Greg McKeown:
Hello everyone. I’m your host, Greg McKeown, and I’m here with you on this journey to learn so that we can operate at our highest point of contribution. Have you ever felt frustrated by the endless pursuit of efficiency? Have you ever felt that there was more to life than the zero inbox? Well, today is part one of a two-part interview with Oliver Burkeman, the author of Four Thousand Weeks.
For many years he wrote a popular column on Psychology for The Guardian called This Column Will Change Your Life. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Psychologies, and New Philosopher. By the end of today’s episode, you will have the mindset that Burkeman believes most upends the time management industry of the last 30 or 40 years. Let’s get to it.
Whether this is the first episode or one of many that you’ve listened to, please subscribe and invite others to subscribe as well.
Oliver, welcome to the podcast.
Oliver Burkeman:
Thank you so much for inviting me. I’m really happy to be here.
Greg McKeown:
What questions did you write Four Thousand Weeks to answer?
Oliver Burkeman:
Wow. On one level, I guess it was how I could come to a more peaceful and less tormenting, and less anxiety-inducing relationship with time myself. That’s me and my therapist’s version of the answer. You’re very welcome to take on this role, by the way.
The other is, I suppose, in a slightly different vein, would be like what is the thing that bugs me about all these productivity books that I’ve read and often tried to follow the advice of and that never work the way I think they’re going to work and what’s that all about?
Greg McKeown:
What you just said is that this was a personal book before it was a professional enterprise, that this was something you yourself have been tortured by. What did I get wrong?
Oliver Burkeman:
Exactly, correct. No, that’s right. It’s certainly true for me. My theory is that nobody is compelled by topics to write books about them that they don’t struggle with, on some level. If I think about something that I’m good at and have never struggled with, I always come up with things like spelling, right? I don’t want to write a book about it. That’s not of interest to me. So I mean, I don’t know if you’d say the same. I certainly feel like it’s pretty much a given that when a book is trying to offer advice or a new perspective or some kind of wisdom, it’s something that the author needed to figure out for themselves in a personal way.
Greg McKeown:
If it’s not overstating the point, what is the essence of the suffering that you personally were feeling?
Oliver Burkeman:
I think it took a long time to come into focus, and it would’ve depended on where you interrupted me on my journey and said, what’s going on in your head right now? But one version of that would just be to say that I felt continually I wasn’t doing enough of the stuff that was on my plate. I wasn’t meeting enough of the demands or pursuing enough of the ambitions that felt important, and that I was quite often just on the cusp of getting the productivity system or the level of self-discipline or the approach to scheduling that would nail this once-and-for-all but I was never there, and partly this is a sort of getting through your life kind of issue isn’t it becomes a certain point for me in my forties when the idea that the real properly organized part of life is soon to begin, becomes harder and harder to maintain faith in, really.
Greg McKeown:
Okay. So having tried to apply many productivity systems yourself in pursuit of being able to make a contribution, you get to the point where you say it’s not just about the system, it’s not just about efficiency. There’s a different mindset altogether, a different paradigm, one might say. And what is that paradigm as you write it in Four Thousand Weeks?
Oliver Burkeman:
I think the distinction that you are pinpointing there has to do with the emotional agenda that one brings to these techniques, right? It’s not that any given productivity technique might not be perfectly serviceable. It’s going from the state where you believe that what you’re going to do is somehow achieve a kind of mastery over time, a certain kind of control. You’re going to be in the driver’s seat of your life in a particular way that entails never dropping any balls, never disappointing anybody, being sort of limitlessly capable of handling what’s thrown at you, and you sort of transition into a mindset where you actually have a lot more agency. It’s very empowering. It’s not at all about sitting in a hammock and doing nothing, but it’s where you sort of accept in a deep sense the finitude of your amount of time, your control over that time. And you sort of let go of this goal of trying to get your arms around everything precisely so that you can pour your time and attention and heart and soul into a handful of things that matter without this sort of tormenting fantasy that you have to do all of the things that feel like they matter.
Greg McKeown:
When I was finishing my work on Essentialism, I was trying to capture the essence of what I learned, and one of those things was this awakening to the pathetically absurdly short amount of time that we get. That’s how Essentialism ends. But this is how Four Thousand Weeks begins in an essay and a treaties specifically trying to illuminate that idea. Can you just share a little more with us about that?
Oliver Burkeman:
Sure. Well, I mean the title of the book Four Thousand Weeks is extremely roughly average life expectancy in the developed world. You get a few more weeks than that if you are moderately fortunate. Obviously, many people get fewer. To me, I hope it’s a startling title and all the rest of it. But the real point there is not the specific quantity, but the ramifications of the fact that it’s finite, that it comes to an end. Even if they find a way to enable us all to live into a hundred twenties or something. When you put that in weeks, it’s still pretty short. It’s like 6,000 and something. So you never get to a point where the feeling that we often go through in life of having all the time in the world is really that’s never actually backed up unless they literally find a way for us to live forever.
So the focus for me really is on finitude rather than shortness. A bit of a fine distinction, really, but it’s just the fact that your time comes to an end or will come to an end is what makes, I think, all the ways in which we struggle with time vivid, and it makes it matter. If you live forever, then the question, should I do this or that with the next hour or the next quarter or with my life would always be like, it doesn’t matter. You’ve got all the time in the world after that to do all the other things; try all the other options as well.
And I think it’s also what gives us this deep sense of wanting to get this kind of total control over our time because that idea of control over our finite time becomes sort of synonymous with not being bound by our finite time. I think it has a fear of death at the heart of it, it’s this idea that somehow you could kind of escape the human condition, and this sounds very sort of abstract and philosophical, but I think it’s that level of emotional dislike of being finite that actually then cashes out in all sorts of the ways in which we sort of use time, right? Distraction, procrastination, trying to multitask, and doing less. As a result, all the rest of this, I think, has its sort of deepest origins in this way that we rail against the fact of finitude, which just means that there will always be far more things that matter than we will have the opportunity to address.
Greg McKeown:
It sounds like the essence of this is to embrace the reality of death, the shortness of life, in order to liberate ourselves to actually start living it, to make trade-offs because we’re in one massive trade-off called life. And so instead of ignoring death, instead of pretending we go on forever in this life and there’ll always be time, or just avoiding the conversation you are saying, start with that reality. Everything else becomes clearer once we get clearer on that. Is that about it?
Oliver Burkeman:
I think that really is it, and what that makes me want to sort of add to that is that I think there is a way of interpreting all this talk of death and finitude, which is actually quite stressful. It’s the attitude sometimes you get in a context like this where people, it becomes this notion that you’ve got to squeeze value from every single minute. You’ve got to fill your life with really extraordinary and unusual accomplishments; otherwise, it doesn’t count somehow. And I really, the bit that I’m always at pains to try to convey here is I think it’s a really relaxing, empowering, and relaxing message. Again, not relaxing as in giving up on life; relaxing as in being able to do your small number of things in an active and relaxed frame of mind because people who think that they’re going to sort of live the most amazing life ever and therefore they have to be constantly vigilant to make sure they’re using every minute of their precious time.
There’s something in that stance that still imagines that you could maybe do everything that counts in life. And when you realize how completely lost this battle is, right, that ship has just so fundamentally sailed the idea that any one human with 4,000 weeks of life could follow through on all the things that seem exciting, seem important, seem meaningful, that’s exactly when you can just come back down to doing the things that are your things to do. So I think for me it’s been a really sort of, it’s ultimately very freeing and grounding, and then that follows into being motivating.
Greg McKeown:
Because instead of trying to live life as a game of optimization in which if we can just move the chess piece just so then we can win every game, and every second and every moment at our highest state of wild success and perfect joy, it’s like all of that, all of it becomes a nonsense. We are playing a completely different game. We have almost nothing left right now. So, therefore, what?
Oliver Burkeman:
Well, I mean, I think you have written incredibly well on this, right? It’s this idea that what prioritization has to mean is reconciling yourself to letting go of all sorts of ways you could have used your time that would’ve been perfectly good uses of your time. There’s this notion that saying no and stripping things down to their essentials just involves getting rid of boring and tedious stupid stuff is not enough that it involves getting rid of all sorts of things that another person in another life would’ve been well advised to do. There are great things to do, it’s just that you may have to make a small number of choices. And one of the things that I’ve found, I think other people find as well, is that if you can sort of inhabit this mindset, the actual question of what you should be spending your time on becomes totally easy to answer, or at least it becomes easier to hear your own intuitions about that.
People sometimes want me to have included a list in the book of the meaningful things you should spend your life on, and I’m like, no, the only thing I’m doing here is maybe clearing away a sort of fog that gets in the way of us seeing that for ourselves. I don’t know if you have found it to be that way as well in terms of priorities and intuition.
Greg McKeown:
Okay, first of all, I love that description. It reminds me of a quote from Robert D. Hales, who’s a churchman, and at the very end of his life, he’s very unwell, and he summarizes what he’s learning this way. He says, “When you cannot do what you have always done, then you only do what matters most.”
And I think what you are trying to do with both, of course, the title and then the positioning of the whole book is to put somebody in a sense in that situation now so that they don’t pretend that they’re in a substantially different position than Hales is that, oh, we think, oh, someone who only has six months or a year and a half, oh, they’re in a really difficult position or a very different one to mine. But what you are saying is it’s all so short; we’re already there. We’re already in the same game.
Oliver Burkeman:
And I recall the reflections of somebody, I’m afraid I’ve forgotten the details, but somebody who I think was in the position of being given a terminal diagnosis and not having very much time left projected by doctors reflecting on how she was asked by some close friends what it felt like to know that she was going to die and just being sort of staggered by this question as if that was not true of the person asking it, right? I mean, the idea that only some people for whom the end of their time we’ve got reason to believe is very soon they’re the only people who know they’re going to die. It’s wild. It sort of breaks your brain to realize it because, of course, we all know, at least intellectually, that our time is going to come to an end. But there is this very understandable and all sorts of theories about it, but very understandable, a huge amount of energy dedicated to not thinking about that. And I don’t think I’ve done more in this book or in my own life than divert a small amount of that energy away because it’s still a terrifying prospect, but just a little bit can make you realize certain things that they were already true, and you already knew on some level they were true. Nobody really thinks they’re going to live forever. They just make decisions every single day about their time as if they were going to live forever.
Greg McKeown:
Well, it gets real here because literally over the last few days, I have been in something like constant communication with a friend of mine who we go back way with who is definitely going to die of cancer. And the question is when? And so it shifts our conversation into a very real place for me as I think, still though, about him. So I’m not yet going, oh, this is about me because, for him, 20 more years means a lot to him. I was doing the calculation, so let’s say he’s going to have something like 2,600 weeks, maybe it’s 2,700, but the thousand or 2000 or whatever the number is, 3000 weeks that he misses really matter to him, and it’s extremely frustrating for him and occasionally debilitating even though he is serving and thinking of others and inspiring in heroic ways, I would say. But I just wonder, I know now it’s taking ideas you wrote about sort of at one level and giving it back to you in another, but what’s the message for him or what’s the message for us?
Oliver Burkeman:
Yeah, I mean this, as you say, absolutely gets to the nub of the matter, and this is a sort of a self-absorbed thought, but I’m acutely aware that don’t think that anything that I have done in terms of writing this book or thinking about these issues, I’ve got no particular reason that would prepare me to face that kind of news with equanimity. I think it is in a different league from all kind of thinking and writing and conceptualizing about this stuff, and I think it would be the wrong. So I’m not convinced that I have a message for him as opposed to the other way around. But I think the wrong thing to derive from what I’ve been saying here would be that it doesn’t matter whether your life is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7,000 weeks long. It’s not that it all collapses to nothing. It’s that the finitude is the thing that we are responding to.
And without putting words into your mouth or to Matthew, your friend, I can see that the experience of being in that situation makes it true in a way that is just unignorable where we manage to ignore it normally on a day-to-day basis, and I think have to ignore it on some level, on a day-to-day basis.
This is not a manifesto for going around trying to feel like you have that kind of diagnosis if, in fact, you don’t. Right? It’s the idea that the sort of horrifying insult of not getting to go on living is universally true, and it manifests in so many different ways. And so people who are not in the position of your friend, it’s just the position of constantly trying to do things on a daily basis that sort of allow you to maintain the fantasy that you’re not really bound by these terms and conditions.
That distraction is part of this. Procrastination is part of this sort of relentlessly keeping your options open or trying to get your arms around everything and become hyper-optimized. I think it’s all part of the same thing. And to have those intellectual possibilities taken away from you by the facts of your situation, it’s coming down to earth as forcefully as you can.
It would be interesting to discuss, if you want to, the ways in which some people who undergo this kind of news find a kind of liberation and a spiritual opening from it. But I also think that’s not really something you want to try to impose on anybody else, obviously, if it’s not where they’re at.
Greg McKeown:
Well, one of the things that occurs to me is that a lot of these subjects are dealt with at a very surface level. For example, it’s tempting when somebody is facing their imminent death. That’s a very distinct thing. That’s not going through something hard. It’s a very distinct thing, and it’s easy, I think, for people to first of all want to avoid that just sort of withdraw even as they’re affected by it, even as they wish they could do something. And that’s been an unintended consequence of this diagnosis is that many people have withdrawn, or then there are those that engage, but it’s at a very surface level. So, maybe very optimistic, well, you don’t know, maybe something good will come along, so on. Or maybe they give advice. Many people seem to give advice in this situation.
Oliver Burkeman:
Which is dealing with their own anxiety primarily. I think. Yes, very understandable, but not very helpful,
Greg McKeown:
Not very helpful, and maybe misses the learning. I certainly myself have found something in Shadowlands, the movie depicting C.S. Lewis’s tragedy as his wife dies of cancer, and then he finally has enough strength or gumption to go to a meeting, a dinner at Oxford, and he’s met there by one of the reverends who says, “Well, we have to trust in God in this moment.”
And which I don’t think is a wrong statement, but it’s brilliantly depicted because C.S. Lewis’s response is like visceral. No, it’s just brutal. The reality is so brutal, and we have to somehow, I think the injunction is something like to mourn with those that mourn to go to experience the awfulness and the learning and the suffering and to be in that rather than to avoid it or to somehow be at the surface. And while I know at one level what you are writing about is, as you describe it, time management for mortals, at another level, perhaps more strongly even than you expected, you are challenging people to confront this essential reality of life. Any reactions to any of that?
Oliver Burkeman:
Yeah, I think that’s really true. The bit that you, well, all of it, but in terms of my message, the things that you said at the end, I think it is really a continuum that has the kind of devastating confrontation with mortality that we’ve been talking about here at one end and one’s natural attempt to try to squeeze another 10 emails answered out of the half-hour that you have at the other end, right?
It’s this incredibly long continuum, which in each case has to do with sort of wanting to escape the consequences of having finite time. And obviously, it is a very fairly commonplace testimony from people who have been put in a position where there’s no escape that there is a kind of a piece that descends or a liberation that is experienced. But this book, for example, this book is not about death and dying, and I have no particular reason to believe that I have become more reconciled to the death of myself or of people I love as a result of exploring it.
It is about all the different ways in which wanting this not to be the human situation cascades down into our daily lives. And I think that the sort of inverse point of that is that, therefore, and I think it’s true in my experience, anything that you can do to let the implications of finitude into your day-to-day life makes some difference in sort of bringing yourself more deeply into reality, even if it’s tiny.
So right, again, at one end of a continuum, you might have somebody who can look upon the prospect of their own death with perfect equanimity, but at the other end, it’s just the willingness to not try to multitask, the willingness to do one thing at a time, to tolerate the anxiety of making the other ones wait while you focus on one of them. That is in itself an act of resistance to the temptation to mentally spin off into a realm where we’re not limited to deny reality.
Every single one of those things, patience, being willing to give things the time they take, all of them are kind of just forms of reconciling oneself to how it really is. And they’re much smaller, the discomfort that is involved in that, even if in some grand way it’s associated with the fear of death, the discomfort involved in that is eminently tolerable. You can try that if you can’t try anything else.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, I mean, let me make one more point specifically on death and liberation, and then let’s move maybe more into that middle territory where you are really exploring practical insights for readers.
I’m thinking here of Steve Jobs Stanford University, 2005 shares three personal stories, but one of them about how he had been diagnosed with cancer, which he said in the speech was an incorrect diagnosis, and perhaps it was, but of course, we know how things went for him in the end. But he wrote this, he said, “Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”
And this leads me to the observation that one of the differences I see in my friend is a determination to reach out and speak to key people about subjects that otherwise he might not. And that speaks to this sort of difference where you say, “We have no time now. What are you waiting for? This is a mirage that you have plenty of time left that you can get to that a decade or two from now.” Right?
So let me ask you this. Of the chapters in Four Thousand Weeks, what is the one chapter that you now think of as the most important place for people to begin in this journey?
Oliver Burkeman:
I mean, it’s hard not to give the dumb answer of the first one because I think I did structure it in a way that I still think is probably the right path. The book is divided into two parts, which I think of, I don’t know if it resonates this way with readers, but as being, first of all, about the consequences of our limited quantity of time. And then the second part about being about our extremely limited control over how that time unfolds and the fact that we don’t ever really have time anyway. So the second part sort of undercuts the first part. And I do think that for me, I have to keep coming back to it in my own life, but I think that for me and for other people, just that simple observation, which I guess gets going in really the second chapter of the book about the limitations of the efficiency mindset, the fact that making ourselves more and more efficient, fitting more and more in is never going to lead to the thing that we want from it because we’ll still be finite and we’re just getting faster at making our way through an infinite supply of things. So we’re never going to get to the end of the emails or the end of the opportunities or feel like we’ve got on top of life in that respect, that basic mismatch between our finite nature, our limited amount of time in a day in a life. It could be whatever level you want to look at versus that feeling that far more things matter than we can currently get our arms around to do and to be focused on. Therefore, the answer must be to find ways to fit more in, and showing why that A fails, but actually, B makes things worse is really the jumping-off point for my book. And I have some things to say about that, but I was interested to know what you were going to say.
Greg McKeown:
You’re talking here about the efficiency trap in chapter two. Yes?
Oliver Burkeman:
Yes.
Greg McKeown:
And what you just said then, I think, is a sort of logical lunacy that you say, “Well, we have way too many things to do. We have almost no time. So the answer therefore is to increase the efficiency of everything we do so that we can maximize the number of things we get done.”
It’s almost like you’re pretending to ignore the first realities, just pretending those aren’t there, and you’re just saying, “Okay, well, I’ll just go as fast as I possibly can with as many things as I possibly can.”
And it does seem to me that many of the productivity approaches are really that, or at least they’re implemented that way. And I think it’s because it really does grow out of the efficiency age of the Industrial Revolution, where everything is about making factory-based adjustments in our lives. If we can think of our life like a factory, we are limitless. I mean, what total nonsense. Go ahead.
Oliver Burkeman:
No, I think you put it brilliantly, and then the analogies with factory machinery give way to analogies with parallel processing in computers, and it all just gets even more alien to who we are. And I think that’s just, yeah, it is a kind of lunacy. I think you are right to point out that a lot of the problem with the productivity approaches is to do with how they’re implemented. And I’m not saying that isn’t encouraged by certain productivity gurus. I think it is sometimes, but a way of organizing your day or a way of thinking about your workflow or a way of organizing your to-do lists, any of these can be totally fine if they’re approached in the spirit of, like, this is a tool that seems to bring a bit more order to this finite situation in which I live and in which I must make real prioritization choices that involve cutting away other alternatives, right? That’s fine.
The problem, and certainly my experience in my days as a sort of full-on productivity junkie, was thinking that actually this new technique or system was going to enable me to get on top of everything, or at least everything that counted with full respect. And I think some is due to Stephen Covey. I am slightly sarcastic in the book about the famous rocks in the jar time management parallel that suggests that good prioritization is the way to fit all our big rocks into our available time. And I want to say there are just far too many rocks. We have to start from the position that only a small number of rocks are getting into the jar. Most of them are going to be neglected completely. That’s got to be the starting point. It isn’t that you can’t prioritize usefully beyond that, but if you start from the idea that there must be a way to find time for everything that matters, there’s just no reason why there should be that match between what matters and what time you have.
Greg McKeown:
That’s a wrap for part one with Oliver Burkeman. It’s an intense subject and an intense conversation.
What is one thing that stood out to you today? What is one thing you can do differently immediately to put this mindset into practice? And who is someone you can share this episode with so that they can benefit and be part of the conversation as well?
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