoulding ourselves into oblivion. So yeah, these
are some of the examples of what you're talking about.
Speaker 3 (24:47):
It's so funny. I was thinking of school drop off
when you were talking about the no later than rule,
and I was just reflecting that so often I will
be doing school drop off, and I will have this
what is essentially a false sense of urgency, because typically
the first couple of hours of my day I don't
have meetings. I'm doing deep work. Therefore I'm not beholden
(25:10):
to anyone other than myself. Yet I feel like, oh, quick, Frankie, quick,
get ready for school, so we can leave, and so
I can be back by eight thirty on the dot,
so I can start my deep work and get a
full two hours in or three hours or whatever my
day is looking like. And I can imagine instead just
going well, I will start no later than nine am,
(25:33):
and just how relaxing that would be. That would completely
take the false pressure essentially that I'm putting on myself
to just go well, that's fine. That's fine if Frankie
is just taking a time and dawdling and we're a
little bit late for drop off, and then I'm a
little bit late coming home, and maybe I'm not at
(25:54):
my desk until eight fifty instead of eight thirty, and
it actually doesn't matter.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
I love that.
Speaker 3 (26:01):
I want to talk about urgency because I've heard you
say that urgency is other people's agenda, but sometimes urgency
is real, Like I think you know, on the parenting example,
if the school is calling me saying Frankie is unewell
and you need to pick her up right now, that
(26:21):
is my urgent problem to deal with. That is not
someone else's agenda, although arguably it's Frankie's agenda and the
school's agenda. How do you think about urgency when you
have clearly got your priorities for the day. What happens
when urgent things come up?
Speaker 1 (26:35):
I wrote a newsletter what's called urgency doesn't exist. And
I'm being slightly facetious because I have always had it's
in the nature of my particular issues and hang ups
and screw ups to be made very anxious by other
people's agendas and constantly feeling like I'm I can't relax
until they've been dealt with. So in a way, I
was pushing back against that and saying like, well, okay,
(26:56):
either you care about using the next portion of your
time on some thing or you don't.
Speaker 2 (27:01):
And you might care about it because you love the experience.
Speaker 1 (27:05):
And you might care about it because you need to
earn some money, and you don't love the experience, but
you love what the money enables you to do for yourself,
for your family, and something's the time sensitive. That's true,
there are things that it makes more sense to do
now the next week.
Speaker 2 (27:18):
But even so, the way we talk about.
Speaker 1 (27:20):
Urgency as this kind of emotion or get developing a
sense of urgency, it always lands for me as trying
to sort of hound yourself into action or acting out
of anxiety. So to part to answer your question, I
suppose I do think it's useful to distrust urgency and
to sort of connect to some reason to want to
(27:41):
do something other than it's urgent. And then when it's really, really,
really urgent, I think it crosses a threshold and it
just in a sense it isn't a problem, even though
it only happens when things really are a problem.
Speaker 2 (27:52):
Does that make sense?
Speaker 3 (27:53):
It does. And because I have people placing tendencies and
I believe that you do as well.
Speaker 2 (28:02):
I think so yeah, I think that's a fair thing.
Speaker 3 (28:05):
And when say, a client of mine at Inventium needs
something urgently in inverted commas, I want to please that
client and I will abandon my own priorities, and I
will take on their agenda as my new agenda because
I want to please. And so I'm wondering how do
(28:28):
you manage that in your own life when someone is saying, Oliver,
I need this now, because I feel like, certainly with
the length that it has taken to get this podcast
in to be scheduled, that you're really good at prioritizing
your own goals. And I don't mean that facetiously. I
(28:50):
mean that very genuinely.
Speaker 1 (28:53):
I've several times now in the last few years people
say to me like, I apologize profusely for not getting
back to them sooner, and they're like, oh no, and
that just shows you're living your philosophies.
Speaker 2 (29:01):
And I'm like, oh, okay, it seems to be. I
do struggle with this.
Speaker 1 (29:04):
I don't want anybody to think that I'm sitting there perfectly, calmly,
you know, ignoring emails.
Speaker 2 (29:09):
I do feel burdened by them.
Speaker 1 (29:11):
I think that what has happened for me, and like,
you know, a certain amount of it, let's just be
completely candid, is like four thousand weeks did pretty well,
and it does sort of affect certain like if I
had only ever sold like five books in my life,
I would feel a very great need every single time
anyone was in any way interested in talking to me
(29:32):
to sort of rush and give them exactly what they wanted.
Speaker 2 (29:34):
And so I do have a little bit of way
to throw.
Speaker 1 (29:36):
Around or something which is a vaguely obnoxious way of
talking about it. But there is like a sense of, well,
hang on, I'm probably going to get a few more
inputs and requests for my time and attention that it's
in my interest to give. So you sort of have
to learn to handle that. Though again, I wasn't ignoring
you because I don't think you're important. I was ignoring
you because I was overburdened by things and I was
(29:57):
very aware that your email was sitting in my in
box and look here, I am right. So I think
what it comes down to this is maybe sound a
bit abstract at first, but let's see if we can
turn it into something more practical. There are totally legitimate
contexts where like somebody else's agenda should become your agenda.
Right if a client of yours has something that they
consider to be urgent and you consider it to be
(30:21):
a central value of your life, to be running a
business where you serve clients well, then on some level
that is just a completely legitimate part of your agenda.
It's the question of distinguishing that from the overlay right
where you've got some ancient psychology where the client is
like your mum or dad or something right in a
(30:43):
sort of deep symbolic, unconscious way probably and you sort
of feel like it. It's like force measure right, It's like, okay,
as soon as somebody else wants something, everything else is
by the wayside, and you can replace that. And I
think I have gradually replaced it with a sense of
weighing things in the balance. It's like, it matters what
(31:03):
other people think and want, and it matters what you want,
and one of the set of things you want is
to do right by certain people, and it all gets
weighed in the balance, and there's no reason for that
to be done in a state of panic or anxiety.
Speaker 2 (31:18):
Again, not that I have managed perfectly.
Speaker 1 (31:21):
And so the request comes across the transfom to you,
and it's potentially open to you when the request like
that comes in to do anything from drop everything else,
because it's your agenda to want to make that client
feel like they've been completely responded to, all the way
through hypothetically to completely ignoring it, and everything in between,
(31:45):
including sending a nice note saying I'm going to get
to this tomorrow or whatever it might be. And none
of those is intrinsically bad. It's a question of how
that factors into your set of goals. I think we've
got lost a bit at some time, maybe in the
sort of productivity conversation. This isn't about being selfish, because
a large number of ordinary, nice, hopefully good people, like
(32:07):
I hope we are are going to have as some
of their own goals, like being genuinely helpful and courteous
and kind to other people.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
That sort of people serving I.
Speaker 1 (32:17):
Suppose, as opposed to people pleasing, right, And then you've
got to understand that, because you are limited in finite
that's sometimes not going to involve immediately saying yes my dreams.
What I would do is I would acknowledge swiftly every
single invitation I get to be on a podcast, and
then I would, as I basically do, I think, choose
(32:38):
to say yes to the ones, not necessarily just the
ones that I think are going to like serve me
in some cynical way, but also ones that might just
be a good, enjoyable experience, and then occasionally also some
that are kind of it's more like good karma. It's like, Okay,
I want to help that person out or something, and
all these different values can coexist, and all of them
are in some sense your values rather than oh no,
(32:59):
somebody else has said something, and deep in my own
conscious they remind me of my dad, who's orders I
always had to obey or whatever. You know, it varies
from person to.
Speaker 3 (33:09):
Person, Oliver, I'd love to know for someone listening that
is like that all sounds really interesting and really helpful,
and they were thinking, Okay, I'm going to do one
thing differently tomorrow practically, what do you think that would
be best served to do?
Speaker 1 (33:27):
I hear this question and I want to kind of
subvert it a little bit, because the old productivity ek
in me and maybe also in you once, like, Okay,
what's the daily practice, Like what's the thing that if
I do it's in my morning routine every day, it's
going to start causing this whole thing to fall into place.
And that's fine. You know, do morning pages, meditate, These
(33:50):
are all good things that are going to bring you
into a more conscious relationship with what's going on in
your mind, and it can only help.
Speaker 2 (33:57):
But what I really want to say is the one.
Speaker 1 (34:01):
Thing to do is not some sort of new habit
or practice that I've told you about, but it is
just to pick something that you know would make you
feel more alive, would bring your life now slightly more
into tune with the kind of life that you have
as a vision for your life, and just do that
(34:21):
thing for twenty minutes, you know, and actually do it.
Because as I've written and probably talked to you about
before in the past, actually a lot of the way
that these good habit kind of approaches can get in
our way is that they become alternatives to just doing
the thing right. It's all about preparing to be the
kind of person in a year or two who has
(34:42):
a really great social life, or who puts themselves forward
in business context. Pick something that you know belongs in
your vision of your life as you would have it be,
and just do it kind of, however badly, and however briefly.
Speaker 3 (34:55):
I love that. What a fantastic answer and subversion of
the question.
Speaker 2 (35:01):
Oliver.
Speaker 3 (35:01):
I'm so grateful that you have chosen to spend the
last hour with me in amongst the huge workload that
I imagine is upon you with I assume and emerging
a deadline for Aliveness. I cannot wait to read it
when it comes out next year. I always love our chats.
Thank you so much for just putting so much great
(35:23):
thinking into the world.
Speaker 2 (35:24):
Oh, thank you, and likewise, no really enjoyable conversation. I'm
grateful for it. Thank you.
Speaker 3 (35:29):
Oliver's new book, Aliveness is not available yet, but it
will probably be out next year, in twenty twenty seven.
And if four thousand weeks changed how you think about time,
Aliveness is set to change how you think about feeling
alive inside of it.
Speaker 2 (35:47):
Now.
Speaker 3 (35:47):
If you would like more from Oliver in the meantime,
highly recommend going back and listening to an earlier chat
that I had with him about time management, as I
think it's a really good companion episode to this one,
and I'll link to that in the show notes. And
if this conversation was one that you found helpful, make
sure you hit follow so you don't miss what's coming
(36:07):
out next on How I Work. How I Work was
recorded on the traditional land of the Warrangery People, part
of the Cooler nation,
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