January 29, 2025 • 34 mins
In an effort to make time for ourselves, many of us fall back on using To Do lists and time blocking. But often these strategies can end up with the same result: getting lost in chasing productivity. So how do we make time for the things that truly count?
Oliver Burkeman is a New York Times bestselling author of books such as ‘Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals’ and ‘Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts’. Oliver is also a regular columnist for The Guardian.
If there is anyone who truly understands the philosophy and psychology of time management and happiness, it’s Oliver.
Oliver shares:
- 🧠 The mindset you should be using when you first approach a task if you want it to be achieved easily
- ⏳ How you can free up time by minimising time spent on worrying
- ✅ The strategy you should be utilising instead of a to-do list to actually create a sense of achievement
- 🌟 Why being open to distractions can actually be beneficial
Key Quotes:
"Don't start from the position that unexpected things happening must be bad."
“There is this tendency to set things up in your mind so that you can never feel like you’ve done something well enough."
Connect with Oliver via his website, or get his latest book, Meditations for Mortals, here
My latest book The Health Habit is out now. You can order a copy here: https://www.amantha.com/the-health-habit/
Connect with me on the socials:
Linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/amanthaimber)
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If you are looking for more tips to improve the way you work and live, I write a weekly newsletter where I share practical and simple to apply tips to improve your life. You can sign up for that at https://amantha-imber.ck.page/subscribe
Visit https://www.amantha.com/podcast for full show notes from all episodes.
Get in touch at amantha@inventium.com.au
Credits:
Host: Amantha Imber
Sound Engineer: The Podcast Butler
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
In an effort to make time for ourselves, many of
us fallback on using to do lists and time blocking,
but often these sorts of strategies can end up with
the same result, getting lost in chasing productivity. So how
do we make time for the things that truly count?
Joining me for a third time on How I Work
(00:22):
is Oliver Berkman, one of my favorite writers. You might
have come across Oliver through the international bestseller four one
thousand Weeks, time Management for Mortals, or his regular columns
for The Guardian, But what I love most about Oliver's
work is that he flips traditional productivity advice on its
head and gives a completely different way of looking at
(00:45):
how we use our time. With his new book Meditation
for Mortals four Weeks to Embrace your limitations and Make
Time for What Counts, which is out now, Oliver has
been thinking a lot about how we can all claw
back time for the things that really matter. In this episode,
we explore the mindset you should be using when you
(01:07):
first approach a task if you wanted to be achieved easily,
and why allowing yourself to be distracted can actually create
a positive result. We also chat about the strategy you
should be utilizing instead of a to do list if
you want to get the most out of your day.
(01:31):
Welcome to How I Work, a show about habits, rituals,
and strategies for optimizing your day. I'm your host, Doctor
Amantha Imber. Oliver's new book, Meditation for Mortals is packed
full of wisdom and advice. So I wanted to know
of everything that Oliver wrote about, which pieces of advice
really stuck with him and changed him the most.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
I seem not able to write anything other than what
feels most compelling to me on the day that I'm
writing it.
Speaker 3 (02:07):
And that applies to the whole book in the sense that,
like you.
Speaker 2 (02:10):
Know, these are the things I have to grapple with,
and then it applies on the level of individual chapters
through the process of writing a book. So it feels
like the answer that changes every day basically. But in
terms of specifics, this book is organized into four weeks,
as you know, and with a sort of short chapter
(02:30):
per day for each of those weeks. Not that I
can control how people actually read it, but that's the
sort of idea. And the third week in there is
called letting Go, and it's about the importance of learning
to sort of let things happen as a sort of
compliment to making them happen, and kind of unclenching from
life a bit. And basically all of that material is
the stuff I sort of needed the most at the
(02:51):
point that I was putting that together, and you know
still now, so all that stuff about, for example, the
willingness to let things be easy and not to sort
of head into big projects or life stages or anything
like that with the kind of assumption that they must
be going to be grueling and take a lot of
unpleasant effort. That means a lot to me because it's
(03:13):
still one of the ones that I sort of grapple
with the most.
Speaker 1 (03:15):
I suppose I love that I did write that down.
Actually it's something I wanted to delve into because it's
a question that I sometimes think about, and I've written
it here. What if this might be a lot easier
than I'd been assuming, I think was the wording from
the book, and I was actually curious, like, well, how
do you apply it every day? But I also wanted
(03:36):
to know to this book project, and particularly following up
on four thousand Weeks, which was such a mega hit
around the world, and I mean, you've written several books,
and so it wasn't like that second album syndrome they
talk about for musicians. Maybe this is like your fourth
or fifth album syndrome. But I wanted to know, for
this project in particular, how did you apply that advice
(03:58):
and did you?
Speaker 2 (03:58):
Well, No, it was a bit like say, album syndrome,
because you know, it's true that I had written a
previous book, The Antidote, and also a collection of columns
called Help, which was a book and is a book,
but I hadn't had to write in the same way, right,
because it was just a question of collecting and editing
some previously written material. But certainly four thousand Weeks was
far and away the most sort of successful thing that
(04:20):
I'd written at the point that it was published. And
so yeah, I think there was a very sort of cliched,
completely predictable and rather tiresome to talk too much about
phenomenon where I sort of froze a bit and thought like,
oh dear, now, if I mess up, more people going
to be watching. So I did kind of a little
bit to some extent sort of freeze and headlights. And
(04:41):
it was interesting because it sort of brought into my
writing process a lot of the questions that I was
already focused on in what I wanted to put into
the book, and it sort.
Speaker 3 (04:51):
Of made them very, very alive.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
And I've found this in the past, right, something about
the process of writing books will sort of fall ground
the things that you're grappling with in the substance of
the book, and actually, you know, you end up, I think,
and I hope being able to express them more authentically
because you actually sort of have to go through a
version of that struggle to get the book written. And
(05:13):
I did have to find ways to allow the possibility
that it was more doable than I thought. But the
basic gist of that was to sort of keep coming
back and back and back. I don't think there's a
single way to flip the switch, but keep coming back
to this thought that maybe what I was ready to
do and able to do in terms of the next
paragraph in the next chapter was what needed to be done.
Speaker 1 (05:35):
And now, just like in your day to day work,
how do you apply that principle of just having things
be a whole lot easier than you'd otherwise assume.
Speaker 2 (05:45):
I mean, a couple of things come to mind. One
is that I do think, and I wish this wasn't
the case, but I do think that a lot of
these insights are just a matter of returning to them
and returning to them and returning to them and gradually
sort of strengthening the mental muscle that allows you to
remember them. So it's sort of catching yourself from one
(06:06):
minute to the next. And it's actually quite sort of
physical for me, right, I sort of I find that
I'm actually sort of tensed against the work. It's in
my musculature somehow, and catching yourself doing that and just
sort of stepping back from it and thinking like, oh,
maybe that's not necessary is very powerful maybe to get
a little bit more practical. The other thing that makes
(06:27):
a big difference there is the idea of really just
thinking about the very next thing and the very next thing,
so sort of using methods of productivity, methods of planning
the day, And there are lots of different ones that
having common this focus on like, Okay, what's the next small,
completable thing, the sort of radically doable little task that
(06:48):
I want to pick and then put into practice. Now,
you can't do things like write a book or even
write a chapter. You can do things like that come
up with a rough plan for the first half of
the chapter, and that's when I can get it down
underneath that threshold of what feels doable, back into that
easier way of working.
Speaker 1 (07:07):
I love that idea of picking the thing that feels
radically doable that will stick with me. I think something
else that this relates to, and I want to say
this might have been in the Letting Go section is
around developing a taste for problems, and you write about
how we kind of go through life and think, oh,
(07:27):
one day all the problems will be gone and there
will just be no problems to deal with, but of
course we know that that is not the case. It's
like it's so simple, but it's also it's like it's
quite profound when you actually think about it. I want
to know, like, how does that one resonate for you,
like on a day to day basis. Is it one
(07:47):
of those things that you do just keep coming back to,
because I was very curious about that.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
I write in the book about this story that Sam
Harris tells about, you know, being in coffee. I think
it is a lunch with a friend one day and
going on and on about his problems. He was addressing
in his work or whatever it was, and her interrupting
him in mid flow and saying, hold on, are you
still under the impression you're going to get to the
part of your life where you don't have any problems?
(08:11):
And he sort of recounts the experience of realizing like, oh, yes,
there is kind of something in the stance I've had
towards life that implies, yeah, not only that a given
problem might be difficult depending on its content, but that
I shouldn't have problems. I'm trying to get through to
the point in life where there aren't problems. And I
sort of explain in the book why this isn't going
(08:33):
to happen, and you wouldn't want it to happen, right.
There are certainly specific kinds of problems that you wouldn't
wish on anybody, But the sort of sheer existence of
problems on some level is the synonymous with having meaningful
work ahead of you. But I try increasingly to have
some kind of direction, have some kind of vision. I
don't it's not purely about just stumbling through the dark,
(08:55):
but not to try very hard to link that up
to moment moment action. So I'm really trying, and it's
very much a work in progress, but I'm really trying
to combine that idea of like having a fairly clear
sense of what I'm trying to create here with a
very very much more intuitive and spontaneous even sense of like, Okay,
(09:17):
what feels like the right thing to do next.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
I want to talk about worrying, and you talk about
this idea of most of the bridges that we worry
about never end up being crossed. Can you tell me
more about that, and just on a day to day basis,
how do you live that? Because I really struggle with
that one.
Speaker 2 (09:40):
Yeah, no, me too, and that's why it was interesting
for me to write about it. The worry is kind
of fascinating, and I think one way of understanding worry
is that it's the sort of attempt by a human
being who is inherently limited to the present moment. One
of the many ways in which were limited is sort
of temporarily localized. We wish we could sort of also
(10:02):
be in the future checking up on it, making sure
that everything's going to be fine, but we can't, and
so worry is this sort of mental discomfort that arises
from trying to repeatedly sort of get out there and
secure a place in time that we're not actually in
and never are in. And you know, if I wanted
to get sort of evolutionary psychology about it, which I
(10:24):
don't usually want to do very much, but you know,
you could see how perhaps we sort of evolved in
an environment where where having that concern and then dealing
with it was something that happened in a very short order.
Like you hear a sound, you're worried about it, you
check it out, you realize it's no threat to your safety.
Now we live in this world that's been called a
you know, delayed return environment, where the thing you're worrying
(10:45):
about could well be whether how an editor will respond
to a pitch you've made sometime in the next four weeks,
or whether an attempt to purchase a house will go
through at some point in the next two months. You know,
all these kinds of slow things. Whether worry just has
no to go, It doesn't motivate a quick action to
get to deal with the worry, It just sort of curdle.
And I think the thing about crossing bridges is, yeah,
(11:06):
there's another way of making the same point. Really we're
trying to sort of think through all the things that
could go wrong, think our way through what we do,
and reassure ourselves that that will have gone okay if
that happens. You can't ever be certain that something goes
okay until it's gone okay. So trying to cross bridges
before you get to them, in that sense, is just
(11:28):
a recipe for that kind of unpleasant, anxious state of constantly,
repetitively trying to do it and failing. There are all
sorts of ideas in cognitive therapy and elsewhere about you know,
scheduling a time of day in which to worry and
things like this, and I think it does help some
people to do something like that. The version of that
that I find helpful is to market date in my
(11:49):
calendar maybe three four weeks in the future, to sort
of remind myself to focus again on that topic. And
I find that knowing that that's there and it's coming
up in the calendar is incredibly powerful in terms of
enabling me to let go of it in the present.
If it's still a big issue four weeks from now,
then I will kick into worrying about it again. I
(12:10):
sort of on some level I'm concerned that if I
were to stop worrying about it, I might completely forget
about it. Right, And it's wild right as parents, if
you're worried about some issue with your child's welfare, like,
I'm not going to forget about that, it's ridiculous. But
some part of me doesn't trust myself. And it's like,
if I let go and just got into the thing
I was working on today, maybe like ten years later,
(12:33):
I'd be like, oh, no, everything's gone terribly wrong in
life because I completely failed to attend to this thing.
So putting that kind of three or four weeks ahead
thing in I find really effective because then I can
be like, Okay, just in case I completely forget about
this important thing, it will come back into my world.
Speaker 1 (12:51):
I love that I've experimented myself with having a worry
least and then setting a daily worry time and confining
my worrying to that time of day, and I found
that quite effective. But what I like about what you've
just suggested is that it's almost like a test of
a hypothesis. And the more and more you're like, if
everything you worry about you actually just put in the
(13:14):
diary to spend some time thinking about a couple of
weeks from today, and then every time you get to
those things, like nine times out of ten, you're going
to think, what was I even worrying about that never
eventuated into anything, which I feel then feeds, you know,
the like a more sensible hypothesis and theory that actually
(13:34):
I worry about things that I don't even need to
be spending time worrying about. So I really I enjoy that.
Speaker 2 (13:40):
Yes, and even in the one time out of ten, right,
then it comes around and you're like, Okay, what are
some the chances are you'll be in a better place
to just sort of figure out some actions that you
could take relative to it.
Speaker 1 (13:50):
Yeah, yeah, now you're right. Even though you're I would
say an anti productivity guru if that is a thing,
you do have some really good pieces of advice around
how we can I guess, make the best use of
our time and think differently about things. And I want
to talk more about this idea of treating your to
do list as a menu. Can you tell me more
(14:12):
about that?
Speaker 2 (14:13):
So I guess where this started off in my thinking
is in another chapter of this book where I'm talking
about not to do lists, but like you're sort of
to read pile or your digital folder of articles save
to read later, and how not very much reflection on
how content works in the twenty first century will reveal
(14:34):
that this is essentially an endless list. The better technology
gets at filtering information, the more stuff we find coming
our way that we feel like we really need to
read or would be really important for our jobs or something.
And I wrote then about how it can be really
helpful to see that kind of collection of things not
as a bucket but as a river. Right, So this
(14:56):
is just an possibly helpful analogy, not as something you've
got deal with an empty but as a sort of
flow of things that goes by you, and your only
job is to pick a few things that seem interesting
and not feel guilty about the ones that go by.
And I find that very useful in my own approach
to literally that topic. You know, the four hundred articles
that I've got stored in a read it later app
(15:18):
If I think that it's my job to get through them, firstly,
I won't approach them in the most creatively helpful or
enjoyable way. But secondly, also like that's not the end
of it. There'll be another four hundred in a short time.
So treating them as like, well, what actually still feels
compelling and let the rest go is much more powerful.
But the more I thought about this, the more I
realize that you know, in a sense, every list of things,
(15:43):
even things that feel much more obligatory than a to
read pile, every list of things has the same character
because if there are more things that you could meaningfully
usefully do with a day, then you will be able
to actually do with the day. Then you are in
(16:04):
fact picking items for now and letting the rest go,
whether you like it or not. So to switch screech
of breaks, to switch metaphor into menus. The point there
is that we don't get stressed by a rest Most
people anyway don't get stressed by a restaurant menu. And
if you do get stressed, it's not because you think
it's your job to get through the whole list right
(16:26):
at a single sitting. The fact that a restaurant menu
is long and you get to pick a few things
from it is kind of the point of a restaurant
menu and what makes it pleasurable. And you can actually
see that the same thing applies to our to do lists,
right because obviously a lot of the things we're going
to be doing are not necessarily going to be as
fun as eating a delicious meal. But if there's more
that we could do than we're going to get to
(16:47):
do in a day, then by definition, what you're doing
when you look at a do list is picking a
few items and choosing a few things that feel most compelling,
most important, most meaningful, and not expecting to get through
the whole of it. And there is quite a deep
potential shift here, which is summed up in that sort
(17:07):
of familiar phrase, But it's that the items on a list,
when you viewed like that, stop being things that you
have to do and become things that you get to do.
You get to pick from a menu, and we do
get to pick from our to do list. Again, we
may decide that certain things that we're going to pick
us kind of unpleasant, in the same way that I
suppose you might pick a extremely healthy side dish and
(17:29):
a menu that you didn't particularly like because actually it's
part of your long term goal to eat healthily. But
there is something really important in letting go of that
notion that you've failed unless you get through the list.
And I think that seeing and understanding our list as
infinite is the way to do that, because then you're
just like, that's not happening.
Speaker 1 (17:47):
Something else I really liked as an idea in this
book is around setting a quantity goal.
Speaker 3 (17:54):
Can you tell me more about that?
Speaker 1 (17:55):
Because I think that's particularly interesting for knowledge workers like us.
Speaker 2 (17:59):
Yeah, so you know, there are other contexts in which
the idea of quantifying your life and measuring everything you
do it can be quite sort of detrimental, and I
sort of don't recommend it, but I'm always one for
picking the right technique for the context and contradicting myself
wherever I feel like it. And the context of quantity goals,
(18:19):
I think that if you do any kind of creative work,
and that I would define very broadly, there is this
tendency to set things up in your mind so that
you can never feel like you've done something well enough,
or that you've done it to a sufficiently high quality.
So the way that you sort of or the way
that I sort of naturally, if I don't catch myself
(18:42):
proceeds as a writer, is sort of to sit there
staring at the screen waiting for something really good to
occur to me finally, maybe it does, and I type
it out, and then I sort of judge it again
and realize it is in. I delete half of it,
and you sort of make this incredibly halting progress over
the page. And it's actually antipathetical to high quality anyway,
(19:02):
because the way to get to high quality is to
is to allow things to flow and then pick from
what flows out. So the idea of a quantity goal
is just that it gives the part of your brain
that wants to think in terms of goals and progress
and productivity something to do. But it's something to do
that sort of doesn't get involved in the quality arguments.
(19:25):
So for someone writing, this could be simply a question
of like, my next job is to add two hundred
words to this, or my next job is to write
for an hour today, or you know. And the most
sort of purely quantity form of this is the kind
of free writing exercise that I was talking about before,
where you might just say, like, I'm setting a timer
(19:46):
for ten minutes and the only rule is that I'm
not going to stop typing or writing for that ten minutes,
and you know that is not going to create the
final draft of a publishable book.
Speaker 3 (19:59):
But that's not the point. The point is to.
Speaker 2 (20:01):
Stay in this world of letting things flow out to
see what there might be to be worked with. So
I find there's something really sort of something that really
sort of removes the drama from things by setting a
quantity goal, because the other problem with the quality goal
is that it's really hard to express, like what does
it even mean to say, I'm going to try and
write this chapter as well as I possibly can, or
(20:23):
really excellently, or as well.
Speaker 3 (20:24):
As the last one.
Speaker 2 (20:26):
These are just kind of endlessly flexible definitions that you
will by default flex in the direction of feeling bad
about yourself.
Speaker 3 (20:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:35):
So I'm very often in my creative work either sometimes
literally writing it down. Sometimes it's just in my mind,
but I'm thinking, like, Okay, what I'm doing next is
a twenty minute brain dump on this topic. What I'm
doing next is filling a single page with a little
structure diagram, because that's how I work. But the point
(20:57):
about the quantity there is it's like filling a single page.
It's not getting the perfect structure and so on and
so on.
Speaker 1 (21:02):
We will be back with Oliver soon, and when we return,
we'll be discussing why being open to distractions can be
beneficial and the strategy you can use instead of a
to do list to make the most of your day.
If you're looking for more tips to improve the way
you work can live. I write a short weekly newsletter
(21:24):
that contains tactics I've discovered that have helped me personally.
You can sign up for that at Amantha dot com.
That's Amantha dot Com. I feel like this dovetails perhaps
into running a done list at the end of the day,
(21:44):
and I think it's fairly self explanatory perhaps, but maybe
I'd love you to talk about how you use a
done list and perhaps what it is in your work.
Speaker 2 (21:54):
Yeah, I would say as a list that you keep
through the day, probably rather than necessarily just at the
end of the day. And this is very adaptable, you know,
if there are people listening and watching who have really complicated,
tricked out task management systems, Like I'm not suggesting throwing
that away. It's just a question of building this in
and making sure that it's got a role, just a
role for recording proactively the things that you do as
(22:17):
you do them, so that you as well as a
to do list or instead of a to do list.
You're also creating this list of your accomplishments through the
day that gets longer and longer as the day goes on,
which I mean to do lists often tend to get
longer and longer as the day goes on as well,
But that's a problem. This is a good thing, right,
the longer you have done with better, And as I
say in the book, you know, it's a very simple intervention,
(22:40):
but I think it is so powerful because it invites
you to compare your output, not to infinity, which is
what we're usually doing, that all the things we could
yet do that would be useful if we could do.
Speaker 3 (22:53):
Them, but to zero.
Speaker 2 (22:55):
It's implicitly it's like, you know, here's what I've done
compared to if I stayed in bed and done nothing today.
So you know, I definitely cycle through the ways I'm
actually doing this in my own life, and actually maybe
that's something to talk about. I'm glad that I do
that now. I'm not in search of the final rigid
system in the way that I definitely used to be.
(23:16):
But one way that you can put this into practice,
obviously is just writing. Is just you know, adding items
to a piece of paper, as you go through them.
If I'm in more of a sort of a motivational rut,
I will sometimes pair this with another approach. So what
I'll do is, I'll it's going to sound very silly
(23:37):
when I put it into words, but you know, I will
in a notebook, on one page, write down a task
that I propose to do, do the task, cross it out,
and then write it down on a different page as
being done. Right, so you have a list of the
things that you're doing. You just added one task at
a time, and then a list of the things that
(23:58):
you've done. I mean, willing to be told that this
is kind of dumb on some level, but I find
it it's really it's really helpful for just sort of focusing
when you're feeling like you lack focus and just finally
on the done list. I mean, one thing that people
have said and that I think I have once or
twice found myself as well, is that if you're in
a really low place, like if you're really in a
(24:20):
kind of like I can't quite make myself get out
of bed kind of psychological place in life, which does happen.
Speaker 3 (24:26):
You can just lower the bar for what counts as
something to be added to your done list. Right, there
is something weirdly motivational, something that gets the ball rolling
about keeping a list in a notebook where you say,
you know, took a shower, made coffee, things that you
wouldn't normally qualify as counters accomplishments because they're two below
the level of significance. But if you do that, you
(24:48):
know you don't need to show anyone else this list.
Speaker 1 (24:50):
You can.
Speaker 2 (24:50):
You can burn it at the end of the day,
and very swiftly people find that it snowballs, right that
you find that if you see, oh, actually, okay, this
narrative inside that says I'm totally useless.
Speaker 3 (25:01):
I've already done like five effective.
Speaker 2 (25:03):
Things today and yeah, maybe one of them was brush
my teeth, But like, okay, maybe two or three hours later,
I'll have graduated to answering some emails.
Speaker 1 (25:13):
That's so good, something that I was thinking about after
I read it around. You know, there's a section around
staying distractible, which of course is the antithesis to a
lot of productivity advice out there. And I know that
you're a fan of Cal Newport in deep work and
the idea of having blocks of uninterrupted deep focused time.
(25:37):
So I was really curious as to how do you
apply this idea of being open to distractions and interruptions
rather than feeling frustrated with them or with children that
come in and interrupt work.
Speaker 2 (25:52):
I mean, yeah, it's funny, I sort of. I did
a podcast with cal just a few weeks ago, and
I sort of really enjoy exploring this sort of tension point.
The conversation between us tends to be like I say, like, well,
you know, but it's really grueling and hard to try
to impose that level of schedule of your life. Couch
response is like, yeah, but it's worth it, So, like,
you know, buck up on some level, right, this is
(26:15):
not wrong. I'm not sort of against the deep work
approach and against time blocking in the sense that he
teaches it at all. A lot of this is to
do with navigating against one's personality and figuring out where
you're most likely to sort of get too rigid and
clamp down, and taking the opposite approach as a kind
as an antidote to that. So, but what I'm talking
(26:35):
about there is this notion that it's really easy, I think,
or for some people people like me, to kind of
make things worse for themselves by trying to sort of
stick to a schedule so rigid that more things get
defined as distractions, and distractions all feel worse when they
(26:55):
do happen, or interruptions, and that distraction, I guess, is
an internal interruption, and then the other kind is people
coming into the room or whatever. So the example I
give him the book. You know, if it's an afternoon
when it's not my turn for school pickup and I'm
working at home and my son burst into the room
to tell me about something that he's done at school
that day, there might be contexts where the right thing
(27:17):
for me to do is to stop and take a
breath and explain that actually I can't listen right now,
and I will be free later. That I might be
working on something urgent, I might be in a conversation
with somebody. This could happen in the next five minutes.
It'll be interesting to see. But I don't want to
have a productivity system that has defined this period as
(27:39):
so importantly devoted to rigid focus that by definition, that
lovely thing that life is supposed to be about is
defined as a problem. I'm not saying it will never
be something that needs to be managed in that way,
But like, don't default to that, don't start from the
position that unexpected things happening must be bad. I think
(27:59):
that is a risk of sort of overly investing in schedules. Obviously,
there'll be people in the audience here who may say, well,
you know, my schedule is you know, there are lots
of professional roles in which your schedule is more dictated
than that, right, if you've got appointments, if you're working
as a teacher, or working in sort of lots of
different settings where there's kind of a scheduled aspect to it.
(28:21):
But to whatever extent you have that autonomy, you don't
want to use that autonomy to make serendipity inherently the enemy.
One of the ways that I seek to sort of
operational is that I guess in my working life is
to relate to another chapter in the book where I
talk about this kind of three or four hour rule
(28:42):
of creativity, where you see all the way through history,
great creative people are choosing to spend about three or
four hours a day on their core activity if they
have the freedom to do that, and then everything else
and the rest of the time. So something I try
to do to emulate that is like, Okay, I'm going
to try really hard to ring fence several hours in
the morning for writing, very few exceptions to that. That
(29:04):
tends to work best for my energy. So I'm trying
to keep that time free to try to exert quite
a lot of control over time. But the crucial flip
side of that is I'm not going to try to
do that with the rest of the working day or
the evening. I'm going to say, okay, after lunch or
however I do it. Then I am just more open
to things. Then I'm willing to make more appointments and
willing to be I'm going to be interrupted. I'm going
(29:27):
to have my phone on the desk so that I
can respond to messages. So that, I think is a
way of kind of finding the balance between structure and serendipity.
Speaker 1 (29:37):
I really like that. It feels like, instead of I guess,
like a rigid time boxed schedule, which in a way
is not particularly resilient, what you're describing feels like quite
an anti fragile kind of system, if you know what
I mean.
Speaker 3 (29:52):
I think that's a lovely way of putting it.
Speaker 2 (29:54):
I mean, and now I want to say in cal
Newport's defense now that he needs my defenses.
Speaker 1 (29:58):
Certainly doesn't He's going quite fine that.
Speaker 2 (30:00):
I think I can imagine him saying now if he
was in this conversation too, that making a very clear
time blocked schedule for your day is not the same
point as saying I have failed if I adapt it right.
So in his like time block planning approach and everything,
there's always these extra columns to the right hand side
of the main time block for adapting and adapting is
(30:21):
the point. And I think there's something to be said
for the idea of a very clear plan very loosely held.
For me, the way that works best is if there
are chunks of the day which are not specifically assigned
in advanced to specific tasks. But you know, maybe we're
all agreeing really here at the end.
Speaker 3 (30:39):
Of the day.
Speaker 2 (30:39):
I do think that the thing I'm happy to sort
of be against is the idea that like setting it
up in your mind so that if reality unfolds in
ways that we're not fully within your control, you've messed up,
because that's just like living in a world that doesn't exist.
Speaker 1 (30:56):
The final thing I wanted to ask you Oliver is
just around your information diet, and you kind of touched
on it before and in terms of treating all the
things that we could be reading as a river as
opposed to a bucket that is filling up. And it
reminded me of this conversation I had with a friend
of mine who's in creative fields and does a lot
(31:17):
of writing, and she said to me a few years back,
she said, I've just had the realization I've done the
calculations of how many books I can read in a
year and probably how long my life will be, and
I've just realized I'm not going to have time to
read all the books that I want to read in
this lifetime. And that really stuck with me. And when
I read sort of how you talk about sort of
(31:39):
there is infinite information out there and for you as
a writer, and when you're researching books as well, how
do you decide what to read, what to like, dedicate
your precious attention to.
Speaker 3 (31:52):
Yeah, it's a fraud issue.
Speaker 2 (31:54):
I think that the approach that I'm gradually but successfully
sort of easing my way in to is just a
much more fluid one. So it's fluid in the sense
of treating the list of potential books as articles as
a river. As we've spoken about like picking from things
and not feeling bad about the others, it's treating individual
books in that way, being willing to read bits and
(32:15):
not necessarily, you know, feel the burden of having to
complete them. I think also it's the willingness to not
try too hard to retain what you're reading. There's this
thing a foot everywhere now in sort of personal knowledge management,
about how you've got to try to remember everything you read.
And I'm just like, maybe in certain you know, if
(32:37):
you're training in the law or in medicine, there are
context where you have to remember the things that you read.
In that way, the rest of us don't need to
do that, right, you can say that if something's relevant,
it's going to stick to some extent, and you know,
if you forget about it, then that's a filter, right.
The fact that something stays or doesn't stay tells you
something about it. It's relevance. So there isn't a sort
(32:57):
of answer to how I choose what to read than
what I feel drawn to and learning to trust that
sort of instinct of what feels enjoyable and interesting and
when a book feels like it's like I'm done with it,
even though I may never finished it and all the
rest of it.
Speaker 3 (33:14):
I think that's the thing we need to cultivate.
Speaker 1 (33:15):
I love that, Oliver. I could continue talking for hours.
Speaker 3 (33:18):
I love your work so much.
Speaker 1 (33:20):
There was just so much wisdom in here. So I
have a feeling I'll be going back and rereading it
and not trying to remember anything, but just knowing that
it's there if I need it. So thank you so
much for being here very early. Hopefully the sun has risen,
But thank you so much for your time.
Speaker 2 (33:38):
Slowly, slowly. Yeah, I knew it would be a pleasure,
and it was. Thank you so much. A month I've
enjoyed it.
Speaker 1 (33:43):
I hope you loved this chat with Oliver as much
as I did. He shed so many nuggets of wisdom
that I am personally very excited to implement in my
own life. And if you want to learn more about Oliver,
I highly recommend checking out his new book, Meditation for
Mortals four Weeks to embrace will imitations and make time
for what counts. We've put links to that and his
(34:04):
website in the show notes. If you like today's show,
make sure you hit follow on your podcast app to
be alerted when new episodes drop. How I Work was
recorded on the traditional land of the Warrangery people, part
of the Coulan nation.
In an effort to make time for ourselves, many of
us fallback on using to do lists and time blocking,
but often these sorts of strategies can end up with
the same result, getting lost in chasing productivity. So how
do we make time for the things that truly count?
Joining me for a third time on How I Work
(00:22):
is Oliver Berkman, one of my favorite writers. You might
have come across Oliver through the international bestseller four one
thousand Weeks, time Management for Mortals, or his regular columns
for The Guardian, But what I love most about Oliver's
work is that he flips traditional productivity advice on its
head and gives a completely different way of looking at
(00:45):
how we use our time. With his new book Meditation
for Mortals four Weeks to Embrace your limitations and Make
Time for What Counts, which is out now, Oliver has
been thinking a lot about how we can all claw
back time for the things that really matter. In this episode,
we explore the mindset you should be using when you
(01:07):
first approach a task if you wanted to be achieved easily,
and why allowing yourself to be distracted can actually create
a positive result. We also chat about the strategy you
should be utilizing instead of a to do list if
you want to get the most out of your day.
(01:31):
Welcome to How I Work, a show about habits, rituals,
and strategies for optimizing your day. I'm your host, Doctor
Amantha Imber. Oliver's new book, Meditation for Mortals is packed
full of wisdom and advice. So I wanted to know
of everything that Oliver wrote about, which pieces of advice
really stuck with him and changed him the most.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
I seem not able to write anything other than what
feels most compelling to me on the day that I'm
writing it.
Speaker 3 (02:07):
And that applies to the whole book in the sense that,
like you.
Speaker 2 (02:10):
Know, these are the things I have to grapple with,
and then it applies on the level of individual chapters
through the process of writing a book. So it feels
like the answer that changes every day basically. But in
terms of specifics, this book is organized into four weeks,
as you know, and with a sort of short chapter
(02:30):
per day for each of those weeks. Not that I
can control how people actually read it, but that's the
sort of idea. And the third week in there is
called letting Go, and it's about the importance of learning
to sort of let things happen as a sort of
compliment to making them happen, and kind of unclenching from
life a bit. And basically all of that material is
the stuff I sort of needed the most at the
(02:51):
point that I was putting that together, and you know
still now, so all that stuff about, for example, the
willingness to let things be easy and not to sort
of head into big projects or life stages or anything
like that with the kind of assumption that they must
be going to be grueling and take a lot of
unpleasant effort. That means a lot to me because it's
(03:13):
still one of the ones that I sort of grapple
with the most.
Speaker 1 (03:15):
I suppose I love that I did write that down.
Actually it's something I wanted to delve into because it's
a question that I sometimes think about, and I've written
it here. What if this might be a lot easier
than I'd been assuming, I think was the wording from
the book, and I was actually curious, like, well, how
do you apply it every day? But I also wanted
(03:36):
to know to this book project, and particularly following up
on four thousand Weeks, which was such a mega hit
around the world, and I mean, you've written several books,
and so it wasn't like that second album syndrome they
talk about for musicians. Maybe this is like your fourth
or fifth album syndrome. But I wanted to know, for
this project in particular, how did you apply that advice
(03:58):
and did you?
Speaker 2 (03:58):
Well, No, it was a bit like say, album syndrome,
because you know, it's true that I had written a
previous book, The Antidote, and also a collection of columns
called Help, which was a book and is a book,
but I hadn't had to write in the same way, right,
because it was just a question of collecting and editing
some previously written material. But certainly four thousand Weeks was
far and away the most sort of successful thing that
(04:20):
I'd written at the point that it was published. And
so yeah, I think there was a very sort of cliched,
completely predictable and rather tiresome to talk too much about
phenomenon where I sort of froze a bit and thought like,
oh dear, now, if I mess up, more people going
to be watching. So I did kind of a little
bit to some extent sort of freeze and headlights. And
(04:41):
it was interesting because it sort of brought into my
writing process a lot of the questions that I was
already focused on in what I wanted to put into
the book, and it sort.
Speaker 3 (04:51):
Of made them very, very alive.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
And I've found this in the past, right, something about
the process of writing books will sort of fall ground
the things that you're grappling with in the substance of
the book, and actually, you know, you end up, I think,
and I hope being able to express them more authentically
because you actually sort of have to go through a
version of that struggle to get the book written. And
(05:13):
I did have to find ways to allow the possibility
that it was more doable than I thought. But the
basic gist of that was to sort of keep coming
back and back and back. I don't think there's a
single way to flip the switch, but keep coming back
to this thought that maybe what I was ready to
do and able to do in terms of the next
paragraph in the next chapter was what needed to be done.
Speaker 1 (05:35):
And now, just like in your day to day work,
how do you apply that principle of just having things
be a whole lot easier than you'd otherwise assume.
Speaker 2 (05:45):
I mean, a couple of things come to mind. One
is that I do think, and I wish this wasn't
the case, but I do think that a lot of
these insights are just a matter of returning to them
and returning to them and returning to them and gradually
sort of strengthening the mental muscle that allows you to
remember them. So it's sort of catching yourself from one
(06:06):
minute to the next. And it's actually quite sort of
physical for me, right, I sort of I find that
I'm actually sort of tensed against the work. It's in
my musculature somehow, and catching yourself doing that and just
sort of stepping back from it and thinking like, oh,
maybe that's not necessary is very powerful maybe to get
a little bit more practical. The other thing that makes
(06:27):
a big difference there is the idea of really just
thinking about the very next thing and the very next thing,
so sort of using methods of productivity, methods of planning
the day, And there are lots of different ones that
having common this focus on like, Okay, what's the next small,
completable thing, the sort of radically doable little task that
(06:48):
I want to pick and then put into practice. Now,
you can't do things like write a book or even
write a chapter. You can do things like that come
up with a rough plan for the first half of
the chapter, and that's when I can get it down
underneath that threshold of what feels doable, back into that
easier way of working.
Speaker 1 (07:07):
I love that idea of picking the thing that feels
radically doable that will stick with me. I think something
else that this relates to, and I want to say
this might have been in the Letting Go section is
around developing a taste for problems, and you write about
how we kind of go through life and think, oh,
(07:27):
one day all the problems will be gone and there
will just be no problems to deal with, but of
course we know that that is not the case. It's
like it's so simple, but it's also it's like it's
quite profound when you actually think about it. I want
to know, like, how does that one resonate for you,
like on a day to day basis. Is it one
(07:47):
of those things that you do just keep coming back to,
because I was very curious about that.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
I write in the book about this story that Sam
Harris tells about, you know, being in coffee. I think
it is a lunch with a friend one day and
going on and on about his problems. He was addressing
in his work or whatever it was, and her interrupting
him in mid flow and saying, hold on, are you
still under the impression you're going to get to the
part of your life where you don't have any problems?
(08:11):
And he sort of recounts the experience of realizing like, oh, yes,
there is kind of something in the stance I've had
towards life that implies, yeah, not only that a given
problem might be difficult depending on its content, but that
I shouldn't have problems. I'm trying to get through to
the point in life where there aren't problems. And I
sort of explain in the book why this isn't going
(08:33):
to happen, and you wouldn't want it to happen, right.
There are certainly specific kinds of problems that you wouldn't
wish on anybody, But the sort of sheer existence of
problems on some level is the synonymous with having meaningful
work ahead of you. But I try increasingly to have
some kind of direction, have some kind of vision. I
don't it's not purely about just stumbling through the dark,
(08:55):
but not to try very hard to link that up
to moment moment action. So I'm really trying, and it's
very much a work in progress, but I'm really trying
to combine that idea of like having a fairly clear
sense of what I'm trying to create here with a
very very much more intuitive and spontaneous even sense of like, Okay,
(09:17):
what feels like the right thing to do next.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
I want to talk about worrying, and you talk about
this idea of most of the bridges that we worry
about never end up being crossed. Can you tell me
more about that, and just on a day to day basis,
how do you live that? Because I really struggle with
that one.
Speaker 2 (09:40):
Yeah, no, me too, and that's why it was interesting
for me to write about it. The worry is kind
of fascinating, and I think one way of understanding worry
is that it's the sort of attempt by a human
being who is inherently limited to the present moment. One
of the many ways in which were limited is sort
of temporarily localized. We wish we could sort of also
(10:02):
be in the future checking up on it, making sure
that everything's going to be fine, but we can't, and
so worry is this sort of mental discomfort that arises
from trying to repeatedly sort of get out there and
secure a place in time that we're not actually in
and never are in. And you know, if I wanted
to get sort of evolutionary psychology about it, which I
(10:24):
don't usually want to do very much, but you know,
you could see how perhaps we sort of evolved in
an environment where where having that concern and then dealing
with it was something that happened in a very short order.
Like you hear a sound, you're worried about it, you
check it out, you realize it's no threat to your safety.
Now we live in this world that's been called a
you know, delayed return environment, where the thing you're worrying
(10:45):
about could well be whether how an editor will respond
to a pitch you've made sometime in the next four weeks,
or whether an attempt to purchase a house will go
through at some point in the next two months. You know,
all these kinds of slow things. Whether worry just has
no to go, It doesn't motivate a quick action to
get to deal with the worry, It just sort of curdle.
And I think the thing about crossing bridges is, yeah,
(11:06):
there's another way of making the same point. Really we're
trying to sort of think through all the things that
could go wrong, think our way through what we do,
and reassure ourselves that that will have gone okay if
that happens. You can't ever be certain that something goes
okay until it's gone okay. So trying to cross bridges
before you get to them, in that sense, is just
(11:28):
a recipe for that kind of unpleasant, anxious state of constantly,
repetitively trying to do it and failing. There are all
sorts of ideas in cognitive therapy and elsewhere about you know,
scheduling a time of day in which to worry and
things like this, and I think it does help some
people to do something like that. The version of that
that I find helpful is to market date in my
(11:49):
calendar maybe three four weeks in the future, to sort
of remind myself to focus again on that topic. And
I find that knowing that that's there and it's coming
up in the calendar is incredibly powerful in terms of
enabling me to let go of it in the present.
If it's still a big issue four weeks from now,
then I will kick into worrying about it again. I
(12:10):
sort of on some level I'm concerned that if I
were to stop worrying about it, I might completely forget
about it. Right, And it's wild right as parents, if
you're worried about some issue with your child's welfare, like,
I'm not going to forget about that, it's ridiculous. But
some part of me doesn't trust myself. And it's like,
if I let go and just got into the thing
I was working on today, maybe like ten years later,
(12:33):
I'd be like, oh, no, everything's gone terribly wrong in
life because I completely failed to attend to this thing.
So putting that kind of three or four weeks ahead
thing in I find really effective because then I can
be like, Okay, just in case I completely forget about
this important thing, it will come back into my world.
Speaker 1 (12:51):
I love that I've experimented myself with having a worry
least and then setting a daily worry time and confining
my worrying to that time of day, and I found
that quite effective. But what I like about what you've
just suggested is that it's almost like a test of
a hypothesis. And the more and more you're like, if
everything you worry about you actually just put in the
(13:14):
diary to spend some time thinking about a couple of
weeks from today, and then every time you get to
those things, like nine times out of ten, you're going
to think, what was I even worrying about that never
eventuated into anything, which I feel then feeds, you know,
the like a more sensible hypothesis and theory that actually
(13:34):
I worry about things that I don't even need to
be spending time worrying about. So I really I enjoy that.
Speaker 2 (13:40):
Yes, and even in the one time out of ten, right,
then it comes around and you're like, Okay, what are
some the chances are you'll be in a better place
to just sort of figure out some actions that you
could take relative to it.
Speaker 1 (13:50):
Yeah, yeah, now you're right. Even though you're I would
say an anti productivity guru if that is a thing,
you do have some really good pieces of advice around
how we can I guess, make the best use of
our time and think differently about things. And I want
to talk more about this idea of treating your to
do list as a menu. Can you tell me more
(14:12):
about that?
Speaker 2 (14:13):
So I guess where this started off in my thinking
is in another chapter of this book where I'm talking
about not to do lists, but like you're sort of
to read pile or your digital folder of articles save
to read later, and how not very much reflection on
how content works in the twenty first century will reveal
(14:34):
that this is essentially an endless list. The better technology
gets at filtering information, the more stuff we find coming
our way that we feel like we really need to
read or would be really important for our jobs or something.
And I wrote then about how it can be really
helpful to see that kind of collection of things not
as a bucket but as a river. Right, So this
(14:56):
is just an possibly helpful analogy, not as something you've
got deal with an empty but as a sort of
flow of things that goes by you, and your only
job is to pick a few things that seem interesting
and not feel guilty about the ones that go by.
And I find that very useful in my own approach
to literally that topic. You know, the four hundred articles
that I've got stored in a read it later app
(15:18):
If I think that it's my job to get through them, firstly,
I won't approach them in the most creatively helpful or
enjoyable way. But secondly, also like that's not the end
of it. There'll be another four hundred in a short time.
So treating them as like, well, what actually still feels
compelling and let the rest go is much more powerful.
But the more I thought about this, the more I
realize that you know, in a sense, every list of things,
(15:43):
even things that feel much more obligatory than a to
read pile, every list of things has the same character
because if there are more things that you could meaningfully
usefully do with a day, then you will be able
to actually do with the day. Then you are in
(16:04):
fact picking items for now and letting the rest go,
whether you like it or not. So to switch screech
of breaks, to switch metaphor into menus. The point there
is that we don't get stressed by a rest Most
people anyway don't get stressed by a restaurant menu. And
if you do get stressed, it's not because you think
it's your job to get through the whole list right
(16:26):
at a single sitting. The fact that a restaurant menu
is long and you get to pick a few things
from it is kind of the point of a restaurant
menu and what makes it pleasurable. And you can actually
see that the same thing applies to our to do lists,
right because obviously a lot of the things we're going
to be doing are not necessarily going to be as
fun as eating a delicious meal. But if there's more
that we could do than we're going to get to
(16:47):
do in a day, then by definition, what you're doing
when you look at a do list is picking a
few items and choosing a few things that feel most compelling,
most important, most meaningful, and not expecting to get through
the whole of it. And there is quite a deep
potential shift here, which is summed up in that sort
(17:07):
of familiar phrase, But it's that the items on a list,
when you viewed like that, stop being things that you
have to do and become things that you get to do.
You get to pick from a menu, and we do
get to pick from our to do list. Again, we
may decide that certain things that we're going to pick
us kind of unpleasant, in the same way that I
suppose you might pick a extremely healthy side dish and
(17:29):
a menu that you didn't particularly like because actually it's
part of your long term goal to eat healthily. But
there is something really important in letting go of that
notion that you've failed unless you get through the list.
And I think that seeing and understanding our list as
infinite is the way to do that, because then you're
just like, that's not happening.
Speaker 1 (17:47):
Something else I really liked as an idea in this
book is around setting a quantity goal.
Speaker 3 (17:54):
Can you tell me more about that?
Speaker 1 (17:55):
Because I think that's particularly interesting for knowledge workers like us.
Speaker 2 (17:59):
Yeah, so you know, there are other contexts in which
the idea of quantifying your life and measuring everything you
do it can be quite sort of detrimental, and I
sort of don't recommend it, but I'm always one for
picking the right technique for the context and contradicting myself
wherever I feel like it. And the context of quantity goals,
(18:19):
I think that if you do any kind of creative work,
and that I would define very broadly, there is this
tendency to set things up in your mind so that
you can never feel like you've done something well enough,
or that you've done it to a sufficiently high quality.
So the way that you sort of or the way
that I sort of naturally, if I don't catch myself
(18:42):
proceeds as a writer, is sort of to sit there
staring at the screen waiting for something really good to
occur to me finally, maybe it does, and I type
it out, and then I sort of judge it again
and realize it is in. I delete half of it,
and you sort of make this incredibly halting progress over
the page. And it's actually antipathetical to high quality anyway,
(19:02):
because the way to get to high quality is to
is to allow things to flow and then pick from
what flows out. So the idea of a quantity goal
is just that it gives the part of your brain
that wants to think in terms of goals and progress
and productivity something to do. But it's something to do
that sort of doesn't get involved in the quality arguments.
(19:25):
So for someone writing, this could be simply a question
of like, my next job is to add two hundred
words to this, or my next job is to write
for an hour today, or you know. And the most
sort of purely quantity form of this is the kind
of free writing exercise that I was talking about before,
where you might just say, like, I'm setting a timer
(19:46):
for ten minutes and the only rule is that I'm
not going to stop typing or writing for that ten minutes,
and you know that is not going to create the
final draft of a publishable book.
Speaker 3 (19:59):
But that's not the point. The point is to.
Speaker 2 (20:01):
Stay in this world of letting things flow out to
see what there might be to be worked with. So
I find there's something really sort of something that really
sort of removes the drama from things by setting a
quantity goal, because the other problem with the quality goal
is that it's really hard to express, like what does
it even mean to say, I'm going to try and
write this chapter as well as I possibly can, or
(20:23):
really excellently, or as well.
Speaker 3 (20:24):
As the last one.
Speaker 2 (20:26):
These are just kind of endlessly flexible definitions that you
will by default flex in the direction of feeling bad
about yourself.
Speaker 3 (20:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:35):
So I'm very often in my creative work either sometimes
literally writing it down. Sometimes it's just in my mind,
but I'm thinking, like, Okay, what I'm doing next is
a twenty minute brain dump on this topic. What I'm
doing next is filling a single page with a little
structure diagram, because that's how I work. But the point
(20:57):
about the quantity there is it's like filling a single page.
It's not getting the perfect structure and so on and
so on.
Speaker 1 (21:02):
We will be back with Oliver soon, and when we return,
we'll be discussing why being open to distractions can be
beneficial and the strategy you can use instead of a
to do list to make the most of your day.
If you're looking for more tips to improve the way
you work can live. I write a short weekly newsletter
(21:24):
that contains tactics I've discovered that have helped me personally.
You can sign up for that at Amantha dot com.
That's Amantha dot Com. I feel like this dovetails perhaps
into running a done list at the end of the day,
(21:44):
and I think it's fairly self explanatory perhaps, but maybe
I'd love you to talk about how you use a
done list and perhaps what it is in your work.
Speaker 2 (21:54):
Yeah, I would say as a list that you keep
through the day, probably rather than necessarily just at the
end of the day. And this is very adaptable, you know,
if there are people listening and watching who have really complicated,
tricked out task management systems, Like I'm not suggesting throwing
that away. It's just a question of building this in
and making sure that it's got a role, just a
role for recording proactively the things that you do as
(22:17):
you do them, so that you as well as a
to do list or instead of a to do list.
You're also creating this list of your accomplishments through the
day that gets longer and longer as the day goes on,
which I mean to do lists often tend to get
longer and longer as the day goes on as well,
But that's a problem. This is a good thing, right,
the longer you have done with better, And as I
say in the book, you know, it's a very simple intervention,
(22:40):
but I think it is so powerful because it invites
you to compare your output, not to infinity, which is
what we're usually doing, that all the things we could
yet do that would be useful if we could do.
Speaker 3 (22:53):
Them, but to zero.
Speaker 2 (22:55):
It's implicitly it's like, you know, here's what I've done
compared to if I stayed in bed and done nothing today.
So you know, I definitely cycle through the ways I'm
actually doing this in my own life, and actually maybe
that's something to talk about. I'm glad that I do
that now. I'm not in search of the final rigid
system in the way that I definitely used to be.
(23:16):
But one way that you can put this into practice,
obviously is just writing. Is just you know, adding items
to a piece of paper, as you go through them.
If I'm in more of a sort of a motivational rut,
I will sometimes pair this with another approach. So what
I'll do is, I'll it's going to sound very silly
(23:37):
when I put it into words, but you know, I will
in a notebook, on one page, write down a task
that I propose to do, do the task, cross it out,
and then write it down on a different page as
being done. Right, so you have a list of the
things that you're doing. You just added one task at
a time, and then a list of the things that
(23:58):
you've done. I mean, willing to be told that this
is kind of dumb on some level, but I find
it it's really it's really helpful for just sort of focusing
when you're feeling like you lack focus and just finally
on the done list. I mean, one thing that people
have said and that I think I have once or
twice found myself as well, is that if you're in
a really low place, like if you're really in a
(24:20):
kind of like I can't quite make myself get out
of bed kind of psychological place in life, which does happen.
Speaker 3 (24:26):
You can just lower the bar for what counts as
something to be added to your done list. Right, there
is something weirdly motivational, something that gets the ball rolling
about keeping a list in a notebook where you say,
you know, took a shower, made coffee, things that you
wouldn't normally qualify as counters accomplishments because they're two below
the level of significance. But if you do that, you
(24:48):
know you don't need to show anyone else this list.
Speaker 1 (24:50):
You can.
Speaker 2 (24:50):
You can burn it at the end of the day,
and very swiftly people find that it snowballs, right that
you find that if you see, oh, actually, okay, this
narrative inside that says I'm totally useless.
Speaker 3 (25:01):
I've already done like five effective.
Speaker 2 (25:03):
Things today and yeah, maybe one of them was brush
my teeth, But like, okay, maybe two or three hours later,
I'll have graduated to answering some emails.
Speaker 1 (25:13):
That's so good, something that I was thinking about after
I read it around. You know, there's a section around
staying distractible, which of course is the antithesis to a
lot of productivity advice out there. And I know that
you're a fan of Cal Newport in deep work and
the idea of having blocks of uninterrupted deep focused time.
(25:37):
So I was really curious as to how do you
apply this idea of being open to distractions and interruptions
rather than feeling frustrated with them or with children that
come in and interrupt work.
Speaker 2 (25:52):
I mean, yeah, it's funny, I sort of. I did
a podcast with cal just a few weeks ago, and
I sort of really enjoy exploring this sort of tension point.
The conversation between us tends to be like I say, like, well,
you know, but it's really grueling and hard to try
to impose that level of schedule of your life. Couch
response is like, yeah, but it's worth it, So, like,
you know, buck up on some level, right, this is
(26:15):
not wrong. I'm not sort of against the deep work
approach and against time blocking in the sense that he
teaches it at all. A lot of this is to
do with navigating against one's personality and figuring out where
you're most likely to sort of get too rigid and
clamp down, and taking the opposite approach as a kind
as an antidote to that. So, but what I'm talking
(26:35):
about there is this notion that it's really easy, I think,
or for some people people like me, to kind of
make things worse for themselves by trying to sort of
stick to a schedule so rigid that more things get
defined as distractions, and distractions all feel worse when they
(26:55):
do happen, or interruptions, and that distraction, I guess, is
an internal interruption, and then the other kind is people
coming into the room or whatever. So the example I
give him the book. You know, if it's an afternoon
when it's not my turn for school pickup and I'm
working at home and my son burst into the room
to tell me about something that he's done at school
that day, there might be contexts where the right thing
(27:17):
for me to do is to stop and take a
breath and explain that actually I can't listen right now,
and I will be free later. That I might be
working on something urgent, I might be in a conversation
with somebody. This could happen in the next five minutes.
It'll be interesting to see. But I don't want to
have a productivity system that has defined this period as
(27:39):
so importantly devoted to rigid focus that by definition, that
lovely thing that life is supposed to be about is
defined as a problem. I'm not saying it will never
be something that needs to be managed in that way,
But like, don't default to that, don't start from the
position that unexpected things happening must be bad. I think
(27:59):
that is a risk of sort of overly investing in schedules. Obviously,
there'll be people in the audience here who may say, well,
you know, my schedule is you know, there are lots
of professional roles in which your schedule is more dictated
than that, right, if you've got appointments, if you're working
as a teacher, or working in sort of lots of
different settings where there's kind of a scheduled aspect to it.
(28:21):
But to whatever extent you have that autonomy, you don't
want to use that autonomy to make serendipity inherently the enemy.
One of the ways that I seek to sort of
operational is that I guess in my working life is
to relate to another chapter in the book where I
talk about this kind of three or four hour rule
(28:42):
of creativity, where you see all the way through history,
great creative people are choosing to spend about three or
four hours a day on their core activity if they
have the freedom to do that, and then everything else
and the rest of the time. So something I try
to do to emulate that is like, Okay, I'm going
to try really hard to ring fence several hours in
the morning for writing, very few exceptions to that. That
(29:04):
tends to work best for my energy. So I'm trying
to keep that time free to try to exert quite
a lot of control over time. But the crucial flip
side of that is I'm not going to try to
do that with the rest of the working day or
the evening. I'm going to say, okay, after lunch or
however I do it. Then I am just more open
to things. Then I'm willing to make more appointments and
willing to be I'm going to be interrupted. I'm going
(29:27):
to have my phone on the desk so that I
can respond to messages. So that, I think is a
way of kind of finding the balance between structure and serendipity.
Speaker 1 (29:37):
I really like that. It feels like, instead of I guess,
like a rigid time boxed schedule, which in a way
is not particularly resilient, what you're describing feels like quite
an anti fragile kind of system, if you know what
I mean.
Speaker 3 (29:52):
I think that's a lovely way of putting it.
Speaker 2 (29:54):
I mean, and now I want to say in cal
Newport's defense now that he needs my defenses.
Speaker 1 (29:58):
Certainly doesn't He's going quite fine that.
Speaker 2 (30:00):
I think I can imagine him saying now if he
was in this conversation too, that making a very clear
time blocked schedule for your day is not the same
point as saying I have failed if I adapt it right.
So in his like time block planning approach and everything,
there's always these extra columns to the right hand side
of the main time block for adapting and adapting is
(30:21):
the point. And I think there's something to be said
for the idea of a very clear plan very loosely held.
For me, the way that works best is if there
are chunks of the day which are not specifically assigned
in advanced to specific tasks. But you know, maybe we're
all agreeing really here at the end.
Speaker 3 (30:39):
Of the day.
Speaker 2 (30:39):
I do think that the thing I'm happy to sort
of be against is the idea that like setting it
up in your mind so that if reality unfolds in
ways that we're not fully within your control, you've messed up,
because that's just like living in a world that doesn't exist.
Speaker 1 (30:56):
The final thing I wanted to ask you Oliver is
just around your information diet, and you kind of touched
on it before and in terms of treating all the
things that we could be reading as a river as
opposed to a bucket that is filling up. And it
reminded me of this conversation I had with a friend
of mine who's in creative fields and does a lot
(31:17):
of writing, and she said to me a few years back,
she said, I've just had the realization I've done the
calculations of how many books I can read in a
year and probably how long my life will be, and
I've just realized I'm not going to have time to
read all the books that I want to read in
this lifetime. And that really stuck with me. And when
I read sort of how you talk about sort of
(31:39):
there is infinite information out there and for you as
a writer, and when you're researching books as well, how
do you decide what to read, what to like, dedicate
your precious attention to.
Speaker 3 (31:52):
Yeah, it's a fraud issue.
Speaker 2 (31:54):
I think that the approach that I'm gradually but successfully
sort of easing my way in to is just a
much more fluid one. So it's fluid in the sense
of treating the list of potential books as articles as
a river. As we've spoken about like picking from things
and not feeling bad about the others, it's treating individual
books in that way, being willing to read bits and
(32:15):
not necessarily, you know, feel the burden of having to
complete them. I think also it's the willingness to not
try too hard to retain what you're reading. There's this
thing a foot everywhere now in sort of personal knowledge management,
about how you've got to try to remember everything you read.
And I'm just like, maybe in certain you know, if
(32:37):
you're training in the law or in medicine, there are
context where you have to remember the things that you read.
In that way, the rest of us don't need to
do that, right, you can say that if something's relevant,
it's going to stick to some extent, and you know,
if you forget about it, then that's a filter, right.
The fact that something stays or doesn't stay tells you
something about it. It's relevance. So there isn't a sort
(32:57):
of answer to how I choose what to read than
what I feel drawn to and learning to trust that
sort of instinct of what feels enjoyable and interesting and
when a book feels like it's like I'm done with it,
even though I may never finished it and all the
rest of it.
Speaker 3 (33:14):
I think that's the thing we need to cultivate.
Speaker 1 (33:15):
I love that, Oliver. I could continue talking for hours.
Speaker 3 (33:18):
I love your work so much.
Speaker 1 (33:20):
There was just so much wisdom in here. So I
have a feeling I'll be going back and rereading it
and not trying to remember anything, but just knowing that
it's there if I need it. So thank you so
much for being here very early. Hopefully the sun has risen,
But thank you so much for your time.
Speaker 2 (33:38):
Slowly, slowly. Yeah, I knew it would be a pleasure,
and it was. Thank you so much. A month I've
enjoyed it.
Speaker 1 (33:43):
I hope you loved this chat with Oliver as much
as I did. He shed so many nuggets of wisdom
that I am personally very excited to implement in my
own life. And if you want to learn more about Oliver,
I highly recommend checking out his new book, Meditation for
Mortals four Weeks to embrace will imitations and make time
for what counts. We've put links to that and his
(34:04):
website in the show notes. If you like today's show,
make sure you hit follow on your podcast app to
be alerted when new episodes drop. How I Work was
recorded on the traditional land of the Warrangery people, part
of the Coulan nation.
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