Speaker 1: Hello there, it's Amantha. I'm currently on a Christmas break,
Speaker 1: so I've handpicked a bunch of my favorite episodes from
Speaker 1: the last year to share with you. Okay, on with
Speaker 1: today's best of episode. Tell me if this sounds like you.
Speaker 1: You've got endless emails to reply to, meetings backing onto meetings,
Speaker 1: that next report to write, customers or clients demanding your
Speaker 1: time urgently, and then there's everything at home.
Speaker 2: Can you relate to that? And I mean, how are
Speaker 2: you supposed to fit it all in?
Speaker 1: If you're anything like me, you immediately start hunting for
Speaker 1: the cool news scheduling software or productivity app. But according
Speaker 1: to Guardian journalist and author Oliver Berkman, maybe it's actually
Speaker 1: time to stop trying out new tools and systems. Oliver
Speaker 1: is a self professed productivity nerd, and he believes that
Speaker 1: our fixation on the next brilliant organizational see SYSM might
Speaker 1: make us feel like we're getting on top of things,
Speaker 1: but it could actually come at the cost of getting
Speaker 1: the truly important things done. So how can we learn
Speaker 1: to prioritize what really matters? And how can we make
Speaker 1: choices that enlarge us rather than diminish us? And why
Speaker 1: should we actually avoid trying to get everything done. My
Speaker 1: name is doctor Amantha Imber. I'm an organizational psychologist and
Speaker 1: the founder of behavioral science consultancy Inventium, and this is
Speaker 1: how I work a show about how to help you
Speaker 1: do your best work. Oliver Berkman just released his latest
Speaker 1: book and it's called four thousand Weeks.
Speaker 2: So I wanted to ask him.
Speaker 1: Why call a book four thousand weeks?
Speaker 3: Four Thousand weeks is the approximate amount of time that
Speaker 3: you have on the planet if you live to be eighty.
Speaker 3: It's a little bit the precise number is a little
Speaker 3: bit more than four thousand. And this was a calculation
Speaker 3: that I just sort of made independently. I mean, turns
Speaker 3: out I was far from the first, of course, but
Speaker 3: I sort of just made it independently a few years
Speaker 3: ago when I was pondering these questions of the shortness
Speaker 3: of life and had a sort of a meltdown in
Speaker 3: response to it. I mean, there's something horrifying about expressing
Speaker 3: it in those terms. I hope that it's not the
Speaker 3: kind of horror that just causes people to not want
Speaker 3: to have anything to do with this book, because I
Speaker 3: promise that if you look inside. My goal is to
Speaker 3: explain how, in some ways this is a relief and
Speaker 3: a reason to stop trying to do impossible things and
Speaker 3: to focus instead on getting round to what matters. But
Speaker 3: not with a kind of panicky white knuckle Oh my goodness,
Speaker 3: I've got to seize the day because we only have
Speaker 3: so little time. So it's a little bit of a
Speaker 3: bait and switch. Maybe there's something sort of shocking about
Speaker 3: the title, but I hope that the book is more
Speaker 3: liberating and empowering than shocking. I guess we'll find out
Speaker 3: if that was a clever decision.
Speaker 1: I do want to talk about I guess prioritization because
Speaker 1: I've read four thousand Weeks and I loved it, and
Speaker 1: I also found it very challenging as well, because I
Speaker 1: feel like it's kind of almost an anti productivity book
Speaker 1: for productivity geeks, of which I am one. And it
Speaker 1: sounds like you are a recovering productivity geek.
Speaker 2: Is that fair to say?
Speaker 3: Yes? Absolutely, yeah, so not even that recovering.
Speaker 1: Not even that recovering. Okay, so we're like, we're kind of,
Speaker 1: you know, amongst friends here.
Speaker 2: That's good.
Speaker 1: So you in the book, you talk about how you
Speaker 1: thought of yourself as the kind of person who gets things.
Speaker 2: Done, and then like you became clear that the things.
Speaker 1: That you got done most diligently were the unimportant ones.
Speaker 2: Well, the important ones got postponed.
Speaker 1: And I feel like that is something that a lot
Speaker 1: of people are going to be able to relate to.
Speaker 2: But I wanted to know, for you, how did you
Speaker 2: figure out that this was happening.
Speaker 3: I mean, mainly, you just look at whatever fancy you
Speaker 3: to do list organizational system you've implemented, and you see
Speaker 3: that the things that have been crossed off, or the
Speaker 3: you know, post its that have been successfully moved across
Speaker 3: the columns, or whatever whatever system you're using, that a
Speaker 3: sort of huge amount of stuff has been done in
Speaker 3: the last week, and it kind of never was the
Speaker 3: stuff that you know, deep down was the most important
Speaker 3: to do. I mean, I write in the book about
Speaker 3: this the way that like, you know, there's a whole
Speaker 3: load of reasons for it, but I think a very
Speaker 3: simple way that people will understand it very easily is
Speaker 3: just that, you know, we want a feeling of productivity,
Speaker 3: especially if we're productivity geeks. We want to get through
Speaker 3: our to do list, so naturally we gravitate towards the
Speaker 3: things that it's easy to process. We maybe shy away
Speaker 3: from the things that are challenging or inti dating. But
Speaker 3: it's the things that are challenging are intimidating that tend
Speaker 3: to matter the most. That's why they're challenging and intimidating,
Speaker 3: because the stakes are higher, and you know, you want
Speaker 3: to write this chapter well and you want this difficult
Speaker 3: conversation with somebody to have a good result. I mean,
Speaker 3: it's it's so that I find this with email as
Speaker 3: a really good example, right, I mean emails that fundamentally
Speaker 3: don't really matter from people who I don't particularly care
Speaker 3: about in the professional context, someone you know I don't want,
Speaker 3: don't I don't want to be rude in stuggings for examples,
Speaker 3: but like you know, some very purely administrative email about
Speaker 3: something I'm trying to figure out, very easy to respond to.
Speaker 3: If someone who's reading my news letter sends me a
Speaker 3: sort of long and involved email that's really interesting and
Speaker 3: feels like it needs a personal response, or if an
Speaker 3: old friend of mine gets in touch with the news update. Right,
Speaker 3: these are my priorities, Like, that's what I want to
Speaker 3: spend my life doing, at least when it comes to email.
Speaker 3: But then it's so easy to fall into what I
Speaker 3: called when I first read about it, the importance trap.
Speaker 3: You know, you say, well, okay, for those things, I
Speaker 3: really need attention and time, and I need focus, and
Speaker 3: I need to not have all these other little sort
Speaker 3: of nonsense tasks tugging at my attention. So I'm going
Speaker 3: to focus for now, I'm clearing the decks, and tomorrow
Speaker 3: or this afternoon or or sometime soon, then I'm going
Speaker 3: to have this wonderful time when I do what really counts.
Speaker 3: And you know, first of all, it just never arrives.
Speaker 3: But secondly, getting more and more efficient at clearing the
Speaker 3: decks sort of postpones even further the time at which
Speaker 3: it arrives, because, as I say a couple of times
Speaker 3: in the book, you know, we live in a world
Speaker 3: of infinite inputs. There isn't an end to the number
Speaker 3: of things that can come and fill the decks. The
Speaker 3: number of emails you can receive, the number of demands
Speaker 3: your boss can make of you, the number of career
Speaker 3: goals you might have for yourself, bucket list places to visit, whatever,
Speaker 3: They're all infinite. So if you get better and better
Speaker 3: and better at processing them, you're just going to feel busier.
Speaker 3: You're never going to get to the end of them.
Speaker 3: And if you're focusing when you do that on the
Speaker 3: least important ones, you're going to find that you just,
Speaker 3: you know, your lists fill up with more and more
Speaker 3: of that stuff. Someone's going to ask you to do something.
Speaker 3: And because you're not thinking in terms of trade offs,
Speaker 3: because you're not thinking, well, what am I going to
Speaker 3: have to not do in order to make time for this?
Speaker 3: Because I am finite and the inputs are infinite. Because
Speaker 3: you're not thinking in terms of like which thing am
Speaker 3: I going to neglect in order to do the other thing?
Speaker 3: You're just going to say yes to more and more
Speaker 3: and more and more things. Your job may make it compulsory,
Speaker 3: you know, for you to say yes to more and
Speaker 3: more and more things, but the result is going to
Speaker 3: be that the most important stuff sort of gets slips
Speaker 3: away over the horizon.
Speaker 2: How do you decline to clear the decks? What does
Speaker 2: that look like in practice for you?
Speaker 3: Well, I'm really careful in the book, I don't want
Speaker 3: to imply that anyone, you know, even someone in a
Speaker 3: relatively sort of privileged self employed position like me, but
Speaker 3: really anyone, very few of us have the choice of just,
Speaker 3: you know, walking away from an inbox that's filling up.
Speaker 3: I don't. I'm sure you don't, and it's going to
Speaker 3: be even less likely that people in more conventionally shaped
Speaker 3: jobs have that ability. Instead. What I'm talking about is
Speaker 3: two things. One is a sort of a psychological stance,
Speaker 3: and then I can talk about practical implementation. The psychological
Speaker 3: stance is just this idea that I think what we
Speaker 3: should be trying to do when it comes to the
Speaker 3: surplus of information and of tasks and all the rest
Speaker 3: of it in the modern world is cultivating some tolerance
Speaker 3: of the discomfort associated with how much there is and
Speaker 3: how overwhelming it feels, instead of constantly scrambling to eradicate
Speaker 3: the discomfort. Because if you do that, at least in
Speaker 3: my case and I think quite a few other people's,
Speaker 3: if what you're chasing is a feeling of control and
Speaker 3: a feeling of like being in the driver's seat and
Speaker 3: finally having your life working order, but you're doing it
Speaker 3: in this context where there's no limit to what can
Speaker 3: come in to need doing, then the only effect of
Speaker 3: that is that you never get around to the things
Speaker 3: that you care about the most. If you can cultivate
Speaker 3: some sense of you know, okay, there's a lot of
Speaker 3: things I, on some level should, in quotes, be doing
Speaker 3: with my time, but I can only ever do one
Speaker 3: thing with each minute, hour, moment, then it's sort of
Speaker 3: a given right. It's math. It's just maths that there's
Speaker 3: going to be lots of things that you're not doing
Speaker 3: every time you choose to do a thing, and to
Speaker 3: the extent that you can be okay with that, you
Speaker 3: can focus on the thing that matters. If you're not
Speaker 3: okay with it, that's when you start trying to sort
Speaker 3: of multitask as an anxiety as a coping mechanism, as
Speaker 3: an anti anxiety mechanism. One really simple way to handle
Speaker 3: this is just in terms of the structure of your day.
Speaker 3: If you have this freedom over your schedule to make
Speaker 3: sure that things like processing your inbox and processing your
Speaker 3: intray or your sort of digital equivalence of intrays happens
Speaker 3: at the end of the day instead of at the
Speaker 3: beginning of the day, and happens on a fixed schedule,
Speaker 3: so that you sort of give it an hour or
Speaker 3: two hours or half an hour depending on your position,
Speaker 3: and then you sort of walk away from it and
Speaker 3: you sort of train that muscle of saying, Okay, this
Speaker 3: is going to get ninety minutes of my attention today
Speaker 3: and then it's going to get nineteen minutes tomorrow. And
Speaker 3: if I get a rhythm up there, you know you're
Speaker 3: going to stay probably on top of most of the
Speaker 3: things that you need to stay on top of. But
Speaker 3: you're not going to be in this kind of Sisyphian
Speaker 3: struggle to get to the top of a mountain that
Speaker 3: you're never going to be able to get to the
Speaker 3: top of because you're sort of saying from the beginning, Okay,
Speaker 3: it's just going to be an hour of my day
Speaker 3: or whatever it should be. And I think that's a
Speaker 3: much more sort of sane way of dealing with the
Speaker 3: infinite inputs.
Speaker 1: Yes, so what does what does it look like when
Speaker 1: you're in your inbox?
Speaker 2: How are you approaching things?
Speaker 3: Yeah, on my on my best days, I am going
Speaker 3: to be saying, you know, I have an approximate plan
Speaker 3: for the day, sort of time boxed, and I have
Speaker 3: a checklist of certain kinds of tough that I aim
Speaker 3: to do daily, of which overwhelmingly you know, processing some
Speaker 3: email is the is the biggest it's the biggest consumer
Speaker 3: of time, and I'll just be in my inbox for
Speaker 3: that amount of time. I have literally have a little
Speaker 3: digital kitchen timer that I will set and that will
Speaker 3: count down, and I'll and I'll be aiming to get
Speaker 3: stuff out of the inbox, either just by replying if
Speaker 3: that's all it needs, if it needs to go into
Speaker 3: my task management system, I'll try to sort of take
Speaker 3: it out of there. In other words, I'm not like
Speaker 3: running my life out of my inbox, where everything from
Speaker 3: missives from friends, urgent things from editors, and you know,
Speaker 3: advertisements from some restaurant that I gave my email address
Speaker 3: to three years ago are all mixed and competing for
Speaker 3: my attention. It's a place that I'm going to take
Speaker 3: things out of, either because the reply is all it's needed,
Speaker 3: or because it goes into my wider system, or in
Speaker 3: many cases of course, it just gets deleted, or it's
Speaker 3: an email newsletter. I read there and then and take
Speaker 3: bits from if I'm interested, otherwise file away and then
Speaker 3: stop when that timer stop. I mean, this is the
Speaker 3: hard part. The hard part is training yourself to sort
Speaker 3: of once you're on a roll and you're like, oh,
Speaker 3: if I just carried on a bit more, I might
Speaker 3: get to the I might get inbox zero, you know,
Speaker 3: depending on the state of your inbox, actually get Actually
Speaker 3: stopping is the part that is hard, But I think
Speaker 3: it's really important because your culting there this in the
Speaker 3: act of stopping, you're cultivating this patience, this this tolerance
Speaker 3: of the discomfort and this willingness to say like, Okay,
Speaker 3: my job is not to try to do something literally impossible,
Speaker 3: which is to you know, get my arms around an
Speaker 3: infinite quantity. My job is to spend a sort of
Speaker 3: reasonable amount of my day and my stamina doing this
Speaker 3: part of my job. And of course it's a far
Speaker 3: better recipe for being able to show up day after
Speaker 3: day after day at your job anyway. So it's not
Speaker 3: like I'm saying that people should sort of be irresponsible,
Speaker 3: because it's not responsible to you know, get onto these
Speaker 3: crazy runs where you're trying to get to the very
Speaker 3: end of something and you end up, you know, going
Speaker 3: to bed three hours late and being incapable of work
Speaker 3: for the next three days or what.
Speaker 2: No, now you mentioned.
Speaker 1: When you're in your in box, it's just so easy
Speaker 1: to prioritize the administrative, quick and easy to respond email,
Speaker 1: and to leave the important ones till some date in
Speaker 1: the future where you have.
Speaker 2: Cleared the decks.
Speaker 1: How do you go about prioritizing responding to the important
Speaker 1: ones and not the easy ones.
Speaker 3: Prioritizing is a really interesting question. I don't really write
Speaker 3: about that so much in the book, and I think honestly,
Speaker 3: on the level of things like email, I do do
Speaker 3: it very intuitively, like I don't attempt to sort of
Speaker 3: have some kind of points system that that weights different
Speaker 3: emails with in different ways. Over the course of my work.
Speaker 3: In general, I do try to prioritize sort of writing
Speaker 3: and related kind of directly creative work, because that's sort
Speaker 3: of the centerpiece of what I do. I try to
Speaker 3: prioritize that in the sense that I try to spend
Speaker 3: the first sort of three four hours of the day
Speaker 3: on that. That's sort of sort of rule of thumb
Speaker 3: that I try to I try to operate. But like
Speaker 3: you know, I think about my working day as divided
Speaker 3: into that that bit and the rest of it, and
Speaker 3: so you know, that's a sort of prioritization of very
Speaker 3: sort of rough and ready prioritization that just comes from
Speaker 3: like knowing what is the fundamental bit of my work,
Speaker 3: the bit the bit that I don't I'm not going
Speaker 3: to I'm pretty rapidly going to stop having any value
Speaker 3: if I if I neglect, I'm still struggling to find
Speaker 3: enough time for like reading. I think that's probably true
Speaker 3: for a lot of people. But like the sort of
Speaker 3: the input side of this, the where you take in
Speaker 3: the sort of intellectual nourishment, it's very easy to tell
Speaker 3: yourself that you're going to get around to that in
Speaker 3: a week or two, once you've got these big things
Speaker 3: out of the way, And I think that's a bad
Speaker 3: tactic and one that I still struggle with.
Speaker 1: I feel like that that relates to what you talk
Speaker 1: about in terms of limiting your work in progress. Can
Speaker 1: you sort of talk about how you do that in practice?
Speaker 3: Yeah. This has been one of the great sort of
Speaker 3: on a day to day level, life changing ideas for
Speaker 3: me that I've encountered in the last few years. One
Speaker 3: of the people who deserve credit for this is guy
Speaker 3: called Jim Benson, who wrote a book called Personal Kanban,
Speaker 3: But it's around in other places as well. This is
Speaker 3: just the idea that the sort of theoretical idea, and
Speaker 3: then I'll say a practical way of doing it. But
Speaker 3: the theoretical idea is just that you set a really
Speaker 3: low upper ceiling on the number of things, number of
Speaker 3: projects or tasks that you're going to allow to be
Speaker 3: sort of actively on your plate at any one point.
Speaker 3: And so if it's like three, then the way this
Speaker 3: works is that you don't you work on one of
Speaker 3: those three and then you move to another one. Perhaps
Speaker 3: you do it. You can sort of go between them
Speaker 3: as you like, but you don't bring on a fourth
Speaker 3: item until you've finished one of them, thereby freeing up
Speaker 3: a slot and so that a new one can become
Speaker 3: one of the three. So a really simple way of
Speaker 3: implementing this is just to have two to do lists. Right.
Speaker 3: You keep one list which is just endless. It's got
Speaker 3: all the three hundred things that you have said you'll
Speaker 3: do or want to do or are thinking about doing,
Speaker 3: and then a second list that has let's say five
Speaker 3: slots on it, and you move five things from the
Speaker 3: long list to the short list. And the rule is
Speaker 3: no more things move from the long list to the
Speaker 3: shortlist until there's a new slot freed up by one
Speaker 3: of them being completed. So then you work on one
Speaker 3: of those five. When it's finished, you cross it out
Speaker 3: and you can add a new one to your list
Speaker 3: now because it only has four on it. It's so simple,
Speaker 3: but I mean, it just has all these kind of
Speaker 3: amazing implications. When you sort of practice it for a while,
Speaker 3: you see it turns out to be much more powerful
Speaker 3: than you and you might have imagined, because it sort
Speaker 3: of brings you right up in into contact with your finitude,
Speaker 3: right with your limitation, because it's actually always the case
Speaker 3: that you can only be working on a few things,
Speaker 3: and in some sense only ever working on one thing
Speaker 3: at a time, like that was always the case. All
Speaker 3: that's happening here is you're becoming conscious of it and
Speaker 3: you're making a wise decision about which ones.
Speaker 1: We will be back with Oliver Berkman soon talking about
Speaker 1: why he keeps a done list. But in the meantime,
Speaker 1: if you're enjoying how I work, you might want to
Speaker 1: connect with me on the socials. I'm on LinkedIn to
Speaker 1: search for Amantha Imba. I'm on Twitter at Amantha, and
Speaker 1: I'm on Instagram at Amantha I and I publish a
Speaker 1: whole lot more content and tips and cool things that
Speaker 1: I'm finding through all of those channels.
Speaker 2: So drop me a note, connect with me there. I'd
Speaker 2: love to hear from you.
Speaker 1: Now. In the book you talk about a done list
Speaker 1: as well. Can you explain how you're using a done
Speaker 1: list and what that is?
Speaker 3: Yeah, that is an incredibly simple notion. That is just
Speaker 3: the idea that in addition to all these lists that
Speaker 3: we keep or systems that we have to tell us
Speaker 3: and organize all the things we have not yet done,
Speaker 3: the sort of terrible weight of the of the not
Speaker 3: yet completed things. Cut yourself some slack, keep a list
Speaker 3: of that you add to of the things that you complete. Right,
Speaker 3: keep keep a record of of what you do. Some
Speaker 3: of the ways that people organize there there to do
Speaker 3: is will naturally create these, Right if you're sort of
Speaker 3: moving things among columns on a canban board or something
Speaker 3: like that, you're going to naturally come up with a
Speaker 3: list of completed items. But if you're the just have
Speaker 3: a sort of regular to do list, like keep one
Speaker 3: other list where you literally write something down every time
Speaker 3: you've you've crossed it off one list, or even if
Speaker 3: you wasn't on that list, you know, if you do it,
Speaker 3: write it on the done list. I think, you know,
Speaker 3: in the simplest level, it's just nice to remind yourself
Speaker 3: that that you sort of almost always, even when you
Speaker 3: feel like a day didn't go very productively, you actually
Speaker 3: probably did a whole lot of stuff. It's incredibly easy
Speaker 3: to forget the sort of number of genuinely worthwhile things
Speaker 3: that you did. On a subtler level, I think it
Speaker 3: helps challenge this notion that a lot of people have,
Speaker 3: and that I certainly am still to some extent afflicted
Speaker 3: by that you sort of start each morning in a
Speaker 3: condition of what I called productivity debt. You know that
Speaker 3: like you owe it to yourself or maybe to your
Speaker 3: boss or something like to sort of pay off this
Speaker 3: debt through being productive, and hopefully, on a really good
Speaker 3: day you might get back up to like zero balance.
Speaker 3: You might get yourself out of overdraft and out of
Speaker 3: debt and back to zero, which is a really kind
Speaker 3: of I mean, there are lots of reasons for it,
Speaker 3: but it's a really unfortunate and self punishing way to
Speaker 3: frame work, and it's tied into all these kind of
Speaker 3: ideas that people have about their self worth and about
Speaker 3: the idea that they're not really justifying their existence on
Speaker 3: the planet, not really really have a right to exist
Speaker 3: unless they unless they sort of pull off a certain
Speaker 3: amount of tasks. Obviously, people are in jobs where they do,
Speaker 3: in another sense, have to do a certain amount of
Speaker 3: tasks to get paid. But in this existential sense, you know,
Speaker 3: I think a lot of people have, certainly me historically,
Speaker 3: have tied up their sense of sort of basic adequacy
Speaker 3: as a human with how productive they're being. And the
Speaker 3: great thing about a done list is it sort of
Speaker 3: rewires this a bit, and it helps you to think, well,
Speaker 3: how about you start the morning at zero and everything
Speaker 3: that you do is extra, like it's a deposit into
Speaker 3: your productivity bank account instead of just paying off a debt.
Speaker 3: Why not think about it that way? Why not think
Speaker 3: that you're absolutely enough as you are, and then if
Speaker 3: you manage to do a whole lot of cool things today,
Speaker 3: that's all X and it's all great.
Speaker 2: That's so cool.
Speaker 1: I love that reframe because I've never been able to
Speaker 1: consistently keep a done list, even.
Speaker 2: Though I really like the advice.
Speaker 1: And interestingly, I've recently changed my workflow around how I
Speaker 1: managed tasks, and I was listening to you talk about
Speaker 1: your to do list strategy and the long list and
Speaker 1: the short list, or I think in the book you
Speaker 1: referred to it as an open list and a closed list. Yeah,
Speaker 1: which really resonated with me, and I've recently someone put
Speaker 1: me onto this software called Motion. Annoyingly, there are two
Speaker 1: calendar software is called Motion and for anyone that is interested,
Speaker 1: it's Usemotion dot io dot com. And how it works
Speaker 1: is that you have your combines your task list and
Speaker 1: I guess this would be the well I guess the
Speaker 1: closed list with your calendar. So you're seeing both on
Speaker 1: the same screen, and you enter your tasks on the
Speaker 1: left hand side, and you assign an approximate time of
Speaker 1: how long they would take to complete, and then you
Speaker 1: drag and drop them into your calendar. So it's sort
Speaker 1: of automatically time boxes for you in terms of that
Speaker 1: task then becomes a meeting with yourself.
Speaker 2: And then when you finish the task, like normally, what.
Speaker 1: Would happen if you were just doing normal time boxing
Speaker 1: is time would pass and you would have finished the task.
Speaker 1: But with this, you actually get to tick it off
Speaker 1: and it stays in your calendar. But it's kind of
Speaker 1: grade out, so like, you get to the end of
Speaker 1: the day and you feel that sense of achievement or
Speaker 1: progress because everything you've completed is still there, but it's
Speaker 1: ticked off and you get to tick it off as
Speaker 1: you go through your day, which also, you know, it's
Speaker 1: just good in terms of giving you that dopamine hit
Speaker 1: as you go throughout it, but it's also good in
Speaker 1: terms of not over scheduling yourself because you kind of like,
Speaker 1: you like, if you treat that task list as the
Speaker 1: closed list and then you make sure that you have
Speaker 1: time to fit everything physically into your calendar, then you
Speaker 1: kind of end up with this perfectly balanced calendar.
Speaker 2: I find.
Speaker 3: Okay, I'm going to I'm going to check that out.
Speaker 3: This is music to my head. It's reminded me of
Speaker 3: I wrote an email newsletter just recently about sort of
Speaker 3: returning to the Pomodoro technique, talk about old school productivity, geekism.
Speaker 3: This is if anyone's listening doesn't know, this is a
Speaker 3: methodology based around dividing your time into twenty five minute
Speaker 3: chunks followed by five minute breaks. But the guy who
Speaker 3: started that has got this very very interesting way of
Speaker 3: talking about time and the idea that what he's doing
Speaker 3: is offering one way for people to stop time being
Speaker 3: a predator, as he puts it, stop stop having this
Speaker 3: kind of antagonistic relationship to time. So, you know, instead
Speaker 3: of instead of sort of starting off with a long
Speaker 3: list of tasks in the morning and and sort of
Speaker 3: beginning the fight, the battle to get them all done
Speaker 3: in the limited amount of time, which sort of pitches
Speaker 3: you into this battle with time. Instead, you sort of
Speaker 3: think about your day as divided up into these chunks,
Speaker 3: and you figure out what can be fitted into them.
Speaker 3: And the fact is if that means neglecting some things,
Speaker 3: well it was always going to mean neglecting some things,
Speaker 3: only now you're doing it without this kind of anxiety
Speaker 3: inducing belief that you might you know, break the rules
Speaker 3: of physics and fit even more in. And that really
Speaker 3: spoke to me is something that I'm also trying to,
Speaker 3: I think say in this in this book, it's the
Speaker 3: big idea here is something to do with kind of
Speaker 3: falling back into reality and falling back into time. Let's
Speaker 3: not get into Heidegger in this podcast, probably, but you know,
Speaker 3: there are some big ideas here that sort of are
Speaker 3: in that go quite a long way back in philosophy,
Speaker 3: it's sort of understanding that what you are is a
Speaker 3: kind of a river of time that flows for a
Speaker 3: while and you're in it as opposed to scrambling out
Speaker 3: of it and then trying to sort of control it
Speaker 3: from above. And what you and your listeners can't see
Speaker 3: now is I'm sort of I'm sort of contorting myself
Speaker 3: into various physical shapes here to try to try to
Speaker 3: articulate this idea that I think a lot of us
Speaker 3: are trying a lot of the time to kind of
Speaker 3: psychologically lever ourselves into a position of being on top
Speaker 3: of our lives and being in command of time and
Speaker 3: being in the driver's seat, being like air traffic control
Speaker 3: and sort of navigating the way things go instead of
Speaker 3: being instead of understanding that we're in it, that we
Speaker 3: are it, that you know today, you have the hours
Speaker 3: of today, and that's that. It's this just like relaxing
Speaker 3: back into reality and seeing not only is that much
Speaker 3: less anxiety inducing to understand that, like you have this time,
Speaker 3: certain things can be done with this time, and that's that,
Speaker 3: but it's also very empowering because you know, it means
Speaker 3: that you get to do the things that you want
Speaker 3: to do. It means you me and that are most
Speaker 3: important to you to do because you're no longer fighting
Speaker 3: this kind of this kind of futile battle to become
Speaker 3: a kind of God with regard to your life.
Speaker 1: It's interesting in the book you write a bit about patience,
Speaker 1: and I guess building your patient's muscle, and it's it's funny.
Speaker 1: I think back to, gosh, it must have been the
Speaker 1: beginning of last year, and one of my goals was
Speaker 1: to become more patient, which probably sounds like a very
Speaker 1: strange goal, and.
Speaker 3: That maybe it's lots of people here.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I didn't succeed, and I still have many days.
Speaker 2: And I was even reflecting on this a few weeks ago.
Speaker 1: I have so many days where I spend day feeling
Speaker 1: like I'm rushed or I'm running behind, like that perpetual
Speaker 1: sense of oh, if only I had, like, you know,
Speaker 1: an extra five minutes in this twenty four hour period,
Speaker 1: I could catch up, which is completely nonsensical. And I
Speaker 1: want to know for you, I imagine that building your patient's
Speaker 1: muscle has been something you're trying to do. What strategies
Speaker 1: have worked for you.
Speaker 3: Well, there's the extreme one that I write about in
Speaker 3: the book where I did this exercise that an art
Speaker 3: historian called Jennifer Roberts at Harvard University recommends where you
Speaker 3: were Oh.
Speaker 1: My god, sorry, I just have to explain it. But
Speaker 1: my god, that made me feel sick when I read that.
Speaker 2: But please explain it.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, Well, basically, if you do it. If she's
Speaker 3: an art historian at Harvard and she has all her
Speaker 3: beginning students do the same exercise, which is that they
Speaker 3: should choose a painting or sculpture in the at a
Speaker 3: museum in the area, and obviously Cambridge, Massachusetts has a
Speaker 3: whole lot of really fantastic art collections and go look
Speaker 3: at it for three hours straight and you can sort
Speaker 3: of you can take a bath from break if you
Speaker 3: have to. But it's but basically, I'm not supposed to
Speaker 3: do anything else but look at the painting. And the
Speaker 3: idea here is that, you know, especially with the visual arts,
Speaker 3: it's really easy to tell yourself that you've seen a
Speaker 3: painting just because you've looked at it, but actually all
Speaker 3: sorts of details in a painting sort of give themselves
Speaker 3: up after a certain amount of time. And I went
Speaker 3: and did this thing and looked at the painting and
Speaker 3: for three hours at the Harvard Art Museums, and it's
Speaker 3: a very interesting experience. It's interesting from the point of
Speaker 3: view of understanding art, which is not one of my
Speaker 3: strong points, but it's also just it really demonstrates that,
Speaker 3: how you know, after a very short time, it's an
Speaker 3: incredibly uncomfortable experience to not be able to try to
Speaker 3: hurry reality to go at the speed you want, right,
Speaker 3: which is what you would normally do. You'd sort of
Speaker 3: so you sort of undergo the discomfort of not being
Speaker 3: able to hurry reality. But on the other side of
Speaker 3: that discomfort, sort of reality opens out in this remarkable way,
Speaker 3: and you find yourself much more relaxed and much more
Speaker 3: in touch with the thing that you're looking at. The
Speaker 3: broader point that I'm trying to make about patients in
Speaker 3: the book is that patience is essentially, in a world
Speaker 3: that is accelerating as much as ours is, the ability
Speaker 3: to be patient, to let things take the time they take,
Speaker 3: is actually a form of control. Right. Historically, I think
Speaker 3: patience has been a thing that it's been a sort
Speaker 3: of virtue of the dispossessed. It's a thing that women
Speaker 3: were told to cultivate patients while their husbands were living
Speaker 3: more exciting lives outside the home, or you know, ethnic
Speaker 3: minorities have been told used to be patient, to wait
Speaker 3: a few more decades to have full civil rights. It's
Speaker 3: been a very sort of passive and oppressive kind of
Speaker 3: so called virtue, right, it's sort of like deal with
Speaker 3: the fact that you don't have power kind of ideology.
Speaker 3: But what Jennifer Roberts points out is that, you know,
Speaker 3: as society accelerates, it becomes a form of power. Rather
Speaker 3: than a way of accommodating yourself to your lack of power,
Speaker 3: it becomes a way of being able to resist the
Speaker 3: fact that every single technological and cultural and economic force
Speaker 3: is pushing us to go fast, go fast, to go faster,
Speaker 3: to the point where you actually can't do well the
Speaker 3: things that you might want to do, or experience life
Speaker 3: in the ways you might might want to And so
Speaker 3: cultivating patients then, I think, is just like that really
Speaker 3: is another part of this kind of falling back into reality,
Speaker 3: and the reality is that you can't hurry the pace
Speaker 3: of everything that you know, reading a book and getting
Speaker 3: the most out of it just takes the time. It
Speaker 3: takes what do you.
Speaker 1: Do on a day to day level when you find
Speaker 1: yourself feeling rushed or impatient?
Speaker 3: Again, it's a good days and bad days question. But
Speaker 3: what I do when I can, when I have just
Speaker 3: enough presence of mind and consciousness to see that that's
Speaker 3: what's happening, is to stop completely, you know, to to
Speaker 3: go from rushing something to to just stopping and really
Speaker 3: focus on trying to feel the discomfort, right, Because I
Speaker 3: think the thing that is so extraordinary about this kind
Speaker 3: of discomfort and other forms of the discomfort that we've
Speaker 3: been talking about, is how little of it will totally
Speaker 3: is how little is required to completely sort of divert
Speaker 3: me from my path of the day and or to
Speaker 3: cause me to get incredibly anxious and frustrated with how
Speaker 3: slow something's going. And if you turn your attention to
Speaker 3: the discomfort, very often you sort of have this understanding
Speaker 3: that like, it's it's not a big deal, right, It's not.
Speaker 3: It doesn't usually feel like some sort of terrible torture
Speaker 3: or pain. It's just a sort of it's a sort
Speaker 3: of mild resistance to being where you are, and that
Speaker 3: things that what's happening is is happening, and you know,
Speaker 3: when you're when it's working well, that will enable you
Speaker 3: to sort of drop more deeply into the experience of
Speaker 3: reality and find that actually there's nothing wrong with you,
Speaker 3: Know that the fact that something is taking longer than
Speaker 3: you than you thought it was, that that then you
Speaker 3: thought you wanted it to that the only cause of
Speaker 3: the anxiety is some bizarre imaginary standard you have that
Speaker 3: it ought to be possible to do this thing more
Speaker 3: quickly than it is possible to do it in And
Speaker 3: so like, why not let go of the imaginary standard
Speaker 3: and and just keep sort of steadily working on God,
Speaker 3: that's so.
Speaker 2: Helpful to keep in mind.
Speaker 1: I feel like I'm going to take it as my
Speaker 1: child to try to apply that today.
Speaker 3: Now. Might you see me waiting in a line somewhere
Speaker 3: looking really angry and like frustrated and clenching my fists. Yes,
Speaker 3: because I'm not perfect at any.
Speaker 2: Of this, and I think that's so good to remember.
Speaker 2: It's so easy.
Speaker 1: I feel like for people to particularly listen to guests
Speaker 1: that I have on how I work and go, They've
Speaker 1: got it all sorted. But it's really refreshing to know that, well,
Speaker 1: all of it doesn't have it all sorted, even though
Speaker 1: we're saying all these really smart things. Now, I wanted
Speaker 1: to ask you something. There are a bunch of things
Speaker 1: towards the end of the book that are questions, and
Speaker 1: then there are some practical ideas. And something that stuck
Speaker 1: with me is I think it's a question that you say,
Speaker 1: James Hollis asks, and it does this choice diminish me
Speaker 1: or enlarge meat when we're thinking about making decisions, And
Speaker 1: I'd love to know, like when and how do you
Speaker 1: apply that question.
Speaker 3: I'll give you one very specific sort of example that
Speaker 3: was very significant to me. I live in the United States,
Speaker 3: come from Britain. A year or two after I arrived here,
Speaker 3: there were sort of various reasons to do with work
Speaker 3: and relationships and all sorts of things that sort of
Speaker 3: caused me to think like, oh, maybe it's time to
Speaker 3: go home. You know, maybe it's time to go back
Speaker 3: where I belong and not stay here. And you know,
Speaker 3: I had I was really only just at the beginning
Speaker 3: of understanding this kind of James Hollis stuff, so maybe
Speaker 3: slightly retroactively applying this way of thinking to that decision,
Speaker 3: But looking back, certainly I can see there that that
Speaker 3: was a time when actually it might have made you know,
Speaker 3: I had no idea it was going to make me happiest,
Speaker 3: but it would have been a form of diminishment. It
Speaker 3: would have been a sort of a retreat from challenges
Speaker 3: that needed to be faced in my life if I
Speaker 3: had if I had gone home, I would have been
Speaker 3: running away and it was enlarging to stay. And as
Speaker 3: it turned out, you know, various extremely good things in
Speaker 3: my life would not have happened if I hadn't if
Speaker 3: I hadn't stayed. I think you can probably apply this
Speaker 3: on a much more sort of low level as well,
Speaker 3: in terms of day to day tasks. I do find
Speaker 3: myself thinking some version of it when i'm when I
Speaker 3: sort of know that there's a there's something I want
Speaker 3: to do for one version of the for one meaning
Speaker 3: of the word want, which is it's important to me
Speaker 3: and it's going to be deeply satisfying to invested time
Speaker 3: in it, but I don't want to do it for
Speaker 3: the other definition of the word want, which is like
Speaker 3: I'm just feeling sort of truculent and tired and I'd
Speaker 3: rather do something easier.
Speaker 2: That's great.
Speaker 1: I love that question so much, now, Oliver. My final
Speaker 1: question for you, for people that want to consume more
Speaker 1: of what you're doing and get the hands on four
Speaker 1: thousand Weeks, which I highly recommend. I just think that,
Speaker 1: you know, it's just it's such a great book for
Speaker 1: people that think about productivity and think about how they
Speaker 1: use their time so much, like so many of the
Speaker 1: ideas really challenged me to rethink beliefs that I held
Speaker 1: about how I use my time.
Speaker 2: So I couldn't recommend it highly enough.
Speaker 3: So, oh, I'm so glad to hear it. Thank you
Speaker 3: so much, my pleasure.
Speaker 1: So how can people get their hands on a copy
Speaker 1: of the book and connect with you in some way?
Speaker 3: Well, I've got a sort of My website is Oliver
Speaker 3: Berkman dot com. That's where you can sign up also
Speaker 3: for my newsletter of The Imperfectionist that has a link
Speaker 3: to pre orders around the world for four thousand weeks.
Speaker 3: Also the url four thousand weeks book dot com four
Speaker 3: zero zero zero weeks book dot com will take you
Speaker 3: to a page that has links for wherever you're listening from.
Speaker 3: And yeah, depending on when this is being heard, pre
Speaker 3: orders and orders are enormously gratefully received.
Speaker 1: Fantastic, Oliver. It's been great having you back on How
Speaker 1: I Work. Thank you so much for giving me part
Speaker 1: of your day to day, part of your time.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much. It was a pleasure and I
Speaker 3: really enjoyed the conversation.
Speaker 1: Hello there, that is it for today's show. If you
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Speaker 3: See you next time.