How To Be Sanely Productive | Oliver Burkeman

I think imperf perfectionism is just my umbrella term. You know, you gotta have a proprietary concept, right? I think it's my umbrella term for that orientation towards life that kind of starts from the perspective of accepting our limitations, right? It's like instead of constantly struggling to get everything done or feel completely certain about where the future is headed, all the rest of it. What if you began from understanding that there would always be too much to do, that we would never be able to be confident about what the future held, that we would never be able to be confident about understanding fully the other people in our lives? You know, all these different ways in which we're limited. How could that be a starting point for a sort of active and immersed and calm life instead of, you know, instead of the way we usually handle things?

Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. And I think that that is a kind of perfectionism, right? I do. I should also have said, I think a lot of people think about perfectionism in a very narrow way as just being about wanting to produce perfect work. But all these ideas that the time is coming when we can finally say our lives are in working order, and we can sit back and relax, be on cruise control, all the, you know, people pleasing, the way we try to make sure everyone's happy with us at all times, I think they can all be seen as forms of perfectionism. So I suppose that's what imperf perfectionism is pushing back against. But yeah, I totally share that illusory fantasy. Yeah.

Or to put it in a different way, I guess, but then we could finally feel, yeah, we could feel like we'd earned our right to exist on the planet. We could feel like we'd done what we needed to do in order to deem ourselves to be okay. And yes, right. And then eat ice cream.

Yeah, and I think something about the way you put it then, I really like, because I do think it's important to say that I think this is incredibly empowering, right? I think there's a tendency maybe to sort of, I hear people talking about how limited we are and think that what we're talking about here is settling for a life of mediocrity or lowering your standards or something like that. And it really isn't. I mean, certainly in my personal experience, it was when I began to let up on this fantasy that the perfect time of everything being in full working order was ever coming, it was precisely then that I was able to plunge more wholeheartedly into doing some meaningful and interesting and enjoyable things right now. Because for as long as that time is still coming, I mean, I think this is the psychological agenda that we're pursuing, right? As long as that time is still coming, you don't quite have to participate as fully as you might in your present life. You don't have to sort of experience the intensity and often negativity of like really showing up because you can just tell yourself, you know, subconsciously, this isn't the real thing yet. But it kind of is.

Yeah, I think that that's right. The glory encompassing lots of unpleasantness as well. But I think that, you know, we don't, or I proceed on the assumption that we don't just do things for completely irrational, stupid reasons. I think it makes that feeling, which is a feeling that control is coming later, that we lack the control and security and firm ground beneath our feet that we think we need, but we have some kind of a plan to get it, which involves, you know, finding a new productivity system or a new spiritual discipline or just summoning more self-discipline than you've ever shown at any prior date in your entire life. But now it's gonna change, that you are en route to that control in the future, is a nice illusion to have on some level. I mean, it's bad because it drains your ability to participate in life, but it has this payoff, which is this feeling that, okay, I might feel vulnerable and out of control now, but that's all gonna change.

What I used to do. So I started my career as a, well, first as a sort of junior newspaper researcher and then as a newspaper writer. And, you know, it wasn't that I didn't produce things. I did, I produced a lot of things in a sort of intensely deadline-driven environment. I know you're very familiar with deadline-driven environments, but it was agony because I was constantly telling myself that after the next deadline, right? That was when I was gonna take a deep breath, figure out how to do this thing, stop just like eating junk and not seeing my friends and not taking any exercise while I worked. I was gonna figure out how to integrate all this stuff, but it was always coming next. On one hand, it wasn't that I was unproductive, but I was sort of miserably productive. And then in another sense, it wasn't productivity on the most important things because in that mindset there was, you know, I would never spend the time that I needed to sort of work on the thing that wasn't urgent but was important and could really make a difference to my career or to maybe even to the world somehow. I would never dedicate energy and attention to that thing because that thing needed someone who knew what they were doing. That thing needed lots of time and not to have any other deadlines pressing down on me and not to be in a situation of felt chaos. So I don't wanna say that I sort of did nothing before this realization began to dawn, but I didn't enjoy what I did as much as I could have done. And I think I sort of systematically postponed the things that mattered the most. And by the way, it comes so naturally to me to talk about this in the context of work, but I think I can see the same pattern in my life and other people's in relationships and psychological growth in general, and parenting and all the rest of it.

I mean, firstly, it's a slow process, right? It's gradual, not sudden enlightenment. If it's enlightenment, which I guess it isn't, but, you know, as gradual growth rather than a totally sudden transformation. But it's kind of, the answer to your question is both, right? On the one hand, it looks like being willing to let certain things go, to accept that, you know, some thing that feels like an obligation because someone might get mad at me if I didn't do it, maybe needs to be deprioritized and maybe I need to pay the price of risking that they'll get mad at me. There are contexts where you can't do that if you want to keep your job, and there are contexts where you can do it and you just have to sort of bear the consequence. But the other thing is that if you get to the place where you're a bit more willing to spend your time on the things that you really care about the most, instead of postponing them all to this moment of perfect security and control and knowing what you're doing later on, you do just feel the pressures of time and of being finite less acutely because you know that you are using at least some of your time in the day to do something that you want to be doing. So if I get a bit of time in the day to work on a book and I have some of the time in the day to hang out with my son, I could be miles away from anything like perfection in how I'm using my time. But because I'm not just systematically putting all the good stuff into the future while I deal with stuff that I just wanna get out of the way, already there's a sort of calmer relationship with time and finitude, I would say.

It does. Let me just say, like, interject and add a little bit. This was really important to me in this book that, like, this structure again, yes, nobody is obliged to read one of the short chapters each day for four weeks, but I wanted to have that option because I have just found both in writing stuff, but also in consuming writing and attempting to grow psychologically in various ways and follow various techniques, that I really need something that can sort of fold itself into my daily life as it is, rather than be one of these things that's like, okay, this is a great system, but I'm gonna need to get clear of everything and have several weeks to put it into practice. I think this speaks to formal, you know, meditation as well. I'm not using the word meditations in this title in that sense. There's caused a bit of confusion already. But I'm talking about sort of phrases and ideas to ponder, but I think there's something really important that was part of my goal here in having things that could just sort of seep into your daily life as it is now with the overwhelm and the lack of time, and maybe make a little bit of a difference there instead of like, here's my complicated system and, you know, you'd better have a lot of time on your hands if you want to implement it. Right?

Yeah, I just think like, I like this idea because if I can communicate what I mean here, the flavor of what I mean, it kind of sets us up for all the rest of it. I think that there is nothing more sort of liberating and energizing than to understand certain ways in which the human condition is worse than we think it is. And that's obviously intended to be funny in a way, but I think it's really true. If you think to pick the obvious example of busyness and overwhelm, if you go through your life thinking that getting on top of all the things, meeting all the obligations is really, really difficult, then that makes life into a huge struggle. But if you go one step further and realize the sense in which it's completely impossible, that's kind of not so much of a struggle anymore. 'Cause then it's like, oh, okay, like all I can do is to pick what seem like the most important ones, however you're gonna define that, and focus on those. Just one more example of the same idea, imposter syndrome. If you think that the problem is that everyone else knows how to do their job or be a parent or whatever, and you don't yet, then you're gonna feel like it takes an awful lot of energy and discipline and experience and learning so you can get up to their level. But if you go one step further and realize that like everybody's just kind of winging it all the time and some are just more confident in their facade than other people, well then, again, the pressure's off and you can sort of show up more fully for things now and take bold actions now and launch new projects now instead of waiting for that time. So I think there's this kind of pattern in a lot of what I write about, which is actually the sort of liberation of seeing just how finite we are.

This is just a sort of image that always helped me. One sort of analogy for looking at what it is to be human is to be in a little one-person kayak on a river. You kind of just, you don't know exactly what's coming next. You don't know when the white water or the still parts are going to come. All you can really do is kind of navigate as best you can in the moment and try to move forward that way. It's kind of vulnerable. It could get very scary, but it's also really kind of exhilarating and alive and you can feel the spray of the water on your face and all the rest of it. Whereas I think that a lot of what we would like and what sort of some maybe bad self-help encourages us to pursue is what I describe as being in a super yacht. Slightly tests the limits of my experience of what it's like to be the captain of a super yacht. I do not have detailed nautical experience in this regard, but I'm talking about, you know, being up on the third story bridge of an extraordinarily large vessel in a sort of air-conditioned area where you program your destination into a computer and you sort of sit back and you're in control. You're above it all. And you get to just let these plans work themselves out and you get to just sort of hang out and look forward to your destination. You feel totally confident that you're getting there. That's not what human life is about, but I think it's often what we wish human life was about. So I'm sort of encouraging people to sort of accept that they're already and always in the kayak rather than engaging in too much of this fantasy of super yacht life.

This is one of the most obvious ways in which this makes a difference. And I've had to learn this the hard way, and I'm still learning it, I think. But anything that you actually do towards a meaningful project, a meaningful activity in your life, however stumbling it might be, however incompetently you might do it, however little confidence you have that you'll come back and do it the next day or the next day or the next, that's just got to still be immeasurably more valuable than all the kind of hypothetical plans for massive life transformations that you're going to achieve. And I think one place that trips people up is in the idea of sort of cultivating good habits. Obviously I don't really think that it's bad to have good habits, but it can be really unhelpful to sort of decide to yourself, okay, now I'm going to become the kind of person who journals every day or indeed meditates for a very long period every day or anything else because then you're turning it into this huge undertaking that stretches off into the future that you're sort of not okay until you've embedded it. And for all sorts of reasons that will be familiar to you and others, these are just sort of liable to cause you to not become the kind of person who does any of those things. Whereas the moment you can just say like, okay, the only thing I can control is whether or not I sit down for 10 minutes today and do what I think meditation is or what I think is useful journaling or paying more attention to my kids, or whatever your goal is. That's the only way that it becomes concrete, but it requires a giving up of control. Whereas the sort of life transformation thing is an attempt to impose control and say like, from now on I'm gonna be a different kind of person. So that's more super yacht, and just doing it with no guarantee of what's coming next is more kayak, to maybe overstretch my analogy here.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Yeah, I mean, I think all these kind of, what you might call pathologies of seeking control, seeking security are kinds of avoidance. 'Cause there are ways of sort of saying, well, look, life feels out of control or confusing or bewildering or upsetting now, but I'm engaging in the activity that will get me to the place where that's no longer true. So yeah, planning is a great example. If you're using planning to sort of, yeah, to try to bring the future under control by thinking through all the things that could happen and figuring out how to respond to them all and getting your schedule, you know, absolutely precise stretching off months and months into the future, the payoff to that is to feel in the moment again like, okay, you may not know what's going on in the world right now, but you're gonna be okay later. All sorts of reasons why this is not how it goes, because, you know, firstly because things happen that you can't control. Secondly, because however far ahead into the future you plan, there's always like another bit of future that you've got to plan after that. So it's sort of baked in that you'll never get closure acting like that. Yeah, it's a sort of an attempt to cross every possible bridge you could cross before you get to it. And that can't work because, yeah, because you haven't got to any of those bridges yet, so you're just fantasizing. I think there's just one example, and, you know, there's one that I come from a family of people who sort of, you know, want the full schedule for their vacation to be planned down to the hour several months in advance. My father denies this, but of course he would. So that's the one that's very close to my heart, understanding how it doesn't actually assuage the anxiety it's meant to assuage. It sort of exacerbates it, but this crops up in a million different other ways.

Yeah. So I think this is a really interesting dimension of kind of productivity gone wrong and optimization gone wrong and the quest for control gone wrong because we don't think about it so much. It's not so obvious, but I think that for a lot of us, there is this feeling that like we ought to be doing something or at least caring about everything that's going on in the world at a time in history when it really feels like we're sort of living through history with a capital H. And I think, you know, it's pretty easy to see that if you come up with 10 ideas for businesses you wanna launch, you're gonna have to pick one or two. Or if you have 50,000 emails in your inbox, you're gonna have to come up with some method that doesn't involve getting through them all the next couple of days. I think it's a little harder to see that actually your ability to meaningfully respond to any given crisis in the world, any given instance of suffering, is also gonna depend on your willingness to kind of neglect other ones. Especially at a time like this that feels as so many sort of multidimensional unfolding things to feel stressed or anxious about. And I think we overlook the way that the news media environment these days is basically a sort of, I mean, it's problematic in all sorts of ways, but one of them is that sort of demand that you treat every new development or every cause as the most important one, and it goes against the grain for anyone who feels sort of broadly well-meaning in life to say, well, I'm not going to dedicate brain space to this issue or that issue because I'm going to focus on this one for my charitable donations or my volunteering work or something. I think we have to do it. Otherwise, what we're doing is sort of emoting in a dissipated way over an enormous amount of awfulness.

Yeah. I mean, one of the questions is to do with which things you pay attention to. The other is to do with how you understand your own capacity to do something about it, right? I think that when our sort of horizons are set too broadly precisely because we feel very strongly about something and our hearts go out to the people involved, or we are terrified by what the story represents, that can actually be really sort of disempowering because you're trying to sort of engage with it at that level that is beyond that of an individual limited human, right? This is why people say, and they're completely correct to say, that action is the antidote to despair. That it is really difficult to feel hopeless about any area of national or international life if you just sort of do some small thing to address yourself to it. One of the problems, of course, is that the sort of social media landscape encourages us to think that emoting or expressing our condemnation and all these other things are a form of doing, and yet very swiftly we realize that they leave us feeling more powerless than before because they don't have any effect. So I think it is, yeah, it's about picking your battles, not feeling guilty about letting go of certain things and recognizing, yeah, if you spend 10 minutes of the day doing something that makes the world a better place, and the rest of the day watching TV shows and eating potato chips, that's more effective, that's being a better citizen than the person who spends the whole day just sort of expressing how bad they feel about the things on social media, for example.

It was clear when I put this book together I was gonna have to really go deep on this question of deciding, 'cause I think in some ways, being willing to make, take decisions is the sort of ultimate expression of what it is to be finite, right? It's to decide to do some things and not others, to decide to move forward with some project when you're sort of roughly happy with where you're at with it instead of holding out for perfection. And I've found that one really useful framing here is to stop thinking about decisions as we usually do, I think, as things that just sort of come along. You're sort of rambling through your life and then suddenly, oh, you've gotta decide, you know, life presents you with a decision. It could be a big decision about a career move, it could be a little decision. And think instead about decisions as things to sort of go looking for, things to sort of look at. Say, I mean, obvious example, it feels if I'm sort of stuck on some sort of creative project and it just feels all sort of gloopy and directionless and I don't know what to do, the answer almost always is to find some decision in the morass that I could take and take it. So, easy example I give in the book is like, if you're trying to do something that involves launching something online, you wanna launch a website of some kind, just choosing which provider you're gonna use and committing to that gets you, that's a decision. It's a tiny decision. It's not an important decision in the scheme of things, but it's just a tiny, real example of what we're doing all the time in life, which is anyway, whether we are conscious of it or not, which is choosing one path over thousands of alternative paths. I think you can apply this in relationships. You can apply this in any area of life. It's not about making a grand gesture or making a big change to your life. It's about just going, looking for something that would close off some options. I think that's always the way to get forward motion when you feel stuck.

Yeah, I like, I love both of those. The first one speaks a little bit more to the chapter in this book about sort of allowing things to be easy and being willing to not assume that if something's worth doing, it must be really hard and grueling. And the one from Ellen Langer, absolutely. I think she's getting at a similar idea. It's the deciding that matters more than it is. You decide, at least very often in life, maybe one can come up with exceptions, but it is that sort of, it's what is represented by the idea of saying, I could take one of 10 paths here but I can only take one and I commit to taking that one. You know, it's obviously got obvious uses in terms of like whether to enter into a long-term relationship or whether to become a parent and all sorts of things. But it really has a lot of use on a much more sort of micro level of, you know, which of the six tasks on my to-do list will I do now, or which opening shall I use for this chapter of the two or three that I can think of. It's the willingness to say, I will choose that, that gets you on your way and that turns out the best work or the best experiences in the end, I'm pretty sure, rather than hanging back to make the exact right decision.

Yeah, that's so great. And I mean, the other thing that puts me in mind of is like, you can work up to this, right? This is not all about suddenly from nowhere summoning the strength of character to like quit a job or move cities or completely change on a dime. You can, like it helps to do this on the level of what you're cooking for dinner. Then you can sort of work from there. Because this, even though the consequences could be very different, the basic move, which is like, I have to let go of some possibilities here, it's the same move.

This was a big revelation for me. I think that we, again, maybe this is more like a certain kind of person that I am, have a tendency to sort of drag through life a whole lot of kind of semi-finished, unfinished projects. Things that you felt excited about when you began them or things that you should have just dispensed with but couldn't quite bring yourself to the thought of finishing them. The thought of getting, of sort of switching to a spirit of finishing things where your method of working or of acting is to sort of pick something, do it and see it through to completion, then move on to the next one, feels like that will be exhausting. A coach I quote in the book, Steve Chandler, points out really vividly, it's the opposite, right? It makes you, it brings energy. There's something about closing things up that's on your plate that, because it entails sort of falling in line with the truth about reality, which is that we can only really do one thing at a time and we're moving sequentially through our lives, there's something about that that sort of puts the wind beneath your wings. Is that right? And so, you know, I think it's important. Just a couple of quick caveats, right? Obviously, I don't mean that you can start and finish an enormous project before moving on to the next one. You're not gonna say like, move house and then do nothing else in your life until you've succeeded in moving house. It's about, what you should do is come up with some very small, manageable chunk and do that and finish that. And secondly, like abandoning things is a form of finishing. I don't think you have to sort of get to the end of every book you start or get to the end of every project you begin. But you do have to be a bit conscious about saying, okay, I am now leaving this aside and giving up on this. It's that sort of strange but very understandable tendency to want to sort of keep 25 things on the boil. There's something very deep going on about the idea that if you have all these different things on the boil, you must have the capacity to do them. It makes you important. You must be going to live long enough to finish them. You know what I mean? There's something quite appealing about that feeling of having too many things on the go at once and something that takes a little bit of will on some level to actually take yourself through them sequentially and start finishing them.

Right? Yes. It makes you feel indispensable. I think I'm, I'm very similar. I, I think it's important. I'm, I'm sure you are better at it than you were, and I'm, uh, or I would imagine that you are, and, and I think I'm better at this than I was. That's always the comparison that needs to be made. But to this day, right, the lure of sort of taking something else on is the lure of like mattering and having the bandwidth to do it and being able to, um, show that you can do it and, and all these things. Even having someone sort of impatiently waiting for you to get back to an email from them, although it on balance is bad for your professional reputation, I assume, uh, in most cases, like you matter, you can't, you can't deny that you matter to that person.

Um, so I'm, I'm writing there about, you know, this general sense that a certain, again, a certain kind of person, I think it's lots of us, I think it's historically been me, uh, is looking for the, the protocol, the set of rules, the, the system that would just make everything run smoothly once and for all. And it's almost like a deal, right? It's like I follow, I'll agree to follow these rules obediently to the letter in return, the system will somehow live life on my behalf. I won't quite have to take responsibility for every moment. It'll just be a sort of automatic process that just works because I'm following the rules. And what happens then, I think, is that very swiftly, you are effectively serving the rules. They're not helping you as a way to achieve the things you want to achieve in your life, that they turn into a, a thing that you have to follow. And, you know, at the extreme end, I suppose that's what a lot of cult-type organizations are, but I think, you know, many of us who don't fall prey to that still, still do this. And what I was, so why I was so taken with this idea of meditating or doing anything else daily-ish, is because like, this is a real form of discipline, right? It, it, it, the daily-ish is not synonymous with, um, just do it whenever you like or whenever it seems easy to do it. And you know that if you've resolved to pursue some habit daily-ish and you do it twice a week, in a week that you did not do it daily-ish. But you know also that maybe in very busy times, four times a week might get to count. You know, that five or six certainly does. And that level of kind of give is a good example, I think, of taking a rule. In that case, the rule is I am going to meditate or whatever else daily-ish. And it's a tool that you're using to bring yourself more fully into life instead of, you know, deciding that you're going to absolutely, consistently, rigidly meditate every single day. Then of course, you know, the moment you fall off the wagon, it's a much bigger disaster. Um, you can never achieve any kind of sense of rest in that process because the, the, the question is always whether you're gonna do it again tomorrow, and so on and so on. So, yeah, that's why I love daily-ish. Thank you. And thank you to whoever, uh, originated it.

I think we seem to live, a lot of us, with this idea that there is going to come a time in the future when we finally don't have problems, right? When we finally got our lives running in such a way that problems, uh, don't arise. The shame of this is that obviously it means that any problem you do face in your life is kind of doubly problematic because firstly, there's like whatever you're trying to deal with, the, you know, the interpersonal issue at work or the creative difficulty in the thing you're writing, whatever it might be. And then there's this sort of fact that the problem exists at all. I think this is just one manifestation of what we've been talking about, right? This idea that the, that this age of peace and plenty is coming later when you figure out how to get there. And the idea of developing a taste for having problems is just, is just the invitation to see that this time is never coming. If, if anything, I think you can expect certain kinds of problem to get worse the older you get. And also that at the deepest sense, you wouldn't want, uh, a life without problems. Important caveat, of course, there are many specific kinds of problems that you wouldn't wish on anybody, and many that I'm privileged not to have experienced, et cetera, et cetera. But the sheer fact of, you know, having things, puzzles in life that you need to work out, that address, address yourself to, like if you didn't have those, if you were at the stage where you could just sit back and eat ice cream, that would be no life. There'd be nothing absorbing at all. So I quote a friend in there who, who, you know, found herself thinking that if only she didn't have all these problems she was dealing with, she could really do her job well. And then the realization dawning that no, the problems were the job, the problems were why she had the job. If there were none of these problems, then the steps in the job could possibly be sort of, you know, automated or outsourced or conducted by, uh, artificial intelligence. The real human thing that we are here to do on some level is to, is to solve problems. So, um, I think that's what I mean by developing a, developing a taste for it, seeing that, like, there's something really stable about that.