Escaping Toxic Productivity: How Hustle Culture & Fake Organization Distracts You

00:00:00.000 | I'm going to try to describe the relationship of your new book to your last book, 4,000

00:00:05.040 | Weeks, then you tell me how you would modify that.

00:00:08.520 | Because I don't see it as, it's not quite right to say a follow-up to 4,000 Weeks.

00:00:13.560 | It's not quite right to say a response to 4,000 Weeks.

00:00:17.480 | I see it as maybe a companion/elaboration/iteration.

00:00:24.440 | There's new things in it and it's more practical, but it also has a lot of philosophy.

00:00:29.480 | And some of the philosophy is refining what you talked about in 4,000 Weeks and some of

00:00:32.840 | the philosophy is also new, which gives it a really interesting relationship.

00:00:37.040 | Am I getting that sort of vaguely right?

00:00:38.760 | Yeah, I think so.

00:00:40.120 | I mean, it was very important to me writing it that it not be something that required

00:00:43.860 | you to have read a word I've written beforehand.

00:00:47.840 | But I think there is, you know, on one level, my subject matter is human finitude, limitation,

00:00:54.320 | how we get things done and enjoy life in this situation of being as limited as we are.

00:00:59.560 | And I guess the focus of this book is much more, in my mind, on action at a day-to-day

00:01:07.200 | level and really going from, you know, going from the fact that you can have all sorts

00:01:13.420 | of ideas about how you want to live and work and never actually do them.

00:01:18.800 | So it's about crossing that gap into sort of actually doing the things.

00:01:24.380 | Which is kind of where things get exciting.

00:01:27.440 | So let's back up a little bit.

00:01:29.560 | So what I wanted to start, my goal, and we talked about this offline, my goal is to try

00:01:32.720 | to understand, this is a show about the deep life, what role does productivity play in

00:01:37.800 | the deep life?

00:01:38.800 | That's going to be our goal, including, and I think that's why I'm glad you're here,

00:01:42.240 | the traps.

00:01:43.240 | There's a lot of dangers as you try to integrate productivity ideas into your life.

00:01:47.240 | There's a lot of traps there.

00:01:48.240 | So let's start from the beginning.

00:01:49.240 | I want to try to identify better what it is you are responding to with both this book

00:01:55.080 | and 4,000 Weeks.

00:01:56.340 | Because I think something that's different about you than other writers from the last

00:02:00.520 | five years who have had some skepticism about productivity culture is, you know about what

00:02:04.800 | you speak.

00:02:06.040 | You wrote this column for The Guardian, I think I counted over 600 columns or 400,

00:02:12.040 | I don't know, I counted at some point, but it was over a decade, right?

00:02:14.880 | >> Too many, yeah.

00:02:15.880 | >> Too many, yeah.

00:02:16.880 | So you wrote a column that looked at advice culture, self-help culture, productivity culture

00:02:20.960 | for a very long time before you came to these books.

00:02:23.280 | So what was it that you came to notice that led you to the motivation to start writing

00:02:29.720 | skeptically about this culture?

00:02:32.200 | >> Yes, I mean, one of the great benefits of writing a column for a long time where

00:02:38.240 | you get to, among other things, you know, test out all these methods and systems and

00:02:42.380 | techniques is that, you know, once you've tried a hundred of them and none of them have

00:02:49.040 | been the silver bullet that brings total peace of mind and calm productivity to your life,

00:02:55.600 | you begin to ask the next question, which is whether there's something amiss with that

00:03:01.400 | quest.

00:03:02.400 | Obviously, if you do a more important job in the world and you only have the time to

00:03:07.600 | test out a handful of these, you might still believe that it's just a question of finding

00:03:11.680 | the right system.

00:03:12.680 | So I really feel like I went through a very kind of productive and positive kind of disillusionment

00:03:17.640 | in that process.

00:03:19.200 | >> How earnest, I read your original column the other day, and there's an earnestness

00:03:24.200 | in it.

00:03:25.200 | Like, I really do want to try to figure out what works.

00:03:27.480 | And then there was also, I think, a very British sort of self-deprecation of it as well.

00:03:32.000 | But how earnest, like if you're looking back at 2006, what would, if I interviewed you

00:03:36.200 | back then, what were you hoping, did you, at that point, were you holding out a significant

00:03:42.720 | piece is going to be found, or were you already pretty suspect?

00:03:46.160 | Because the column had a bit of a sardonic title, I'm very curious in where your mindset

00:03:50.720 | was back then when you started.

00:03:52.280 | >> It's interesting, I think of the process of writing that column over the years as being

00:03:56.280 | a journey from cynicism to sincerity, really, even though as well disillusionment in the

00:04:03.440 | ways that were being offered to sort of build a meaningful life.

00:04:08.840 | But the, you know, I think I began thinking I was mainly going to sort of be mocking and

00:04:15.520 | sarcastic about terrible self-help, still taking the sort of quest for happiness seriously

00:04:21.920 | on some level, because it is obviously on some level a very serious quest.

00:04:25.120 | But the big surprise was how much value there was like hiding in the cheesiness and the

00:04:34.720 | cringe.

00:04:35.720 | That was also a much more interesting and provocative thing to present to the archetypal

00:04:40.400 | Guardian reader, right?

00:04:41.760 | My audience was, I took my audience anyway to be similarly jaded and skeptical.

00:04:47.360 | So that sort of obviously is at odds with what I just said about getting disillusioned

00:04:50.840 | by the methods.

00:04:51.840 | But I think the sort of, so it was a sort of a twin track thing where I gradually was

00:04:57.400 | sort of forced into having different or my own ideas about how to get to these goals.

00:05:01.640 | But I did get more sincere about the goals.

00:05:05.560 | And I think what's going on there partly obviously is that when you start that thing off and

00:05:09.300 | when you start writing sardonically about stuff as a relatively young adult, part of

00:05:15.880 | what you're doing is sort of a bit of a defense mechanism against the fact that you do care

00:05:20.280 | about these things and you would like to find ways to be less anxious and feel less oppressed

00:05:26.080 | by obligation and overwhelm.

00:05:28.320 | But it's kind of a little bit embarrassing to admit it.

00:05:30.940 | So you do sarcastic stuff instead.

00:05:33.200 | Do journalists have a like a special relationship with these type of topics like productivity?

00:05:39.080 | Because it's a weird job.

00:05:41.160 | It's very autonomous in some sense.

00:05:42.840 | It's also very deadline driven.

00:05:45.440 | There's an unlimited ceiling it feels like.

00:05:47.960 | You can go, you can advance to become as famous or as successful as you can imagine or anywhere

00:05:54.600 | along the way.

00:05:55.600 | And it all kind of comes down to what you're going to do and you're all sort of starting

00:05:57.600 | from the same place and everyone's, you have to find some way to break out.

00:06:01.120 | It feels like journalism, maybe similar to like academia, has a special relationship

00:06:05.120 | to this advice because they worry a lot about the things that this advice promises to help.

00:06:12.360 | Yeah, I think that's right.

00:06:14.080 | And I was sort of doubling that up by then the substance of what I was writing about

00:06:17.520 | was this stuff as well.

00:06:19.440 | But yeah, that kind of deadline driven environment where you are a part of a collective operation

00:06:25.640 | and getting the pages filled physically or digitally is the ultimate sort of driving

00:06:32.600 | goal.

00:06:33.600 | But yeah, it's really sort of individualistic in another way.

00:06:36.920 | Everyone inside that organization, who's a writer anyway, is sort of fiercely on some

00:06:41.160 | level competing with each other.

00:06:45.220 | And it feels like it really matters to find the most effective and efficient ways to deal

00:06:53.000 | with each project so you can get on to the next bigger one, I suppose.

00:06:57.280 | Yeah, it's in the water there.

00:06:58.600 | So then what was, when you had the revelation, and you talk about in your last book, it was

00:07:02.560 | on a bench famously in Brooklyn.

00:07:07.400 | How do you describe the revelation you had that led to 4,000 weeks?

00:07:11.120 | Well, this was very much an intellectual kind of revelation.

00:07:14.560 | And the process with me, I don't know if it's, I think it's probably quite common, is that

00:07:17.960 | I have these kind of what seemed like incredibly clarifying intellectual insights.

00:07:23.040 | And then it can take years and years to kind of live into a new way of living.

00:07:28.840 | My intellect goes first, and then the rest of me has to catch up.

00:07:31.680 | But I was, yeah, I tell this story, I was, I'd stopped to sit on a park bench on my way

00:07:36.780 | to my co-working space in Brooklyn where we lived.

00:07:41.400 | And I just had even more article deadlines and stuff I was supposed to do by the end

00:07:47.160 | of that week than I usually had.

00:07:48.920 | I was even more anxious about it all, cycling through what combination of productivity tricks

00:07:55.720 | and total suspension of my social life or sleep I was going to use to try to force my

00:08:02.220 | way through to state of completion on this stuff.

00:08:06.120 | And just being struck really powerfully by the thought, oh, it's impossible.

00:08:10.880 | I'm trying to do something that isn't possible here.

00:08:12.720 | I'm trying to do more things than there will be a way to do in the time available.

00:08:19.760 | And just experiencing that as just incredibly liberating as opposed to depressing, right?

00:08:25.280 | That moment of I'm trying to do something that isn't on the cards.

00:08:31.440 | So actually, the very best thing I can do is to pick some of the things that seem like

00:08:36.480 | the best use of my time and energy and do them and instantly like you're sort of not

00:08:42.680 | overwhelmed in that moment because the whole conceptual structure of overwhelm kind of

00:08:47.440 | operates.

00:08:48.440 | Did you take things off your plate right after that?

00:08:50.400 | Like, was this a matter of saying no to some things or backing out of some things?

00:08:55.080 | What was the practical implications on your workload in that moment?

00:08:58.040 | I think in that moment, a lot of it was just a little bit of renegotiation of existing

00:09:03.980 | deadlines, facing up to the risk of people being furious with me and of course finding

00:09:09.800 | out that they've got their own problems.

00:09:12.160 | They were not pacing up and down their offices cursing my name and didn't really mind at

00:09:17.240 | all taking a bit of extra time.

00:09:19.400 | I don't remember in detail, but I think there might well have been a project or two that

00:09:22.680 | I had to essentially put on ice.

00:09:26.000 | And then, the rest of it is, it's almost like it wasn't even real in some sense, right?

00:09:32.840 | It's like, yes, I've got a lot of emails that need answering on some value of need answering.

00:09:38.740 | But if it takes, in a lot of those cases, if you sort of triage them and some of them

00:09:43.880 | maybe you'd never reply to and some of them, yeah, it's going to take two weeks.

00:09:46.880 | It's not particularly proud of that, but it's not going to bring catastrophe.

00:09:51.320 | And there's the depth of the sort of unexamined idea that something absolutely terrible is

00:09:56.400 | going to happen if you don't get to the end of a sort of purely, on some level, self-created

00:10:02.880 | list of tasks is extraordinary.

00:10:04.800 | We have this joke on the show that people like to imagine there's a dark room somewhere

00:10:09.000 | where all the people you work with are sitting around and they have all this data about you

00:10:12.640 | up on a board somewhere and they're studying your patterns of like, how many things did

00:10:16.560 | Oliver say no to?

00:10:18.240 | Wait a second.

00:10:19.240 | He said no to 50% more things than normal.

00:10:21.800 | And what's his average response time?

00:10:23.280 | They're all caring about this and no one cares.

00:10:25.400 | And how, I mean, you know, how weirdly insulting to the people involved, right?

00:10:29.160 | It's like, you know, when I, I was saying this to my editor at the publisher just the

00:10:34.800 | other day, right?

00:10:37.100 | Not that I suffer from this like I used to, but when I'm late with a deadline or something,

00:10:41.100 | there is this sort of involuntary mental image that this, you know, busy, high status person

00:10:50.340 | with lots on their plate is doing nothing but just sort of sitting around thinking bad

00:10:55.540 | thoughts about me.

00:10:56.540 | How dare he, you know, they're all sitting around, yeah, with sifters of Sherry, yeah.

00:11:03.740 | And look, obviously that there's a certain factor here, whether people are in different

00:11:08.700 | situations and there are genuinely people who are in a sort of tighter spot than me

00:11:12.500 | in terms of, it's a part of a job requirement to answer every email from a certain person

00:11:18.300 | or kind of person in a certain time scale.

00:11:21.220 | And so these trade-offs can be different.

00:11:23.940 | And I've got a certain amount of good fortune in this very sort of autonomous life.

00:11:28.820 | But even in those cases, the sort of existential layer that people bring to it, like then they

00:11:35.300 | have not earned their right to exist on the planet if they don't power through all the

00:11:40.100 | things.

00:11:41.100 | I think that is something we can all let go of.

00:11:42.380 | Okay.

00:11:43.380 | So you have this insight.

00:11:45.780 | So walk us through the response.

00:11:47.780 | So once you recognize you can't do it all, there's a, I mean, I think you used the word

00:11:54.300 | futility.

00:11:55.300 | There's a futility to the idea that you can get it all organized, right?

00:12:01.700 | Like am I saying this right that people have this idea that there's this, this group of

00:12:05.540 | things you need to do to be successful.

00:12:07.940 | And it's, it's maybe a little bit outside of what you could do comfortably, but if you

00:12:10.740 | just get your systems right, you can tackle it and you'll be successful.

00:12:13.260 | But the reality you write about is no, no, there's a vast universe of things you could

00:12:16.420 | be doing.

00:12:17.420 | No matter how organized you are, most things you're not going to do.

00:12:20.920 | So why have that epsilon of that like extra 20 exhaustive percent?

00:12:25.740 | Does it really make much of a difference in terms of how much you're getting done?

00:12:30.300 | Not really.

00:12:31.300 | You're saying no to, to any ways, if I have that right.

00:12:34.580 | Well, first of all, do I have that right?

00:12:36.620 | Am I thinking about that?

00:12:37.620 | Right?

00:12:38.620 | Yeah.

00:12:39.620 | I think one way that sort of resonates a lot with me is that it's about a certain kind

00:12:42.940 | of feeling of, of control, right?

00:12:44.940 | It's about, it's about wanting to feel all these phrases like on top of everything or

00:12:51.580 | like you have your life sorted out or something like that.

00:12:56.380 | And it's the, the problem with that whole approach is, is that, that sort of the point

00:13:04.300 | at which that feeling of control would be satisfied.

00:13:06.660 | Yeah.

00:13:07.660 | Is, is essentially when you had your arms around an incident.

00:13:11.060 | So before we get too far into, okay, so now how do we rewire our mindset and then what

00:13:16.340 | practically we can do from the new book?

00:13:18.220 | I'm curious in the relationship between your ideas and critiques and what I think is the

00:13:23.660 | other main line of productivity critiques the last five years, which I would, I guess

00:13:29.980 | I would characterize as like the Ginny O'Dell, maybe, and Helen Peterson camp.

00:13:37.020 | That's much more of a, an economic critique.

00:13:39.260 | I think more of like a classic Marxist critique, which says, okay, these productivity mindsets

00:13:45.700 | that are sort of causing issues that you also talk about are essentially implanted by the

00:13:51.660 | imperatives of capitalism.

00:13:52.660 | It's more of a Marxist critique that these are, it's a mindset that's been implanted

00:13:57.660 | to try to exploit labor.

00:14:01.060 | Your critiques seem very different.

00:14:02.340 | They seem more psychological than economical.

00:14:06.700 | But how do you, how do you think about the relationship between your critiques and the,

00:14:11.720 | the other kind of big names that have been critiquing productivity in the last few years?

00:14:15.100 | Yeah, it's such an interesting question because I, I do appreciate the best of that work so

00:14:19.820 | much at the same time as kind of feeling that I diverge from it.

00:14:26.420 | For me, it starts with an issue of like my personality, really, at the end of the day.

00:14:33.020 | I want to try to salvage the idea of productive ambition within the kind of context that we,

00:14:43.140 | that we live.

00:14:44.140 | I'm not sort of drawn to the revolutionary implications of that more sort of Marxist

00:14:49.500 | critique.

00:14:50.500 | So I'm just like, okay, I would really like to have much more peace of mind.

00:14:55.300 | There's me coming into this and to some extent still today, right?

00:14:57.940 | I would like to have much more peace of mind and calm, but I would like that not to be

00:15:02.940 | a kind of checking out of, of accomplishment society and, and, and launching cool stuff

00:15:10.980 | and making some money out of it and all the rest of it.

00:15:13.660 | So I'm sort of trying to reconcile those things for myself.

00:15:17.900 | The question then I suppose is whether that can be done or whether sort of consistency

00:15:22.860 | requires you to eventually end up in that, in that Marxist camp.

00:15:27.660 | And then at the end of the day, I just sort of think, well, look, I'm, I feel like I'm

00:15:30.340 | writing for people who get up in the morning and have a to-do list and have stuff they

00:15:36.300 | want to achieve and stuff that they feel pressured to do and, and all the rest of it.

00:15:41.860 | So maybe in a sense, it's just like while we're waiting for the revolution, what can

00:15:45.700 | we do?

00:15:46.700 | You know, because I absolutely think that there's a legitimate criticism to be made

00:15:50.980 | of what I do, which is that it sort of puts the social economic critique to one, to one

00:15:57.140 | side and, and, and doesn't very much address it head on and sort of says, that's all very

00:16:04.860 | well.

00:16:05.860 | But at the same time, here we are as individuals trying to sort of live flourishing lives right

00:16:09.020 | here.

00:16:10.020 | So I guess it's just the standard critique from the revolutionary is don't distract.

00:16:18.220 | Don't distract the masses with practicality because you will turn their mind away from

00:16:23.020 | revolution.

00:16:24.020 | But, but actually it's, it's a very healthy tension that it's good to have the pressure

00:16:26.700 | on the world of work and capitalism, but you also have to be helping individuals, as you

00:16:33.020 | say, who right now feel completely overwhelmed and don't know what to do.

00:16:37.500 | And capitalism is probably not going to fall this year.

00:16:39.620 | Right.

00:16:40.620 | And I'm being a little bit unfair in talking about revolution, right?

00:16:43.060 | There's a completely legitimate version of this that says what really matters is family

00:16:47.260 | friendly healthcare systems and childcare systems and all sorts of other aspects.

00:16:56.020 | And if we have that, then a lot of these kind of bad tensions that we feel in our work and

00:17:01.200 | our productivity might not arise.

00:17:03.740 | But again, you know, the response is, yep, totally.

00:17:06.180 | And meanwhile, uh, I, what, what should we do?

00:17:09.700 | I think an interesting place where maybe I'm closer to those writers than you is something

00:17:16.300 | that I think the, those writers in me are very interested in is the kind of boring details

00:17:22.700 | of knowledge work.

00:17:24.580 | Like how does knowledge work function?

00:17:27.380 | How does management happen in knowledge work?

00:17:30.180 | How does work flow?

00:17:31.860 | Like what's the structure of a typical job where you work at a computer and you go to

00:17:36.300 | a cubicle or this or that?

00:17:37.780 | Um, and I'm interested and I want to get your opinion on this because it feels like there's,

00:17:40.820 | there's two different rel relevant forces that are both a source of people's exhaustion

00:17:46.860 | with the idea of productivity.

00:17:49.020 | One is the psychological, which, which I think you talk about very well, the, the pressure

00:17:53.700 | you put upon yourself to figure it out, have the best systems, you know, get it all done,

00:17:59.940 | piece through productivity.

00:18:02.100 | Then there is what's happening in the workplace.

00:18:05.060 | So it's like what I write about in my last book, pseudo productivity, um, the rise of

00:18:09.220 | the managerial strategy of using visible activity as a proxy for useful effort.

00:18:13.460 | Um, the impossibility of that, it's almost as it's an institutionalization of, I think

00:18:19.380 | the feudal mindsets that you talk about in your book as ultimately being a nihilistic

00:18:24.420 | and you're never going to, you're never going to get your arms around everything.

00:18:26.980 | Um, and yet the modern workplace has these pressures of activities, what matters.

00:18:32.340 | So more is better than less.

00:18:34.020 | And any moment where you could be working and you're not, you're actually having a personal

00:18:37.020 | negotiation and having to balance your life against work.

00:18:39.540 | And it's just like impossible sort of balance you have.

00:18:42.100 | I mean, so how do you, how do we think about the world of work?

00:18:47.100 | Like what is its contribution to this exhaustion that people feel with productivity and, and

00:18:52.460 | how's that overlap with the way you talk about it?

00:18:54.820 | Wow, that's an interesting question.

00:18:57.460 | And, and I think you're right that it's something that connects you with the, um, we might say

00:19:04.180 | more radical productivity critique in some way.

00:19:08.820 | And the main difference I always say is they think, uh, the world of work is doing it on

00:19:12.860 | purpose to exploit and get more labor.

00:19:15.060 | And I say, no, no, no, the managers in the role of knowledge work have no idea what they're

00:19:18.060 | doing.

00:19:19.060 | It's, it's a dumpster fire.

00:19:20.340 | It's random and everyone's running around and actually it makes people very unproductive.

00:19:24.500 | It doesn't create value.

00:19:25.940 | It's not, it's not like getting the longer hours out of the assembly line worker or it's

00:19:30.940 | bad for the worker, but you build Model T's cheaper.

00:19:33.100 | I was like, actually the way we work in knowledge work is chaotic.

00:19:35.780 | It exhausts people.

00:19:36.780 | It's unproductive.

00:19:37.780 | It's bad for the organization.

00:19:38.980 | It's more ignorant and not understanding how knowledge work works.

00:19:42.380 | That's the main place we differ, but we both see, I guess, the world of work as being a

00:19:45.940 | big force of productivity negativity.

00:19:47.820 | Yeah.

00:19:48.820 | And listen, I don't dispute that at all.

00:19:50.780 | I just, I think the only answer I have really is that, is that, yeah, I am coming, I think,

00:19:55.900 | from this somewhat more psychological place where I'm asking like how one confronts the

00:20:04.040 | reality with which one is faced each day.

00:20:06.100 | One big part of which is obviously, you know, organizational life and the office and, and

00:20:10.540 | how, and how work works.

00:20:12.740 | So one place where this comes up is, is in sort of the question of how much autonomy

00:20:20.100 | you need in your work situation to benefit from the things that I'm saying, the things

00:20:26.020 | that you're saying, things that anybody's saying.

00:20:28.380 | And, and I think one place that I go in this new book is almost in a sort of existentialist

00:20:34.340 | philosophy direction, right?

00:20:36.060 | To look at the kind of the, the choices that we retain, even in situations where we're,

00:20:41.620 | where we're very much sort of our actions are guided by these kinds of, as you say,

00:20:47.660 | probably in many ways, largely irrational and counterproductive ways of approaching

00:20:51.980 | work.

00:20:52.980 | So, yeah.

00:20:53.980 | I think they're just different, different angles on the same material.

00:20:57.020 | It's not a very, not a very good answer on some level.

00:21:00.940 | Well, one of the things I like about the way you talk about, and you even said this earlier

00:21:04.500 | in this interview, and I think it's a good point for me, and I think it's something that

00:21:08.420 | my audience really likes about you, is that I think you're pointing out that some non-trivial

00:21:13.940 | percent of what people in a normal office job feel like is unavoidable and put upon

00:21:21.220 | them by their managers is actually in their mind.

00:21:23.940 | Which I think is really interesting that we tell a story of everyone is demanding this

00:21:29.180 | email to be answered and everyone is demanding, I say, yes, and if not in the control center,

00:21:35.140 | they're going to notice this and start getting upset.

00:21:37.700 | And I think that's a really important point that even in knowledge work, which does put

00:21:41.260 | these weird productivity pressures, we amplify it in our head.

00:21:45.980 | Right.

00:21:46.980 | Absolutely.

00:21:47.980 | And if you go sort of, if you zoom out or up or something from that far enough, you

00:21:52.940 | get to this kind of question of what it means to be a human facing options and choices in

00:21:58.580 | the world that sort of dissolves the boundary between the work setting and the rest of life

00:22:02.980 | because it applies to the whole of life.

00:22:05.260 | And in one of the chapters in this book, I talk about this quotation from the therapist

00:22:11.660 | Sheldon Copp who says, "You're free to do whatever you like.

00:22:15.860 | You need only face the consequences."

00:22:17.580 | And it's this whole sort of vision of the world, which is absolutely on point, I think,

00:22:21.380 | for finite human beings, where every single thing that you feel you have to do is really

00:22:27.740 | a question of saying you're not prepared, perhaps quite wisely, to shoulder, to pay

00:22:33.780 | the costs of not doing it, right?

00:22:35.500 | That's always the only question at hand.

00:22:38.420 | And I think, you know, there's a terrible cliched version of self-help that says you

00:22:43.780 | can always choose anything and you've got no limits on your autonomy at all.

00:22:46.900 | And just like by thinking about large piles of gold, you can become a billionaire.

00:22:51.260 | But there's another, the more sort of, as I say, existentialist idea of choice, which

00:22:54.700 | is like, actually, it's never, unless you're under physical restraint, I suppose, it's

00:23:01.060 | never literally the case that you have to do anything.

00:23:06.040 | It's always the case that you're choosing which disadvantages to put up with, the disadvantages

00:23:13.340 | of submitting to those pressures of the workplace or not doing.

00:23:18.480 | And that can be very, very obvious for some people, right?

00:23:20.660 | Like, I've got to do that, otherwise I get fired.

00:23:23.140 | But there's something important in terms of one's sense of oneself in the world, there's

00:23:28.540 | something very important about seeing that it is still technically a choice.

00:23:33.660 | Even if to take one of the options would be kind of totally insane and you'd never do

00:23:37.740 | it.

00:23:38.740 | The fact that you could means something.

00:23:40.340 | Right.

00:23:41.340 | You could, there's nothing stopping you from saying, I'm not answering emails, or I'm just

00:23:46.700 | going to say, no, I don't want to do this type of projects anymore.

00:23:49.700 | Like all this is that you're choosing sort of what your day-to-day is, and it might be

00:23:56.500 | a bad option, but you're not being forced to do anything.

00:23:59.180 | Right.

00:24:00.180 | And if you start from that sense in which your freedom of choice is sort of unlimited

00:24:03.940 | and you can say no, it's like, I would prefer not to, right?

00:24:07.980 | It's Bartleby the Scrivener as the key to modern productivity culture.

00:24:15.420 | I'm not suggesting that most people are going to, or should, decide just to stop answering

00:24:20.700 | emails from people more senior to them in an organization, for example.

00:24:24.060 | But just from once you see that, what we're getting at here, it then allows you to more

00:24:30.420 | consciously let back in the pressures you're going to submit to, the ones you're going

00:24:35.020 | to resist, and through that sort of process navigate to where you want to get to.

00:24:40.020 | Well, I like this because it's compatible with what we talk about here on the show a

00:24:43.340 | lot about lifestyle planning.

00:24:46.240 | So working backwards from an image of what makes a good life good, as opposed to like

00:24:52.020 | fixating on a singular grand goal and hoping this will fix everything, right?

00:24:56.940 | It's knowing like, what do I want my schedule to feel like?

00:25:00.820 | What do I want to live?

00:25:01.820 | What do I want the rhythm of my day to look like?

00:25:04.520 | You have a lot more options for sort of working in small steps and taking advantage of small

00:25:09.100 | opportunities to move towards an ideal lifestyle image.

00:25:12.340 | There's a lot more options than you think versus I just want to be at the top of the

00:25:18.260 | pile and if I get there, then I'll be happy.

00:25:21.620 | But I want to actually, so what I want to survey, I want to get your help on this, like

00:25:26.140 | I know a lot about the business world and its intersection with productivity.

00:25:32.500 | Somewhat ironically, given that I write about this, I know very little about the other types

00:25:37.060 | of productivity culture, online, books, the way people talk about productivity when they

00:25:43.360 | actually are talking about productivity.

00:25:44.860 | You know a lot about that world because you wrote this column for so long and you push

00:25:48.660 | back against that world in the books.

00:25:51.320 | Can you give me like, what is this world saying?

00:25:53.940 | I don't use social media.

00:25:54.940 | I'm not very online.

00:25:56.460 | I don't read a lot of books in my own genre.

00:25:59.780 | What is the non-corporate productivity self-help advice world?

00:26:05.560 | What is this?

00:26:06.560 | Is it books?

00:26:07.560 | Is it online?

00:26:08.560 | What are the core messages?

00:26:10.180 | How do we define this world that you were reacting to?

00:26:15.060 | I mean I think on some level it's getting more varied and multifarious, so I don't want

00:26:21.580 | to sort of totally caricature it.

00:26:25.920 | But I do think that what you get in all of that, and I am familiar especially with what's

00:26:32.440 | going on in this world on YouTube and on Twitter, whatever it's called now, and to some extent

00:26:40.320 | this is there in the book world as well.

00:26:44.620 | There is still this driving focus on the idea that there is one very simple way, obviously

00:26:53.780 | it's a totally different way depending on whose video you're watching, but there is

00:26:57.360 | one very simple way to, there's a rule of some kind, a system of some kind that if you

00:27:02.320 | follow it, everything will fall into place and it will be essentially automatic.

00:27:09.480 | That you do an enormous amount, that it's the right stuff, and that you make huge amounts

00:27:14.100 | of money from it.

00:27:16.180 | This is very YouTube, right?

00:27:17.700 | This feels very YouTube.

00:27:18.700 | Yeah, no.

00:27:19.700 | There's this extraordinary escalation in like, it starts off with like, how I make ten thousand

00:27:26.660 | dollars a month, and then you scroll through the videos and you're at like, how I make

00:27:30.500 | ten million dollars a month.

00:27:31.500 | And it's like, well, if you did, I don't think you'd be…

00:27:33.100 | And they're in front of a jet, right?

00:27:34.100 | Right, right, yeah, exactly.

00:27:35.100 | On the thumbnail, right?

00:27:36.100 | Yeah, exactly.

00:27:37.100 | So that's the sort of really money focused side of it.

00:27:40.940 | But even when it's not really money focused, right, it has the same basic idea that there

00:27:45.820 | is something that will make it sort of plug and play.

00:27:49.660 | And I think, for example, I know you say you're not so familiar with it, but I think this

00:27:53.380 | stuff, but I remember you talking about, in the world of, when it comes to writing, right,

00:27:59.940 | there's a version of this in the world of like, personal knowledge management and note

00:28:03.380 | taking and the great, very interesting writing that's been done on things like the idea of

00:28:08.020 | a Zettelkasten, which we probably don't need to get into now.

00:28:10.420 | But again, sharing this notion that if you really do all this well, the bit where you're

00:28:16.220 | sitting down to write will be effortless, and you won't have to ever go through the

00:28:21.220 | difficult bit of like, I don't know what to write, I'm thinking.

00:28:25.340 | And I think I'm quoting you all the time on writer's block, just being the feeling of

00:28:31.620 | writing.

00:28:32.620 | So I'm seeing this maybe now with AI too, right?

00:28:35.420 | So now I think I am kind of plugged into what you're talking about, because I see this with

00:28:38.380 | AI a lot, just if you, there's a possibility.

00:28:42.660 | And this is the exact same thing, by the way, that went on in the 2000s during the productivity

00:28:46.820 | prong period, where the idea was, if you're using technology in the new way to support

00:28:53.100 | your task systems, work will become effortless, right?

00:28:57.020 | And you would believe it, because this technology is new, so it's possible that there's some

00:29:00.860 | sort of new insight.

00:29:01.860 | I'm seeing that now with AI.

00:29:02.860 | Oh, totally.

00:29:03.860 | So I have this, look, I have this like interactive, I built a custom LLM, and I talk to it, and

00:29:10.700 | there's, yeah, okay.

00:29:11.700 | So now I think I'm plugged into what you're saying.

00:29:13.820 | It's less about, sometimes productivity culture is characterized as like, well, there's all

00:29:18.540 | these books saying, do as much as possible or do more, but what you're saying is much

00:29:23.100 | more subtle.

00:29:24.100 | No, no, it's not that the books are saying, do more.

00:29:26.980 | It's there's a system that's going to cure you.

00:29:30.240 | There's a system that's going to make the hard thing go away.

00:29:33.880 | It's going to make life easy, like it's going to be cranking widgets.

00:29:38.460 | Right, right.

00:29:39.460 | And I want to say at least two things against this, right?

00:29:42.080 | One is that it, yeah, maybe three.

00:29:44.120 | One is that this doesn't exist, that you're not going to define this thing.

00:29:51.160 | But another is that you really wouldn't want it if you had it.

00:29:56.680 | So first of all, if you put something like that in place, and it sort of works a bit,

00:30:01.400 | one of the things you find is this thing I've referred to elsewhere as the efficiency trap,

00:30:04.720 | right?

00:30:05.720 | You find, even if an AI assistant can handle huge amounts of what you'd previously been

00:30:10.680 | handling, what do you think is going to happen to all that freed up bandwidth, right?

00:30:13.920 | It's just going to, all else being equal, it's just going to get filled with even more

00:30:18.680 | stuff for you to do.

00:30:20.760 | But also, and I think this is where I, this is the new book in some ways, whoever thought

00:30:26.640 | that a life of cranking widgets isn't fun, and this idea that if you could sort of get

00:30:33.320 | everything running completely smoothly and not have to engage with problem after challenge

00:30:38.540 | after problem, that that would actually, this is my argument, that would actually be a much

00:30:42.760 | less rich and meaningful life.

00:30:46.240 | So we are really capable of sort of, and this is, there's a quote from some game designer

00:30:50.920 | about this, right?

00:30:52.040 | People left to their own devices will optimize the fun out of the game.

00:30:54.960 | And I think that's what we really are at risk of doing in productivity as well.

00:30:58.520 | So I agree with you.

00:31:00.200 | You probably agree with me.

00:31:01.200 | I think David Allen, he's so misunderstood.

00:31:05.080 | Because the title of that book, Getting Things Done, makes people who just hear the title

00:31:09.840 | think it's a book about maximizing output or getting ahead.

00:31:14.000 | It's a dark book.

00:31:15.000 | I keep telling people it's very nihilistic.

00:31:18.820 | He wants to reduce work to just cranking widgets because he sees work as so stressful and anxiety

00:31:28.040 | producing and soul numbing.

00:31:29.800 | He's like, I just don't want to be, feel this way anymore.

00:31:33.440 | So can't we just make things into like automatic actions that you just do and you can just

00:31:39.520 | disengage?

00:31:40.520 | I mean, it feels almost like something you would see, yeah, maybe from an existentialist

00:31:44.320 | writer or a nihilist writer from like the early 20th centuries or something.

00:31:47.080 | I see it as a dark book.

00:31:48.400 | I see it as a cry for help too.

00:31:49.840 | It seemed like, look, the fact that we have people trying to figure out how to numb themselves

00:31:54.160 | to work means the world of work is broken.

00:31:57.200 | Like you should see Getting Things Done and be like, okay, what's going on in knowledge

00:32:00.360 | work in the late 90s, early 2000s?

00:32:02.920 | But instead people see that title and think, oh, he's saying, yeah, if you can just do

00:32:06.420 | more, we're going to get ahead.

00:32:07.520 | He doesn't want anyone to get ahead.

00:32:08.840 | He's just trying to, he's numbing himself with task lists.

00:32:11.960 | Can we just like take our mind, like just disconnect from this grimness that is knowledge

00:32:17.120 | work?

00:32:18.120 | I have never really considered the dark version of GTD.

00:32:24.240 | I do think it's misunderstood.

00:32:26.120 | I tend to come at it from a somewhat less nihilistic perspective, I guess, about the

00:32:33.920 | book in the sense that like firstly, he's a little bit like Shakespeare or somebody

00:32:39.400 | and that there are ideas from that book that we just all completely use now and don't give

00:32:42.760 | him credit for because they're-

00:32:43.760 | JS: Full capture.

00:32:44.760 | It's like a brilliant idea.

00:32:46.440 | Exactly.

00:32:47.440 | And then the other thing is, yeah, I mean, in a way, and there is a whole kind of spiritual

00:32:54.040 | dimension to his life and biography, which is interesting, actually.

00:32:57.080 | But like, in a way, this debate about whether it's positive or negative is a debate that

00:33:03.800 | goes through all sorts of kind of Eastern philosophies, right?

00:33:06.480 | Should you deal with the things that burden us in life by trying to sort of non-attach

00:33:12.760 | from them?

00:33:13.920 | And then is that a recipe for kind of retreat from life or is that actually the way to plunge

00:33:18.920 | into life?

00:33:19.920 | So I think there's a positive reading of getting things done where sort of reducing everything

00:33:24.180 | to cranking widgets might then allow you to sort of be more fully present.

00:33:29.860 | So maybe that will be a more positive reading.

00:33:31.400 | But you're right.

00:33:32.400 | That may not be the case.

00:33:33.400 | Is it about maximizing your capacity to move through as many tasks as possible?

00:33:41.600 | Certainly not that you might ever get to the end, to the end of them.

00:33:44.860 | There was a, it was referenced, I went and looked this up the other day, getting things

00:33:48.720 | done was referenced in The Office, the American version of The Office.

00:33:53.560 | The book was, they had one of the characters in the story arc was, he was trying to impress

00:33:59.440 | the managers.

00:34:00.440 | So he was trying to show that he was productive and he said, yeah, I've been reading this

00:34:04.680 | book, getting things done.

00:34:06.820 | And I saved, it was something like, I saved 90 seconds this morning by like brushing my

00:34:12.320 | teeth while I showered.

00:34:13.320 | And he's like, and I just lost that 90 seconds explaining this to you, ah, shoot, or whatever.

00:34:18.240 | I'm like, oh, that was the conception of getting things done, that it was somehow about, you

00:34:21.680 | know, if you brush your teeth in the shower, yeah, you're going to save more time.

00:34:26.080 | I think of more of the archetypical, I like going back in memory lane.

00:34:29.460 | This literature is very interesting to me.

00:34:31.480 | Probably the archetypical book in my mind of you can get your arms around it all is

00:34:36.920 | maybe Stephen Covey, which was really trying to unify it's work, but your life outside

00:34:42.800 | of work.

00:34:44.080 | Nothing about that book was about optimization.

00:34:45.880 | I don't think anything about that book was about getting more, trying to get more done

00:34:50.920 | than other people.

00:34:51.920 | In fact, there's very few books that actually make the argument do more.

00:34:57.400 | The closest one I can think of is maybe hyper productivity, which was, but that was like

00:35:01.700 | pretty pragmatic.

00:35:02.700 | He's like, look, I'm an executive.

00:35:04.500 | This is a stupidly hard job because you have to do 50 things.

00:35:08.260 | Here's how I do it.

00:35:09.780 | Right.

00:35:10.780 | But Stephen Covey seems like maybe the archetype of you could figure out what's important to

00:35:14.660 | you and then you can very carefully plan based on these visions of the roles and you're,

00:35:20.220 | and making sure that your actions are aligned.

00:35:22.260 | And there's a, there's a super optimism.

00:35:24.740 | And I wrote about this in the New Yorker.

00:35:25.740 | I did this whole history of time management and productivity books.

00:35:29.380 | And I was like, that book reflected the optimism of the late eighties, you know, capitalism

00:35:34.100 | is booming.

00:35:35.300 | All the baby boomers were doing well.

00:35:37.080 | They all were buying houses.

00:35:38.420 | Everyone was feeling pretty good.

00:35:39.420 | And it was very optimistic.

00:35:40.780 | Like you can, you can shape a really meaningful life with the right system.

00:35:44.860 | Right.

00:35:45.860 | And also the sort of especially digital connectivity is not yet at a place where the sort of challenge

00:35:53.520 | to that from what I think of as infinite inputs, right, has become, uh, evident, right?

00:35:58.940 | You're not going to feel, uh, you're not going to be suffering from this problem of just

00:36:04.420 | a completely unlimited incoming stream of emails or completely unlimited list of things

00:36:08.180 | you feel you want to read or opportunities to go play.

00:36:11.060 | Right.

00:36:12.060 | It's, it's, it's still sort of sheltered by the sort of lack of that kind of technology.

00:36:16.420 | I mean, that's, that's the difference between Alan and Covey is email came along.

00:36:21.380 | I mean, I think of Alan as entirely a response to the digital workplace and it went from

00:36:25.960 | this optimism.

00:36:26.960 | I have a couple of meetings during the day and maybe I'm going to like dictate a memo,

00:36:31.720 | which I'll give to the typing pool.

00:36:32.860 | It went from that in 1989 to, oh my God, the stuff that's coming in.

00:36:37.140 | Alan talks about in his book, working with clients or an intake process where like, let's

00:36:42.180 | just write down everything that you're, you have some sort of commitment to do or obligation.

00:36:47.580 | And it would take, he said on average, like four to six hours.

00:36:50.020 | Right.

00:36:51.020 | So if I was doing Covey's time, it'd be like, yeah, I'm working on this project and when

00:36:54.360 | I'm done, I'm going to do this and I'm having a martini with lunch.

00:36:57.300 | I think it was.

00:36:58.300 | Yeah.

00:36:59.300 | No, totally.

00:37:00.300 | Yeah.

00:37:01.300 | A different time.

00:37:02.300 | Yeah.

00:37:03.300 | For sure.

00:37:04.300 | Okay.

00:37:05.300 | So let's get into then.

00:37:06.300 | So in 4,000 weeks, you kind of go through the psychology, the futility, also the liberation

00:37:09.680 | of recognizing you can't do it all.

00:37:12.840 | Life is finite and it's okay.

00:37:16.340 | You can, instead of trying to control everything, trying to master your life with systems, you

00:37:24.780 | can make sure you make time for the important things.

00:37:27.000 | Make sure you make time for just the present right now.

00:37:29.560 | Your new book now wanders a little bit more into, okay, how do we put some of this in

00:37:35.020 | the practice?

00:37:37.660 | Which I appreciate.

00:37:38.660 | So this is my big question, kind of my goal for this interview.

00:37:43.780 | How do we find the line between having enough structure that it's not chaos, but not getting

00:37:51.980 | snapped in the productivity or efficiency trap?

00:37:54.620 | How do we find that line?

00:37:56.180 | Yeah, that's the question and it's probably the question that will surface the most interesting

00:38:01.260 | kind of differences between us I would expect.

00:38:04.820 | So, you know, make for a better debate as it were.

00:38:11.140 | So I want to say something quickly.

00:38:12.140 | I don't want to go on and on about the book, but about the structure of the book because

00:38:15.140 | I think it's like substantively relevant.

00:38:17.140 | Yeah, yeah.

00:38:18.140 | It's important.

00:38:19.140 | Yeah.

00:38:20.140 | The 28-day structure.

00:38:21.140 | So this book is divided into four weeks and each week has seven short chapters.

00:38:26.740 | And the invitation, as I put it, right, certainly not an instruction, is that you might read

00:38:32.060 | one of these chapters roughly per day for a month.

00:38:36.660 | And part of the thinking there was that I really needed to avoid this book itself becoming

00:38:43.140 | another example of the kind of thing that you read and maybe take notes on for your

00:38:47.020 | note-taking system and then decide to put into practice one day when you've got lots

00:38:50.660 | of free time and you can do it perfectly, right?

00:38:52.580 | I really wanted to resist that and pull the rug from that every opportunity.

00:38:55.860 | No, I'll just go into our Zettelkasten system, which will surface automatically the semantic

00:39:00.980 | connections and then we'll be brilliant.

00:39:03.140 | Awesome.

00:39:04.140 | Yeah.

00:39:05.140 | I'm not sure I've ever found someone for whom it does work.

00:39:08.820 | No.

00:39:09.820 | So the idea of this is that if you're reading it roughly on this pace, or maybe you read

00:39:13.220 | it through once and go back and do it if you like something, that these tiny little perspective

00:39:18.720 | shifts, which are all in the direction of this approach that I call imperfectionism

00:39:22.340 | and all about sort of getting around to doing the stuff here and now, these little perspective

00:39:27.660 | shifts will actually take root and have some impact in the next 24 hours after you read

00:39:33.500 | that chapter.

00:39:34.500 | And so it doesn't become another of these things that you have to sort of make a big

00:39:40.740 | transformation in order to put it into place or wait until you've got the bandwidth.

00:39:44.220 | It can just be something that helps right here and now in the midst of the too many

00:39:48.860 | emails and the anxiety-inducing news headlines that you can't stop thinking about or whatever.

00:39:54.860 | So in that sense, to come back to your sort of guiding question here, it's really about

00:40:03.300 | getting over the...

00:40:06.620 | It's really for people, at least on one level, who are very drawn to lots of structure and

00:40:12.860 | lots of plans and lots of systems, like me, because it's sort of constantly saying, "Well,

00:40:19.780 | yeah, that has a role to play, but the main thing is, can you just do one of the things

00:40:23.220 | now?"

00:40:24.220 | And it's like, "Well, this is an interesting rule you might like to follow, but in the

00:40:27.380 | meantime, just do that thing."

00:40:29.020 | It's about taking the things that we know we want our lives to consist of and building

00:40:34.820 | the muscle that allows you to just do a little bit of that thing today for 10 minutes, however

00:40:40.900 | imperfectly, with however little confidence that you're going to be able to make a practice

00:40:45.340 | of it and come back to it every single day for the rest of your life.

00:40:48.140 | Because actually, I think that skill and the willingness - and it's kind of an emotional

00:40:52.140 | struggle anyway for a lot of us, I think - that skill to be able to do that, almost notwithstanding

00:40:58.260 | the systems, is kind of foundational.

00:41:01.900 | And when you have that in place, I think, that's when all sorts of rules and structures

00:41:07.060 | can play a role.

00:41:09.900 | I think my big fallacy in my earlier life was thinking that, first of all, I needed

00:41:17.180 | to figure out the structure.

00:41:18.860 | I would then put the structure in place, and the emotions and the motivation and the inspiration

00:41:23.680 | would all sort of follow.

00:41:25.460 | And I think it's probably the other way around.

00:41:27.020 | >> I mean, I think that's really interesting because most people, including myself, don't

00:41:31.340 | always think about that aspect of delivering ideas, like the actual functional intake,

00:41:38.980 | like how you encounter and start making progress on ideas.

00:41:42.940 | We just give out the frameworks, which leads to - I think a lot of people do - which is

00:41:46.540 | framework collecting.

00:41:47.540 | Let me just collect some more.

00:41:49.860 | I'm getting closer to being ready to put things in, but let me collect a little bit more information.

00:41:54.740 | Let me figure out exactly how this system is working.

00:41:57.060 | Let me get my computer set up just perfect before I turn it on.

00:42:02.740 | And so I really appreciate that about the book.

00:42:05.140 | The book itself has a framework of like, hey, I know you don't want to hear a page a day,

00:42:10.220 | like a week.

00:42:11.220 | Like, trust me, you need to actually start doing some things.

00:42:16.620 | Religion kind of has this figured out, right?

00:42:18.420 | Where it's, okay, wait, you actually have to start doing the rituals for you to have

00:42:24.260 | a deeper religious experience.

00:42:25.580 | You can't just sit and study the religion from afar and be like, okay, I'm convinced.

00:42:29.780 | Let's do it.

00:42:30.780 | Like, religion has been very good about that.

00:42:32.140 | And so maybe it's borrowing a pretty good idea of like, you got to kind of get in there

00:42:35.220 | and we need help.

00:42:36.220 | How do you kind of mess with imperfection?

00:42:39.980 | Get in there and get started, trying some things, making ideas that are abstract embodied

00:42:45.860 | so that like it's intuitive and you understand what's going on.

00:42:49.540 | That's very smart.

00:42:50.540 | I really like that about the book.

00:42:51.980 | Thank you.

00:42:52.980 | And I think when it comes to the structure piece, I've got this chapter in there on the

00:42:56.620 | idea that, really summing this up in some sense, that the role of rules and the role

00:43:03.060 | of systems in a productive and meaningful life has to be that those rules serve the

00:43:09.500 | life we want to live, rather than that our lives become in service to the rule.

00:43:14.740 | So one example of where this comes, and I think could be maybe an interesting, I'm interested

00:43:20.380 | to know if you agree or disagree, is that an awful lot of approaches to productivity

00:43:27.940 | seem to me to be based around holding in check or even suppressing moods and desires, right?

00:43:35.180 | And to sort of say that the question of what you feel like doing in any given moment has

00:43:39.740 | really got to be put away in a box.

00:43:43.860 | And I feel like I've tried that many, many times, without realizing I was doing it, and

00:43:51.060 | found that all that does is run into this sort of constant internal combat between what

00:43:55.740 | I feel like doing and what my system or my plan calls for me to do.

00:44:02.040 | And so one of the things I'm looking at in this book is how can we maybe think about

00:44:06.260 | riding or harnessing those flows?

00:44:09.100 | What is the role for asking yourself, if you have the autonomy of course in your situation,

00:44:12.980 | what is the role for asking yourself, "Wow, what do I feel like doing now?"

00:44:17.660 | And I quote Susan Piver, the meditation teacher who has written very eloquently about this

00:44:24.260 | idea that actually once she was able to sort of navigate a little bit more by pleasure

00:44:30.540 | or by what she wanted to do, you don't find that actually all you want to do is sit around

00:44:34.980 | and eat ice cream and not pay your bills and do your taxes.

00:44:38.260 | You find that at the appropriate moment you're happy to do those things.

00:44:41.740 | So obviously there is at least a sort of surface level tension here with most obviously time

00:44:47.700 | blocking even your very sort of flexible and accommodating approach to it.

00:44:52.740 | I'm really interested to know what you make of those thoughts.

00:44:56.460 | Well, I think it's a place where we disagree and agree.

00:44:59.740 | So I actually agree with you.

00:45:04.420 | It is draining.

00:45:06.420 | The fundamental psychological state of time blocking is keeping your attention on the

00:45:11.980 | thing that is blocked even if you don't want to do it.

00:45:15.700 | And it's draining.

00:45:17.300 | It's why I talk about you can't, don't time block your evenings, don't time block your

00:45:21.220 | weekends.

00:45:22.220 | Not that that wouldn't be useful, but you're just going to exhaust yourself.

00:45:28.060 | It's really hard.

00:45:29.980 | You have to take breaks more.

00:45:32.220 | You have to kind of take days off.

00:45:33.340 | I think time blocking is very psychologically difficult.

00:45:37.380 | I also think I'd be glad actually if we didn't have to do it.

00:45:41.100 | So I think we actually secretly agree is I see time blocking as a necessary evil for

00:45:47.380 | a lot of knowledge, work jobs, the, the amount of things that are being put on people's plates

00:45:52.460 | and knowledge, work jobs.

00:45:54.340 | The only way for people to actually get them done in a way that they don't have to work

00:45:59.300 | late at night or in the morning or be running around with their hair on fire is they have

00:46:02.060 | to do this like really hard discipline they have to become.

00:46:04.580 | It's like the monk, the Zen monk that masters Shaolin Kung Fu to sort of accomplish another

00:46:12.220 | mind state.

00:46:13.220 | It's really hard work, but they're, you know, that's what they, that's what they have to

00:46:16.060 | do.

00:46:17.060 | That's like, that's the trial.

00:46:18.060 | So I think I said this on my show a few weeks ago.

00:46:21.460 | I think you said something in, in, in response to something I'd said.

00:46:24.340 | It was in response.

00:46:25.340 | Yeah, I heard that.

00:46:26.340 | It was great.

00:46:27.340 | It was in response to, yeah, an interview you were doing where you're talking about it.

00:46:28.820 | And I was saying, okay, where I agree is, um, I, I want to me an ideal job.

00:46:33.380 | You wouldn't need a time block and time blocking is pretty brutal.

00:46:38.140 | It also, however, gets about two, two X more things done during a normal workday.

00:46:43.740 | And for like the really overloaded knowledge worker who doesn't want to bring their work

00:46:47.860 | home, who only has like a childcare window that lasts from here to there.

00:46:52.380 | It's like, it brings home the bacon.

00:46:54.760 | That's really interesting because actually, you know, there's a little chapter in my new

00:46:59.640 | book about, you know, um, what I call the three to four hour rule about getting creative

00:47:04.640 | work done.

00:47:05.640 | I love this rule by the way.

00:47:06.640 | We can, we can talk some more about it.

00:47:07.640 | But like, and actually in a sense that is a, uh, advocating for some kind of time blocking,

00:47:12.040 | right?

00:47:13.040 | For sort of vigorously defending three or four hours in your day for this sort of deep work.

00:47:19.120 | But then what I'm also saying is that, is that, um, not trying too hard to, to structure

00:47:26.200 | or block the rest of the, of the time being open to interruption and distraction that

00:47:30.680 | time and serendipity in that time, like that is where I place the sort of reasonable balance

00:47:35.120 | in terms of how much control we can expect to have over the flow of a workday.

00:47:39.600 | So this leads me to the interesting, although possibly in some ways very kind of mundane

00:47:47.720 | conclusion that maybe the difference we're talking about here is just that I think I

00:47:52.720 | have the kind of stamina and capacity for time blocking about half of a ordinary working

00:47:59.920 | day and you're advocating doing it and including those sort of more, um, bitty email-y conversational

00:48:06.780 | parts of, of the day.

00:48:08.480 | Um, in which case like, you know, uh, uh, unity and consensus has been, uh, has been

00:48:15.960 | established.

00:48:16.960 | And I'll say, and I think this is important data point in the summers, right?

00:48:21.520 | So when I'm, when I'm during the normal academic year, my job approximates, I think like a

00:48:26.280 | busy executive, right?

00:48:27.680 | Because I have the academic responsibilities.

00:48:30.000 | I often have service responsibilities at Georgetown, like right now I'm the director of undergraduate

00:48:35.680 | studies for the computer science department and the director of a computer science ethics

00:48:41.360 | major.

00:48:42.360 | And I know academics always love getting lots of admin responsibilities.

00:48:44.960 | It's our, it's our dream.

00:48:46.360 | It's why we got into academia was to run things and, and go on committees.

00:48:50.280 | Yeah, for sure.

00:48:51.280 | Um, and then I have my writing, my podcasting, so I feel like I'm a, I'm a, like a mid-level

00:48:55.800 | VP.

00:48:56.800 | Uh, and I, I have to like time block the hell out of my days.

00:48:59.080 | In the summer, I'm a full-time writer.

00:49:01.800 | I don't time block.

00:49:02.800 | I think that's probably telling.

00:49:05.360 | In other words, um, when my load becomes possible that I feel like I don't have to time block,

00:49:10.400 | I am like, good, right.

00:49:12.360 | Let me, let me stop, let me stop actually doing it.

00:49:15.080 | My fear is in the type of positions like I have during the school year.

00:49:19.000 | If I went into the second half of the day, and so this is going to be a little bit more

00:49:21.840 | reactive and chaotic.

00:49:22.840 | There's a lot of little things to do.

00:49:24.520 | The reality of the modern workplace is you would lose the entire afternoon, right?

00:49:28.600 | It would all be emails and meetings like nothing would, I mean, it's basically writing off

00:49:34.320 | that time is the way I see it.

00:49:37.160 | Interesting.

00:49:38.160 | Yeah.

00:49:39.160 | Um, it's really interesting because I sort of, the other author who I, and I mentioned

00:49:45.320 | him a couple of times in my book, and I'd, I'd, I'd be fascinated to hear an interview

00:49:51.360 | between, if you ever decided to interview him, uh, this, um, this Dutch writer called

00:49:57.360 | Paul Lumens who's written this book called Time Surfing that I think you must maybe has

00:50:02.840 | passed across your radar.

00:50:03.840 | I don't know.

00:50:05.840 | It's a completely intuition based approach to time.

00:50:10.600 | It's like, I'm slightly exaggerating, but it's basically throw away all lists, throw

00:50:15.640 | away all plans and just, just navigate by your intuition and choosing what to do.

00:50:22.400 | And it's certainly the most sort of well-developed and credible version of that very radical

00:50:26.880 | approach that I've, uh, ever encountered.

00:50:29.200 | And it's, and so it's on the other end of the continuum here.

00:50:33.300 | And so I guess where I'm, why I'm bringing him up right now is that I sort of, when I

00:50:36.160 | think about that second half of the, of the day or whatever it is, I think there's, there's

00:50:41.360 | something very useful about developing the muscle, metaphorically speaking, that permits

00:50:49.020 | you to, to not just be lost to that flow.

00:50:52.600 | Now maybe there are workplace contexts where, you know, it's just people yelling at you

00:50:57.800 | and you can't possibly develop that muscle, but to sort of be able to think, well, actually

00:51:04.080 | what I would like to do now is this thing, even while I can feel the pressures of this

00:51:09.720 | other thing.

00:51:10.720 | I think in that there's something very useful being, being, um, being, uh, strengthened

00:51:17.720 | there and it's actually, I guess I'm a bit more optimistic than you that it can be relied

00:51:23.880 | upon.

00:51:24.880 | But I'm curious though, right?

00:51:25.880 | Because I think this is the number one fear people have.

00:51:28.280 | You know, I'm thinking about like my audience.

00:51:30.840 | If I say, if they hear your advice, um, kind of feel where your energy is.

00:51:35.040 | They don't trust themselves.

00:51:36.040 | They said, my energy is always going to say, look at social media or whatever, but what

00:51:39.840 | you're saying is no, no, no, that's trainable.

00:51:43.020 | And you have.

00:51:44.020 | And so like, tell us about that.

00:51:45.200 | Like give us confidence that with some practice you can actually make good decisions.

00:51:51.360 | I think this thing about trusting yourself is extraordinarily powerful.

00:51:54.000 | I'm so glad you brought it up.

00:51:55.000 | Yeah.

00:51:56.000 | And it kind of comes up in all sorts of contexts.

00:51:57.600 | So yeah, one of them is in planning the notion that the reason we have to sort of plan so,

00:52:04.600 | so vigorously is because, um, we will just completely lose ourselves to dopamine hits

00:52:11.800 | or whatever.

00:52:12.800 | If we aren't following a plan, it comes up in some sort of anxiety and worry about the

00:52:18.520 | future.

00:52:19.520 | And I quote Marcus Aurelius in this book, right?

00:52:21.760 | There's a famous line in his meditations where he says, don't worry about the future because

00:52:25.960 | you'll meet it with the same psychological resources, basically weapons in one translation

00:52:32.160 | that you meet the present with in the moment.

00:52:35.280 | We trust ourselves a lot.

00:52:36.280 | We trust ourselves to implement all sorts of great productivity systems and make all

00:52:40.280 | sorts of plans.

00:52:41.520 | But it's all premised on the idea that the future version of ourselves will be this kind

00:52:44.880 | of totally vulnerable person who's in sway to everyone else's agendas.

00:52:50.000 | And Marcus is saying like, well, actually, like if, if you've got some agency over your

00:52:53.800 | life now, why not assume you're going to have agency over your life, uh, in the, in the

00:52:58.360 | future as well.

00:52:59.520 | So when it comes to, um, planning, yeah, we have this kind of strong sense that we know

00:53:07.040 | what we're doing now, but only on the basis that we won't know what we're doing, that

00:53:10.320 | we won't be able to trust ourselves later on.

00:53:13.080 | And the ridiculous part about that, I don't know if I've ever quite managed to convey

00:53:17.560 | what I mean here, but is that even if you think of yourself as a person who's very plan

00:53:21.880 | driven, you are in fact completely spontaneous, right?

00:53:24.780 | Because you're deciding in each new moment to carry on following your plan.

00:53:28.800 | So every bit of evidence you've got that's brought you to where you are now is that you

00:53:33.160 | can trust yourself to navigate through life like that.

00:53:37.720 | And you know, absolutely the attention economy, social media, the world we live in is more

00:53:42.040 | of a threat and a challenge to that than anything before.

00:53:44.240 | But no, I think it is completely trainable.

00:53:47.840 | And that question I mentioned before about like, what do you feel like doing is a part

00:53:51.600 | of that, right?

00:53:52.600 | Because it's to do with trusting that your, that the emotions and the whole world of your

00:53:57.160 | mind and psyche that are separate from your sort of rational thought right now might have

00:54:02.640 | some role to play, right?

00:54:03.720 | There might be something that can a little bit guide you instead of something you've

00:54:06.920 | got to constantly be trying to sort of eradicate and stamp out.

00:54:11.480 | So yeah, I think it gets a little bit woo, maybe, but I think the sort of self-trust

00:54:16.920 | part of this is huge.

00:54:19.240 | I believe that, right?

00:54:20.800 | Like I buy that.

00:54:21.800 | I think, tell me if you think this is fair.

00:54:24.520 | I think part of the benefit we provide, the sort of collective audience, you and I, like

00:54:29.480 | the collective audience who does care about like, look, I feel overwhelmed, I care about

00:54:34.280 | my life, I want it to be meaningful, I don't want to just be stressed out.

00:54:37.440 | All the issues that we deal with is we can present sort of two ends of a spectrum in

00:54:42.960 | which people find their way in the middle.

00:54:46.560 | So like in my situation, you know, I have these multiple roles, I'm an extreme.

00:54:53.920 | And so I have systems dialed in that makes it all manageable.

00:54:59.160 | Like my planning is complicated because it's really pretty intricate.

00:55:02.920 | Like I'm trying to make the writing career dovetail with the academic career, with this

00:55:07.760 | new media piece coming up over here and my, like, how does this all, it's complicated

00:55:11.720 | long-term plans.

00:55:13.080 | And so like in my world, I do planning at different timescales for simplicity.

00:55:18.000 | I say, look, I can't, in the moment, I'm not going to be able to keep straight the sort

00:55:23.080 | of complexity of how I'm trying to make these things work.

00:55:25.480 | So why don't I like put aside time when I think about the big picture and then at the

00:55:29.360 | weekly scale, I can sort of distill that down to like, what matters about that for this

00:55:33.800 | week?

00:55:34.800 | Because a lot of this stuff doesn't.

00:55:35.800 | And then on the daily scale, I don't have to worry about that at all.

00:55:38.920 | But I also agree with you.

00:55:40.160 | I think most people, their plan's not so complicated.

00:55:44.460 | And the intuition, like they know, like this is what I'm trying to do and this is what's

00:55:48.200 | important to me.

00:55:49.200 | And maybe it's okay.

00:55:50.560 | It's like you represent for people, first of all, there's like a psychological validation

00:55:54.480 | and reality of like what we struggle with and how we think about it, trusting intuition

00:55:59.320 | more.

00:56:00.320 | And maybe a lot of people find this is why both of us are popular is not that most people

00:56:05.840 | maybe aren't, they're not taking on all my systems.

00:56:08.400 | I'm kind of an extreme, but maybe they have more than you're talking about, but they need

00:56:12.280 | to encounter both of us to try to figure out what they're doing.

00:56:18.880 | This is like an Aristotelian approach to productivity.

00:56:23.160 | The golden mean is where virtue lies.

00:56:25.600 | I think there's a lot to that.

00:56:29.160 | Certainly, you know, my working life is less complex than yours in the sense of these kind

00:56:38.560 | of whole big, significantly separate domains.

00:56:45.040 | On the other hand, I kind of feel like I almost want to say that my working life and maybe

00:56:52.640 | everybody's working life by definition in a sense is sort of maximally complex, right?

00:56:57.080 | It's like there are, I still feel very much like I'm navigating through, you know, 2000

00:57:05.200 | things that I could in principle do with the next moment.

00:57:08.160 | Definitely not sort of divided up in the way that I know your work is, but certainly like

00:57:14.920 | just a huge kind of pointless nightmare of things that I could spend the next.

00:57:20.000 | And it's the reality of writing is that the better you do at writing, the more people

00:57:23.280 | want to try to stop you from writing by giving you all these things, all these opportunities.

00:57:27.560 | That is absolutely true.

00:57:28.560 | I'm sure that something similar is there for sort of any, almost any knowledge work, right?

00:57:33.560 | The sense that like there's just an endlessly proliferating number of things that you could

00:57:37.600 | be keeping track of.

00:57:38.600 | So actually, I think a lot of what you say is right, but I also think that something

00:57:45.900 | about a somewhat more intuitive approach, a somewhat more self-trusting approach actually

00:57:50.960 | fits very well with a situation of great complexity because, you know, it's almost as if you can't

00:57:57.800 | work this out using, there isn't some algorithm you can bring to any sort of to-do list that's

00:58:03.080 | bigger than your time, than the bandwidth you have.

00:58:06.440 | It's just going to be a question of broadly speaking, feeling your way and developing

00:58:14.080 | the self-trust to focus entirely on the thing that you do decide to do.

00:58:19.560 | Because at least like, you know, do that thing and finish it instead of being distracted

00:58:23.560 | by the knowledge that there are an infinite number of other things you could be doing.

00:58:26.880 | So is this a good summary, I want to hit some of like the big practical ideas from the book

00:58:31.680 | that resonated with me.

00:58:33.880 | So here's three I want to underscore.

00:58:36.040 | One, protect a few hours for deep work essentially.

00:58:41.000 | Like you do, make sure you have some time protected every day for working on what's

00:58:45.600 | important.

00:58:46.600 | So a kind of acknowledgement of like, okay, if you're not protecting time at all, you're

00:58:49.840 | never going to just sort of have a lot of free time.

00:58:51.920 | So just protect, use like two to four hours for working on something that's important.

00:58:57.440 | Try to make progress on the things that matter.

00:58:59.400 | Use the term daily-ish, which I like.

00:59:01.560 | So that means like be regular, but don't beat yourself up.

00:59:05.200 | It's got to be every day.

00:59:06.400 | I liked the way you talked about Seinfeld and the Seinfeld don't break the chain, which

00:59:11.440 | is very popular online.

00:59:12.720 | And he said, I just said that as a quip, like this should just try to do things often.

00:59:18.280 | Like he wasn't supposed to be a big productivity system.

00:59:20.480 | Again, self-trust because it's like, have the willingness to see that you can bring

00:59:25.200 | discipline to your work without, in some way other than sort of being absolutely enslaved

00:59:32.760 | to a very, very specific brittle system that you've got to follow every day.

00:59:36.280 | Right.

00:59:37.280 | You take your comedy seriously, you're going to work on it if you are sick on Sunday, it

00:59:42.320 | doesn't really matter.

00:59:43.320 | And then the third idea I was going to put into this trio, you talked about be okay with

00:59:47.320 | your house being messy when guests come over, which I actually see as probably meant as

00:59:53.000 | a broader metaphor for the imperfectionism philosophy you talk about, which is be okay

00:59:59.120 | with not everything has to be perfectly done.

01:00:02.680 | Like, yeah, I didn't get around to cleaning up the house before people came over, but

01:00:07.360 | it applies to work as well.

01:00:08.560 | Like, you know what?

01:00:09.560 | I didn't like polish this thing or I was going to go do it's okay.

01:00:13.360 | Like not, it's okay.

01:00:14.560 | The goal is not everything has to be perfect.

01:00:16.400 | Right.

01:00:17.400 | And I think something that's important to say about that, that's the chapter on so-called

01:00:21.120 | scruffy hospitality, right?

01:00:22.400 | Which is this great phrase that comes from an Anglican pastor from Tennessee called Jack

01:00:29.640 | King.

01:00:30.640 | And he's not just saying, and I'm not just saying like, it's okay, permission to not

01:00:37.200 | be able to do everything perfectly.

01:00:38.400 | That's important because actually our fundamental nature as limited humans in this world is

01:00:42.800 | such that we're not going to be able to do things perfectly.

01:00:45.480 | But it's also in that context, this really interesting relational side of it that this

01:00:52.200 | approach to literal hospitality, to having people around for dinner is very often more

01:00:58.760 | connective, right?

01:00:59.760 | That actually when you sort of drop the facade of trying to do things perfectly, people feel

01:01:04.840 | more welcomed into your home and they feel like they must be your real friends because

01:01:10.000 | you're showing them the unvarnished version of you.

01:01:11.880 | And I think where that sort of generalizes, I'm not suggesting that, you know, at a sort

01:01:19.160 | of white shoe New York City law firm, you can just walk around the office in your pajamas

01:01:23.880 | all day.

01:01:24.880 | It's not, there are obviously limits to this.

01:01:26.460 | But there is this thing, and I find this in my writing all the time, that when you're

01:01:30.280 | willing to sort of confess a little bit more to the kind of flaws and imperfections and

01:01:35.920 | insecurities that we all sort of navigate through the world with, people respond extraordinarily

01:01:41.120 | positively to that.

01:01:42.120 | There is a sort of-

01:01:43.120 | Because they have the same.

01:01:44.120 | Right.

01:01:45.120 | And there is a kind of a, there's not just a sense of shared problems, but also a kind

01:01:47.480 | of an empowerment that comes from, like when I write an email newsletter that even mentions

01:01:51.760 | like this is what I do when I'm feeling completely overwhelmed by to-dos, I will get some responses

01:01:56.800 | that are like, I can't believe even you sometimes feel completely overwhelmed by to-dos.

01:02:01.440 | And I'm like, what part of calling everything the imperfectionist did you not understand?

01:02:06.640 | But you know, there's something directly empowering and connecting and part of building a meaningful

01:02:11.560 | life for us all to just be a little bit more open with each other about the fact that we're

01:02:17.640 | not sort of sailing through it in absolutely perfect confidence.

01:02:21.180 | So what do you think about the anxiety of workload, ideas like David Allen's full capture,

01:02:29.320 | having a place to store things so it's not in your head?

01:02:31.880 | Because I could see you falling on either side of this, it's systemsy, but also the

01:02:36.680 | idea of full capture comes out of, I don't want to be stressed about stuff all the time.

01:02:41.680 | It can be sort of freeing.

01:02:42.720 | So where do these ideas of not keeping stuff in your head, how does that fall into how

01:02:47.560 | you think about productivity?

01:02:49.040 | This is an interesting one because this is definitely one area where I'm sort of less

01:02:53.560 | intuitive in the sort of Paul Luman's sense that I mentioned and more systemsy.

01:03:00.360 | And I don't know what you think about this, you may well have spoken about it.

01:03:04.760 | But I think there's a really important and interesting distinction to be made between

01:03:08.760 | task management and time management.

01:03:11.520 | And I think there's quite a strong argument that sort of very intuitive and flexible and

01:03:18.040 | forgiving approach to managing your time is actually aided by having a really quite rigorous

01:03:23.040 | and clear system of where you're recording things.

01:03:27.600 | And I think that full capture part of David Allen, to this day, it's my immediate response

01:03:33.760 | to feeling like I'm overwhelmed and need to get clarity is to literally get like an enormous

01:03:39.160 | stack of index cards and write down on one per card every single thing until I've got

01:03:44.080 | a big pile and then think, okay.

01:03:47.800 | The difference now is that I don't mistakenly think, now if I just do one after the other,

01:03:52.240 | I will get to zero.

01:03:53.240 | It's like, there it is.

01:03:55.400 | And that enables me not to be taking on this, yeah, this role that the brain is not so great

01:04:01.280 | at.

01:04:02.280 | So, you know, I don't tend to sort of hugely structure those lists.

01:04:07.760 | I've written elsewhere, I think, you know, having a sort of endlessly huge master list

01:04:12.440 | and then feeding things from that onto a very limited thing.

01:04:16.680 | That's just the sort of Kanban has aspects of that idea in it, right?

01:04:20.360 | Keeping your work in progress, anything that does that, incredibly powerful.

01:04:23.260 | But it starts with being willing to be, yeah, completely comprehensive.

01:04:27.920 | Because otherwise, I think what you end up doing is not writing things down and not recording

01:04:31.280 | things because were you to do so, you'd be, you'd frighten yourself by how many things

01:04:36.840 | there are.

01:04:37.840 | And actually part of owning your limitations is to say, yeah, I exist in a world that has

01:04:42.160 | a 400 item list of things that are in some sense on my plate.

01:04:46.600 | Okay.

01:04:47.600 | And I'm going to be doing about four today.

01:04:49.320 | I mean, we used the phrase on the podcast, facing the productivity dragon.

01:04:52.080 | Right.

01:04:53.080 | Exactly.

01:04:54.080 | Which is looking at that list.

01:04:55.080 | I've heard you use that and you're exactly, that's exactly the phrase.

01:04:56.400 | Yeah.

01:04:57.400 | Okay.

01:04:58.400 | So a place where it seems like we definitely agree, and this might differentiate us from

01:05:01.520 | some of the other writers on the topic, is it sounds like we both agree a life with no

01:05:08.320 | thought about productivity, that's not better either.

01:05:12.000 | If it's just productivity as a construct of false consciousness or whatever, and I'm not

01:05:18.440 | going to have to do list.

01:05:20.160 | I'm not going to think about what I am and am not going to do with structuring my time

01:05:25.440 | or having no thinking about organization.

01:05:28.200 | It seems like, and you can correct me if I'm wrong.

01:05:29.600 | We both sort of agree, well, that's going to be a stressful existence as well.

01:05:33.520 | It's the, it's the horseshoe theory.

01:05:35.880 | No productivity can bring you right back around to too much productivity.

01:05:39.760 | It gets you to a stressful existence just via different means.

01:05:43.200 | Yeah, absolutely.

01:05:44.440 | And the sort of, the part of you, the frontal cortex part that is planning and taking an

01:05:49.440 | overview, that's a part of you too, right?

01:05:51.720 | There's a very, there's a, there's a place you can go not so much in the sort of radical

01:05:56.920 | work critique stuff, but more in the spiritual literature that I've spent an awful lot of

01:06:00.560 | time in as well.

01:06:02.680 | There's a place you can go that sort of takes you to the idea that there's something wrong

01:06:10.800 | about like thinking and strategizing and tactics and it's sort of, it's to be switched off

01:06:17.960 | if at all possible.

01:06:19.100 | And then you get, you know, into the places where people use that phrase, like don't forget

01:06:24.720 | we're human beings, not human doings.

01:06:26.440 | And I get very annoyed and want to sort of grab them by the lapels and say, no, doing

01:06:31.200 | stuff is the point here on some level, right?

01:06:33.600 | Doing the right stuff, absolutely.

01:06:35.840 | Not just doing the biggest quantity of items totally, but there is some sense in which

01:06:40.920 | the point of being alive, just to zoom out to the biggest picture possible, is to bring

01:06:46.920 | things into reality, to create stuff.

01:06:49.160 | Yeah.

01:06:50.160 | People like doing things.

01:06:51.160 | Right.

01:06:52.160 | And then maybe that's not what we traditionally think of as productive tasks.

01:06:55.640 | Maybe it's to do with building a family or strengthening the bonds of a community or

01:07:01.240 | all sorts of things it could be, but it's still creative in the broadest sense.

01:07:05.280 | And I don't think that that requires or even benefits from trying to sort of switch off

01:07:11.120 | the part of your brain that can make plans and strategies and organizational systems

01:07:15.200 | for that.

01:07:16.200 | So we can summarize the goal here as you want to do things that are important without being

01:07:20.320 | chronically stressed out by the things you have to do.

01:07:22.440 | Yeah.

01:07:23.440 | I love that.

01:07:24.440 | Yeah.

01:07:25.440 | Okay.

01:07:26.440 | All right.

01:07:27.440 | So I think we've made some progress here.

01:07:28.440 | I mean, it sounds like, okay, we agree a life with no thinking about tasks and organization

01:07:34.560 | time management.

01:07:35.560 | You're going to, and that's very stressful and that'll alienate you from your nature.

01:07:39.760 | We agree task management's important because if you have stuff just in your head, it's

01:07:42.880 | stressful and you can't relax.

01:07:43.880 | You can't do anything.

01:07:44.880 | You've got to have things written down somewhere.

01:07:47.000 | Where we differ is actually pretty minor, I think, which is the degree of systemization

01:07:53.000 | needed to deal with the question of managing your time.

01:07:56.840 | Right.

01:07:57.840 | Once you have that down, your advice falls short of systems.

01:08:03.000 | I tend to talk about things in terms of systems.

01:08:05.800 | That's pretty similar water, I would say.

01:08:10.920 | And then we kind of have the same goal of, I think we both have a real aversion to anxiety

01:08:17.080 | and stress.

01:08:18.080 | I have a huge aversion to, I have too much to do.

01:08:21.520 | I'm overwhelmed.

01:08:22.520 | My day is packed.

01:08:23.520 | I really dislike that.

01:08:24.800 | I think we have that aversion.

01:08:27.720 | So we're sort of on the same page and where we're differing is just to the degree of

01:08:32.920 | structuring and time management.

01:08:35.800 | I think there's a lot to that point and, you know, it's always a little bit dissatisfying

01:08:39.240 | to bring kind of sort of personality type based arguments into things.

01:08:45.440 | I don't like those things generally and I think I've heard you, I suspect that you also

01:08:50.140 | don't like that kind of form of argument.

01:08:53.320 | But I do think that it's relevant and important to what I'm doing that when I say I'm not

01:09:02.280 | so into systems, I'm doing that from the point of view of someone who has sort of gone so

01:09:08.960 | far in the direction of systems, but I'm sort of providing an antidote to myself and to

01:09:13.680 | people who think like me in this way and are this particular kind of, you know, recovering

01:09:20.680 | productivity geek or whatever the phrase I've used sometimes is.

01:09:24.040 | So it's definitely sort of a, it definitely has that sort of antidote feeling to it.

01:09:30.540 | It's like, this is the way to think if your tendency through your upbringing or whatever

01:09:36.880 | else is to swing so far in the other direction.

01:09:40.200 | So I'm, you know, I'm super curious as to, in your aversion to being overwhelmed, for

01:09:47.520 | example, is that because you've been through large phases of being very miserable through

01:09:53.200 | being overwhelmed or are you actually coming from a significantly different personality

01:09:57.040 | than me who is in no danger of kind of massively overinvesting in attempts to control your

01:10:05.400 | life?

01:10:06.400 | It's actually, it's more psychological with me.

01:10:08.800 | In graduate school, I developed an insomnia that could be severe but random.

01:10:15.880 | And it gave me this anxiety of if I try to do too much, so if my days are filled with

01:10:21.940 | like these things have to get done, what would happen if I don't sleep?

01:10:26.640 | I wouldn't be able to actually do that work from that like a quirk of braid wiring got

01:10:32.680 | me the way I started thinking about work is, okay, I need work to be something where tomorrow

01:10:37.300 | doesn't matter, but next month does.

01:10:39.320 | In other words, like no particular day is critical, but it's critical that over the

01:10:45.360 | next month I make progress on the book.

01:10:48.280 | So it's like, Sunday's not important, but February is, that's the way I began to think

01:10:51.720 | about work.

01:10:52.720 | And it was just happenstance.

01:10:53.800 | I think if I hadn't had the insomnia, I probably would have fell into the, let's rock and roll.

01:11:00.800 | Let me fill, let me fill every minute of the day.

01:11:03.840 | Let me crush it because I, you know, I'm a capable person.

01:11:06.320 | I have high energy.

01:11:07.320 | I'm a smart guy.

01:11:08.320 | I probably would have pushed a lot more into it.

01:11:12.120 | And I probably would have been, I don't know, a more successful professor or something like

01:11:16.160 | this or had businesses or something.

01:11:18.000 | So it's, it's a quirk, like a lot of my approach to time management, which is anxiety and stress

01:11:23.700 | reducing based is I don't trust myself to be able to get after it every day.

01:11:28.600 | So how do I design a whole life where that's not necessary?

01:11:31.680 | Right.

01:11:32.680 | Yeah.

01:11:33.680 | That makes perfect sense.

01:11:34.680 | Yeah.

01:11:35.680 | I love that.

01:11:36.680 | Yeah.

01:11:37.680 | Yeah.

01:11:38.680 | Well, anyways, I could, I could talk, I could geek out about this forever, but I know you're

01:11:39.680 | on a book tour.

01:11:40.680 | You have a schedule.

01:11:41.680 | Oliver, my, my audience loves you.

01:11:43.440 | They love your stuff.

01:11:44.440 | I've, they're, they're always talking about it.

01:11:46.360 | We talk about a lot on the show, so I know they're excited.

01:11:49.360 | They're excited for this one and I'm excited that you're here by the new book.

01:11:54.440 | Yeah.

01:11:55.440 | You will like if you, if you like what we talked about on the show, you are going to

01:11:58.960 | absolutely love meditation for mortals.

01:12:01.340 | And if you haven't read 4,000 weeks, you should read that too.

01:12:03.420 | You don't have to, but you should read, you should read both of those as well.

01:12:07.480 | Oliver, a real pleasure.

01:12:09.360 | Thanks for joining the podcast.

01:12:10.360 | Thank you.

01:12:11.360 | I'm so glad we got to do it.

01:12:12.360 | All right.

01:12:13.360 | So that was my conversation with Oliver.

01:12:14.580 | I hope you liked it.

01:12:15.940 | We have some more in-depth interviews lined up in the spirit of Oliver Berkman's philosophy.

01:12:22.700 | I'll release them as I have time.

01:12:24.260 | I'm not trying to put too much pressure on myself.

01:12:26.580 | I'm just using my intuition as he would say, to figure out when there's an idea I like

01:12:31.180 | and to release them as I am able.

01:12:33.260 | Again, you got to check out Oliver's book.

01:12:35.520 | His new book is called meditations for mortals and is fantastic.

01:12:39.540 | His previous book, 4,000 weeks is a must read if you haven't read that as well.

01:12:43.580 | We'll be back on Monday with another normal episode of the show and we'll be back with

01:12:47.140 | in-depth probably in the next three or four weeks or so.

01:12:51.220 | And until then, as always, stay deep.

Escaping Toxic Productivity: How Hustle Culture & Fake Organization Distracts You | Oliver Burkeman

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