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Hello, friends. Lacy Camp, you're listening to No Small Endeavor. This is one of our unabridged best-of episodes with Oliver Burkeman, author of the New York Times bestseller 4,000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. This is one of those interviews and books I have continued to ruminate on in a healthy way, I think, since having had the interview and read the book. I think that especially his insight about paying attention to pain and the way that may actually reduce suffering has been one that has especially stuck with me. You'll get that in the third part of the interview, I think it is. And just generally speaking, his counsel to learn to pay attention to life and the beauty of the fact that life is that, rather than obsessing quite so much about the circumstances of life, to simply receive the gift of life itself as the gift it in fact is. And that was a terrible sentence, but I think you know what I meant. Anyway, enjoy this interview, unabridged, with Oliver Burkeman.
Oliver Burkeman is the author of the New York Times bestseller 4,000 Weeks, which we'll be discussing today. He's also the author of other books, including The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking. For years, he wrote a popular column for The Guardian entitled "This Column Will Change Your Life." In his email newsletter, The Imperfectionist, he writes about productivity, mortality, the power of limits, and building a meaningful life in an age of distraction. And he lives now in the North York Moors. Welcome, Oliver.
Thank you very much for inviting me.
Hi, it's a delight to have you. I love your book, and I think one of the reasons I love your book is that you confess being a sort of productivity geek, and I too confess to that. And you and me both, for example, getting rather obsessed with people like David Allen's book Getting Things Done. But how do you get from a book on... how do you get to this current book from being obsessed with productivity?
Well, I think it's a pretty straightforward journey, really. But it's the kind of journey where you come to the end of a trail and then you need something else, right? I think what happened was that I had explored kind of every productivity technique going, read every book. I was writing a column, as you mentioned, for The Guardian newspaper. One of the things I got to do was to try out all sorts of different systems for trying to get in control of my time. And I think there's actually that phenomenon, isn't there, where it's precisely because you do get to try everything out and none of it brings the kind of salvation that you were looking for — just to get immediately theological here — it's precisely because you do get to do that that you can have maybe some new, fresh thoughts or a different perspective that I'm trying to communicate in this book. If I hadn't gone all the way down that rabbit hole, I might still be here thinking that, you know, next week I was going to find the perfect system. And there is a little part of me that still hopes that next week I'll find the perfect system, but yeah.
Yeah, you open up saying, early on in your book, you say, "The world is bursting with wonder, and yet it's the rare productivity guru who seems to have considered the possibility that the ultimate point of all our frenetic doing might be to experience more of that wonder." So how do you... is it simply for you that sort of getting to this sort of frustration that you got a lot done, but in getting a lot done you weren't getting more important things done?
Yeah, I mean, that's definitely one of the symptoms, right? One of the things that happens if you really put a lot of effort and discipline into becoming more efficient at processing your tasks — or so I discovered anyway — was that you get really, really good at doing the least important things. And you also discover that because the supply of those tasks is effectively, you know, infinite for us in this era anyway, you don't get to the end of them. So all those plans for kind of getting on top of one's email, for example, just lead to the sense that you're answering far more email, getting far more email, because that's what happens if you reply to a lot more email, and sort of, you know, absolutely not getting anywhere closer to what it was that you thought you were chasing. And I think another part of this — we can come to it later maybe — but I think another part of this is that I think a lot of us, certainly me in those days, feel a very strong desire to kind of, yeah, get on top of, be in control of our time. It's that sort of desire to somehow dominate — not necessarily dominate anybody else, but to, you know, be in the driver's seat of our lives, I suppose, in a way that, yeah, in a way that firstly doesn't work for all sorts of reasons, but secondly does have the effect of kind of squeezing out, squelching out the wonder and the awe and the joy.
Yeah, yeah, it certainly does seem to be in my experience as well that the better I got at doing more stuff faster, that indeed there was this endless supply, and you even began to get a reputation, right, that the more stuff you can get done, then the more people feel free to ask you to do X, Y, or Z, and it's a sort of endless productivity trap, I suppose, right?
Yeah, it doesn't end because, yeah, as I say, firstly the supply is infinite, and you don't get to the end of an infinite supply. And then actually the act of getting through the supply can generate more of it. So it's... and it sort of ups the tempo at which you do things. But if you just up the tempo at which you do things without getting to the end or focusing on what matters the most, that's just called being busier and more stressed. So yeah.
Yeah, here it reminds me, we recently did an interview with Rebecca DeYoung, who's a theologian on the seven deadly sins, and I was reminded of her description of the so-called sin of sloth, where typically we've thought of sloth as being lazy with regard to productivity, but she notes that historically sloth was thought of as inattention to more important matters, or inattention to relationship, or inattention to the meaning of life. And it's this ironic sort of thing in which it may be actually our obsessions on productivity might lead us toward unexpectedly sloth.
I think that's a fascinating angle. It immediately reminds me of the idea that I think comes from more of a Buddhist tradition, that one of the forms of laziness is busyness. That sort of not exerting a certain kind of — I don't know how to talk about it — but not exerting a certain kind of agency or discipline over one's actions in that way, or kind of mastery, is to have like not done something rather than doing all the things. It's actually sort of a failure in some sense, or falling away from the ideal path.
Yeah, right. Yeah. So early in the book you make the argument that we in the contemporary world think of time in ways quite different than, say, a medieval peasant might have thought about time. So can you describe that difference for us?
Yeah, I mean, I think there's all sorts of things that have changed over the decades and the centuries, but I think the most fundamental thing that I wanted to try to articulate was the sort of very idea of seeing time as a thing at all. That's the kind of very nontechnical phrasing that I use in the book. This sort of alienated sense we have today that there is me and then there is my time, and it's some sort of resource that I have to use, or it is a little mental timeline that's always ticking along beside me and I'm trying to keep up with it, or, you know, it's something that I need to maximize the value of. All these ideas about having a relationship with time, which, you know, and for most of us these days is some form of adversarial relationship most of the time. But the very premise of a relationship obviously is that there are two things here: me and time. And I think that the direct daily experience of a medieval peasant and many other people at different points in history would have been what anthropologists call task orientation instead of time orientation. It would have just been that time was just the medium in which you lived. It would have been that, you know, there was no sense that you had the power to sort of step outside of this flow and, you know, manage it, control it, change the level of efficiency with which you were approaching it. One of the things I try to — one of the sort of needles I try to thread in the book is I think that today the times that we feel this way are those kind of moments when the clock falls away, when we feel like we've stepped out of time. These often happen in sort of prayer or meditation, or in wonderful natural landscapes, or at the birth of a baby, or, you know, they tend to happen at these very peak moments. The point I'm trying to suggest is that I think there was a time — I think there's good reason to believe that there was a time in pre-industrial cultures when most, if not all, of life would have been lived in that vein, which is not to say that it wasn't absolutely terrible in all sorts of ways, right? It's not that everyone just went around as if they were at some wonderful moment in their lives. But the one problem they didn't have — while they had all sorts of problems to do with illness and disease and injustice and a million other things — one kind of problem they didn't have was time problems, right? That sense of being overwhelmed, trying to fit more things into your time than you have the time available for, of feeling guilty about wasting time. All these different things are all premised on this idea that there's you and that there's time, and this is somehow something else, and you've got to deal with it instead of just be it.
And then you indicate that the Industrial Revolution becomes a key turning point towards the change.
Yeah, absolutely. I think that, you know, it's very hard to sort of unpick causality directions here, and I don't really even try. But there's very obviously lots about the Industrial Revolution that require a kind of third-person, objective, agreed-upon idea of time. You can't coordinate shifts in factories or transportation networks without that. You get the spread of — actually starting before the Industrial Revolution — you get the spread of public clocks, and, you know, the idea that you might see the time when you were out in the market square or something, it wouldn't be the same time as at the next village over. That wasn't until sort of the railroads started to do the biggest job of synchronizing those. But there was nonetheless this idea of, you know, time other than just the flow of life. And yeah, I think that all gets much, much more pronounced as a result of industrialization. I think there are other reasons why it's become even more sort of acute just in the last few decades, because of certain kinds of agreed-upon boundaries between work and non-work, and leisure, and the Sabbath versus working days, and all these things obviously persisted far, far beyond the 19th century. But yeah, I think industrialization was a big part of it.
Talk to us more about what you see as other contributing factors to the exacerbation of this. You even use the language, I think, of seeing it as a social contagion. So what are some of those other factors that contribute to this sort of frenetic instrumentalization of time?
Well, these days, I mean, it's always hard to unpick the role of kind of economic forces and political forces versus technological ones. As I say, I don't actually, you know, in this book, at this stage of the book that you're talking about, I'm more trying to paint a picture of how it is rather than claim that I know, you know, who or what to blame. But I think, you know, digital technology is a really fascinating case here, because digital technology really just supercharges all of these things. It provides us with these absolutely unprecedented capacities to do things in an unlimited way — or a less limited way, I should say — both in terms of the number of messages we can send, the distance we can send them in no time at all, the information we can access about events happening thousands of miles away. But of course, while that seems to hold out the promise that, okay, at last we could get on top of our stuff and answer all the emails and know about all the things we wanted to know about happening in the news, pretty obviously it does two things at once, right? It allows us to take in a lot more of the world and to exert more control over the world at the same time as it massively, massively extends the amount of the world that we even know about, that we even hear about. So email is, you know, it's a great way to answer lots of messages fast, but you wouldn't get so many messages if it wasn't for email, right? So there's this constant back and forth between — well, as I put it in the book, I think, you know, technology promises to help us get on top of everything, but it never works in the end because it always is expanding the size of the everything that we're trying to get on top of.
Right, right, yeah. That reminds me of a book written by a Quaker, I think it was the 1930s, entitled A Testament of Devotion. But I remember he has this passage where he's talking about mass media, and he makes the claim that the human was not designed, created, didn't have the capacity to deal with the onslaught of information foisted upon the human by mass media. And of course that's the 1930s, right? So when you think about that, how much that's changed in the last 90 years, which of course I think is precisely segues into your — at least what I see as one of your fundamental arguments that you're making in the book, and namely that we refuse to accept finitude, or that our struggle with our finitude is causing us deep anxiety, and that's one of the reasons that we're so drawn toward this sort of frenetic pace or this frenetic desire for productivity. So talk to us then about that major move in your book about this call to an acceptance of our finitude or acceptance of our limitation.
Sure, yeah. I mean, and I think this happened kind of happened for me through sort of a personal experience of this, right? I mean, and it was for me through all this productivity nonsense. It happens, I think, you know, the struggle with finitude is pretty universal, but the articulation of it through being a productivity geek is just one flavor of it. But, you know, it's this sense that this dawning realization that my efforts to get control of my time was sort of an attempt in some way to not accept the truth about what it is to be a limited human being — to have a limited amount of time, which means that there's going to be more things that matter than I'll ever get to do, to have limited knowledge, limited control. You know, I think something that's going in the back of the mind of many people obsessed with productivity is the idea that one day they will get to a place where they're kind of, they're sort of emotionally invincible and they can handle any bit of work that's thrown at them and it's all completely smooth sailing. And yet, of course, being vulnerable in relationships and not being able to do everything that is asked of you and having to make tough choices about what you're going to do — these are just built in, they're just hardwired, and I think that, I mean, they're just structured into our situation. And so as I began to look through this lens, I found more and more contexts where it seems clear to me, but also, you know, echoed in the work of many philosophers and psychotherapists and psychoanalysts and all sorts of people, that so much of what we do that adds to our suffering and gets in the way of our living the most meaningful lives we could, it seems to have its roots in this idea of like not wanting to feel fully what it's like to be finite in all the ways that we are.
Yeah, you have at one point, you say, "All this illustrates what might be termed the paradox of limitation, which runs through everything that follows: the more you try to manage your time with the goal of achieving a feeling of total control and freedom from the inevitable constraints of being human, the more stressful, empty, and frustrating life gets. But the more you confront the facts of finitude instead and work with them rather than against them, the more productive, meaningful, and joyful life becomes." I wonder, you know, what sort of feedback have you gotten from folks about — what sort of criticism, I guess, or naysaying have you received in response to that kind of claim?
That's a great question. Obviously, it's in the nature of this business that you mainly get commentary from people who resonate and respond positively, because the other ones don't contact you. And, you know, some people who do — I will get to the actual criticism — but some people who do, I think, and I have appreciated the book, use words like they find it confronting. You know, I think there's an element of what I'm doing here which is, in a hopefully witty and approachable way, dumping a bucket of cold water over the reader's head in certain ways. And hoping, I think this is important, to show that actually the end result of that is peace of mind and relaxation. It's not a kind of like, life is so short, so you better stress out massively trying to force meaningful activity into every second. I guess the couple of sort of pushback arguments there are, you know, one that is something that people in sort of business world and startup world especially have, which is, isn't it only by trying to break limits and do the impossible that we ever achieve anything really splendid and meaningful as humans? Isn't there a benefit in sort of aiming to do the impossible? And I have a response to that, which has to do with what we really mean by the impossible, and pointing out that the greatest inventors and entrepreneurs and life- and world-changing reformers, you know, did not spend all their days trying to answer every single message that came into their inbox, right? And then I guess the other part of this, which might be of more interest to you, I don't know, from the theological perspective, is like, well, where's the role for the infinite in what I'm saying? I don't think what I'm saying about human finitude is at all incompatible with the idea that there is something infinite that is relevant to the fate of humans, but I definitely don't really go there in the book, right? I'm just sort of focusing on the fact that we are finite. I think that certainly from a religious perspective, I think some people definitely want to say like, okay, but do we not partake in something infinite as well? So that's a whole other dimension.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it definitely has another dimension, but it perhaps counterintuitively is not one I'm particularly interested in discussing at the moment, at least, because I think that... I think it's so helpful to have you confront us with this sort of life that we have, it is in fact finite. And, you know, I was thinking, for example, as you were describing that, Thomas Merton, the famous 20th-century monk, Catholic writer, has one passage in one of his meditation books where he talks about the immensely frustrated person who is trying to ring every last bit of perfection out of every moment that he lives. And, you know, it's like I thought, well, that's what Oliver is saying, right? Is that we get to this point of exasperation, being unable to live life well, when we have this sort of perfectionistic instrumentalization or obsessive focus on productivity with every moment.
Yes, but I don't know that particular Merton line, and I'm fascinated by that, because you're right, I'm making the same critique. But actually, one interesting response to the book — or maybe more to the title — because some people sort of read the title and realize the 4,000 weeks as a reference to the average human lifespan, and then sort of freak out. One of the ways you can go with this, and you see this in the culture in general, not just about my book or anything, is that, you know, life is short, and therefore you have to ring something really, really, really stupendous out of every moment. And there is a kind of modern version of that kind of carpe diem philosophy that I think is — I find personally just incredibly stressful. It's like, oh, I've got to do this as well, come on, I'm just trying to stay on top of things here. And I think that is a sort of — I always think of that as sort of the conclusion you'd get if you sort of went halfway with what I'm saying here, because hidden inside that desire to kind of live the most stupendous life is a kind of backdoor quest to overcome the human situation, right? There's a kind of backdoor way of saying, well, right, you know, maybe I can't live forever, but I can do things in the limited time I have that are so stupendous that it's almost a proxy for living forever somehow.
Right, right, yeah. You know, I'm currently on sabbatical from my university appointment, and I'm finding myself having to be very conscious. And your book turned out to be immensely helpful in reading at the start of a sabbatical, because my natural tendency would be to try to cram my iCal full of all sorts of — every moment full of something stupendous. And, you know, and I do plan to travel, and I do plan to get to visit with a lot of folks, but it's helping me reframe the notion of — in terms of things like sabbatical, namely Sabbath, rhythms of rest, rhythms of social connection, rhythms of friendship, and to maybe have just a little bit more breathing space to pay attention to the things that really do make life meaningful, as opposed to cramming them full of more consumerist experiences that the productivity side might foist upon me.
