The Productivity Paradox: Why Less Is More With Oliver Burkeman

So, here’s a scenario: It’s Monday. And you open up whatever calendar or planner or to-do list you use to organize the essential activities of the upcoming week. There’s a large project due Thursday. And an important meeting Wednesday. Your nine-to-five is chockablock with meetings, and your kid has a school function Tuesday, and there are holiday gifts to buy before Friday, and just when you’re pretty sure your week couldn’t possibly take one more featherweight of responsibilities, the HVAC unit sputters to a stop, requiring a call to the local heating and cooling guys, which obliterates four hours of Monday.

You can tell yourself that this week is cursed. Or you can tell yourself the truth: Feeling an imbalance between the time you have and the time you want to have isn’t really a curse at all. It’s a bit more like … the definition of being alive. To see life clearly in this way is what I’ve come to think of as Oliver Burkeman brain. Oliver is the author of the books Four Thousand Weeks and Meditations for Mortals.

Today, in what’s become a holiday tradition of sorts, we bring back Oliver to chat about doing more by doing less, the dubious benefits of scheduling, and the freedom that comes from accepting our limitations.

If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com.

In the following excerpt, Oliver Burkeman breaks down the philosophy for time management and happiness that he explores in his two most recent books.

Derek Thompson: So before we dive into your latest work, I think it’d be useful for people coming to you for the first time to get a refresher in the basics of your very particular outlook on life that you first spelled out in your book Four Thousand Weeks. So if you could, what is “4,000 weeks” a literal reference to, and what sort of life does Four Thousand Weeks ask us to live?

Oliver Burkeman: Well, 4,000 weeks is very approximately the average life expectancy in the developed world these days. I rounded it down to get the nice, titular figure with three zeros in it, but that’s approximately what it is. I think there’s something powerful about thinking about our finite time in weeks. We both don’t get very many of them and yet it’s also quite easy, it seems to me, to wonder where the last four or five or six of them went all the time. They seem to pass pretty rapidly. I think that the basic idea of that book, I suppose, is just that we spend a lot of time and a lot of effort in flight from our limitations, from the limited quantity of time we get and the limited control we have over how that time unfolds.

And I sort of argue that it’s that running away from it, it’s that emotional avoidance of finitude, that causes a huge proportion of our troubles with time, our stress and overwhelm and distractibility and all the rest of it. And then actually, there’s incredible power in embracing limitations, in looking them full in the face and more fully inhabiting our position as finite humans instead of constantly trying to optimize or efficiency-ize our way out of them.

Thompson: That’s a lovely summary. It’s very much resonant with what I took away from the book, which is that, ironically, seeking freedom requires us to accept limitations. And there’s, in a weird way, an enormous amount of freedom in accepting the truth of our limitations. That’s sort of the “normal person” summary of the book. For a sicko who reads philosophy and listens to philosophy podcasts like me, I’d say what I really appreciated about the book is that I have loved and have always loved existential philosophy, going from Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer to the new guys like Camus. And I think of your philosophy in a way as being a little bit like existentialism mugged by common sense. You don’t rely on inscrutable German like Heidegger. Thankfully, you don’t rely on his nauseous politics, but you find a way of making the wisdom of existential philosophy incredibly memorable to modern audiences.

And there’s an aspect of that that I’d love to talk about really through the rest of the show. So your new lovely book, Meditations for Mortals, is organized under several dozen mantras. You call them meditations. I’m going to think of them as mantras for the purpose of this question. And I want to start with my favorite mantra from the book, and that is: “It’s worse than you think.” It’s worse than you think. I think there’s enough wisdom packed into those five words that we could spend several hours talking about them. But let’s just peel back the first layer. What are you talking about? It’s worse than you think. And how on earth is something so cosmetically depressing supposed to be useful to people?

Burkeman: Well, I’m just coming at this as something that I have, in a very personal way, been through and come out to some extent the other side of to understand why it is so liberating and empowering to understand the sense in which our situation as finite humans is worse than we think. I think there are all sorts of contexts in which we see ourselves as having a very, very difficult struggle to stay on top of everything and to feel in control in the way that we think we need to. So pick a few obvious examples. It feels really, really difficult to stay on top of all the to-dos that feel like they need staying on top of. It feels really, really difficult to get to the point where you feel like you know enough to be a really competent parent or a competent spouse or to understand what makes other people tick and to really sort of get a handle on everything. Get into the driver’s seat of life.

And my argument is that these things are not actually really, really difficult. These things are, in some important sense, impossible. There will always be too much to do. There’ll always be more things that we could meaningfully spend our time on than we will be able to devote our actual time to. There will always be aspects of any other person, especially those closest to us, that sort of mystify us. And trying to understand how to be a parent sort of changes underneath you every single week, right? Because the children in question change. And I think that in that transition from very difficult to impossible, there is incredible liberation. I mean, to put it on a very superficial level, it’s just because you get to stop fighting to do something impossible and you get to stop postponing the real meaning of life to the point at which you have conquered this challenge. And you get to relax about that and to just plunge in right now into what it is that you wanted to do with your time.

This excerpt was edited for clarity. Listen to the rest of the episode here and follow the Plain English feed on Spotify.

Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Oliver Burkeman
Producer: Devon Baroldi