Self-Help Expert: Why Productivity Is Ruining Lives | Oliver Burkeman

There was a big shift when people started to think about time as a resource. Chasing dreams of super productivity is sort of chasing immortality. Getting on top of everything, especially in the modern world, is a mirage. It's not the right goal to have. Oliver Burkeman, author of Four Thousand Weeks, one million books sold on high performance. If you're ever going to make meaning and do cool stuff and build things and create and all the rest of it, it's going to have to be right here in the middle of the chaos. Life is problems. It's in that acceptance of how actually you're powerless in a certain way, powerless to just like completely change your personality, you get a lot more power because then you're free to just like act here and now. This episode is supported by Huel.

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Wow, it's a big question. I mean, I think there are all these different reasons that flow into each other, right? There's kind of historical reasons, economic culture that we live in, some of the religious traditions that inform our culture. But a big part of it now really is just that feeling that there's like an infinite amount of stuff that you need to get your arms around in order to stay afloat, or in order to pursue the goals or the objectives that matter to you. Infinite amount of stuff to read, to learn how to do, infinite number of emails to send or answer, all the rest of it. And so we get on this treadmill where we're trying to get more and more efficient at getting through these supplies of inputs, but that's not going to work because that's not how you know, because that's not how infinity works, right? You can't get your arms around it. And so we end up in this situation of trying to pack more and more and more in and never get the reward of feeling like we're getting through enough of it to sort of relax for a moment or gather our energies. And so it just sort of perpetuates and gets worse and worse. And yeah, and then busyness becomes like a status symbol. It becomes, it would have been insane to people in the pre-industrial era to learn that when you rose up through an organization or your business took off or something in the modern world, you get busier as a result. Like surely the whole point of higher status was to be able to spend your days banqueting and hunting stag and things like that, whereas now it's like, yeah, busyness shows that you're doing well, which is strange.

I mean, I think it happened at different stages. One of the big ones, a long time ago now, the process of like industrialization. There was a big shift when people started to think about time as a resource. I think, you know, prior to that, people did piecework, right? You did a thing, you made something, you sold it. It wasn't like you weren't selling your time then. As we started thinking about shift work and how to get the most out of a person's time, there's this natural pressure to kind of eke as much value as you can out of the somebody working for you in your factory, say. And then it becomes like personalized in the sort of white-collar work and then knowledge work, digital work that we have now. It's like a very personal thing, like I have to try to maximize my own value to myself by squeezing, squeezing, squeezing more value out of every given hour. And so, yeah, you naturally get to this place where the sheer fact of doing a lot of things seems to be like meaningful in itself, when it seems to me obviously isn't, right? Like it depends on the things you're doing. You could well be taking actions that were sort of directly detrimental to a company or a life. Sometimes not doing things is the right step, but we really just have this kind of like doing at all costs, and then maybe we'll get to the place of total optimization, perfect control, and after that it'll be plain sailing, but it's always in the future, you know.

Well, there are all sorts of kind of specific methods, and I really hope we'll get to them. I think the big picture idea here is that for a lot of us, maybe most of us today, we spend our lives in this state of like struggling towards this time when we're going to be in control, we're going to be on top of everything, we're going to have like nailed it all down. But it's always in the future, right? That moment when you feel like, okay, now I have financial security, now I have the productivity system that allows me to easily process anything that's thrown at me. Like it's always either a few months away or a couple of years away or the next productivity system away or something. And so we're sort of scrambling towards this place where we feel like then we would feel in control. And the thing about kayaks and super yachts is like what I want to say is really just being human, being a finite human means being in a little kayak on a river, doing what you can, as you don't know what's happening next. It's all a bit risky. All you can do is respond to things that happen in the moment. You can steer, you can have an objective in mind, a destination, but you can't sort of just sit back and find the system that's going to do it all for you, which is the analogy of the super yacht, you know, sort of sitting in this silent, serene, air-conditioned bridge and just like pressing some buttons and leaning back. So I want to advocate in everything I'm doing against this idea of postponing real life to the point when you've really figured it all out, and saying what we really have to do is learn to take imperfect but real action here and now, without feeling completely ready, without feeling on top of everything, because getting on top of everything, especially in the modern world, is a mirage. It's not the right goal to have.

I mean, yeah, and back in the day when I was working as a daily newspaper journalist and on deadline after deadline, I didn't realize that it was kind of everybody who has this feeling of being on the back foot permanently, trying to catch up, get to this point. I certainly felt it, but I thought maybe it was just me and in a few more years I'd figure out how to, you know, be as competent as everybody else, which is imposter syndrome, right? Another manifestation of this whole thing. One of my favorite studies in the whole of social psychology says that we probably don't know the full extent of the busyness epidemic because the very busiest people are too busy to take part in surveys about how busy they are. So, you know, I think it is absolutely epidemic. And even when it's not busyness, right, even if you think like that's not my problem, I don't have too much to do, and there are people, there's still something, there's still like some like I haven't quite figured out how to like do life yet, and maybe in the next book that I pick up in an airport or the next course I take or something, I'll finally get to that. And it holds us back.

I think the perspective shift where it begins, and all the sort of techniques and habits and everything follow on for me anyway from that kind of perspective shift, is just to get a little bit more comfortable with seeing like how it really is, how there is just always going to be too much to do for a human being. You're never going to feel, almost by definition, you're never going to feel ready to enter the next life stage or launch the next innovative venture in your life, right? Because it's new by definition. You're never going to be able to feel confident about the future. This is a big one, right? People want to say, well, let's just wait for this period of unsettling stuff to get in my life or in the news, whatever, let's just wait for that to get out of the way and then I'll get down to it. Seeing that you're not going to get there either, and that if you're ever going to make meaning and do cool stuff and build things and create and all the rest of it, it's going to have to be right here in the middle of the chaos and the not exactly knowing what you're doing and the probably having too many emails waiting for your answers. So it's really a skill of being willing to do things, however imperfectly, however briefly and stumblingly, but to actually do them instead of create all these amazing fantasies about how we're going to do them brilliantly later. And I guess that's the philosophy that I think of as imperfectionism.

Right, and you can, right, just not by doing more, getting, not right, exactly by just, the only way to get there is to do more, and then more comes. So yeah, of course, right. So it's like the only way to rest is to be restless, which just doesn't make any sense, right? It's directly opposed. I think the reason that, I mean, you can get there in isolated domains, right? So if all you really want to do in your life is be on top of your email, you can do it, but it will come at a cost of something that actually you care about more. Yeah, any of us could be completely on top of one of these streams if we just fixated on it. I think the reason we never get to the kind of security we're seeking, that sense of like, okay, now I am in the driver's seat of life, I mean, not to get too deep or depressing too early, but it's basically because like that's not what finite mortal humans get to do, right? That urge for security is really an urge to like be immortal, not to have to die, not to be limited in all the ways we are, just non-negotiable limited. So it's an escapism, right? It's saying like, I'm, it's sort of dreaming of this thing that might happen in the future as a sort of an excuse for not quite having to show up fully for life in the present, right? With all its unpredictabilities and vulnerabilities and all the things that are difficult about being in relationships or being a parent or anything. It's like it's saying, well, no, no, no, this isn't real. It's going to be problem-free in a little while, so I'll really dive in properly then. And so there's that kind of desire for, yeah, some system, some philosophy, some morning routine, you know, that you could sort of plug into your brain, and once it was installed, it would all just, you wouldn't have to worry about anything else. And I just don't think that's what it means to be human. One of the ways I've put it in my writing is, you know, it's very easy to fall into this notion that the time is going to come eventually in your life when you don't have problems and you can just get on with life because all the problems are out of the way. And actually, like life in a meaningful and not even depressing sense, life is problems. Life is getting really good at grappling with each new problem that comes your way and even choosing certain problems that you want to have because of what they lead to. In the new book I've written, I tell this story that Sam Harris, the podcaster and author, told about being at coffee, I think it was with a friend, and kind of he's like moaning on about all the problems that he's facing in his work and his life at the moment, and she interrupts him and says, hold on, are you still under the impression that one day you're going to get to the stage of your life where you don't have any problems? And he sort of realizes with a start that, yeah, unconsciously he had been doing this. Obviously it makes no sense intellectually. We all know that like there's going to be stuff, and on some level, the more you go through life, the more problems you can expect, right? Because you get older. But we do, a lot of us have this notion that there must be this problem-free time coming. And yet, I mean, firstly, there's just no reason to believe it would ever happen. But secondly, you wouldn't want it to happen because if you think about what a problem is in the broadest sense, it's just like something in the world that demands that you address yourself to it, and that is, I think, what gives meaning to our lives. If you really had the kind of total control over life that we think we want, that led to there being no problems, every single day was completely predictable, every single person you met you understood fully, every single, you know, football game you watched you knew the outcome, like all this would be, there'd be no fun in life. There would be none of what one scholar I quote calls resonance, you know, the thing that really makes life feel worth living actually depends on not having solved all our problems and not being in total control of it all.

Yeah, no, I love that way of putting it. And there's a psychotherapist who I've quoted a bit called Bruce Tift, who somewhere, I don't know where, I don't recall where, but it says like, imagine thinking about the thing that bothers you the most about yourself, right? So your problem with procrastination or your short temper or the thing you really wish you could get rid of, and just kind of imagine knowing that some version of that anxiety, whatever it might be, some version of that was going to be with you for the rest of your life. You're never going to get completely shot of it. And as he says, and as I've found, like many people find that incredibly liberating because it's not depressing at all. It's like, okay, this is just part of who I am. And now instead of postponing all the good stuff until I've fixed that, I can just do the good stuff now, and I can launch the projects and commit to the relationships and have the experiences now without waiting for that. It's in that acceptance of how actually you're powerless in a certain way, powerless to just like completely change your personality, you get a lot more power because then you're free to just like act here and now.

It's a really good point. I think there's a sort of a perspective shift, and then there's a specific technique. And the perspective shift is to say, well, in a sense, all our time is already 100% full, right? Because there's more things that we could usefully do with our time than we'll ever have the time to do. All you're doing in every moment is making a choice between the thing you do and all the things you choose not to do. And if you are at a stage in your life or a situation in your life where like running the family is a huge proportion of what you do, like that can be the source of meaning once you see that you are in some sense choosing that. I know it doesn't always feel like a choice, but everything is a trade-off in that respect. So the first thing to see, I think, is that if you are going to make more time for working on your screenplay that you want to write or your art career that you'd like to develop or your songs you want to write, whatever, something is going to have to give because that is just what it is to be a finite human. And there may be seasons of life where nothing can give, and if that's the case, then at least don't beat yourself up about it because like that is just what it is to be human. On the other hand, if there is anything that can give, you know, if actually your family would be fine if you took yourself away for half an hour a day, if actually your boss would be fine if you were a little bit slower but still reliable at responding to emails so that you could make a little time for something, it is on you to make that choice and to own that trade-off, as it were, and to accept the negative consequence, because there will always be one, in order to get the other thing. There's a creativity coach I love called Jessica Abel who has this idea of paying yourself first with time. What she means by that, and obviously it's an idea borrowed from personal financial advice and stuff, but is not to fall into this trap of waiting for the point in the future when you'll have all this other stuff out of the way and these amazing vistas of spare time and focus will magically emerge, and then you can write the novel, write the songs, develop the skill you want to learn, whatever. Instead, you just literally have to like claim it up front. So you do just have to say, where in my life today or this week is there half an hour, an hour, where I can just do this, make sort of a bridgehead into this activity, not like knowing that there will be people waiting for me and somebody's probably going to get impatient with me and I might get like judgment from people for doing it, but like that's just the trade-off I'm going to have to make if I'm going to do this with my life.

It's so interesting to me because it feels like a downer, and then actually when you really think about it, it's incredibly liberating. I mean, I feel like I say that about a lot of what I argue, but you know, that's why you argue it, because you believe it, which is great.

Yeah, no, completely. There's a quote in the new book from Sheldon Kopp, who was a great psychotherapist who died a couple of decades ago, and he says, 'You're free to do whatever you like, you need only face the consequences.' And this is a kind of an amazing mantra, I think, for many people, because I think we either think that we can't make certain choices in life, to leave certain jobs, leave relationships, we either think we just can't, or we want some way of doing this that will have no negative consequences at all. So it's like you either want to escape from negative consequences, or you're just like, this is the way it's got to be, I hate it, but we got to carry on this way. And he's pointing out like, no, you can do pretty much whatever you want, it's just that there will be negative consequences, and you have to take responsibility for those. So if you leave a certain professional situation, there might be financial insecurity. If you leave a certain relationship, there might be like agony and anguish caused for you and other people. But in certain contexts, that might be the right trade-off to make, and in other contexts it won't be, right? In other contexts you might say, oh, actually that urge to travel the world, it's not worth it to me given what I'd be giving up for it. It sounded nice, but actually I'd rather stay and commit to the situation that I'm in. It could go either way, but because you see that there's always this trade-off, I mean, the way I like to think about it is we're sort of looking for ways to be free from finite reality, but this is a way to be free in finite reality, because you say, well, okay, it's just the question of which negative consequences I want to own as the price for doing the things that matter the most to me.

Oh goodness, it's traumatizing just to talk about.

Sure, I'll happily talk about that nightmare on the Central Line. I should say as a preface, like you're right, but obviously this is like me, all these books are like me leaning myself into discomfort, right? It's exactly the stuff that I struggle with that ends up in these books, because that's why I feel motivated to write them. I think that's probably true of anyone writing kind of advice-type books, so it's always worth bearing in mind. This was a thing that I did when I was reporting my book The Antidote, the subtitle of which is 'Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking'. So it's all about like approaches to happiness that don't involve just really trying to force yourself to feel great all the time. And one of them is an exercise adapted loosely from Stoic philosophy by Albert Ellis, the great and completely eccentric psychotherapist, who actually proposed that you do this on the New York City subway. I was in London, so I did it on the Central Line, but the instructions are simple. You just take a ride on public transport and just as you come into each station, you just speak out loud the name of the station in the train car, in the carriage, so that everyone can hear you.

If you say, I've said this in public events and stuff, and like everyone is just like, and me too, right? Everyone is just like, oh my God, it would be so embarrassing to do it. And it's really interesting to think about why it should be so embarrassing, right? Because like you are not picking a fight with anybody, you are not trying to convert anybody to your religion or political cause, you're not revealing secrets about yourself. If anything, you're being kind of helpful, right? Because you're telling them the name of the station.

And this, I mean, I did, I spent a lot of time backing off from it as well, even during that experiment, I can tell you. But like when you do it, of course, you know what happens when you do it, right? Which is that like a couple of people briefly look at you like you're not all there, and then they go back to reading their, well, then it felt like it was a while ago now, but now it would just be phones, right? Only smartphones. And you know, people are wrapped up in their own troubles and they're not really thinking about you at all. And also the thing that I think Ellis thought was so important about this is even if it's bad, even if it's unpleasant, and you think at the end of it like I don't want to do that again in a hurry, which certainly was my attitude at the end of this experiment, it's not the end of the world, right? The sort of emotional, the anxiety that we have when we think in advance about doing all sorts of things, it's sort of a little bit like the world being completely destroyed in a nuclear war or something, right? I mean, that's the level of arousal and negativity that grips you, which is completely absurd when you then test the thing. The point is just to sort of pressure test your beliefs by bringing them into contact with reality and to see that most of the worst consequences that we go around fearing are just much more handleable than we think they would be. And at least for a while after that experiment, I don't want to say it persisted forever, you know, there was a sense of like, oh, I could sort of do anything now, right? You know, I mean, not literally, but if that's not an issue, then how many other sort of weird people-pleasing or shrinking violet tendencies that I've had can just be sort of let go of. So yeah, I don't know, we need a new epidemic of people doing that on the Central Line, maybe, or maybe not.

Yeah, I mean, I think obviously that book title is very broadly speaking the average lifespan in the developed world. I rounded it down for a nice title number, obviously it's got to have, you couldn't make it the specific number. And it is shocking at first. I was certainly shocked when I first made that calculation. But what I'm trying to do in that book is not say time is short, therefore you've got to like stress out about trying to cram every second of your life with the most exciting, most impressive accomplishments you possibly can, because that is not a nice way to live.

What I really want to say, again, at first sounds depressing, but I promise you it isn't, is actually life is so short, the time we get is so little, that there's no possibility of doing more than tasting a few things from the kind of banquet of things life has to offer. And that is why you can let go of that kind of self-berating, endless struggle to cram stuff in, and instead pour your time and attention and energy into the few things that you've decided really, really matter for you in this season of your life. And it's very focused on productivity of a meaningful kind, right? Because it's like letting go of trying to get everything in order so that you can do everything, and it's really just plunging into the handful of things. I think there's this really, I mean, I've mentioned this a little bit already, but there's this really dangerous tendency to sort of postpone full engagement with life, and a strong understanding of just how finite and mortal we are can really work as a good antidote to that, because it's like at some point if you're going to do the things you know you want to do in your life, like you're going to have to do them in a present moment. Yeah. There's a great, great quote from John Maynard Keynes, the economist, about how the purposive man, he puts it, he meant like, you know, people who are really focused on being productive for productivity's sake or whatever, doesn't really love his cat, but only his cat's kittens, nor in truth the kittens, but only the kittens' kittens, and so on forward forever to the end of catdom. So it's just this lovely idea that like you never really get to be fully here in life because it's all about getting to the point where you can get your arms around everything. And the understanding that time will eventually run out, and you actually don't know when, and that's going to be, is really powerful as an antidote to that tendency, which is one of the reasons why I have tattooed on my wrist, which I had done in this studio actually, my tattoo done here.

Payhawk has changed everything. I can control the company spend in just a few clicks, all our day-to-day tasks are automated, and I have more time to take part in strategic decision making. I mean, too easy. But here's my secret: I miss the old days, collecting receipts, worrying when a sales rep leaves with the company card, getting surprised by the cash flow. That's all in the past with Payhawk.

Yeah, I think we... I think what we do... I love the tattoo, by the way. I'd be interested to know whether it, um, does it sort of fade into the background or does it still work? Does it work as a reminder? It works as a reminder because I talk about it, right? And it's there, and it captures you sometimes. But I love telling people that I've got it because I'm very much in the camp that people are not living a life understanding that we're all dying, you know. The Daily Mail is the worst for always having stories about people finding out that they've got some terminal diagnosis at a young age, and the reason why they put those stories out there, I guess, is because they know people click on it, because we're fascinated with what must that feel to be told at a young age you're dying. Well, I can give both of you a terminal diagnosis right now, and you can give one to me and everyone else in this room. Like, I'm afraid to say that, you know, when you see someone say, 'I couldn't believe it when the doctor said it was terminal,' well, I can go to the doctor now and ask him, 'Am I terminal?' and the answer is yes, right? Yeah, so it's about the power of getting to this place, I don't think can be underestimated.