Speaker 1: Tell me if this sounds like you. You've got endless
Speaker 1: emails to reply to, meetings, backing onto meetings, that next
Speaker 1: report to write, customers or clients demanding your time urgently,
Speaker 1: 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.
Speaker 2: Oliver is a.
Speaker 1: Self professed productivity nerd, and he believes that our fixation
Speaker 1: on the next brilliant organizational system might make us feel
Speaker 1: like we're getting on top of things, but it could
Speaker 1: actually come at the cost of getting the truly important
Speaker 1: things done. So how can we learn to prioritize what
Speaker 1: really matters? And how can we make choices that enlarge
Speaker 1: us rather than diminish us? And why should we actually
Speaker 1: avoid trying to get everything done? My name is doctor
Speaker 1: Amantha Imber. I'm an organizational psychologist and the founder of
Speaker 1: behavioral science consultancy Inventium, and this is how I work
Speaker 1: a show about how to help you do your best work.
Speaker 2: Oliver Berkman just released his.
Speaker 1: Latest book, and it's called four thousand Weeks, So I
Speaker 1: wanted to ask him 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 I've read four thousand Weeks and I loved it,
Speaker 1: and I also found it very challenging as well, because
Speaker 1: I feel like it's kind of almost an anti productivity
Speaker 1: book for productivity geeks, of which I am one. And
Speaker 1: it 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 3: That's good.
Speaker 2: So you in.
Speaker 1: The book, you talk about how you thought of yourself
Speaker 1: as the kind of person who gets things done, and
Speaker 1: then like you became clear that the things that you
Speaker 1: 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 fancying 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 intimidating, but it's
Speaker 3: the things that are challenging or intimidating that tend to
Speaker 3: matter the most. That's why they're challenging and intimidating, because
Speaker 3: the stakes are higher, and you know, you want to
Speaker 3: write this chapter well, and you want this difficult conversation
Speaker 3: with somebody to have a good result. I mean, it's
Speaker 3: it's so that I find this with email as a
Speaker 3: really good example, right, I mean emails that fundamentally don't
Speaker 3: really matter from people who I don't particularly care about
Speaker 3: in the professional context, someone you know I don't I
Speaker 3: don't want to be rude in stockings for examples, but like,
Speaker 3: you know, some very purely administrative email about something I'm
Speaker 3: trying to figure out, very easy to respond to. If
Speaker 3: someone who's reading my newsletter sends me a sort of
Speaker 3: long and involved email that's really interesting and feels like
Speaker 3: it needs a personal response, or if an old friend
Speaker 3: 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 on clearing the decks, and tomorrow
Speaker 3: or this afternoon or sometime soon, then I'm going to
Speaker 3: 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 peoples,
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 in working order, but you're doing
Speaker 3: it in this context where there's no limit to what
Speaker 3: can come in to need doing, then the only fact
Speaker 3: of that is that you never get around to the
Speaker 3: things that you care about the most. 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 fix 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 and I think that's
Speaker 3: a much more sort of sane way of dealing with
Speaker 3: the 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 best days, I am going to be saying,
Speaker 3: you know, I have an approximate plan for the day,
Speaker 3: sort of time boxed, and I have a checklist of
Speaker 3: certain kinds of tough that I aim to do daily,
Speaker 3: of which overwhelmingly, you know, processing some email is the
Speaker 3: is the biggest is the biggest consumer of time, and
Speaker 3: I'll just be in my inbox for that amount of time.
Speaker 3: I have literally have a little digital kitchen timer that
Speaker 3: I will set and that will count down, and I'll
Speaker 3: and I'll be aiming to get stuff out of the inbox,
Speaker 3: either just by replying if that's all it needs, if
Speaker 3: it needs to go into my task management system, I'll
Speaker 3: try to sort of take it out of there. In
Speaker 3: other words, I'm not like running my life out of
Speaker 3: my inbox, where everything from missives from friends, urgent things
Speaker 3: from editors, and you know, advertisements from some restaurant that
Speaker 3: I gave my email address to three years ago are
Speaker 3: all mixed and competing for my attention. It's a place
Speaker 3: that I'm going to take things out of, either because
Speaker 3: the reply is all it's needed, or because it goes
Speaker 3: into my wider system, or in many cases, of course,
Speaker 3: it just gets deleted, or it's an email newsletter. I
Speaker 3: read there and then and take bits from if I'm interested,
Speaker 3: otherwise file away and then stop when that timer stop.
Speaker 3: I mean, this is the hard part. The hard part
Speaker 3: is that is training yourself to sort of once you're
Speaker 3: on a roll and you're like, oh, if I just
Speaker 3: carried on a bit more, I might get to the
Speaker 3: I might get inbox zero, you know, depending on the
Speaker 3: state of your inbox, actually get Actually stopping is the
Speaker 3: part that is hard, but I think it's really important
Speaker 3: because you're cultivating there this in the act of stopping.
Speaker 3: You're cultivating this patience, this tolerance of the discomfort, and
Speaker 3: this willingness to say, like, Okay, my job is not
Speaker 3: to try to do something literally impossible, which is to
Speaker 3: you know, get my arms around an infinite quantity. My
Speaker 3: job is to spend a sort of reasonable amount of
Speaker 3: my day and my stamina doing this part of my job.
Speaker 3: And of course it's a far better recipe for being
Speaker 3: able to show up day after day after day at
Speaker 3: your job anyway. So it's not like I'm saying that
Speaker 3: people should sort of be irresponsible, because it's not responsible to,
Speaker 3: you know, get onto these crazy runs where you're trying
Speaker 3: to get to the very end of something and you
Speaker 3: end up, you know, going to bed three hours late
Speaker 3: and being incapable of work for the next three days
Speaker 3: or what 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 emails
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 question. I don't really write about
Speaker 3: 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 waits 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 or four hours of the
Speaker 3: day on that. That's sort of sort of rule of
Speaker 3: thumb that I try to I try to operate. But
Speaker 3: like you know, I think about my working day as
Speaker 3: divided into that that bit and the rest of it,
Speaker 3: and so you know, that's a sort of prioritization of
Speaker 3: very sort of rough and ready prioritization that just comes
Speaker 3: from 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, where you take in the
Speaker 3: sort of intellectual nourishment, it's very easy to tell yourself
Speaker 3: that you're going to get around to that in a
Speaker 3: week or two, once you've got these big things out
Speaker 3: of the way, And I think that's a bad tactic
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 2: Can you sort of talk about how you do that
Speaker 2: 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 can Ban.
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 projects,
Speaker 3: or tasks that you're going to allow to be sort
Speaker 3: of actively on your plate at any one point. And
Speaker 3: so if it's like three, then the way this works
Speaker 3: is that you don't you work on one of those
Speaker 3: three and then you move to another one. Perhaps you
Speaker 3: do it. You can sort of go between them as
Speaker 3: you like, but you don't bring on a fourth item
Speaker 3: until you've finished one of them, thereby freeing up a
Speaker 3: slot and so that a new one can become one
Speaker 3: of the three. So a really simple way of implementing
Speaker 3: 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 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 dumb
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 our 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 at not yet
Speaker 3: completed things. Cut yourself some slack, keep a list of
Speaker 3: 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 you sort of almost always, even when
Speaker 3: you feel like a day didn't go very productively, you
Speaker 3: actually probably did a whole lot of stuff. It's incredibly
Speaker 3: easy to forget the sort of number of genuinely worthwhile
Speaker 3: things that you did on a subtler level. I think
Speaker 3: it helps challenge this notion that a lot of people
Speaker 3: have and that I certainly am still to some extent
Speaker 3: afflicted by that you sort of start each morning in
Speaker 3: a 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 tosk. Obviously, people are in jobs where they
Speaker 3: do in another sense have to do a certain amount
Speaker 3: of tasks to get paid, but in this existential sense,
Speaker 3: you know, I think a lot of people have, certainly
Speaker 3: me historically, have tied up their sense of sort of
Speaker 3: basic adequacy as a human with how productive they're being.
Speaker 3: And the great thing about a done list is it
Speaker 3: sort of rewires this a bit, and it helps you
Speaker 3: to think, well, how about you start the morning at
Speaker 3: zero and everything that you do is extra, like it's
Speaker 3: a deposit into your productivity bank account instead of just
Speaker 3: paying off a debt. Why not think about it that way?
Speaker 3: Why not think that you're absolutely enough as you are,
Speaker 3: and then if you manage to do a whole lot
Speaker 3: of cool things today, that's all extra 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 though I really like
Speaker 1: the advice. And interestingly, I've recently in my workflow around
Speaker 1: how I managed tasks, and I was listening to you
Speaker 1: talk about your to do list strategy and the long
Speaker 1: list and the short list, or I think in the
Speaker 1: book you're referred to it as an open list and
Speaker 1: a closed list, which, yeah, which really resonated with me,
Speaker 1: and I've recently someone put me onto this software called Motion. Annoyingly,
Speaker 1: there are two calendar software is called Motion and for
Speaker 1: anyone that is interested, it's Usemotion dot io dot com.
Speaker 1: And how it works is that you have your combines
Speaker 1: your task list and I guess this would be the
Speaker 1: well I guess the closed list with your calendar. So
Speaker 1: you're seeing both on the same screen, and you enter
Speaker 1: your tasks on the left hand side, and you assign
Speaker 1: an approximate time of how long they would take to complete,
Speaker 1: and then you drag and drop them into your calendar,
Speaker 1: so it sort of automatically timeboxes for you in terms
Speaker 1: of that task then becomes.
Speaker 2: A meeting with yourself. And then when you finish the task,
Speaker 2: like normally, what.
Speaker 1: Would happen if you were just doing normal timeboxing is
Speaker 1: 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 NEWSLETTERG 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 it got this very very interesting way
Speaker 3: of talking about time and the idea that what he's
Speaker 3: doing is offering one way for people to stop time
Speaker 3: being a predator, as he puts it, 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 what can be fitted into them. And
Speaker 3: the fact is if that means neglecting some things, well
Speaker 3: it was always going to mean neglecting some things, only
Speaker 3: now you're doing it without this kind of anxiety inducing
Speaker 3: belief that you might you know, break the rules of
Speaker 3: physics and fit even more in. And that really spoke
Speaker 3: to me is something that I'm also trying to, I
Speaker 3: think say in this in this book. It's the big
Speaker 3: idea here is something to do with kind of falling
Speaker 3: back into reality and falling back into time. Let's not
Speaker 3: get into Heidegger in this podcast, probably, but but you know,
Speaker 3: there are some big ideas here that that sort of
Speaker 3: are 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 while,
Speaker 3: and you're in it as opposed to scrambling out of
Speaker 3: it and then trying to sort of control it from
Speaker 3: above and what you and you're listening can't see now
Speaker 3: as I'm sort of I'm sort of contorting myself into
Speaker 3: various physical shapes here to try to try to articulate
Speaker 3: this idea that I think a lot of us are
Speaker 3: trying a lot of the time to kind of psychologically
Speaker 3: lever ourselves into a position of being on top of
Speaker 3: our lives and being in command of time and being
Speaker 3: in the driver's seat, being like air traffic control and
Speaker 3: sort of navigating the way things go instead of being
Speaker 3: instead of understanding that we're in it, but we are it.
Speaker 3: That you know today you have the hours of today,
Speaker 3: and that's that. It's this just like relaxing back into
Speaker 3: reality and seeing not only is that much less anxiety
Speaker 3: inducing to understand that, like you have this time, certain
Speaker 3: 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 mean and that are most important
Speaker 3: to you to do because you're no longer fighting this
Speaker 3: kind of this kind of futile battle to become a
Speaker 3: 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 I gave.
Speaker 3: Me but 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 the day
Speaker 1: feeling like I'm rushed or I'm running behind, like that
Speaker 1: perpetual 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 2: Muscle has been something you're trying to do. What strategies
Speaker 2: have work 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 were,
Speaker 3: Oh my god.
Speaker 1: Sorry, I just have to explain it. But my god,
Speaker 1: that made me feel sick when I read that. But
Speaker 1: please explain it.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, Well, basically, if you do, and 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 and
Speaker 3: look at it for three hours straight. And you can
Speaker 3: can take a bathroom break if you have to. But
Speaker 3: it's but basically, I'm not supposed to do anything else
Speaker 3: but look at the painting. And the idea here is that,
Speaker 3: you know, especially with the visual arts, it's really easy
Speaker 3: to tell your self that you've seen a painting just
Speaker 3: because you've looked at it, but actually all sorts of
Speaker 3: details in a painting sort of give themselves up after
Speaker 3: a certain amount of time. And I went and did
Speaker 3: this thing and looked at the painting and for three
Speaker 3: hours at the Harvard Art Museums. And it's a very
Speaker 3: interesting experience. It's interesting from the point of view of
Speaker 3: understanding art, which is not one of my strong points,
Speaker 3: but it's also just it really demonstrates that how you know,
Speaker 3: after a very short time, it's an incredibly uncomfortable experience
Speaker 3: to not be able to try to hurry reality to
Speaker 3: go at the speed you want, right, which is what
Speaker 3: you would normally do. You'd sort of so you sort
Speaker 3: of undergo the discomfort of not being able to hurry reality.
Speaker 3: But on the other side of that discomfort, sort of
Speaker 3: reality opens out in this remarkable way, and you find
Speaker 3: yourself much more relaxed and much more in touch with
Speaker 3: the thing that you're looking at. The broader point that
Speaker 3: I'm trying to make about patients in the book is
Speaker 3: that is that patience is essentially, in a world that
Speaker 3: is accelerating as much as ours is, the ability to
Speaker 3: 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, to go fast, to
Speaker 3: go faster, to the point where you actually can't do
Speaker 3: well the things that you might want to do, or
Speaker 3: experience life in the ways you might might want to
Speaker 3: and so cultivating patients then, I think, is just like
Speaker 3: that really is another part of this kind of falling
Speaker 3: back into reality, And the reality is that you can't
Speaker 3: hurry the pace of everything that you know, reading a
Speaker 3: book and getting the most out of it just takes
Speaker 3: the time it takes.
Speaker 1: What do you do on a day to day level
Speaker 1: when you find yourself feeling rushed or impatient?
Speaker 3: Again, it's the 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 just stopping and really focus
Speaker 3: on trying to feel the discomfort, right, because I think
Speaker 3: the thing that is so extraordinary about this kind of
Speaker 3: discomfort and other forms of the discomfort that we've been
Speaker 3: talking about is how little of it will totally is
Speaker 3: how little is required to completely sort of divert me
Speaker 3: from my path of the day and or to cause
Speaker 3: me to get incredibly anxious and frustrated with how slow
Speaker 3: something's going. And if you turn your attention to the discomfort,
Speaker 3: very often you sort of have this understanding that like,
Speaker 3: it's it's not a big deal, right, It's not. It's
Speaker 3: not it doesn't usually feel like some sort of terrible
Speaker 3: torture or pain. It's just a sort of it's a
Speaker 3: sort of mild resistance to being where you are and
Speaker 3: the things that what's happening is is happening, and you
Speaker 3: know when you're when it's working well, that will enable
Speaker 3: you to sort of drop more deeply into the experience
Speaker 3: of 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 thought it was that then you thought you wanted
Speaker 3: it to that the only cause of the anxiety is
Speaker 3: some bizarre imaginary standard you have that it ought to
Speaker 3: be possible to do this thing more quickly than it
Speaker 3: is possible to do it in And so why not
Speaker 3: let go of the imaginary standard and just keep sort
Speaker 3: of steadily working on God, that's.
Speaker 2: So 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 clanching my fists. Yes,
Speaker 3: because I'm not perfect at any of this, And I think.
Speaker 2: That's so good to remember. It's so easy.
Speaker 1: I feel like for people to particularly listen to guests
Speaker 1: that I have on how I.
Speaker 2: Work and go, they've got it all sorted.
Speaker 1: But it's really refreshing to know that, well, all of
Speaker 1: it doesn't have it all sorted, even though we're saying
Speaker 1: all these really smart things. Now, I wanted to ask
Speaker 1: you something. There are a bunch of things towards the
Speaker 1: end of the book that are questions, and then there
Speaker 1: are some practical ideas, And something that stuck with me
Speaker 1: is I think it's a question that you say, James
Speaker 1: Hollis asks, and it does this choice diminish me or
Speaker 1: enlarge me when we're thinking about making decisions, And I'd
Speaker 1: love to know, like when and how do you apply
Speaker 1: 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 I'm
Speaker 3: maybe 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 hadn't 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. I love that question so much.
Speaker 1: Now, Oliver, my final question for you for people that
Speaker 1: want to consume more of what you're doing and get
Speaker 1: the hands on four thousand weeks, which I highly recommend.
Speaker 1: I just think that you know it's just it's such
Speaker 1: a great book for people that think about productivity and
Speaker 1: think about how they use their time so much like
Speaker 1: so many of the ideas really challenged me to rethink
Speaker 1: beliefs that I held 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 side?
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 Newsleader 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 when this is being heard,
Speaker 3: pre orders and orders are enormously gratefully received.
Speaker 2: Fantastic, Oliver. It's been great having you back on how
Speaker 2: I work.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for giving me part of your
Speaker 1: day today, part of your time.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much. It was a pleasure, and I
Speaker 3: really enjoyed the conversation.
Speaker 2: That is it for today's show.
Speaker 1: If you are not a subscriber or follower of How
Speaker 1: I Work on your podcast app, now is the time
Speaker 1: to hit the subscribe or follow button, because next week
Speaker 1: I have got an awesome indie you with Nicki Sparshot.
Speaker 1: And Nicky is the CEO of the Unilever and T
Speaker 1: two and has some very very interesting and practical tips
Speaker 1: to share, including the power of saying yes. But How
Speaker 1: I Work is produced by Inventium with production support from
Speaker 1: Dead Set Studios. The producer for this episode was the
Speaker 1: amazing Jenna Koda, and thank you to Martin Nimba who
Speaker 1: does the audio mix for all the episodes and makes
Speaker 1: everything sound better than it would have otherwise.
Speaker 2: See you next time.