The Art of Manliness - Treat Your To-Do List Like a River, and Other Mindset Shifts for Making Better Use of Your Time

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:11.340 When you think about living more fully and making better use of your time, you probably

00:00:15.300 think of finding some new organizational system that you can structure your life with.

00:00:19.520 Oliver Berkman says that what you really need instead are perspective shifts, small, sustainable

00:00:24.420 changes in how you view and approach your day-to-day life.

00:00:26.840 He provides those mindset shifts in his new book, Meditations for Mortals, four weeks

00:00:31.220 to embrace your limitations and make time for what counts.

00:00:34.340 We talked about some of them today on the show, including why you should view life's

00:00:37.760 tasks and problems like a river instead of a bucket, stop feeling guilt over your productivity

00:00:41.560 debt, make peace with your decisions by embracing an unconventional reading of the poem, The

00:00:45.900 Road Not Taken, aim to do your habits daily-ish, be more welcoming of interruptions, and practice

00:00:51.240 scruffy hospitality.

00:00:52.440 After the show's over, check out our show notes at awimp.is slash meditations for mortals.

00:01:09.620 All right, Oliver Berkman, welcome back to the show.

00:01:12.960 Thank you very, very much for having me back.

00:01:14.680 So we had you on back in 2021 to talk about your book, 4,000 Weeks, Time Management for

00:01:20.940 Mortals, and that's episode number 748 for those who want to listen to that.

00:01:25.240 You got a new book out called Meditations for Mortals.

00:01:28.620 How is this book a continuation of your thinking and writing in 4,000 Weeks?

00:01:35.000 Well, I guess on some level, it continues my kind of fixation on what it means to be a

00:01:40.660 finite human and how we're supposed to deal with that in a way that makes us sort of maximally

00:01:46.780 happy and accomplished and all the rest of it.

00:01:50.040 The real difference here in my mind is that I really wanted to go deep into this question

00:01:55.420 of the problem I call actually doing things, right?

00:01:58.340 This idea that it's incredibly easy to have a very clear sense of what you want to have

00:02:03.380 in your life, the projects you want to accomplish, the way you want to show up in your relationships

00:02:08.120 and all the rest of it, and not to actually do it for real.

00:02:12.720 So this book, both in its content and its slightly maybe unusual structure, is an attempt to sort

00:02:18.620 of really get into and maybe over that gap from knowing to doing.

00:02:24.720 Yeah, so one of the big takeaways I got from our first conversation was that you're exploring

00:02:29.120 this idea that human beings have the, we're a paradox.

00:02:31.900 We're finite in time and space.

00:02:34.540 We only have so much time.

00:02:35.600 We can only be in one place at one time, but we also are capable of generating infinite

00:02:41.060 possibilities of things to do.

00:02:44.000 And I think we brought in the philosopher Kierkegaard.

00:02:46.420 Kierkegaard talked about that.

00:02:48.120 And he talks about how this paradox of being finite, but having infinite possibilities, it

00:02:54.980 creates anxiety or angst.

00:02:57.200 And one response is like, we just don't do anything.

00:02:59.900 It's like, ah, what's the point?

00:03:01.280 And I think that's what you're trying to explore in this book, Meditations for Mortals, like

00:03:05.620 how to get over that.

00:03:06.500 How can you actually start getting stuff done?

00:03:08.500 But you start off the book talking about something you've noticed when you've talked to people

00:03:12.180 and just in the online discourse is people are trying to be super productive.

00:03:16.160 They're getting stuff done.

00:03:18.380 And they're talking about how their work isn't just exhausting.

00:03:21.180 They just describe, even though they're getting a lot of stuff done, they just feel empty,

00:03:25.160 flat, maybe a bit dead inside.

00:03:28.380 And you bring in this guy named Hartmut Rosa, the sociologist, to explain why we might feel

00:03:35.120 dead inside, even though we're getting a lot done.

00:03:38.460 What's going on there?

00:03:40.860 Yeah.

00:03:41.440 So Hartmut Rosa has this whole theory, and it's the name of a very big book he wrote as

00:03:45.320 well, called Resonance.

00:03:46.580 And he is trying to sort of do what, in many ways, all sorts of philosophers have been doing

00:03:52.340 since forever, which is to put language on whatever it is that really makes life feel

00:03:58.060 vivid and alive and worth living.

00:04:00.920 And his argument is basically that what we as individuals and also as whole civilizations

00:04:05.880 attempt to do by default is to get more and more control over time and space.

00:04:12.820 And this is pretty obvious in the context of mainstream productivity culture, for one

00:04:19.020 thing, and all sorts of self-development stuff.

00:04:21.640 It's like, try and be more intentional and have your schedule consist more and more of

00:04:27.360 the things you want it to consist of and get control that way.

00:04:31.380 But he points out that actually this sort of project of increasing control seems somehow

00:04:36.020 to squeeze out the resonance, the sort of sense of aliveness or vividness that actually

00:04:42.560 is the thing that most people sort of recognize as being like, okay, I'm really fully alive

00:04:49.320 and fully showing up in this finite life.

00:04:52.780 One very, you know, mundane example that might not resonate with everyone, but it certainly

00:04:57.100 resonates with like productivity geeks or recovering productivity geeks like me is, you know, if you

00:05:03.200 ever sort of get really excited by somebody's new system for organizing your goals and your

00:05:08.780 tasks and, you know, you come up with your 90 day vision and your five year vision and

00:05:13.400 all the rest of it, and you stick it all into a system with a schedule.

00:05:17.040 And now you know exactly what steps you've got to follow the next week to make it happen.

00:05:21.740 That's incredibly exciting for a couple of days, that sense that you're seizing control

00:05:25.520 of your life.

00:05:26.760 And then pretty much every time it just becomes like in a couple of days, it's like dead.

00:05:33.480 It's like, oh my God, do I have to do all these things now that I've told myself I have

00:05:37.540 to do?

00:05:37.900 It just feels like slogging through a bunch of predetermined tasks and there's no excitement

00:05:44.340 in it anymore because all you're doing is making your way through a plan that you came

00:05:49.120 up with in the past.

00:05:50.460 There are many, many other examples, but that's one that always resonates for me just because

00:05:53.840 I've been there so many times.

00:05:55.460 No, we had a guy on the podcast early this year named Andrew Root, who is a professor

00:06:01.100 of theology, and he uses Rosa's work to explore how it's affecting church congregations.

00:06:08.200 Oh, wow.

00:06:08.860 And he wrote a book called Congregation in a Secular Age, Applying Rosa's Framework.

00:06:14.200 And something he noted in the book was that he'll go to congregations and on the surface,

00:06:18.700 they look like they're thriving.

00:06:20.220 Their membership is growing.

00:06:21.500 They're adding new wings to their buildings.

00:06:23.240 They're developing new programs.

00:06:24.580 But when he talks to the pastors, the pastors say, yeah, our members are just depressed.

00:06:29.820 Like they're just checked out.

00:06:31.280 They're kind of just going through the motions.

00:06:33.500 And Root's idea, Applying Rosa's Theory, is that churches have picked up on this idea

00:06:39.260 that in order to thrive, you have to constantly be growing.

00:06:41.740 If you're not growing, you're dead.

00:06:43.560 It's kind of like the idea we have in our Western industrialized world.

00:06:48.000 And he says what ends up happening, these churches, they feel like they had to constantly

00:06:52.000 just be doing more and more.

00:06:53.860 They have to keep doing the stuff that they were doing to get to the point that they are.

00:06:58.060 But then they have to do more to keep growing.

00:07:00.600 And the gains they get are just marginal.

00:07:03.660 And they just feel like, I'm just kind of staying in place, even though we're doing lots

00:07:07.320 of stuff.

00:07:07.900 And they just become despondent.

00:07:09.740 They're like, what's the point?

00:07:10.580 I'm just going to go through the motions.

00:07:11.820 Yeah, I can totally see how that applies in that setting, right?

00:07:17.880 You actually do meet with success in a way, right?

00:07:21.540 The congregation does stabilize or get bigger or whatever it might be.

00:07:25.440 But it's a success that seems to somehow be won at the cost of the whole purpose of what

00:07:32.420 you're doing in the first place.

00:07:34.660 Yeah, and I think a lot of people might feel that on an individual level.

00:07:38.380 They feel like, if I want to grow and keep getting better and better, I just got to do

00:07:42.280 more and more and more, in addition to the other stuff I was doing.

00:07:45.200 And then you end up feeling burned out.

00:07:47.900 And then you actually end up not wanting to do anything.

00:07:51.160 Yeah.

00:07:51.560 No, exactly.

00:07:52.080 And one of the things I'm really getting at in the new book is that it's not just that

00:07:57.000 this doesn't work and makes life worse, but that actually doing the opposite, experimenting

00:08:03.300 with ways to really confront how little control we have, how little time we have, all the different

00:08:08.360 ways in which we're limited, kind of letting yourself feel the truth of that is not just

00:08:14.740 something you should do because then you're in touch with the truth.

00:08:19.540 It's actually the way to get a lot of the things done that you thought you would get

00:08:23.760 done through the systems and schemes for increasing control.

00:08:27.580 There's a sort of sense in which constructive and creative activity kind of just wants to

00:08:33.220 happen naturally.

00:08:34.260 And our big problem is all the things we do to get in the way of it rather than that we

00:08:38.760 don't make it happen.

00:08:40.560 You also talk about this idea of the efficiency trap that we can get into as we try to control

00:08:46.340 more and more of our lives and try to do more.

00:08:48.120 What is an efficiency trap?

00:08:51.400 This is just the sort of title that I give to this very familiar experience of finding

00:08:58.200 that the ways we follow to try to become more efficient, more optimized, you know, to try

00:09:02.980 to keep up with the volume of stuff that we want to do and that the modern world sort of

00:09:07.540 pressures us to do reliably sort of make us busier and more busy with the least important

00:09:13.420 things.

00:09:15.420 Because, you know, we can go into detail, but the basic headline is just if you work on

00:09:21.200 making yourself better and better and better at getting through more and more and more

00:09:25.540 things in a given period of time, which is what efficiency essentially is, if that incoming

00:09:30.960 supply of things is essentially infinite, whether it's a supply of emails or demands or family

00:09:36.040 obligations or like ambitions and places you want to travel and all the rest of it, if

00:09:40.680 the supply is effectively infinite, getting through it faster isn't going to help, right?

00:09:44.640 It's just going to cause you to have more on your plate and to be diluting your attention

00:09:50.100 between more things.

00:09:52.200 It's also going to stop you making the tough decisions you need to make about which things

00:09:55.560 are really worth your time.

00:09:56.600 And so the result of that is that, you know, if you've ever experienced like really deciding

00:10:01.220 to get on top of your email and you really do it and you really succeed, all that happens

00:10:04.800 is that you immediately get much more email because you're replying to more people more

00:10:09.100 quickly and they're replying to you and you have to reply to them.

00:10:11.280 And, you know, it has the exact reverse effect.

00:10:13.640 It doesn't get you to that place of, you know, that kind of plateau of effortless calm where

00:10:21.120 you're finally on top of everything.

00:10:22.640 It has the reverse effect.

00:10:23.620 You see this effect happen with automobile traffic.

00:10:27.880 I think they've done studies where they widened roads.

00:10:31.420 They think, well, this will clear up congestion if we widen the road or make the highway bigger.

00:10:35.300 But all it does is just increase the amount of traffic going through.

00:10:38.980 And so it just, it creates congestion again.

00:10:41.480 Yeah.

00:10:41.960 Induced demand.

00:10:42.760 It makes the previously congested route more attractive to more motorists.

00:10:46.340 Yeah.

00:10:46.520 So we see that in your email.

00:10:47.860 I'm sure everyone's seen that your to-do list.

00:10:49.340 So the more efficient you get, you're just going to get more of that stuff you're getting

00:10:52.000 efficient at.

00:10:52.720 How is this related to this idea you talk about productivity debt?

00:10:58.340 Productivity debt.

00:10:59.080 Again, I seem to sort of come up with these labels for feet.

00:11:02.640 I think it's useful to have a label, but I don't think the feeling is anything new.

00:11:06.340 I think that it's really useful to sort of pick it out.

00:11:08.340 This is the notion that I think many of us have that we almost sort of wake up in the

00:11:12.180 morning feeling like we're in a kind of moral debt that we've got to pay off.

00:11:17.040 We've got to do a certain amount of stuff.

00:11:18.760 Get a certain amount of stuff done by the end of the day.

00:11:21.440 Be productive to a certain level.

00:11:23.780 Otherwise, we haven't quite earned our right to exist on the planet.

00:11:28.640 You know, we're not quite succeeding minimally as human beings.

00:11:33.220 Um, and when I first started talking, writing about this, people really resonated.

00:11:38.740 Like, I mean, it's at least my tribe of people.

00:11:41.880 I don't know whether it's everybody, but you know, people are like, yes, that is exactly

00:11:44.880 what it's like.

00:11:45.580 And the best you can hope for in that situation is that by the time it's the end of the day

00:11:50.400 and you're finished, you might be back at a zero balance.

00:11:52.800 You know, if you're lucky, you might have just earned your way back to feeling okay about

00:11:57.420 yourself.

00:11:58.560 And, you know, this is where I stop and say, in a sense, if you're in a salaried profession

00:12:04.060 or something like that, or in any job, really, you are in productivity debt of a kind.

00:12:09.320 You do owe your employer output in return for your pay.

00:12:14.580 But that's not the same as this kind of existential burden that I think many of us carry that we

00:12:20.040 have to sort of earn our, our right to exist through productivity.

00:12:23.760 And so one of the ideas I suggest in the book is that actually there are ways of encouraging

00:12:27.940 yourself mindset shifts to sort of start the day at a zero balance, not start the day in

00:12:32.360 debt, but start the day at zero thinking like, okay, I'm fine.

00:12:36.500 I'm enough.

00:12:37.320 I'm a good enough person, all the rest of it.

00:12:39.140 Now, anything that I do during the day is like extra.

00:12:42.180 And that's because I want to, you know, I want to create some cool things in the world,

00:12:46.020 not because I absolutely have to do it just to sort of plug this void.

00:12:49.640 I think that's a really important switch for any of us who fall into this category that

00:12:53.900 psychologists call insecure overachievers, which is, you know, probably a good chunk of

00:12:59.940 people.

00:13:00.640 Yeah.

00:13:00.860 So productivity debt, it sounds like it's like productivity, original sin.

00:13:04.340 So you just feel like I've been burdened with this thing and I got to, and one approach is

00:13:08.540 like, well, I can overcome it myself.

00:13:10.640 And you're arguing, it's not like a religious argument, but it could be, it's kind of a religious

00:13:14.880 thing.

00:13:15.220 It's like, well, no, just accept the fact that you can't overcome this on your own.

00:13:19.220 Like you can't get yourself out of this hole.

00:13:21.920 You kind of have to just give up a little bit.

00:13:24.620 And by giving up, it's liberating and you can actually get more done.

00:13:27.920 It's like you, you accept some grace in your life.

00:13:31.020 Absolutely.

00:13:31.580 And you know, it's not a religious book and I'm not in a, any sort of conventional sense,

00:13:35.140 a religious person, but that sort of those battling ideas within Christianity between,

00:13:40.500 you know, salvation through works and earning your place in heaven through your efforts.

00:13:46.220 And then on the other side, grace, the idea that, you know, your right to exist and your

00:13:51.720 right to enjoy the world is just undeserved and given regardless of what you do, that that's

00:13:58.140 how those ideas have been worked through in, in the religious context.

00:14:02.020 So it's absolutely, it's all sort of religious because I think something we're trying to do

00:14:06.260 when we follow all these kinds of personal change techniques, even if we do them as entirely

00:14:10.800 as secularists is on some level to sort of save our souls, you know?

00:14:15.700 Okay.

00:14:16.120 So let's talk about how we can shift out of this mindset of, we have to get out of productivity

00:14:21.000 debt.

00:14:21.400 We have to just get as much done as possible and give up a little control in our lives

00:14:25.840 so that we can actually experience life more fully.

00:14:29.420 And you give different tactics.

00:14:31.200 And one chapter that stood out to me, because I completely related to this, is the feeling that

00:14:36.800 many people have in the information age of drowning in information.

00:14:41.820 We all have our to read list of books.

00:14:44.720 Maybe you've got a bunch of articles on an Instapaper that you've, you know, you saved

00:14:49.500 and you're like, I'm going to read these one day.

00:14:51.160 You got stacks of the New Yorker somewhere of articles you want to read.

00:14:56.840 How does the way we typically approach our to read list create feelings of, oh man, I'm never

00:15:03.940 going to get through this and it's just, I'm drowning.

00:15:07.440 Yeah.

00:15:07.820 It's such a sort of ubiquitous feeling.

00:15:09.480 And I was amazed after I first started writing about this, because I'm not a video games person

00:15:13.440 to find that this is totally common as well as a backlog of games to play, which is totally

00:15:19.400 blew my mind because I just sort of filed video games away as things that people just

00:15:22.920 do for fun.

00:15:23.440 So why would you ever feel that there was a backlog?

00:15:26.400 But of course, that's how I approach lots of books.

00:15:29.600 And I still do feel burdened by a backlog.

00:15:31.880 So it's a really interesting phenomenon, just sort of how ubiquitous it is.

00:15:36.000 I think that this is one of many areas of life where really the solution is not to try

00:15:40.140 to make the situation feel better by getting through more stuff and finding ways to power

00:15:45.920 through more and more of this supply, but actually by understanding the way in which the situation

00:15:51.100 is worse than we think it is.

00:15:53.460 Actually, when you really see how impossibly big the potential supply of things to read

00:16:00.340 is or potential supply of things to listen to or watch, it's just so much bigger than

00:16:06.440 any human could manage.

00:16:08.980 Even just the good stuff, the stuff that's relevant to you, the stuff that is high quality,

00:16:13.080 even that, whatever criteria you apply, it's still going to be effectively infinite.

00:16:17.840 And so the only way to proceed through that, so firstly, there's a kind of immediate perspective

00:16:21.860 shift, I think, from seeing that and being like, oh, okay, getting on top of this is impossible.

00:16:26.540 That's really helpful because now my challenge is not to try to get on top of it, but just

00:16:31.420 to sort of engage with it in the most enjoyable and meaningful way.

00:16:36.580 And the metaphor I use in the book for information is like to see your to read pile or your video

00:16:41.900 game backlog or whatever it is as a river rather than a bucket.

00:16:45.400 In other words, not a bucket, something that contains a whole lot of stuff and your job

00:16:49.560 is to empty the bucket, but just something that is flowing past you or you're standing

00:16:53.940 in the middle of it and it's flowing around you or something.

00:16:56.540 And all you need to do, all you ever could do is pick a few items as they pass by that

00:17:03.660 seem like the most worthwhile to pick and not feel guilty about the ones passing by.

00:17:10.400 Because as I say, you know, we don't feel guilty, most of us, about not getting through

00:17:14.500 all the books in the Library of Congress.

00:17:16.200 It's only when we sort of draw the boundary a little bit closer to home and say, all the

00:17:21.520 articles in our read later app and all the podcasts in our queue and all the books on

00:17:25.820 the list we've been keeping, you know, only then do these lists become tormenting.

00:17:30.160 But in fact, they're all effectively impossible.

00:17:31.980 And that's actually very liberating.

00:17:33.740 Yeah, because the bucket keeps filling up infinitely.

00:17:36.320 Right.

00:17:36.460 You keep adding to it.

00:17:37.360 Well, you know, yeah, the bucket has a hole in the bottom and it's just a flow, whatever.

00:17:40.600 Whatever.

00:17:40.800 Yes.

00:17:41.420 I'm aware of the metaphor.

00:17:42.800 Yeah.

00:17:43.060 Exactly.

00:17:43.300 No, I remind the bucket's like, it's got those, remember those old magic beer floating

00:17:47.680 faucet fountains?

00:17:49.460 You know what I'm talking about?

00:17:50.940 They used to sell them at Spencer's store in the mall.

00:17:54.280 So it looks like this, this faucet's magically floating above a beer mug and it's just constantly

00:18:00.020 filling up.

00:18:01.420 Yeah.

00:18:01.780 Oh, and that's what your to read bucket is like.

00:18:04.380 Exactly.

00:18:04.940 Yeah.

00:18:05.040 So yeah, the metaphor is instead of thinking of your to read list as a bucket you have to

00:18:08.780 empty, it's just this flowing river you can dip in.

00:18:12.540 Like, I'm going to read this magazine article and that's fine.

00:18:16.120 That's all I got to do.

00:18:17.840 Yeah, no, exactly.

00:18:18.700 And the reason it's all you got to do is because on some level, it's all you could ever do.

00:18:22.700 Yeah.

00:18:23.280 You know, you can do more than other people.

00:18:25.140 You can dedicate a larger proportion of your week to reading than someone else does.

00:18:28.680 But the place where you empty the supply and you have read everything relevant to your

00:18:34.260 career or everything relevant to your hobby or every thriller that you would enjoy reading,

00:18:40.040 that's never coming.

00:18:41.420 Do you think we can apply this mindset to our to-do list as well?

00:18:45.720 I think in the end we have to, right?

00:18:47.700 I mean, this is where people start objecting and saying, oh, but I have to get through this

00:18:50.620 impossible amount.

00:18:51.540 And then I say, well, if it's an impossible amount, you're not getting through it.

00:18:55.260 And so no matter how much you have to, that's kind of a little bit meaningless because you're

00:19:00.300 not going to.

00:19:01.020 I think that, you know, another metaphor here that I've found very useful is that there's

00:19:07.000 the kind of list that you feel you have to get through.

00:19:09.240 And then there's a kind of list that is like a good example is like a menu, right?

00:19:12.560 So those big menus you get in, well, I know New York City diners, but I'm sure there are

00:19:16.860 lots of other diners, sort of 15 page laminated things that have, you know, 400 different

00:19:23.240 dishes that you could order.

00:19:24.760 Nobody looks at that list and thinks that at dinner that day, they've got to somehow

00:19:28.900 get through it all.

00:19:29.720 That would be completely absurd.

00:19:31.820 They get to pick from the list and the sort of abundance of the list is a good thing because

00:19:37.420 it's like, wow, look at this range of things I could pick from.

00:19:41.440 And actually, if you think about our situation as finite humans, to-do lists are kind of inevitably

00:19:47.320 menus as well, right?

00:19:48.680 If there's always going to be more that you could do or feel like would be meaningful and

00:19:54.140 important to do than you are going to do, then actually you're always picking from a

00:19:58.440 menu.

00:19:58.940 You're never successfully, anyway, getting through a list.

00:20:04.020 And I think that can be quite powerful because to me, anyway, it triggers that sense of like,

00:20:08.960 oh, I get to do this.

00:20:10.360 You know, that's been many people have remarked on.

00:20:12.980 Instead of having to do this, I kind of get to do it.

00:20:15.580 And that doesn't mean that you won't sometimes decide that, you know, you have to file your

00:20:19.220 tax returns.

00:20:20.300 It's just that the fundamental relationship with that list is not one of, I'm kind of

00:20:26.440 failing at life until such point at which the list is completely finished.

00:20:31.960 When you first introduced this idea of bucket and river to reading list in your email a while

00:20:36.580 back ago, it reminded me, I actually inspired an article that I wrote on our site about Mark

00:20:42.100 Forster's autofocus method.

00:20:45.000 Yeah.

00:20:45.620 Because I think his autofocus, so this is a way to keep track of your to-dos and Forster's

00:20:50.480 autofocus method, what I think is ingenious about it is it treats your to-do list like

00:20:55.100 a river.

00:20:55.780 Basically, you just create this giant list and you keep adding to it and it can be infinite,

00:21:00.540 but instead of categorizing it by due dates and categories and things like that, you just

00:21:05.940 pull out your list and then you just go down it and whatever sticks out to you, like you

00:21:10.840 do that thing and you work on it for a little bit and then you cross it out.

00:21:14.340 If you didn't finish it, you put it at the bottom of the list and you just kind of, yeah,

00:21:18.600 you treat it like a river.

00:21:19.360 You're just kind of going in and picking things out, whatever you feel like doing and it gets

00:21:23.920 stuff done.

00:21:24.340 I've used it before and I find it actually, it can be really liberating.

00:21:28.340 I think it really can.

00:21:30.060 One of the things I love about Mark Forster's work is that he's actually sort of constantly

00:21:33.800 experimenting, right?

00:21:34.760 He has about 50 of these time management algorithms for working through a list and some of them

00:21:40.360 are sort of purely intuitive.

00:21:41.640 What do you feel like doing?

00:21:42.580 And then some of them try to balance that with how do you sort of finish the things that

00:21:47.020 are hanging around too long and deal with urgent items and all the rest of it.

00:21:51.080 So I think there's definitely something to be said for picking things and saying like,

00:21:54.480 these are the ones I'm going to do before I move on to the others.

00:21:57.580 But the basic context is always going to be that life is just an endless list of things

00:22:03.620 you could be doing and you need some way of working, working that list, not working through

00:22:09.140 the list, but just like working it because getting to the end of it is not going to happen

00:22:13.920 and it's just going to make you constantly live mentally in the future for that point that

00:22:17.220 never arrives.

00:22:17.840 Okay, so the big takeaway here is to treat your to-read list and your to-do list like

00:22:24.500 a river because I think a lot of people think this, but it's not the case that if you work

00:22:28.820 hard enough or if you find some perfect organizational system, you're finally going to get caught up

00:22:35.100 on all this stuff.

00:22:36.240 Because if you think you are, that you're going to get the bottom of these buckets, these

00:22:39.900 to-do buckets, you're just going to constantly be stressed out because the buckets just fill

00:22:43.680 back up.

00:22:44.380 And so it's just a recipe for frustration.

00:22:46.580 So instead, you just got to stand by the river, dip in each day, and then do what you can

00:22:53.560 and be okay with the rest flowing by you because the flow is never going to end because that's

00:23:00.440 the nature of life.

00:23:01.440 Something related you talk about in the book, and this really resonated with me because this

00:23:05.720 isn't the story of my life.

00:23:06.920 I've noticed in my life that I've constantly been searching for and working towards an

00:23:13.000 Edenic state where I have no problems.

00:23:17.140 And it's made me absolutely miserable.

00:23:19.520 And it's funny because my wife just brings this up.

00:23:22.380 She's like, remember when you said once you solve this problem, you'd be happy?

00:23:26.640 And then the problem's solved.

00:23:28.500 And I find something else to be miserable about.

00:23:30.760 How can realizing that you'll always have problems help you get more of the right things done

00:23:36.880 and also just be happier?

00:23:39.400 Well, almost the way you asked the question, I feel like I can already taste the sort of

00:23:43.020 relaxation of this, right?

00:23:44.140 It's like we go through life having like a double problem with our problems.

00:23:48.700 Like one is the fact that you've got to take the car in for servicing and the fact that

00:23:53.520 you've got to file your taxes and the fact that you've got to figure out some interpersonal

00:23:58.360 conflict at work.

00:23:59.760 And then the other is like some idea that we shouldn't have any of these in the begin

00:24:03.420 with.

00:24:03.640 We're supposed to have got to the point in life by now where we don't have these problems.

00:24:09.040 And depending on your personality, you'll either like blame the world for still giving

00:24:12.460 you this BS to deal with, or you'll blame yourself for not having, you know, become a competent

00:24:18.400 individual who's supposed to have no problems.

00:24:21.560 But when you stop to think about it, this really makes no sense, right?

00:24:25.060 The idea that there's going to be a time when all the problems are gone, because to be a

00:24:33.240 finite, limited human in the world, by the broadest definition of problems, is just to

00:24:37.700 have problems.

00:24:38.700 Like life is just a sequence of problems. 0.85

00:24:41.420 Now, that's not the kind of attitude to say, so life sucks, right?

00:24:45.440 And there's no fun or something.

00:24:46.620 It's just that if you define a problem generically enough, like everything we do is problem solving.

00:24:53.440 There are definitely certain kinds of problem that afflict people that, you know, nobody

00:24:58.720 would wish on anyone and that I hope never to have to experience in my own life and all

00:25:02.540 the rest of it.

00:25:03.180 But the sheer fact of problems, it's just what life is.

00:25:06.440 So I'm, I'm a couple of things I mentioned in the book, right?

00:25:08.840 It's like you run into people.

00:25:10.680 Sometimes I have a friend who had this moment of realization that, you know, she thought

00:25:15.880 she could do her job really well if it wasn't for all the problems she had to be dealing

00:25:18.460 with all the time.

00:25:20.560 And you run into this attitude, but she had this understanding that came to her after a

00:25:25.640 number of experiences that, you know, no, no, your capacity to deal with problems, that

00:25:30.020 is the substance of the job.

00:25:32.700 And if there weren't those problems, then it could be completely automated, right?

00:25:36.660 Reduced to steps and set off to go.

00:25:38.880 The thing that we do as humans is solve problems.

00:25:42.380 And what's so interesting to me about this is there are contexts where this is obvious.

00:25:46.180 Like I don't resent the fact that when I'm writing a book, I have to solve the problem

00:25:49.940 of how to structure it.

00:25:51.840 And there are contexts in which it's downright pleasurable, right?

00:25:54.280 We finish our work day where we've been resenting and moaning about our problems and then sit

00:25:58.660 down and watch like a detective show where we're engaged in trying to figure out a problem

00:26:03.720 because that's fun or play a board game where we're trying to essentially solve a

00:26:08.860 problem.

00:26:09.160 So it's really quite strange that we have this notion that in any other area of life,

00:26:13.400 there's going to be a problem-free time.

00:26:15.820 And to sort of answer your question directly, once you can release that a little bit, that

00:26:20.060 sense, it stops you defining your present experience as like fundamentally flawed because you haven't

00:26:26.860 got to this future fantasy yet.

00:26:29.960 And then you get to like dive into and relish and often even enjoy the problems, you know,

00:26:35.700 today's, today's set of problems.

00:26:38.140 I love it.

00:26:38.960 Some of my wife tells me whenever I start doing my moaning about that sort of thing, she's

00:26:42.760 like, well, if you don't have any problems, it means you're dead.

00:26:44.880 I'm like, that's, that's a good point.

00:26:47.720 Yep.

00:26:48.640 Absolutely.

00:26:49.120 I agree with that.

00:26:49.600 That's been helpful.

00:26:50.040 So yeah, it's something I'm struggling.

00:26:51.800 I've struggled with, but this book was a good reminder that there will always be problems.

00:26:55.780 It's just part of being alive.

00:26:57.520 We're going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors.

00:27:02.600 And now back to the show.

00:27:04.440 So we're constantly adding stuff to our to-do list in our personal lives.

00:27:08.620 There's things to do, always do around the house, things to do for the kids, planning

00:27:12.320 vacations, that's piling up.

00:27:14.360 But then these days, I feel like there's a lot of pressure that we have to take action

00:27:20.000 to alleviate not just our problems, but the world's problems.

00:27:23.380 We have to be for causes and we have to do all these different things.

00:27:27.600 Why do you think this pressure exists to be an active do-gooder in everything?

00:27:32.560 It's really interesting the way it's changed just over my adult lifetime.

00:27:38.120 I mean, I think there are a number of different things.

00:27:40.260 To some extent, it may be true that we are living now through a period of greater real

00:27:44.920 systemic world crises than before or that we realize it more.

00:27:49.660 You know, I go back and forth.

00:27:51.260 On some level, maybe it's always felt like there's a sort of crisis of democracy engulfing

00:27:55.880 the planet and a crisis of the climate and economic crises.

00:27:59.740 But there does seem to be like maybe we are living in slightly more acute times in many

00:28:06.360 ways than people were doing a few decades ago.

00:28:09.560 Obviously, you go back a few more decades and it gets very, very tumultuous and anxious

00:28:15.300 again.

00:28:16.440 But the other part of it is the way the attention economy works, right?

00:28:21.400 The fact that if you're a person who thinks you have any obligations at all outside your

00:28:26.860 own four walls, if you're in any way sort of globally or societally oriented, you're

00:28:32.460 instantly going to be urged by every campaign group, every news organization, every social

00:28:37.880 media platform, you're going to learn about more human suffering and more events and more

00:28:43.360 scary occurrences than anyone in history ever was exposed to.

00:28:48.540 And you're going to find everybody who's campaigning for something presenting their cause as the

00:28:52.940 number one thing to which you absolutely must give your attention.

00:28:56.460 Otherwise, everything in the world will go catastrophically wrong.

00:28:59.020 So just because that's the incentive of the attention economy, I think it's really interesting

00:29:03.760 how even very responsible news organizations, I'm not talking about like sources of misinformation,

00:29:09.800 are incentivized to just slightly exaggerate every story that they report because it has

00:29:15.800 to sort of hold its own in that online arms race for attention.

00:29:19.820 So I make the case in the book, borrowing partly from the work of David Cain, who writes the

00:29:23.940 Raptitude blog, that, you know, part of being a good citizen in the modern world is actually

00:29:29.740 having the ability to withdraw your attention from things as well.

00:29:32.620 It's being willing to say, okay, I care deeply about these eight causes in the world, but I'm

00:29:39.120 going to pick this one and give it some of my time and money.

00:29:41.820 And I'm not going to feel bad about neglecting the others, not because they don't matter,

00:29:45.280 but because that's the only way that a human can actually effectively make a contribution

00:29:49.260 on that kind of level to what's going on.

00:29:51.380 Yeah, it's recognizing your finitude.

00:29:54.320 Yeah, exactly.

00:29:55.040 Yeah.

00:29:55.260 We had a podcast guest, a professor of philosophy, Brandon Warpke, who wrote a book, Why It's

00:29:59.780 Okay to Mind Your Own Business.

00:30:01.600 Yeah.

00:30:02.040 And he makes that same case.

00:30:03.020 Like there's so many different things you could care about, but you only have so much

00:30:06.080 time and you can only be in one place at one time.

00:30:09.100 So you have to pick one or two things that you're going to devote yourself to, and that

00:30:13.220 will actually allow you to get stuff done.

00:30:16.640 Yeah, no, exactly.

00:30:17.760 And I mean, this is just simply the same idea, whether it's applied to being a good citizen

00:30:22.260 or getting through your to-do list or, you know, doing fun stuff in your life, right?

00:30:27.080 It's like, there's a direct relationship between being able to withdraw energy and focus from

00:30:32.520 some things and being able to have it available to give it to some others.

00:30:36.760 Yeah.

00:30:37.760 Okay.

00:30:38.100 So when it comes to causes, all these things can be important, but you only have so much

00:30:42.640 time and energy you can devote.

00:30:43.920 So be okay with just, I'm going to focus on this one and I'm going to do my best with

00:30:46.900 that.

00:30:47.560 Related to this idea is letting people, other people, maybe close to you manage their own

00:30:52.380 problems.

00:30:52.940 Because I think another tendency we have, not only do we want to add our own stuff to our

00:30:56.600 to-do list, but when we see someone having a hard time, like we want to make their problems

00:31:00.320 our problems.

00:31:01.300 Maybe not everybody, but I have a tendency to be like, well, you got a problem.

00:31:03.880 I got to help you out.

00:31:04.960 So how can we overcome this tendency to want to help solve other people's problems and

00:31:10.700 add it to our to-do list?

00:31:13.440 Yeah.

00:31:13.620 I mean, this is people pleasing, right?

00:31:15.300 On one level or another, it's the idea that something is amiss.

00:31:19.940 If someone's cross with you or if someone's sort of feeling distress and you haven't done

00:31:24.020 something about it, or if someone's impatient or we've manifested in lots of different ways.

00:31:27.940 I think lots of people go through life worrying that other people might be mad at them.

00:31:31.260 Other people, it's more like they can't bear to see somebody.

00:31:33.880 Struggling with something before weighing in.

00:31:36.240 Obviously, on one level, it's important to remember that you're not helping someone necessarily

00:31:39.960 grapple with their problems if you are sort of constantly stepping in to take the burden

00:31:45.120 off their shoulders in that way.

00:31:47.840 The other thing that I sort of try to examine in the book is this sense that we often relate

00:31:52.460 to other people's feelings as if they're sort of much more important than anything else,

00:31:58.580 and that we have to make sure that other people's feelings are okay, whether they're feelings

00:32:02.780 about us or not.

00:32:04.260 And actually, when you really sort of think about the limitations that we have when it

00:32:07.260 comes to making a difference to other people's insides, it's another case of seeing that

00:32:12.360 these are just more things to be weighed in the balance.

00:32:14.520 As finite creatures, we go through life making trade-offs all the time.

00:32:17.820 If I spend this hour on X, I can't spend it on Y.

00:32:20.480 If I neglect these emails for an hour, I can go and have a walk in the hills, and that'll

00:32:24.900 be wonderful.

00:32:25.420 On the other hand, people might get impatient and mad that I hadn't responded to those emails.

00:32:28.840 So both of these things are real, the pleasure of the walk and the problem of the impatience.

00:32:33.940 And all you're doing is weighing them and saying, you know, like, am I willing to incur

00:32:39.000 the burden to me of the fear that someone might be impatient, say, in order to get the benefit

00:32:44.300 of the walk in the hills?

00:32:45.380 Or is this one of those occasions where actually, you know, it's my boss, and I'm going to choose

00:32:50.000 to focus on making sure he's not impatient, and I'm willing to forego the fact that I

00:32:55.080 could have spent the next hour walking in the hills?

00:32:58.340 All right.

00:32:58.400 So we talked about some things we can do to overcome this feeling of productivity debt

00:33:02.560 and angst that we might have with our to-do list.

00:33:05.220 So one is, don't think of your to-do list, your to-read list as buckets you have to empty

00:33:09.960 each day.

00:33:10.620 But they're just rivers.

00:33:11.700 It's always going to be there.

00:33:12.860 It's always going to be flowing.

00:33:13.740 You can just pick things out and do them and read them as needed or when you feel like

00:33:18.400 you want to do it.

00:33:19.280 Don't feel like you have to solve all the world's problems or other people's problems.

00:33:24.580 But let's talk about just taking action.

00:33:25.820 Let's say we got this river in front of us of things we could do or things we could read.

00:33:30.460 It can still feel overwhelming because you're like, well, which one do I pick?

00:33:33.700 And you start waffling because you're like, well, if I choose this one, then I'm going to

00:33:37.660 miss out on that one.

00:33:38.500 You have this chapter about how Robert Frost's poem, famous poem, The Road Not Taken, can

00:33:45.020 help us get out of this analysis by paralysis mode.

00:33:48.500 So what can we learn from Robert Frost's poem?

00:33:50.880 Well, this is this very famous poem that I'm sure many, many listeners will be familiar

00:33:54.880 with, you know, about two paths diverging in a yellow wood.

00:33:58.160 I think most Americans have to study it in high school at some point.

00:34:01.000 And the usual way that this poem is interpreted is that, you know, it's about how you should

00:34:08.120 choose the road less traveled.

00:34:10.800 And then that's the path that will make all the difference, all these lines in the poem

00:34:14.740 that sort of suggest that being unconventional and striking out on your own journey is what

00:34:20.140 you need to do.

00:34:21.620 But as the poet David Orr has shown in a really fascinating book about that poem, if you read

00:34:26.940 it closely, that's not what Robert Frost is saying at all.

00:34:29.260 He's saying repeatedly that when you come to these kind of decision points in life and

00:34:34.020 you're trying to choose what to do, again, whether it's a big life choice or which of

00:34:38.340 the following to-do list items should I spend the next half hour on, you know, you can't

00:34:43.160 know in advance which is the path that is going to make the difference.

00:34:46.820 You can't even know in hindsight because you will not have the counterfactual, right?

00:34:50.040 You didn't go down two paths for that hour.

00:34:52.200 You never could.

00:34:53.260 You might later on in life say, oh, yes, I took these paths and that's what really made

00:34:58.060 the difference.

00:34:58.500 But that's a little bit like when, you know, you get those people interviewed in the newspapers

00:35:03.300 who've lived to 110 and they say it's like, you know, whiskey and cigars are what made

00:35:08.640 it right.

00:35:09.020 You never know whether it's what they attribute their longevity to.

00:35:12.420 And it's like, you'll never know if that's despite or because of, right?

00:35:15.400 It's like, there's no, you'll never know whether the decision that you took, whether if a decision

00:35:20.680 you take leads to happiness, you'll never know if another decision would have led to more

00:35:23.540 happiness.

00:35:23.940 If a decision you take leads to misery, you'll never know whether another decision would have

00:35:28.100 led to more misery.

00:35:29.340 And I think that ultimately this is quite freeing because what I think Frost is getting at,

00:35:34.500 I'll put it this way, what I take from Frost is that there is intrinsic meaning making

00:35:39.240 in deciding, in choosing a path.

00:35:42.100 And especially if you do that on a very sort of modest level, right?

00:35:46.620 Choosing a path for the next hour, choosing a path for the next week.

00:35:50.780 It isn't something where the stakes have to be terribly high.

00:35:53.200 But what you do is you get into this habit and this practice of being decisive in life,

00:35:58.580 not being decisive by thinking you've chosen the right answer, but just being decisive.

00:36:04.460 And I think that will see you a lot further than, you know, trying to analyze the exactly

00:36:09.000 correct decisions.

00:36:10.200 Yeah.

00:36:10.300 Action is the answer typically in a lot of situations.

00:36:12.800 Well, not all the time.

00:36:13.740 Sometimes not doing anything is the best thing, but you never know.

00:36:16.900 So you just consciously choosing to not do anything.

00:36:19.980 I think that's important, right?

00:36:21.120 It's like, yeah, sometimes the right thing to do about a difficult decision is give it a

00:36:24.740 few days, but to decide to do that, not just to sort of end up doing that because

00:36:29.020 you're torn and agonized by indecision.

00:36:31.140 Okay, so just, you never know, you can't know completely whether your decision or indecision

00:36:36.020 is going to, what's going to, the result's going to be.

00:36:38.460 So you might as well just do something, just make the conscious decision.

00:36:43.140 Right.

00:36:43.540 Do you have anything else you want to say about that?

00:36:45.220 No, I was going to say, because you're, in some sense, you're deciding all the time

00:36:47.600 anyway, right?

00:36:48.160 Yeah.

00:36:48.280 I mean, in some sense, we're choosing as many people, including Mark Manson have, you

00:36:52.840 know, written very, he's written very well about this, right?

00:36:55.340 We're always choosing.

00:36:56.340 So the real question is whether we do it consciously and with a little bit of reason and wisdom.

00:37:01.140 Or not, not choosing how to use an hour is really not an option for us.

00:37:06.060 Another bit of advice, it's not a system, but again, it's just a way to change your stance

00:37:11.500 and how you approach the things you got to do in your life is committing to doing things

00:37:17.260 daily-ish.

00:37:18.720 That can help you start taking more action.

00:37:20.600 How so?

00:37:21.000 I love this phrase.

00:37:23.300 It comes from Dan Harris, the meditation teacher, podcaster.

00:37:26.700 And it's what he says when people ask him how often they should meditate, right?

00:37:31.040 Daily-ish.

00:37:32.140 Some people sort of hate this, right?

00:37:33.420 There's a big trend online, especially at the moment in favor of like consistency at

00:37:37.780 all costs.

00:37:38.320 What really matters is showing up every single day.

00:37:40.540 And there's truth in that, but there's also a dark side, right?

00:37:44.120 Which is that a real sort of obsessive fixation on rigid consistency becomes very sort of,

00:37:51.220 you have sort of fight with yourself to make yourself do it.

00:37:53.520 If you miss a day, it can have outsized damaging implications because you then tell yourself

00:37:58.520 the whole thing's ruined because you didn't do it every single day.

00:38:00.880 You can end up sort of going through the motions as if checking the box on the calendar that day

00:38:04.420 is somehow more important than the thing it is that you're trying to create.

00:38:08.340 And what I like about daily-ish is it's like, it's just enough pressure.

00:38:12.100 It's like, you know that if you only do something twice in a week, you didn't do it daily-ish.

00:38:16.980 It's not just doing it whenever you feel like it.

00:38:19.240 And you know, in a busy time, maybe four times a week is going to count.

00:38:22.440 And then the rest of the time, maybe it should be five or six, right?

00:38:24.840 It's got that kind of give in it.

00:38:27.140 And what I really like about this is that it's a rule that serves you and serves the thing

00:38:34.380 you're trying to bring into being, whether that's a meditation practice or writing

00:38:37.800 or anything else, as opposed to the situation where you end up serving the rule, which I

00:38:43.840 think is a place that people, I speak from experience, who are sort of a little bit fixated

00:38:48.600 on the perfect morning routine and all the rest of that.

00:38:50.920 It's a place we get to very easily, where actually somehow the most important thing is

00:38:55.720 that we get up at 5 a.m. and get precisely 30 minutes of sunlight and drink two glasses of

00:39:00.520 water.

00:39:00.700 Well, no, the most important thing is your health and your energy.

00:39:03.180 And that might be the best way to do it most days.

00:39:07.580 Yeah.

00:39:07.660 Going back to a religious metaphor, you know, when Jesus talked about the Sabbath, you know,

00:39:11.640 the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. 0.92

00:39:15.020 So these are these things we establish for ourselves, whether they're routines or whatever.

00:39:18.540 We've got to remember that we didn't create these just so we can do them.

00:39:21.180 They're there so they can help us become a better person and have a more fruitful life.

00:39:24.700 Yes.

00:39:25.220 And I do sort of refer to the religious history of these rules in my, the Christian history of

00:39:29.260 these rules at one point in the book. And I'm a little bit annoyed that I've realized I have not

00:39:33.420 used that specific quotation about the Sabbath because it's exactly the point.

00:39:39.200 There's something I've done in my life. So I used to be really like, I got to have a routine,

00:39:43.260 morning routine and a nightly routine that I got to follow to the T. But like you said,

00:39:47.800 like it's so fragile. I guess if you mess up or you don't do it, you feel like your whole day is

00:39:51.980 shot. So something that I shifted to a couple of years ago, instead of having like a routine,

00:39:56.320 I have just a daily checklist. So there's things I want to get done during the day.

00:40:01.100 It doesn't matter when I do them. Yeah. As long as I get them done. So if it's like meditation,

00:40:06.000 if I can't get it in the first thing in the morning, well, if I got like five minutes during

00:40:09.300 the day, I'll just do it. Yeah. That's great. And it reminds me of something I did, especially when

00:40:13.960 our son was really, really young, like newborn and, you know, two thirds of one's discretionary time

00:40:20.760 is instantly wiped out. And I, I took to having like a, what I thought of as a running order,

00:40:25.360 right? It was like with the first hour of discretionary time that I have this today,

00:40:29.780 I'm going to do some journaling, a bit of meditating and a bit of exercise. But, but those

00:40:34.920 discretionary times could come at, you know, 4am, 7am, 1130am, just totally unpredictable when they

00:40:43.700 would come. But I would know what the sort of one, two, three things I wanted to do with that time

00:40:49.060 were when they arose. Yeah. I think having kids, that's what caused the shift in me too.

00:40:53.400 So, cause it's easy to be like, well, I got this really great, awesome, strict morning and

00:40:58.880 evening routine. We don't have these little people who barf and go pee and need a cup of water. 1.00

00:41:05.120 It's funny. I mean, you know, obviously everybody's different and having kids is not for some people

00:41:09.040 and for other people they wish it was and it can't be and all the rest. But, but if you spend any time

00:41:12.900 in sort of YouTube productivity culture, it is, there's so much of that is dominated by kind of

00:41:17.680 young men who are still a few years away from having kids and telling you how to, you know,

00:41:23.120 exactly nail your morning. I'm afraid I, I don't have a lot of time for that these days, both,

00:41:28.240 both metaphorically and literally. Okay. Yeah. Same. So do things daily-ish and remember these

00:41:34.540 things you've established for yourself, they're there to serve you. You're not there to serve them

00:41:38.060 and try a checklist. If a morning or evening routine is not working for you, I think a checklist

00:41:42.480 because it provides, as you said, a bit, enough flexibility, but enough structure that allows you

00:41:47.220 to bend, but not break. Yes, exactly. Another thing you talk about is this time management principle

00:41:54.780 that people have seen. We've talked about this on the podcast is time blocking. So you block off time

00:42:00.440 for uninterrupted work, but you argue that trying to be uninterruptible could make you miserable and it

00:42:07.820 can also cause you to miss out on life and relationships. How so? Well, yeah, I'm sort of

00:42:13.120 trying to sort of tread a kind of balanced line here. So one section of the book, I, I talk about

00:42:18.320 how trying to safeguard or ring fence three or four hours in the day for focused work is a really good

00:42:23.340 battle tested technique. But on the other hand, I think, yeah, trying to be sort of absolutist about

00:42:28.600 your control over your time and say, this is how everything is going to unfold for the next,

00:42:34.120 you know, 14 hours or whatever. It just creates a lot more opportunities for when things

00:42:38.980 are unpredictable for that to cause stress and to sort of be deeply unwelcome and to throw you off

00:42:45.500 off guard. I think to some extent, our modern world and our work requires silence and focus and the

00:42:51.620 ability to shut out interruptions. And to another extent, it requires us in a different way, it requires

00:42:56.040 us to be available and not to think that we know before an email comes in or before somebody suggests

00:43:02.140 doing something that like, we actually know how time should best unfold. And anyone who has a

00:43:07.360 different view or for reality has a different view, that's a problem. So I sort of advocate and

00:43:11.960 try to practice a sort of twin track approach where yes, there are small bits of my calendar that are

00:43:18.240 very time blocked. And it's really like, I'm going to do everything I can to make sure they're

00:43:22.420 undisturbed. And then the rest of the time, I'm trying to go with the flow a bit more and be okay with

00:43:26.880 that and still maintain some agency and autonomy within the sort of chaos and cacophony of real

00:43:33.740 life, not to keep defining everything that happens that's different from my plan as somehow

00:43:40.100 a problem. Sometimes it might be a negative, but very often it's something positive that I

00:43:45.520 couldn't have predicted.

00:43:46.100 So don't always think about a friend dropping by unexpectedly, or if you're working from home

00:43:51.260 and your kid toddles into your office to show you a picture, don't feel like it's an

00:43:55.760 annoyance because you can just embrace the interruption.

00:43:58.640 Right. Or, you know, maybe sometimes you're on a deadline and actually it is going to be

00:44:03.420 necessary for you to turn in a calm and friendly way to your child and look them in the eye and say,

00:44:08.340 I'm going to have to be with you in an hour rather than now, you know, that, that can be okay.

00:44:13.100 What I advocate against is a sort of productivity system or an approach to time management that

00:44:19.800 turns like every interruption or every sort of visit from your child into your workspace as a

00:44:25.760 problem. It's like, if you're following a very strict schedule, then you're creating all these

00:44:30.780 kinds of walls, conceptual walls for other people to run into and cause a problem. Whereas, you know,

00:44:38.120 yes, sometimes you might have to do that, but you have to do that because the work demands it in that

00:44:42.480 moment, not because that's how you are approaching your whole work life.

00:44:47.380 All right. So the trick is to find a balance and there's no system or hard rule that's going to help

00:44:51.340 you find that. It's just something you have to, it's a skill that you have to develop to figure

00:44:55.400 out, okay, how am I going to... Right. And look, if you have a lot of autonomy over your time and

00:45:00.360 your work is in some sense, knowledge, work, creative, I think four hours of protected time

00:45:04.500 is a great rule of thumb, but that's it. It's a rule of thumb. Yeah. We're just navigating this all

00:45:08.840 the time. Another sort of self-help or productivity advice that you take aim at is this idea to be kind

00:45:17.860 to your future self. So you got to save money, save for retirement. You got to skip the cake

00:45:24.640 today. So your future self will thank you. But you argue that maybe we just need to tell our future

00:45:30.900 self to take a hike sometimes. Why is that? Well, there's a huge focus in personal development at the

00:45:37.960 moment, especially it seems to me on thinking carefully about making choices now for the benefit

00:45:42.180 of your future self. And obviously it has wisdom to it. But I think that the kind of people who are

00:45:47.940 attracted to that kind of advice in the first place are much more likely to be too good at deferring

00:45:52.680 gratification than not good enough. Right. There are people in the world who need to sort of get their

00:45:57.940 act together and think more about the future, but they're not people who are kind of already into

00:46:02.000 personal development stuff. I think what we who are into that stuff need to remember is that you can

00:46:07.980 go too far. You can make it so that you're constantly doing everything for the benefit of a future self

00:46:12.380 that in some sense will never exist. Because when you get to that future, there'll still be another

00:46:16.460 future self to focus on until one day there isn't. And so it's actually important to be able to claim

00:46:23.420 to like cash in some of your preparation as well to be able to say on a given day, like, actually,

00:46:29.880 I'm going to do something that is fun today, because I have created the life in which I'm able to do that

00:46:35.280 instead of always sort of postponing that into the future.

00:46:39.960 Yeah, I've seen this. I think I've seen some personal finance people talk about this when it

00:46:44.400 comes to saving for the future. And one argument they make is like, well, if you save too much,

00:46:49.760 like if you're just really aggressive with your savings, you're like, well, I'm doing this for my

00:46:53.500 70 year old self. They remind you, it's like, well, when you're 70 years old, you're not going to be able

00:46:59.260 to hike the Appalachian Trail or to do some strenuous dream activity you always had, because you're just

00:47:05.040 going to be old. So like, do that now, if you can, when you're 35 or 40.

00:47:10.800 Yeah, absolutely.

00:47:12.540 Yeah, I think that's, I think, I think it's wise. So again, you're not saying like, you know, you're

00:47:16.100 not trying to be like, what's the grasshopper in that parable, where you just don't care at all

00:47:21.040 about the future, but you don't want to be an ant, either, or like a drone, just constantly saving

00:47:26.100 stuff. It's all about finding a balance.

00:47:29.080 Right. And you got to ask who you are, and which counter pressure you're more likely to need.

00:47:34.240 And, you know, as I say, I just think there's a big self-selection bias. If you are listening to

00:47:39.660 this podcast, if you are interested in my book, if you read this kind of stuff, the risk that you

00:47:44.200 might pay no attention whatsoever to your personal development or your future, it seems very slim.

00:47:50.060 Whereas the risk that you might go too far seems a little bit more, you know, on the cards,

00:47:55.220 if you see what I mean.

00:47:56.360 One last principle you talked about that resonated with me. One thing that can help us to

00:48:00.180 feel like we're living life more fully, have a more flourishing life and not be so stressed out

00:48:06.140 is embracing scruffy hospitality. What's that and how can it help us have a more meaningful life?

00:48:12.480 This phrase comes from a Tennessee pastor, Jack King, who described in his own life how he

00:48:17.960 sort of really enjoyed with his wife hosting people for dinner. But the sort of checklist that

00:48:23.580 they went through to get the house ready and the meal to be fantastic and the lawn to be mowed

00:48:27.400 became so onerous that they kind of didn't want to invite people around anymore.

00:48:31.480 And so he sort of went full on in the other direction to what he calls scruffy hospitality,

00:48:35.320 which is just inviting people around to have what's in your cupboards with the house as it is

00:48:40.860 and to sort of allow yourself to drop the facade. And what he found, and I think what other people

00:48:46.160 find, and to the extent that I've practiced this myself, what I've found is it's not just okay.

00:48:50.840 In many ways, it's better. In many ways, there's more connection when you sort of let

00:48:55.140 the facade drop. As I say in the book, you know, even before I encountered the phrase,

00:49:00.100 I had noticed before that if we were having friends around and I saw like crumbs under our

00:49:04.040 fridge or something like that, I'd be terribly, I'd be like, oh my goodness, got to tidy that up

00:49:09.640 before visitors arrive. But if I saw it at someone else's house, like it would take a lot for me to

00:49:14.140 get judgmental about it. I just wouldn't. I'd just be like, oh, you're letting me into your real life.

00:49:19.600 You know, here we are for real in your real life. This isn't some show you're putting on for me.

00:49:23.860 So, you know, no shade to people who really love putting on a very glamorous dinner party. I think

00:49:28.940 that could be a great hobby in itself. But we shouldn't make these facades sort of necessary

00:49:35.780 precondition of relating because I think it makes relating less of a vivid and an enjoyable experience.

00:49:41.220 I think one of the examples you gave was, you don't sweat it if your five-year-old leaves a dookie

00:49:45.800 in the toilet because other people are probably doing that. If you'll see that, they're like, well,

00:49:49.460 my kid does that too. Right. It's like, I mean, it's like they know you've got a kid,

00:49:54.320 right? It's not, it's not, um, yeah, exactly. And they know, and if they've got kids too,

00:49:58.080 they've had that, they know that that happens and it's like, whatever. Exactly. Nobody,

00:50:02.180 nobody's actually judging you or if they are that the problem is with them.

00:50:05.340 Yeah, exactly. Well, Oliver, uh, this is a great book, a lot of great advice.

00:50:09.280 Where can people go learn more about it in your work?

00:50:11.000 The book Meditations for Mortals out in early October in the U S and wherever you buy your

00:50:16.080 books and everything about this is also at my website, oliverberkman.com, where you can sign

00:50:21.240 up for the newsletter too. Yeah. The newsletter is fantastic. I highly recommend our listeners

00:50:24.560 sign up for that. Well, Oliver Berkman, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.

00:50:28.360 Thank you very much, Brett. I've really enjoyed it.

00:50:31.200 My guest here is Oliver Berkman. He's the author of the book Meditations for Mortals. It's available

00:50:34.820 on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website,

00:50:38.640 oliverberkman.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash meditations for mortals,

00:50:43.740 where you can find links to resources. We need to delve deeper into this topic.

00:50:53.340 Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website

00:50:57.000 at artofmanliness.com, where you find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles that

00:51:00.920 have been written over the years about pretty much anything you can think of. And if you haven't

00:51:03.900 done so already, I'd appreciate it if you take one minute to give you a podcast or Spotify. It

00:51:07.160 helps out a lot. And if you've done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with

00:51:10.660 a friend or fan member who you think was something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued

00:51:14.200 support. Until next time, it's Brett McKay reminding you to listen to the AOM podcast,

00:51:17.640 but put what you've heard into action.

The Art of Manliness - October 09, 2024

Treat Your To-Do List Like a River, and Other Mindset Shifts for Making Better Use of Your Time

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