There’s never enough time, and the work is never done. On this episode, author and journalist Oliver Burkeman shares his insights on how we can better manage our time, but not get bogged down in productivity.

If you’re felt overwhelmed, stressed or unfulfilled, Oliver’s book, Four Thousand Weeks, offers a valuable reframe: pushing against the endless need for productivity, and towards a Zen-like surrender to the fact that we can’t – we won’t – get it all done.

Links

• Join the conversation live
• Become a member of the Happy Startup School
• Join the next Vision 20/20 cohort
• Four Thousand Weeks – Oliver’s book

for those of you who are listening at the moment who are not familiar with Oliver's work, um, I usually get our guests to just give us, uh, an introduction of themselves.

And the invitation is, how would you describe yourself now in terms of what you do and, and, and what occupies your, your thinking and your time, uh, and a little potted history of how you got to here.

Yeah, well, I guess it's very natural to want to answer that on the on the professional plane.

You can probe me with therapist questions later if you if you want to and I'll try and be open about them.

But just to be quick about it yeah, I would describe myself as a I guess as an author and a journalist.

Um, becoming more author and less journalist as the last sort of decade has gone on.

I wrote this book Four Thousand Weeks that you mentioned and a previous book called The Antidote Uh, which is about the problems with positive thinking And before that I wrote or during that time as well I wrote a column for a lot of years for the Guardian's weekend magazine called This Column Will Change Your Life which uh necessitated explaining to lots of people that this was sort of meant to be a joke or tongue in cheek name for the column, but um, I guess it changed my life if not, I can't speak for readers, um, sort of looking at the intersection of self help culture, productivity, spirituality, philosophy.

And it gradually sort of over the years that I was writing it got to just, I had the immense good fortune and privilege really of just being able to write about stuff that was Interesting to me and compelling, so it was a great sort of test bed for all sorts of ideas.

Looking back at my own career to date.

I'm always struck how I think of myself as quite a cautious, risk averse, anxiety prone person, but I've on a number of different occasions taken what seemed in hindsight to be quite risky or bold choices, you know, uh, leaving a PhD program at Harvard University after a semester when it was kind of like an amazing thing to have landed because I just knew that it wasn't I wasn't it wasn't for me.

Um, a job I was offered very early in my journalistic career that at that time was kind of I couldn't get my head around the idea that I could earn a salary that healthy but turning it down because it wasn't going to take me towards writing.

And you know, uh looking back and back and back i'm always making these decisions that like, I'm not quite sure how I managed to make them at the time because I certainly didn't feel confident Uh about making them but what they all were were in service of getting to making sure that I could spend a chunk of each week Ideally each day making sense of stuff through through writing.

What does that mean to you?

What are the things that you're trying to make sense of?

I think it's quite hard to put words on that just because, to oneself, I think it always seems like what you're struggling with is like the meaning of life, right?

It's like, it's everything.

Of course, it isn't everything.

There are all sorts of challenges that I've never had to experience, or um, issues that aren't compelling to me.

But, but when I think about what is the domain that I'm sort of interested in writing and communicating about and talking with other people about and maybe helping people with in some way, it is just like being in the world, right?

I come up with these kind of impossibly general, uh, maybe not very helpful labels for, for what it is.

And that I think was, you know, just to get a bit more specific is why, um, it kind of clicked when I realized that I could write this book about.

time, uh, which I, uh, just did because on some level that's just one lens for looking at everything, right?

It's like nothing doesn't unfold in time.

Uh, none of our challenges are not challenges of how to be in the time that we get.

So, yeah, I think I am a generalist by, by nature, and I'm sort of looking for, if you're a generalist who's just sort of interested in the broadest questions, what you need when it comes to sort of creatively executing things is, is some kind of lens, some kind of focus that means that your book is not an attempt to write.

about everything because then it's, uh, 500,000 words long and you end up just like sitting on a park bench with a stack of manuscripts talking to yourself for decades.

Um, if you want to actually want to do something that's real and in the world, it has to have that focus.

But it's always been for me a way of trying to focus what feels like a very, very general set of, of interests.

There's something I was curious about the, the idea of writing, because one of the things that we try and encourage people who go through our programs and people of the community is to thingify their thoughts.

And one way to do that is through writing an expression and even a conversation I had this morning is like this person had so much passion and and and conviction about the things they wanted to do and the question was like Have you actually written that down or shared that with anyone?

Yeah.

And so there's something around Working out well, we've been inherited this phrase working out loud, that help is facilitated through this writing process.

Yeah, and if I heard you correctly saying thingify your thoughts, I think that is brilliant.

That's um, that is exactly part of it.

So firstly, yes, there's the stage where like putting it out on the page.

And very often kind of even before writing it's like diagrams like I I I seem I naturally seem to sort of think in diagrams rather than pictures or words and so I'm often sort of figuring things out that way and then putting words onto them or you know journaling morning pages type stuff, which I also do.

There is this sense of seeing things from a different vantage point.

There's something a little impersonal about it, which I think helps to get it out of your very specific context.

You can begin to see ways in which there are sort of general principles being addressed.

So that stuff is really, um, I think it's a really useful thing that not only for the end result of the work, but it just sort of keeps one sane as well, right?

Just to, to see one's problems.

Actual life problems that you're experiencing on the page is to sort of have, make them more tractable, make them more, uh, dealable with.

And then a sort of specific subsection of maybe this is of thingifying your ideas is.

This notion of sort of putting specific words and labels onto concepts and, and ideas.

So I've always been struck how, when I can, doesn't happen all the time, but when I can sort of give a sort of, good sort of juicy little label to some whole set of, Ideas as I think maybe i've done in the book with ideas like what I call cosmic insignificance therapy, right?

There's sort of great benefits of understanding your own your own smallness in the scheme of things.

Something like that It just becomes a kind of it becomes something I can go back to Because it's got that label and it exists as a kind of a nugget in the world and it also seems to really help in leading other people to similar perspective shifts to be able to kind of put things down in that way and that wouldn't come without writing, right?

That wouldn't come if I was just sort of, for me, if I was just wandering around thinking things or talking about them even.

I think there's something around being able to put to words.

What other people may be feeling or not understanding about the way they're looking at life that invites connection.

In a sense, the way we started our work was very much about putting into words something we were feeling about work.

And in this case, Laurence, I was specifically talking about the Happy Fester.

And I was wondering if you know how you would relate to that and also thingifying your thoughts was the thing that that was your set of words as well when we were starting out

Yeah, i'm sure like a lot of the best ideas, I probably stole it from somewhere, but I can't remember what the source was um, but in absence of that, yeah, I mean the interesting thing is I never, I never actually sought to carve out time to write.

I wouldn't consider myself a writer.

My wife's what I'd call a proper writer.

She, she's a journalist, studied journalism, ended up working in magazines.

But I found it really helpful as a tool to communicate ideas, but also more than anything, just to build clarity, I think for myself.

So actually the process of writing was a process of clarity for me to understand what is it I'm trying to say.

And also who am I talking to?

And so, yeah, in the early days we didn't really have a business idea with a Happy Startup School.

We had an agency at the time, but it was, I think a set of ideas to communicate and then see what came back.

And yeah, that led us to our first people to have conversations with.

And like you said, using some language that maybe we hadn't seen elsewhere, just opened up curiosity for people.

And so, yeah, we ended up putting a manifesto together, which, um, was really almost, uh, I guess, a view of the world and a set of beliefs and values.

But, um, yeah, it certainly cut through some of the noise I found, so.

Yeah,

I found that process of clarity and distilling ideas helped other people connect with what we were trying to do.

And I'm assuming with your work, the way I've understood your work, because I've listened to a few podcasts that you've been on, and also I discovered you on, um, Sam Harris's Waking Up.

And, you've invited a lot of connection, I'm assuming, and people have been very interested in talking to you and finding out more about your, the way you look at the world.

Yeah, I guess that, I think that's fair.

I mean, I think I get a lot of, I, I, I, it's been great, and it's given on to some amazing conversations, and I really enjoy that.

Uh, the, I feel very, ambivalent about the email load because everyone feels ambivalent about email and yet at the same time Like I get some extraordinary emails that are from people.

I mean, I don't just mean being nice about my work I mean in terms of what they are revealing about themselves or sort of insights reading recommendations all sorts of things and I feel bad that they don't Get those emails don't get the attention that they deserve and i'm working on this.

I think that a lot of what I'm writing about, and maybe it's what a lot of people in this kind of space are ultimately writing about, is it's not like some brand new idea, it's not even a brand new synthesis of other ideas, it's just a question of pointing out what is already true, but yeah, that people are not necessarily, uh, fully articulating.

There's a great, um, thing Steven Pinker writes about, about how the sort of metaphor, good, or the analogy for, for good writing is, uh, in his view, the idea of sort of standing next to somebody and pointing at something over on the, in the line of, Vision and saying, look, do you see that over there?

You know, it's like it's not a question of doing a big song and dance and showing them something they've never seen before.

It's just a question of like directing their attention to something that when they when they look at it like that they'll they'll see oh, yes, you know, I get it.

That's how it that's how it is And I already have understood that on some level, uh, but but not so clearly.

And human finitude and mortality and the limitations of our time, like, couldn't be more the case, uh, for that, because, like, nobody does, nobody really needs telling that their time is, is finite, uh, or that they're going to die, right?

It's it's um, what you can do usefully in that subject matter is Is sort of direct people's attention a little more to what it what what the ramifications of that are what that means on a daily And just sort of, yeah, just kind of share the experience of being in the same boat, trying to, trying to make life work out, you know?

It's like, it's, um, a lot of it is just traveling the journey in together, I think, rather than necessarily making some great innovation in how you, in how you do it.

That's really helpful.

Because I think one of the things I, I come up across, uh, in our work is this need to, or this feeling to be unique, have a new idea, have something essentially to lead from the front.

And I love, you know, what you said there's, like, I just got this image of stood standing on the coast looking at the sea and then just can you see that boat over there.

And potentially the person's already seen it in their peripheral vision but they just haven't taken note.

And when the way you talk about this idea of time and death is like In a world that is full of distraction, of, full of content, um, I think we don't, while we know that things, there's some truths about the world, we die, we don't necessarily spend time thinking about that or thinking about the limitations we have.

And so I feel it's an empowering message for particularly people in our community who feel Change needs to happen in the world or things that need to be pointed out But they still they think oh everyone else is talking about it When in fact the person next to them might not have heard that person talk about it or even have considered looking at it the world in a different in that way

what this is reminding me of and this is obviously from my point of view of to the extent that i'm a involved in running my own business or being an entrepreneur it is entirely a sort of Production of content based thing, so that's the angle that I come from.

But it's what I'm always struck by.

And I was very, very influenced by that famous essay, a thousand true fans that Kevin Kelly wrote, uh, years ago, which basically makes this argument.

You know, it can be, it can be criticized the argument, but the basic idea being that in the, in the era of digital communication, you just need to find the thousand people around the planet who are willing to pay $100 a year to, because they're so into your angle on things and your way of seeing things and then you've got then that's a hundred thousand dollars, right?

So the the point being that you don't need this kind of blockbuster success through having an extraordinarily unique idea or unique take on things.

You just need to be able to sort of, again, this is within the idea of within writing and communication.

You just need to be able to say things in a specific way that is true to you, and you will find the small number of people around the planet who just are on that wavelength and want more of that.

And the, you know, just to talk about the economics of it for a moment, it's a very small number as a proportion of like the world's population, but it can be easily a big enough number to make this something sustainable to do.

And it's a bit funny to talk about in the context of Four Thousand Weeks because that was actually The first time i've had a book that was like on the bestseller list and sort of in some sense did become this kind of bigger thing.

Even then when you look at the absolute numbers of book sales like anyone who's conditioned to think in terms of like movies and tv or let alone, you know ride sharing apps or something will just laugh in the face of Book sales, which are all sort of really as a proportion of the population of a country or something, you know minuscule.

Um, but they're big enough, uh, for, to sort of make it all worth doing, and actually probably also to like make some degree of real change maybe in the culture.

So I think that's just the, the really rewarding thing is like getting clear on what you want to say and finding that there's a bunch of other people who are really on that wavelength.

Well, I think one thing a lot of people struggle with, I think, is blocking out the noise from everyone else.

So there's maybe having clarity on who those people I want to attract are, but there's a lot of fear, I think, where people put their ideas out there and that they're going to get shot down or the trolls are going to jump on board and criticize them.

Who do you think you are to be saying this?

or, you know, talking about this.

So I suppose there might be something about, you know, where you found that confidence from, because it sounds like you ring fenced your time in the morning for writing.

Even back then, it sounds like you made some changes in your career, which maybe on paper didn't make sense financially, but you were clear that you, you needed to ring fence that writing.

So you've obviously had, had confidence in your own ideas, would you say from a young age that there's something here that's useful for people?

Yeah, I mean, on some level, yes.

I think that's just comes from, being sort of fairly well parented, and that is just an, that is just an accident of birth for all of us, and some people have to struggle to get there more than others.

Um, that, that sort of basic trust that if you sort of have some ideas, there's something worth sharing.

But as soon as that's out of my mouth, I think it makes the experience I've had sound way less fraught than it has felt to me because it's really, each time I've written the book and various other times as well gone through this process of kind of suddenly thinking that there's nothing there and then remembering that actually the thing that I have doesn't need to be, you know, the definitive statement on this topic.

Doesn't need to, doesn't need to appeal to everybody.

You know, in many ways, um, working for years in a sort of deadline driven newspaper environment, environment was tremendously useful for me.

I'm happy to talk about that, but I think one downside of that whole milieu is that you were constantly thinking about, like you were writing for a general audience.

The Guardian is obviously a demographic segment.

It's not everybody but it's a lot of different people.

And you're perpetually sort of picturing the person flicking through the paper on the Underground and like reading the first sentence of your article and then thinking like this is boring and flicking off to the next page.

So there's this constant kind of jazz hands need to sort of make sure that you you get people's attention for as many people as possible.

And, you know, we see that on social media today as well in all sorts of um damaging ways.

But so it's really been a sort of amazing liberation in a way to discover that, like ,yeah in the context of writing an email newsletter Even writing a book doing various other things.

I'm involved in, you have to do it well.

I don't mean you can just sort of sit there and say the first thing that comes off the top of your head.

But you're not, the job here is not to be for everybody.

And and the more that I Do the things that I think really matter and find that there are, there is this feedback from people who agree that they, they really matter, the less it, I sort of even think about the fact that there's presumably are many people out there who if they ever came across that email newsletter or that book would be left cold by it.

It's like, in a way, who cares?

Um, I when you talk about the social media sort of angle on this, I think of the link baity titles and the kind of tactics and strategies to, you know, get your attention within the first few seconds and even I think it's in your book, you know, you talk about what it means to spend more time with the difference in revenue for Amazon, depending on the amount of time people spend on the landing page.

And if the homepage took a second longer to load, they would lose a million dollars a year.

Yeah, absolutely, yeah.

Really this impatience with attention and trying to capture that.

And so there's tactics and strategies that content creators employed just to grab people in that first few seconds.

And there are tactical strategies that need to be employed.

And there's just a, there's this learned craft of good writing, I think.

And so, uh, while I was trying to get out here, there's, there's finding something we're curious about, finding something we're passionate about, something we're, there's something that we want to explore.

And there's the the craft of presenting those ideas well, whether that's writing video or audio.

And I think was linking in to here with you is like, how we communicate is a very important aspect of this.

How we learn to tell the story or how we guide people into to our world that I think is an important crop of important skill.

Again, what's missing from what you just said there and, and, and is rightly missing is, is that what you don't need to hone is the ability to like, solve people's problems definitively or even solve your own problems definitively.

It is just this sense of maybe getting a bit better and more eloquent at sharing the journey, at bringing people into that kind of experience.

You know, there was alan watts the famous 1960s 1970s, uh, spiritual writer and speaker who's been having a bit of a resurgence, uh, in recent years.

He always denied being a guru, denied being an expert or a therapist or anything like this, and said he was a, said he was a spiritual entertainer, you know.

Sounds a bit like David Brent.

Right, right.

When he's writing about, when he's writing about, um, or speaking about Zen Buddhism, for example, he's not trying to make you become a Zen Buddhist.

He's not trying to say Zen Buddhism has the answer to everything.

He's not even trying to claim that he's a Zen Buddhist.

He's just saying, and this is, I'm roughly quoting him here, you know, This is a point of view that I enjoy and I find that other people enjoy sharing this point of view with me, and that it sort of, you know, enhances their lives to spend more time in that place.

And i've gradually come around to the conclusion that actually that is one of the most useful things I can do with the, you know, whatever skills I've got.

You know, certainly there are little sort of techniques and methods and things I do that I can pass on to other people they might like to do.

But above all, it's just this sense of like, spending more of life in this mental space of coming to terms with finitude and being okay with our imperfections and, and seeing that acknowledging all that stuff does not need to mean resignation or mediocrity.

It's actually the basis of doing some really cool and exciting and, and, uh, interesting things in life.

It's, it's just a question of sort of kindling more of that feeling in in people.

And, and as long as a newsletter that I write or a Or a chapter in a book that I write does that, then it seems to have done its job.

Whether or not it also has you know now do this step one step two step three.

Um, because that's always secondary to the kind of how you're being, you know, it's uh, it's always a secondary thing

There's something, and I'm going to link this to businesses, uh, that want to scale, products that want to scale.

They find a process, they find a set of steps and they think, all right, everyone follow these steps and you'll be successful.

Linking it to the whole social media thing.

Six steps to six figures in six months.

Do that, you're done, all good.

Uh, and from my own experience, that is such a personal journey that is so dependent on your own context and your own limits and your own boundaries around doing the work.

What i've been more comfortable with with our work is, unless i'm working with someone one to one I can't ever think I will ever get them to where they need to be particularly Starting this idea of this business that aligns with who they are.

But what we can do a lot of the time is through having conversations with person people like yourself and the writing that Laurence does a lot and a lot of the podcasts that I try to produce is open a door to a new way of thinking.

And then signpost to others who can take you on that journey in more depth.

A little bit like you were saying, looking into the distance saying Oh, did you see that thing over there?

That's quite interesting.

Maybe you should follow that.

I'm not going to take you there because that isn't my job to do.

But I can, I'm curious enough about the world or curious enough about this part of the world to then want to talk about it and just point people in the direction of other ways of looking at the world, because I'm interested in that.

And, um.

On that, there's the, the tactics and strategy, the tools, the things that will help us and, and correct me if I'm wrong, I remember listening to you talk about the early days where you were looking at the, you know, different ways to be more productive and the different ways to sort of manage our time, maybe get Inbox Zero all these things that make us feel better.

And then below that which I think is this book Is this actually what is our relationship to this need to be more productive?

and so I'm, just curious about that because for me, my interest in the work isn't necessarily how to do better marketing how to price better how to make more money how to make products It's also a why do I want to start this business?

What is it about business building and?

Being my own boss, and what will get in my way of being my own boss.

It's interesting.

So i'm curious about that step from i'm going to think about productivity to actually i'm thinking about why are we trying to be productive.

Yeah, I mean I think one one of my answers to this is just that I had this very fortunate situation of writing this column, short, weekly, deadline driven, somebody be mad at me if I didn't submit it, you know, for many years.

One of the things that I did there quite frequently was to sort of experiment with, read about, uh, try to implement ways of organizing time, being more productive, focusing on, you know, the outcomes that I wanted to achieve.

And, and if you do that, um, with enough of these kinds, if you, if you try enough methods and, and none of them have the effect of Bringing you this kind of peace of mind that you're trying to get through them, none of them get you to this feeling of being in control of time, then you're lucky because in a way you get you sort of you exhaust them and you get to think think well Okay, maybe there's a problem with the question that i'm asking here.

If you're someone who doesn't have this weird job of writing a column where you test time management techniques, then maybe you only have time to try out three or four and you might think that the perfect one is still around the corner.

I really got to the bottom of the barrel in a sense.

And, um, and that's when you start to think like, what is it about this thing that I always think I've got to find some way to take care of everything that is thrown at me?

Or, um, you know, Achieve all the ambitions that I have for my life Otherwise i'll be like a bad person somehow?

And you know, i've had various epiphanies on this in this regard.

But in the book I describe one of them sitting on a bench in Prospect Park in Brooklyn where we lived at the time.

And just in the middle of another of these sort of flights of anxious fretting, trying to figure out how I was going to put together the week in order to get through all the things that I had to get through, and and just realizing Oh, it's impossible.

I'm trying to do something that is not possible and the enormous liberation of that right the enormous liberation of the shift from this Is very hard to this is impossible, Uh, because you no longer have to try to struggle to do something that you know actually can't be done.

And so that was my encounter, one of my encounters, with the sort of underlying psychology of why we're trying to do this.

I think that many, many of us in different ways have our self worth wrapped up in our productivity in ways that are not very healthy.

And we sort of think that a certain level of, we're in this odd situation where it feels, I think, for a lot of people like...

in order to be just sort of minimally adequate human beings and, and sort of feel minimal respect for themselves, they have to do an amount that is sort of beyond the possibility of anyone doing.

So it's like, it's not that you want to sort of do a stunning thing accomplishments in the world in order to be exceptional and unusual It's because you think that's like the minimum you have to do.

Or you think that living an extraordinary and exceptional life is the If you don't do that, then it's sort of humiliating and you've you've failed to sort of earn your right to exist on the planet.

So, you know, I think it's always, yeah, I think that question, like, why are you doing this?

And why do you want to do this?

Why do you feel that you have to do this is really interesting because it can be the answer that actually, maybe you don't need to do it.

Right?

I mean, if, if the reason you feel you have to do it is because you won't be sort of allowed to feel okay about yourself if you don't do it, then maybe the best thing is to work on that, is to work on that belief.

And so, yeah, this is my sort of lifelong struggle, right?

It's sort of getting up in the morning and realizing that actually, you know, in a certain sense, I don't do anything for the rest of the day.

Obviously, you know, you need to pay the mortgage.

You need to feed your kid.

It's not, not, not quite literally true that you could spend your whole life in bed.

But in that deeper existential sense, like I don't need to do any of these things.

I could probably renegotiate the deadlines or give back the book advance or, you know, there's all sorts of.

The universe is not demanding that you do these things.

It's, it's much more like, It's a much nicer situation than that.

It's like, if this is something that is really going to make you feel alive, then you get to do it.

But that sort of very kind of Calvinist sense of like, you know, you've got to save your soul by putting in the work, uh, is probably something to let go of rather than to.

Double down on

So on that I just wanted to made me drew me to this question from Lina.

And she she's asking I wonder if there's a particular world view or spiritual practice that maybe lends itself towards embracing finitude?

Mean, I am endlessly fascinated by the ways in which the stuff that I'm dwelling on here resonates with people in different religious and spiritual traditions.

Sometimes they object to it.

You know, there's obviously, a certain way of stressing finitude that, that's in tension with certain kinds of religious ideas of eternal life.

Not all interpretations of the idea of eternal life, but certainly some of them.

There are these kind of two strands in, in Christianity and Protestantism, just to take that as one thing, uh, between, you know, the idea that you save your soul by doing lots of good works in the world and the countervailing idea that you're you're saved anyway And it's not about works.

It's about faith.

Um, I don't think there's necessarily one spiritual practice or one tradition.

I think that these are sort of religious and spiritual questions just inevitably and therefore every spiritual and religious tradition has something to say about them.

I have found, just as a matter of what resonates with me, that Buddhism in general and Zen specifically has, and Soto Zen even more specifically than that if there are people who know about this stuff.

It seems to me to be the most sort of, to have the most resources to sort of talk about what we're what we're talking about here partly because it doesn't demand Certain kinds of belief that I would struggle to say that I believed.

It doesn't demand, uh, certain kinds of conceptual frameworks.

It is pretty much explicitly an attempt to see through, let go of, go beyond, uh, those conceptual frameworks to like this, the reality that we're really in right now as it actually is.

And so, it feels very consistent with not using concepts to try to make yourself feel like you can get through everything or like, Fulfillment is coming in the future.

It's very much focused on the present.

And what I love about the instructions whenever you try to read track down instructions for specifically zazen the zen version of meditation is that like there just aren't any instructions apart from you have to put your body in this situation and sit down and do that and sit there for a certain number of minutes.

Because, not, I don't think the people The people who communicate this are being coy.

I think it's just like, it's a physical thing.

It's to do with being in this world right now.

And the moment you say to someone, count your breaths or try to get really concentrated or anything like that, you're back into that world of seeking the concept, seeking fulfillment in the future.

And so I'm really drawn to this kind of refusal that there is in Zen to say like, you know, follow this trail and maybe it's coming later.

It's like, no, it's this.

It's, it's sitting on a cushion.

And just being there, I find that very appealing, but I think it's all a question of personality and your personal history and what resonates with you and all the rest of it.

What I was thinking there was this idea of acceptance and And being with discomfort, um, particularly the discomfort of not knowing what's coming next, and then also the discomfort when you're talking about finitude of, and there might not be a next, because I, I don't have all the time.

I don't have all the capacity.

Yeah.

And the, and the, and an odd kind of.

security that there is in that.

I think this is a, I don't know, really necessarily have the words to explain this, but there is this idea that occurs in various Zen texts, but I think it's probably in other traditions too.

I'm not trying to evangelize for Zen, but, um, of this idea that the doubt is the only solid ground.

That kind of fully opening to exactly what our situation is with regard to what we don't know can't control is the only kind of security worth worth the name.

It's kind of a it's a it's it's something that you can have faith in Uh, I don't know if that just sounds annoyingly paradoxical, but I think it does get something get something true.

And so I wanted to Get your thoughts on a couple of things To do with this idea of not having enough time to do everything, um, uncertainty of where the future will lead, um, discomfort in the moment.

And this, and it was related to this topic about passion versus responsibilities.

It's like what I'm drawn to do, what I feel I need to do versus all the things I think I should be doing or the responsibilities I have in the moment.

I connect a little bit to the decisions you were saying you made around, Oh, I could have taken that job that earned me money, but I needed to go do something else.

I could have continued with this opportunity to do a PhD, but I felt it was, I needed to do something else.

It's like, how have you made the decisions, some of these kind of challenging decisions of what felt like a, and maybe this is the wrong way, a whim or something that's like drawn to something versus what people around you need you to do, or society tells you to do.

Yeah, it's such an interesting question and quite a tricky one because on the one hand there's the kind of social pressure.

Everyone always expected you to be a doctor and you want to be a performance artist, right?

That's what a classic kind of thing.

But there's also the kind of obligations that come from, that like you do have on some level.

The obligations other people obligations to children parents maybe some extent partners for certain.

So in navigating all of this, you can't, you can't ever really just take the attitude, at least in a superficial sense of the term, you can't be like, I'm just going to do what I want because plenty of times I don't want to do things that I think are absolutely part of my set of, of obligations in the world.

Um, I think that this has to be intuitive, ultimately.

These kinds of decisions, I think it is a mistake to think that there's a sort of a system for taking them, but I do think there are sort of pointers.

And one of the ones I write about in the book that has meant an enormous amount to me is this question from James Hollis, the Jungian psychotherapist who talks about addressing the question to sort of choices that you're facing like forks in the road in life.

He says like, you know, you should ask whether the path you're planning to embark on enlarges you or diminishes you.

And, you know that might not those words might not work for everyone.

But what I love about it is like to me, that's kind of clear usually.

And it and it bypasses this question of like what will make me happy?

Which is a terrible question to us because we're so bad at um Predicting it and it gets you know, short term pleasure and long term, uh, fulfillment get tangled up and messed up.

So, I've had the experience many times of sort of not knowing what to do, and then actually when you ask a question like that, you kind of do know what to do.

And what it enables you to see is that It enables you to distinguish between, to discriminate between the kinds of unpleasantness and challenges and things in life that are part of growth and the part and the ones that are just like bad, right?

So if you're in a, if you're facing problems in your relationship, you might be really miserable about it.

But if you ask that question is what you're going through, something that's enlarging you and enlarging you as a couple, or a family or diminishing you?

You, that brings a different answer right?

And the same would work for business challenge certainly.

It enables you to see that there are certain kinds of thing that are kind of sucky to have to experience but there are part of maturing and growing and becoming a bigger person.

And then there are the other kind that actually are a red flag that you're in the wrong line of work or that a relationship has reached the end of its run or something like that.

Um, and they the one the ones that sort of cause your soul to shrivel rather than the ones that make you think like I hate this but I can see that it's leading somewhere.

So I think that is a useful, a useful thing.

Then again, I also don't want to overemphasize how much I've ever thought through anything really.

You know, I think, I love that this idea that the philosopher Laurie Paul has about what she calls transformative experiences, of which becoming a parent is the sort of paradigm, but I think lots of other things apply as well.

It's not only a point that applies to parents.

Where you make a decision.

In life, but you can expect to change you so much as a person that you can't predict from before it whether it's going to turn you into the kind of person who would have wanted to take that decision, right?

So it's not just the sort of cliche that, uh, after people have kids, they tend to be really happy that they had kids.

It's like, you might, you might be someone who really wants to have kids.

And then having a kid turns you into the kind of person who wishes you, who wouldn't have wanted to have kids, right?

Who knows?

You just can't tell.

She uses the analogy of, um, you know, becoming a, becoming a vampire by being bitten by another vampire, right?

It's like, it's a total personality change and you can have it all sorts of contexts.

Like, you know.

going into a different line of work, walking away from a job, changing the country you live in., they, they have a big enough effect on you that trying too hard to figure out whether the, the you on the other side of that is going to endorse the decision is, um, is probably just a fool's errand.

Well, it's maddening, I think, and you just don't do anything.

And I think that, I really like that phrase, and I think I'd like to hold on to that.

It's like, will it, was it, will it cause your soul to shrivel?

Will it enlarge me or diminish me?

Or is it enlarging me or diminishing me?

It's Hollister's phrase, and yeah, I think, think he would also probably endorse that sort of language.

Is your soul, is it?

I love that.

Is it good?

Is it making us, is it, is the soul getting larger?

Yeah.

Even just that is like, is that going to cause my soul to shrivel?

Right.

All right.

I want to touch it.

There's a line he uses.

I don't know if it, I think it comes from another Jungian and I don't think it comes from Jung, Carl Jung originally, but he talks about how like we, we tend to walk through the world in, in shoes too, that are too small for us.

And this notion of kind of making sure that what you're doing is soul sized in some way.

Another phrase that comes from Hollis or maybe from somebody that he's quoting.

And you know, it can be difficult because people can say, well, I don't like the situation I'm in, but I've got to be in it.

And then it gets hard and you've got to say, well, maybe it is sometimes the soul size thing to do to, to stay in situations that are not maximally creatively fulfilling if they otherwise are creating the work or the supporting the family that you want to create a support.

But, um, yeah, I think it's, it's useful to think in terms of the soul, even regardless of what you want to sign up to in terms of beliefs about what that might be.

I'm drawn to that, using that framework, which is the expansion of the contraction, the diminishing or the enlargement.

Primarily because last night I was, I was, uh, an event around men's mental health.

And we were having a discussion around anger, healthy and unhealthy anger.

And one of the things that came out of the discussion, what I found quite helpful is like, I always thought angry, anger was a bad thing.

But there's a, I mean, expansive anger.

I'm standing my ground, I'm holding a boundary, I'm protecting something, which seems like a expansive aspect of anger.

And then there's the diminishing side of anger, where I'm trying to crush someone, and I'm trying to make them smaller, and I'm trying to oppress.

And relating that to that thing about, you know, it's, there's a feeling, even though it's not a great, you know, particularly angers, it has its connotations, but if there's a sense of like, actually, there's an expansive feeling about it, whether whatever that decision in this case anger, that seems like a helpful signal.

that, yeah, that speaks to the whole sort of idea that emotions are messengers, right?

Emotions are signs of things.

They're not things that to be got rid of or encouraged necessarily.

They just, they just are, what you're feeling is always, in some sense, valid, and okay.

Obviously how you act on the basis of it can be very much not okay.

and, uh, yeah, the only question is like, what is this?

What is this mood trying to tell me?

Uh, as opposed to how do I get rid of it?

And by the way, if you do actually want to get rid of it, I'm sure understanding what it's trying to tell you is almost always the way to do that

Particularly a lot of people we work with who want to, you know, find a happier path in their career or business, and so they're trying to essentially protect more of their own time and be more autonomous in the decisions they make at work.

And so there's a real need for them to have more autonomy.

So basically protect their own time.

Like people have done post COVID.

I think people are a lot more protective of that time, but at the same time, this need and desire to connect and to want to be part of the collective.

And I think there's an example you shared in the book about this around how in some ways you have to sacrifice some of your own autonomy if you actually want to build connection with others or actually do anything worthwhile.

So I'm just curious to know if there's any, I guess, thoughts for people around this, this tension that always exists when we decide, do I spend an hour on my own, do my own thing or do I commit to a cause or a community.

I care about.

Yeah, I think it's fascinating.

It's always fascinating me.

I mean, I think that I go through life or and I think lots of people do or maybe I used to, thinking that the ideal would be that I get to call the shots about how my day goes, right?

And maybe I can't do it completely but the ideal would be that I could you know get it when I wanted and work when I wanted and Engage other people when I wanted.

And yet, the reality is that we make sacrifices of that kind of total temporal sovereignty all the time, willingly, because we know that that's what makes it possible to do anything that makes life worth living.

Most sort of mundane examples, it would maybe people would have liked to have...

We could have attended this event live at some other time of day, but we can all only attend it live by, uh, by all agreeing to show up at a certain time on a certain day.

And if there's any sort of collective benefit from all being here, that benefit is dependent on our making that sacrifice.

Or, you know, you belong to a choir that meets or a sports team that meets at a specific time.

And just more generally, then I think that's a really useful reason to.

to question that notion of always wanting more control over time.

I've definitely grappled with this since becoming a father because obviously I don't want to have a kind of approach to scheduling my work that, that defines it as a problem when my, like, son wants my attention for half an hour at a time when I wasn't otherwise the parents on duty as it were.

Um, now maybe sometimes I'm still going to have to say, sorry, I, I, I'm doing something else, but you don't want to define other people, uh, as interruptions just because of how much, how sort of invested you are in your, in your plan for your day or your goals for the quarter or whatever it is.

So figuring out that sort of, navigating that, I certainly don't think I've, like, you know, come to the end of this journey at all, but that's really interesting to me because it's true not only in the sort of work versus family thing, but even within work, right?

The degree to which you just plow forward and execute on the things you decided you were going to execute on versus the degree to which you remain open to unexpected things that could lead to far more interesting conclusions is a real, it's a real, you know, it's a thing to constantly navigate and probably to give up hope of having a final position on

Actually that's and that leads me on to just one more question before we start to close is one of the challenges that I see a lot of our community faces the shiny new object syndrome.

How how do you keep focused?

And not get distracted.

With difficulty.

Um, I mean, I do think that as I've gradually immersed myself in this perspective of sort of looking finitude in the face as it were, you do naturally come to feel a bit more that every yes is a no to many other things and so it gets easier to handle that.

Um, you know, I'm certainly experimenting with ways of organizing my calendar that kind of, I call this fixed volume productivity in the appendix to Four Thousand Weeks, you know, that say, maybe I'm going to be available for a certain amount of time for a certain kind of thing in a week.

And when that quota is full, I'm going to make myself say no to further requests for that.

Or, um, I'm going to dedicate a certain amount of time this week to a certain project.

And, sort of success, the definition of success will be.

Doing that and stepping away at the end of that time.

Uh, the part where you stop is often just as important.

And I yeah, I just try in those those hours of the morning that I began by talking about I do try to have sort of one definable, ideally sort of physical goal in mind.

I often, I often sort of define my work for the morning as like, the draft of a section or something implicitly printed out, like if I can hold it in my hands, that feels like I've made something for the, for the day, the printer is much more closely involved in my writing life than I think it probably is for most writers these days, which is very annoying because they still haven't invented a seamlessly, flawlessly working printer, it seems.

But, um, uh, you know, bringing things into the world, doing things, okay, I did that, put that aside, that has been done.

I have, I have sort of crafted a thing today.

And that way, you know, you naturally sort of keep going to the end of that thing rather than drifting off into other, into other potential goals.

.David Brooks writes somewhere about how the way to deal with having too many things to do is to pick the things that you, that really sort of make you alive and then make them squeeze everything else out rather than trying to find a way to handle all the all the other things.

And a lot of my approach to handling overwhelm does involve neglect of of things that probably on some level ought to be done, but uh, but you got to choose

Joyful neglect or your Jomo approach.

That's a practice and a half.

Yeah.

Well, I'm, I, I don't want to take more of your, take up more of your fixed volume of podcasting time.

But before we leave, there's this, idea of three things that you believe to be true for you.

Personal truths.

I feel like I've got like a hundred, but the three that I'll pick as being maybe Very true, and maybe useful to other people.

Number one, I would say, It's never the wrong thing to look reality in the face.

To sort of, um, acknowledge where you are and how things are and to have conversations and to find things that I don't wanna go on about this, but, you know, I feel like the, the canonical example here is like people who stressed about money and don't want to check their bank balance in case they find that it's worse than they're expecting or who don't want to go to the doctors in case they find discover something bad about their health, right?

It's like it's always there's always more suffering and avoidance.

In the end, but in turning towards things and taking real stock of the situation, I have learned and have to continue to remind myself.

Number two, I would say, uh, I've written about this a lot, but is this fact that, uh, I sincerely believe is true, which is that, uh, everyone is winging it all the time.

That, um, other people's sense of confident certainty about where they're heading is mainly an act or an illusion of some kind.

And that feeling unready for doing the thing that you're doing is a, is a universal situation.

And I find that belief.

Uh, very consoling, but also empowering, because it means that if I feel I'm ready to do something, that's not a good reason not to do it, because, uh, nothing would ever get done if that was the, if that was the rule.

And then thirdly, I hope I can convey this idea in the, briefly, because I still struggle to do it, but the way I put it in a newsletter recently was that, um, I think you, you have to choose sanity now rather than later.

I mean, that if there is some value that you want to express in your life or some experience of peace of mind or of calm that you're sort of striving to create in your life, you sort of have to just decide to express it now and then work on sort of deepening ,it rather than buckling down and telling yourself that with enough stress and hard work It's going to be coming in a month or a year or something like that.

So, you know, it's it sounds very abstract, but I kind of mean like, you know, if If part of your goal for your life is that you get to do some writing every day, you have to just start doing some writing every day.

If part of your goal for your day is that there's always time to go on a walk for an hour, you have to kind of go on a walk for an hour today.

Not, not, not if your close family member is in the emergency room or something, but you know what I mean.

In putting aside the real exceptions.

Like it won't work to put that off to when you finally have the bandwidth to do it, because a, that time is never coming and be, all you'll be doing is reinforcing this psychological pattern that says fulfillment and peace of mind is in the future rather than now.

So you have to choose what you sort of how you want to show up and just do it now.

Not in a day or a week or a year.

I think you mentioned something similar all those years ago at that workshop about, I think your experience working at the Guardian and working, you mentioned government as well, this idea of imposter syndrome and how actually everyone's winging it behind the scenes in these organizations that we think are, you know, on the outside, they've got their stuff together, but actually on the inside, rarely work like that in the real world, which like you said, is super empowering.

And I found that too.

We've worked with people put on a pedestal.

They, they think that the beacon of clarity and Insight, but actually they're sort of still swans trying to work it out under the water.

No, thank you for your time.

Thank you.

Thanks for a great conversation.

I've really enjoyed it.