Oliver Burkeman: How to Live a Meaningfully Productive Life

Thank you very much for having me on.

Oh, it's a lovely way to put it.

I'm glad to hear it. Yeah. No, I mean, and I'm so specifically glad if you felt like the experience of reading it affected the change in some way because that was what I really wanted to do. I didn't want to do one of these books where it's like, here are the 20 things to put my system into practice and then you never get around to putting it into practice, right? Because you're too busy or whatever. It's like, can you actually go through some of that change by reading the book?

Thanks. Yeah. No, I mean, I think it's it I have been told in the past that people use the word confronting to describe the stuff I write, and I never really come across that use of the word until people started saying they found my books confronting. But I think that, yeah, there is something, isn't there, about like the discomfort of facing certain truths about both about like reality in the world and then about like, yeah, the personalities of those of us who are into this stuff, that is kind of unpleasant, but it's a good kind of unpleasant in the long run, right? It's like you end up more resilient or calm or something as a result of having gone through that.

I mean, I say I'm a writer and an author and a journalist usually because the journalism side of this is still really important to me, even though I'm not like working on a daily newspaper anymore. On what I write about, I don't know, productivity, philosophy, mortality, I don't know, then I sort of get on with a long list of things I think. I guess what it is is human limitation, right? The ways in which we're limited as humans, the sort of non-negotiable ways in which we're finite, and how kind of stepping into that instead of trying to avoid feeling the truth of it is actually a real portal to, you know, doing more, feeling better, living a more fulfilling life. It's not something to be sort of to sort of run away from in horror.

I mean, there were many moments, and I sort of write about this a little bit in the introduction to this book. Looking back now at me in my sort of mid-20s, working at the Guardian in this context where I was like, I was at the place I sort of dreamed of working at one day in my life, but quite early on in my career in this very sort of deadline-driven environment. It's even more high pressure in certain ways now because the internet was only really getting started.

But this idea, like you're constantly working towards, you know, a deadline at the end of the day, and then maybe you get a day or two's more relaxed, but then there's another one and then another one. And for anyone who wants to try to like feel in control of their working lives, which is a big part of what's going on, I think, with that kind of productivity obsession, it's really useful, but it's also really terrible, right? Because you're kind of I was constantly telling myself, right, okay, right now I'm behind and I should be going faster and I should be more productive and more organized, but just as soon as I've got this deadline out of the way, then I'll like take a breath and I'll like sort things out and I'll start eating better and spending more time with my friends and not just like existing on pizza and coke and trying to get through to the next deadline. But then of course there's always another deadline and another deadline. So you end up kind of living in this state of mind that says like, soon in the future I'm going to finally figure out how to do this and be in charge of it, but I'm never quite there. And I think that yearning to feel like you know what the heck you're doing and that you're in control of it is, yeah, is what powers a lot of interest in productivity systems, apps, gurus, all the rest of that.

Yeah. I mean, in general, right, like being very overwhelmed with stuff prompts you to try to deal with it in ways that leave you feeling more overwhelmed. The example I give in the book, previous book I wrote, 4,000 Weeks, is like email is a classic example of this that most people can relate to. If you have a sort of completely overloaded inbox and you say to yourself like, 'Okay, I'm going to get on top of this now. This has gone on long enough. I've got to sort of handle this.' And then you start answering email at a much more rapid pace than you did before. Staying on top of it, you just get more email, right? Because you reply to more people quickly and they reply to you and you get a reputation for being responsive on email. So more people email you in your organization or whatever. And so there's this pattern that repeats. I called it the efficiency trap in 4,000 Weeks, right? This pattern that repeats through all sorts of domains where if all you do is try to make any system more efficient, including like yourself because you're feeling like you've got too much you want to do, the main result, all else being equal, is that like more and more inputs will be attracted into that system. So you won't end up any less busy or stressed than before.

I mean, yes and no, right? And the no part is that I was totally in this situation long before much social media existed. I mean, I'm of an age, Generation X, such that computer technology and to some extent the internet was in the water from when I was a sort of teenager, but social media is a development of some time after that, and I was already deep in that kind of feeling of needing to do more to feel all right about myself. So talk about that if you like, but I definitely think it's a sort of an exacerbator and a catalyst because, you know, apart from anything else, it's a very appealing when you're stuck in that space, you want more advice that implies like it might be the silver bullet to get, you know, the one thing that if you started doing, you'd finally get to that plateau of being in control. Or if it feels more like what you need is kind of gumption and mindset, then you need to keep consuming those messages to keep you lifted up and sort of high on that stuff. So I definitely think there's a it's a bit like, you know, we talk about how social media spreads a lot of anxiety about political topics or about anger about political topics or about like whether AI is going to lead to the end of the world or all these kind of apocalyptic visions that are all to do with like anxiety is kind of contagious, and I think anxiety about productivity is contagious too. And like the message that, yeah, if you just emulated somebody a bit in a slightly more disciplined way or you got up another half hour earlier or in some other way you sort of like squelched your desire to like rest and relax and sleep or whatever, then you'd finally get there. I think that's a very, very seductive message.

Right. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, I think there are so many different reasons that it's almost not worth trying to identify like specifically one of them. I'm sure that it's a sort of combination of evolutionary reasons and like capitalism, and there's lots of religious influences in there as well. The Protestant work ethic, right, is one of the classic ways of understanding this notion that through the amount of work that you do, you demonstrate that you're like saved in a religious sense. But there's something of that even for those of us who are like sort of completely secular, there is that sense of like there's something like salvation related in this idea, this idea that if you could only get enough done and be a kind of person who was sufficiently optimized to do all the things that life threw at you and all the things you wanted to do, like then you would reach this level of adequacy. And obviously, you know, like consumer capitalism has a great interest in keeping us feeling like we're not quite there yet because then you keep working and you keep buying and spending all the rest of it. Maybe even evolution, I'm a little bit usually suspicious of evolutionary arguments, but like, yeah, evolution doesn't have a strong interest in your being happy, right? It has a strong interest in your being just dissatisfied enough to keep doing all the things it wants you to be doing.

I think what it adds up to for a lot of us is that feeling that I think you were referring to earlier, right, that it's not like you'd like to achieve a whole bunch of stuff because that would be fantastic and your life could be even better than it is now and you could help lots of people and it would be satisfying. It's like you have to do all this stuff because then maybe you get up to the baseline level of like, okay, I'm gonna be financially okay and I can feel good about myself and la. So it's like all this struggle just to be like just about all right. And I think you see that in a lot of people who are like famously very wealthy and successful and powerful, right? They're doing it fueled by some kind of pretty deep insecurity.

And I often think about how people act in accordance to their reward systems.

I think something significant happened to me around that college time, right? Because I wasn't a super anxious kid at school and I was a ball of anxiety at university. And I mean, I don't want to make it sound like I came from a very, very gritty working-class comprehensive school. It was a pretty like comfortable kind of comprehensive school. But still, you know, you find it sort of relatively easy to be I found it relatively easy to be like do very well compared to the average like in that school, and I was probably had, you know, one of the more privileged lives of people in that school. And then suddenly you're in this domain where like everybody's only there because they were the top of their class in the whole country, and a whole lot of them come with this kind of like infused into their blood confidence that you get from a different another layer again of the class system. So yeah, like at that point I became sort of very stressed out that I didn't have what it took to do well enough. And also, and this I get from goodness knows where, I mean I can speculate, but like also this sense that that was like life or death, right? Because that's one of the things that I think goes along with this mindset is not just that you really, really, really want to like do more and drive yourself harder, but that if you didn't, that would be like a total calamity. And partly, you know, the economic system that we live in reinforces that, right? It is really bad if you can't get the qualifications you need and find the job opportunities you need. Things are not, you know, things are not good for people who have the misfortune to not be able to do that. But at the same time, you know, like it would have been okay if I hadn't got like the best possible grade in the best possible class of degree or whatever. And I don't think I was aware of that at all during my college days. I think I was basically like, this is just I've just got to excel in this otherwise like it's all over. It's very strange because I don't think I got that message at least overtly from my parents. I think that I yeah I but I got to Cambridge and was yeah felt I had to do anything I possibly could to try to like keep my head above water.

Yeah, I think it's a really good question, and although I don't work inside one of those environments, you know, we all work inside this culture which has a lot of the same messages. I think a big part of the point is to really sort of emphasize this thing which you've already touched on, that like this although I think this does point to a sort of slower and gentler and calmer pace of life, I also think it leads to more accomplishment on the things that matter, right? So I do think that whatever autonomy you have in a corporate context to sort of say, let me go off and do my thing, like the results are going to speak for themselves to some extent. There is that awkward conversation depending on the context where you have to say like, you know, can we experiment with this? Cal Newport, who I'm sure you're familiar with his work, has done like a lot of interesting work on this specific question of like persuading senior management to experiment to see if it isn't in their own best interests to let these things happen, because I really think that they ultimately are the sort of productivity-at-all-costs approach not only leaves people burned out and unsatisfied and wanting to look for another job, but there are reasons why it sort of systematically prioritizes the wrong work and systematically causes people to focus on the things that they can either, you know, get the quickest burst of dopamine for having finished or the quickest proof of life in the surveillance systems of the company to show that they're doing things. But that is going to almost always mean not the things that move the needle the most, right? For the organization as much as for the individual.

The other side of it, I guess, is just that like it's like an internal sorry, I haven't tapped the microphone. The other side of it is it's like an internal psychological process ultimately, right? You go to your desk and you have to make choices as a finite human with a vastly greater range of things you could do with the next hour than you're going to be able to do with the next hour because you can only be in one place at one time. And to some extent, even if the culture around you demands that you do 20 things with that time, like pretending that you're ever going to meet that request isn't going to help anybody. And so there's actually a sort of inner discipline of like, okay, these are the inputs, these are the pressures, and this is what I'm going to do because the reality is I'm finite, whatever the management might wish.

I mean, I don't want to underestimate the importance of financial security and things like that, right? And to some extent, this is a sort of Maslow's hierarchy of needs question. Like you do need to focus on certain things in order to have the luxury to focus on the next ones. I think the big danger is to imagine that this kind of finding your life purpose, working out your guiding values is some kind of top-down thing where you're going to go away on a retreat for a week or, you know, whatever, and then come up with a system, and then you're going to like force your life to comply with this system on some level, right? The list of things that make for a meaningful life is so universal that it's kind of boring, right? Where everyone knows that it's rich social relationships, that it's time to yourself and time with others, time in nature, doing things that feel like they make a difference and serve other people as well as simply sort of helping you make a living. This is like such a cliche.

When it comes to actually like operationalizing that, I think it's really important to see it as a kind of a constant course correction, moment-to-moment thing. And for me, the real point at which the rubber hits the road with this question is not in some sort of mission statement of what you want your life to be, but in that feeling of like getting into that intuitive place of being able to choose, like, okay, got several things I could do with the next hour on Tuesday morning at 11:00 a.m. whatever, or, you know, on a weekend, which one? There are different ways into this. There's a great Jungian therapist called James Hollis who talks about asking which choice enlarges us or diminishes us. That's a really interesting question. Sometimes I think of it using phrases like, you know, what is it, what's the one thing that kind of needs to happen now? What's life asking of me right now? There's these various grand ways of doing it, but really moment to moment, I think it's just doing what you can to keep in touch with that almost preverbal sense of like, is this something that is like a good way for me to be spending some of my time on the planet? It's kind of a dissatisfying answer, I accept, because it isn't a sort of a matrix and you get the answer out at the end and then you go do it. But I think that's the way to do it.

And I think it's then also a question of learning gradually and painfully to give like your full attention to that thing once you're doing it. I have situations all the time where I could choose to do more work or I could choose to spend a bit more time with my 8-year-old son. And the cliche would be to say like the right thing to do is always to not do the work and always to spend time with the child. And, you know, I try to do that a lot. The real important point is that like once I've decided that one of them is what I'm going to do, can I let go for that hour or two of all the thoughts about the other one that like sort of needs doing as well.

Yeah, I mean, I sort of borrowed and probably adapted this idea from Carl Jung, right? The phrase is something that that sort of Jungians like to use a lot, and some people talk about as if like you have one life task in your life. I'm thinking of it more in a sort of moment-to-moment, week-to-week, month-to-month way. But it's this idea of like not asking what do I want out of life right now? What would make me happy? But actually asking like what's the work that like I'm here to do? Like what's the thing that I am here to do? And I don't think that means that you have to I think this is important. I don't think it means you have to give up your work as a or your ambitions as a singer-songwriter and become a humanitarian aid worker. Is that right? It could do, but it also could be that actually the thing that is yours to do is the thing that might feel to you like it's a hobby or like it's some an indulgence or something. I think it can sometimes take more strength of character to be okay with the fact that you're not going to be doing some sort of grandiose service to humankind as your thing. So it's not about like becoming just a pure kind of do-gooder instead of following what brings you alive. It's about following what brings you alive. But yeah, Jung makes this really interesting point that it's going to probably be difficult, right? Your life task is probably not going to be something that just comes completely easily and takes no effort and just involves like lying around doing nothing, but it's going to be something that you can do. Like there'll be a next step that you can take in your current situation.

And what's so important about that, I think, is that there's a whole lot of ideas in the culture about destiny and fate and life purpose and all these things where people get into their heads that like they were meant to be X, but their situation means they've got to be Y instead. And so, you know, the example I give in the book, like your life task is not going to be that you have to do something that involves spending thousands and thousands of pounds on film equipment to become a movie maker. If you've got £100 in the bank, it might involve something that takes you there step by step later in the future, but it's not going to be like my economic situation means that I can't achieve my destiny. Or another example, maybe people sometimes feel that it was their sort of destiny and their purpose in life to have children, but they're not able to be biological parents. Again, your life task is something else because your life task is adjacent to where you actually are. And even I don't know, maybe there aren't life tasks in some sort of scientific sense, right? But that's just a really useful frame for thinking like what is the intersection of what makes me feel alive and what I could do next with the resources that are around me right now instead of like what lies over this kind of unreachable, unbridgeable chasm of opportunity or privilege or personality type or anything else.

Yeah. No, I really like the way you put that. And of course, you know, I want to say as well that like there's a very common criticism of self-help culture in general, right? Which is that it's kind of relentlessly hyperindividual and it says like it's on you to sort out your life and don't complain about having been born into a situation less privileged than somebody else. Just get to work.

Yeah, I'm remembering a tweet that came that went everywhere in COVID as well about that was like some awful hustle culture stuff about like if you don't come out of this pandemic with like a new business and like all this this and this and this, then you didn't you never lacked time, you lacked discipline. Because it's like, yeah, what happened in COVID was we all suddenly had loads of time, especially those of us with preschool age children where close the preschools. No, but the thing I want to say is like these two ideas can exist simultaneously, right? Number one, we live in a society of a lot of economic inequality and things should be changed to make that not the case. Number two, as an individual, wherever you find yourself in that, there is always this thing that you can do next. There's this somewhere in your circumference of possibility, there's that option for agency. And a lot of the sort of self-help stuff gets into this logjam where it's either like either socioeconomic circumstances don't matter and it's all your responsibility and if you're poor it's your fault and all that awful stuff, or it's like the systems failed us and there's nothing you can do until there's a revolution, right? And like I think we can reject both of those or in some sense accept both of them and say like, you know, the really in the challenge that I write about, I think, is the challenge of what do you do where you find yourself? Doesn't mean that where you find yourself is like that it's right that you find yourself there.

Yeah. Sasha Chapin is a writer who he's got like he Yeah. He talks about how like he had this sort of great ambition to be a certain kind of novelist and that was his like big life ambition. And then it was only sort of after that had crashed and he'd realized that was never going to be on the cards for him that he was able to sort of adopt this stance of what he calls playing in the ruins, right? It's like finally I don't need to make my reality measure up to some idea in my head or that I got from my parents or the culture. I can just like see what I have and what will be the coolest stuff that I can do with it right here.

I mean, to me, that Marcus Aurelius quote is so lovely because it sort of points out this really strange thing that we do, right? Which is we just don't trust future us to stay on the straight and narrow or to do the thing that the moment calls for when it arrives, but we really trust present self to make these kind of incredibly rigid plans which we then going to like try and hold ourselves to. The problem with this is like either it fails because life gets in the way and interrupts you and your plan doesn't it's impossible to stick to and you break yourself, or even when it succeeds, it sort of has this effect for me anyway, I know I'm not alone, I don't know if it's universal, but like this it sort of drains life of its life and vigor somehow, right? Because your week just becomes like I'm just putting into practice these steps that like this guy, which was me yesterday, decided that I had to put into practice, or ChatGPT decided even worse, I would say. So like I think what we're trying to a lot of the time what we're doing when we try to plan in this very ambitious way is we're trying to kind of throw a straightjacket around the future and say like this is what is going to happen and I can be confident now that this is what I'm going to want to do later, or I'm going to make myself do later, or that events are going to allow me to do later.

And Marcus, and I quoted as saying like, well, you know, first of all, I would say he almost certainly says it as well somewhere because he says all the wisdom. But like, firstly, you can't know in advance the situation when you tell yourself that you're going to go and do X habit at X:00. Like not only do you not know what will happen in your external reality, but your mood is like a it's a factor, right? You can't just completely ignore the fact that you might feel absolutely unable or unmotivated to do. But on the other hand, like you've got a really good track record up till now in your life of having managed to like do a bunch of stuff and respond to things when they happen and sort of go with the flow and take things as they arise.

I think what this speaks to is a role for planning which is not like throw it out and just sort of float around doing nothing, but to really understand it as a kind of a navigational tool. So, I'm a big fan of like, you know, writing out in sort of present tense language the sort of that kind of ideal normal day practice that people have, right? That sort of idea of like having a vision of how you'd like to be showing up in your life and how you'd like your life to be, or having some sort of basic principles that you're navigating by. The problem comes when you take them and you like turn it into this incredibly rigid like these are my monthly targets, these are my weekly milestones, these are my daily things, and then this is the time-boxed day of everything that's going to happen. Apart from anything else, you're saying like it doesn't matter what you feel like in the moment. And I would say like maybe we could harness that energy of what we feel like instead of constantly trying to stamp it out. I've certainly found life goes more smoothly and successfully that way, right? Because it does matter what you feel like doing. It doesn't mean you just hedonistically, you know, amble through life doing nothing difficult, but it does matter what you feel like.

I mean, I think I mentioned it in the book, but I certainly mentioned

I'm losing track, but like this, there's a blog post that a friend of mine, a meditation teacher, Susan Piver, wrote which has the headline, um, 'Getting Things Done by Not Being Mean to Yourself,' which was a real sort of, uh, you know, moment of insight for me because I realized exactly how mean I had been being to myself to try to, to try to get things done. There is this inner conflict that we set up when we say like, um, you know, these are things I'm going to do and I'm not going to let my stupid moods get in the way. And even that quote that everyone loves from Chuck Close, right? Um, 'Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work.' Like everyone loves that. It's like so down to earth and like just, you know, getting down to business. But it has this edge of like, you know, it doesn't matter what mood you're in. It doesn't matter what gives you pleasure in life. It's just do it, do it, do it, do it. And apart from anything else, it's just not a, um, uh, constructive way to, to get those things done because you set up this inner struggle. You're so annoyed with yourself, it's just, it's just sort of internal combat.

And Susan Piver writes about how when she allowed herself to do the things that, um, she wanted to do, when she allowed that question like, what do I feel like doing, to at least have some role in navigating through the day, a lot of those things you might worry you would never get around to doing, she did. Because like most of us, the implication of, of a lot of, a lot of people seem to assume that they'd be like the worst people in the world if they didn't keep a hawkish eye on themselves, right, all day long, they'd just completely forget it all and unravel. But most, that's not true. Like, you know, if you're interested in this stuff in the first place, you're interested in doing interesting stuff in the world and keeping your commitments and delivering, uh, things you said you'll deliver and shipping product and all the rest of it. So there's something really important about allowing a role for what you feel like doing and harnessing that energy instead of...