Treat Your To-Do List Like a River, and Other Mindset Shifts for Making Better Use of Your Time
Episode Stats
Summary
When you think about living more fully and making better use of your time, you probably think of finding some new organizational system that you can structure your life with. Oliver Berkman says that what you really need instead are perspective shifts, small, sustainable changes in how you view and approach your day-to-day life. He provides those mindset shifts in his new book, Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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When you think about living more fully and making better use of your time, you probably
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think of finding some new organizational system that you can structure your life with.
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Oliver Berkman says that what you really need instead are perspective shifts, small, sustainable
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changes in how you view and approach your day-to-day life.
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He provides those mindset shifts in his new book, Meditations for Mortals, four weeks
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to embrace your limitations and make time for what counts.
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We talked about some of them today on the show, including why you should view life's
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tasks and problems like a river instead of a bucket, stop feeling guilt over your productivity
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debt, make peace with your decisions by embracing an unconventional reading of the poem, The
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Road Not Taken, aim to do your habits daily-ish, be more welcoming of interruptions, and practice
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After the show's over, check out our show notes at awimp.is slash meditations for mortals.
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All right, Oliver Berkman, welcome back to the show.
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So we had you on back in 2021 to talk about your book, 4,000 Weeks, Time Management for
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Mortals, and that's episode number 748 for those who want to listen to that.
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You got a new book out called Meditations for Mortals.
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How is this book a continuation of your thinking and writing in 4,000 Weeks?
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Well, I guess on some level, it continues my kind of fixation on what it means to be a
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finite human and how we're supposed to deal with that in a way that makes us sort of maximally
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The real difference here in my mind is that I really wanted to go deep into this question
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of the problem I call actually doing things, right?
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This idea that it's incredibly easy to have a very clear sense of what you want to have
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in your life, the projects you want to accomplish, the way you want to show up in your relationships
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and all the rest of it, and not to actually do it for real.
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So this book, both in its content and its slightly maybe unusual structure, is an attempt to sort
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of really get into and maybe over that gap from knowing to doing.
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Yeah, so one of the big takeaways I got from our first conversation was that you're exploring
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this idea that human beings have the, we're a paradox.
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We can only be in one place at one time, but we also are capable of generating infinite
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And I think we brought in the philosopher Kierkegaard.
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And he talks about how this paradox of being finite, but having infinite possibilities, it
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And one response is like, we just don't do anything.
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And I think that's what you're trying to explore in this book, Meditations for Mortals, like
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But you start off the book talking about something you've noticed when you've talked to people
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and just in the online discourse is people are trying to be super productive.
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And they're talking about how their work isn't just exhausting.
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They just describe, even though they're getting a lot of stuff done, they just feel empty,
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And you bring in this guy named Hartmut Rosa, the sociologist, to explain why we might feel
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dead inside, even though we're getting a lot done.
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So Hartmut Rosa has this whole theory, and it's the name of a very big book he wrote as
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And he is trying to sort of do what, in many ways, all sorts of philosophers have been doing
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since forever, which is to put language on whatever it is that really makes life feel
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And his argument is basically that what we as individuals and also as whole civilizations
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attempt to do by default is to get more and more control over time and space.
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And this is pretty obvious in the context of mainstream productivity culture, for one
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thing, and all sorts of self-development stuff.
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It's like, try and be more intentional and have your schedule consist more and more of
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the things you want it to consist of and get control that way.
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But he points out that actually this sort of project of increasing control seems somehow
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to squeeze out the resonance, the sort of sense of aliveness or vividness that actually
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is the thing that most people sort of recognize as being like, okay, I'm really fully alive
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One very, you know, mundane example that might not resonate with everyone, but it certainly
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resonates with like productivity geeks or recovering productivity geeks like me is, you know, if you
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ever sort of get really excited by somebody's new system for organizing your goals and your
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tasks and, you know, you come up with your 90 day vision and your five year vision and
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all the rest of it, and you stick it all into a system with a schedule.
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And now you know exactly what steps you've got to follow the next week to make it happen.
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That's incredibly exciting for a couple of days, that sense that you're seizing control
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And then pretty much every time it just becomes like in a couple of days, it's like dead.
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It's like, oh my God, do I have to do all these things now that I've told myself I have
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It just feels like slogging through a bunch of predetermined tasks and there's no excitement
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in it anymore because all you're doing is making your way through a plan that you came
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There are many, many other examples, but that's one that always resonates for me just because
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No, we had a guy on the podcast early this year named Andrew Root, who is a professor
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of theology, and he uses Rosa's work to explore how it's affecting church congregations.
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And he wrote a book called Congregation in a Secular Age, Applying Rosa's Framework.
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And something he noted in the book was that he'll go to congregations and on the surface,
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But when he talks to the pastors, the pastors say, yeah, our members are just depressed.
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They're kind of just going through the motions.
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And Root's idea, Applying Rosa's Theory, is that churches have picked up on this idea
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that in order to thrive, you have to constantly be growing.
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It's kind of like the idea we have in our Western industrialized world.
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And he says what ends up happening, these churches, they feel like they had to constantly
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They have to keep doing the stuff that they were doing to get to the point that they are.
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And they just feel like, I'm just kind of staying in place, even though we're doing lots
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Yeah, I can totally see how that applies in that setting, right?
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You actually do meet with success in a way, right?
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The congregation does stabilize or get bigger or whatever it might be.
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But it's a success that seems to somehow be won at the cost of the whole purpose of what
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Yeah, and I think a lot of people might feel that on an individual level.
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They feel like, if I want to grow and keep getting better and better, I just got to do
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more and more and more, in addition to the other stuff I was doing.
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And then you actually end up not wanting to do anything.
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And one of the things I'm really getting at in the new book is that it's not just that
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this doesn't work and makes life worse, but that actually doing the opposite, experimenting
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with ways to really confront how little control we have, how little time we have, all the different
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ways in which we're limited, kind of letting yourself feel the truth of that is not just
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something you should do because then you're in touch with the truth.
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It's actually the way to get a lot of the things done that you thought you would get
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done through the systems and schemes for increasing control.
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There's a sort of sense in which constructive and creative activity kind of just wants to
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And our big problem is all the things we do to get in the way of it rather than that we
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You also talk about this idea of the efficiency trap that we can get into as we try to control
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This is just the sort of title that I give to this very familiar experience of finding
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that the ways we follow to try to become more efficient, more optimized, you know, to try
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to keep up with the volume of stuff that we want to do and that the modern world sort of
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pressures us to do reliably sort of make us busier and more busy with the least important
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Because, you know, we can go into detail, but the basic headline is just if you work on
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making yourself better and better and better at getting through more and more and more
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things in a given period of time, which is what efficiency essentially is, if that incoming
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supply of things is essentially infinite, whether it's a supply of emails or demands or family
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obligations or like ambitions and places you want to travel and all the rest of it, if
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the supply is effectively infinite, getting through it faster isn't going to help, right?
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It's just going to cause you to have more on your plate and to be diluting your attention
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It's also going to stop you making the tough decisions you need to make about which things
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And so the result of that is that, you know, if you've ever experienced like really deciding
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to get on top of your email and you really do it and you really succeed, all that happens
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is that you immediately get much more email because you're replying to more people more
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quickly and they're replying to you and you have to reply to them.
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And, you know, it has the exact reverse effect.
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It doesn't get you to that place of, you know, that kind of plateau of effortless calm where
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You see this effect happen with automobile traffic.
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I think they've done studies where they widened roads.
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They think, well, this will clear up congestion if we widen the road or make the highway bigger.
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But all it does is just increase the amount of traffic going through.
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It makes the previously congested route more attractive to more motorists.
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So the more efficient you get, you're just going to get more of that stuff you're getting
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How is this related to this idea you talk about productivity debt?
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Again, I seem to sort of come up with these labels for feet.
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I think it's useful to have a label, but I don't think the feeling is anything new.
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I think that it's really useful to sort of pick it out.
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This is the notion that I think many of us have that we almost sort of wake up in the
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morning feeling like we're in a kind of moral debt that we've got to pay off.
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Get a certain amount of stuff done by the end of the day.
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Otherwise, we haven't quite earned our right to exist on the planet.
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You know, we're not quite succeeding minimally as human beings.
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Um, and when I first started talking, writing about this, people really resonated.
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Like, I mean, it's at least my tribe of people.
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I don't know whether it's everybody, but you know, people are like, yes, that is exactly
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And the best you can hope for in that situation is that by the time it's the end of the day
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and you're finished, you might be back at a zero balance.
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You know, if you're lucky, you might have just earned your way back to feeling okay about
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And, you know, this is where I stop and say, in a sense, if you're in a salaried profession
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or something like that, or in any job, really, you are in productivity debt of a kind.
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You do owe your employer output in return for your pay.
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But that's not the same as this kind of existential burden that I think many of us carry that we
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have to sort of earn our, our right to exist through productivity.
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And so one of the ideas I suggest in the book is that actually there are ways of encouraging
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yourself mindset shifts to sort of start the day at a zero balance, not start the day in
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debt, but start the day at zero thinking like, okay, I'm fine.
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Now, anything that I do during the day is like extra.
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And that's because I want to, you know, I want to create some cool things in the world,
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not because I absolutely have to do it just to sort of plug this void.
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I think that's a really important switch for any of us who fall into this category that
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psychologists call insecure overachievers, which is, you know, probably a good chunk of
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So productivity debt, it sounds like it's like productivity, original sin.
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So you just feel like I've been burdened with this thing and I got to, and one approach is
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And you're arguing, it's not like a religious argument, but it could be, it's kind of a religious
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It's like, well, no, just accept the fact that you can't overcome this on your own.
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And by giving up, it's liberating and you can actually get more done.
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It's like you, you accept some grace in your life.
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And you know, it's not a religious book and I'm not in a, any sort of conventional sense,
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a religious person, but that sort of those battling ideas within Christianity between,
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you know, salvation through works and earning your place in heaven through your efforts.
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And then on the other side, grace, the idea that, you know, your right to exist and your
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right to enjoy the world is just undeserved and given regardless of what you do, that that's
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how those ideas have been worked through in, in the religious context.
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So it's absolutely, it's all sort of religious because I think something we're trying to do
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when we follow all these kinds of personal change techniques, even if we do them as entirely
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as secularists is on some level to sort of save our souls, you know?
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So let's talk about how we can shift out of this mindset of, we have to get out of productivity
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We have to just get as much done as possible and give up a little control in our lives
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so that we can actually experience life more fully.
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And one chapter that stood out to me, because I completely related to this, is the feeling that
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many people have in the information age of drowning in information.
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Maybe you've got a bunch of articles on an Instapaper that you've, you know, you saved
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and you're like, I'm going to read these one day.
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You got stacks of the New Yorker somewhere of articles you want to read.
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How does the way we typically approach our to read list create feelings of, oh man, I'm never
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going to get through this and it's just, I'm drowning.
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And I was amazed after I first started writing about this, because I'm not a video games person
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to find that this is totally common as well as a backlog of games to play, which is totally
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blew my mind because I just sort of filed video games away as things that people just
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So why would you ever feel that there was a backlog?
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But of course, that's how I approach lots of books.
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So it's a really interesting phenomenon, just sort of how ubiquitous it is.
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I think that this is one of many areas of life where really the solution is not to try
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to make the situation feel better by getting through more stuff and finding ways to power
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through more and more of this supply, but actually by understanding the way in which the situation
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Actually, when you really see how impossibly big the potential supply of things to read
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is or potential supply of things to listen to or watch, it's just so much bigger than
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Even just the good stuff, the stuff that's relevant to you, the stuff that is high quality,
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even that, whatever criteria you apply, it's still going to be effectively infinite.
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And so the only way to proceed through that, so firstly, there's a kind of immediate perspective
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shift, I think, from seeing that and being like, oh, okay, getting on top of this is impossible.
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That's really helpful because now my challenge is not to try to get on top of it, but just
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to sort of engage with it in the most enjoyable and meaningful way.
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And the metaphor I use in the book for information is like to see your to read pile or your video
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game backlog or whatever it is as a river rather than a bucket.
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In other words, not a bucket, something that contains a whole lot of stuff and your job
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is to empty the bucket, but just something that is flowing past you or you're standing
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in the middle of it and it's flowing around you or something.
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And all you need to do, all you ever could do is pick a few items as they pass by that
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seem like the most worthwhile to pick and not feel guilty about the ones passing by.
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Because as I say, you know, we don't feel guilty, most of us, about not getting through
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It's only when we sort of draw the boundary a little bit closer to home and say, all the
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articles in our read later app and all the podcasts in our queue and all the books on
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the list we've been keeping, you know, only then do these lists become tormenting.
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But in fact, they're all effectively impossible.
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Yeah, because the bucket keeps filling up infinitely.
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Well, you know, yeah, the bucket has a hole in the bottom and it's just a flow, whatever.
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No, I remind the bucket's like, it's got those, remember those old magic beer floating
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They used to sell them at Spencer's store in the mall.
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So it looks like this, this faucet's magically floating above a beer mug and it's just constantly
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Oh, and that's what your to read bucket is like.
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So yeah, the metaphor is instead of thinking of your to read list as a bucket you have to
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empty, it's just this flowing river you can dip in.
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Like, I'm going to read this magazine article and that's fine.
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And the reason it's all you got to do is because on some level, it's all you could ever do.
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You can dedicate a larger proportion of your week to reading than someone else does.
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But the place where you empty the supply and you have read everything relevant to your
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career or everything relevant to your hobby or every thriller that you would enjoy reading,
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Do you think we can apply this mindset to our to-do list as well?
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I mean, this is where people start objecting and saying, oh, but I have to get through this
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And then I say, well, if it's an impossible amount, you're not getting through it.
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And so no matter how much you have to, that's kind of a little bit meaningless because you're
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I think that, you know, another metaphor here that I've found very useful is that there's
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the kind of list that you feel you have to get through.
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And then there's a kind of list that is like a good example is like a menu, right?
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So those big menus you get in, well, I know New York City diners, but I'm sure there are
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lots of other diners, sort of 15 page laminated things that have, you know, 400 different
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Nobody looks at that list and thinks that at dinner that day, they've got to somehow
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They get to pick from the list and the sort of abundance of the list is a good thing because
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it's like, wow, look at this range of things I could pick from.
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And actually, if you think about our situation as finite humans, to-do lists are kind of inevitably
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If there's always going to be more that you could do or feel like would be meaningful and
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important to do than you are going to do, then actually you're always picking from a
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You're never successfully, anyway, getting through a list.
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And I think that can be quite powerful because to me, anyway, it triggers that sense of like,
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You know, that's been many people have remarked on.
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Instead of having to do this, I kind of get to do it.
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And that doesn't mean that you won't sometimes decide that, you know, you have to file your
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It's just that the fundamental relationship with that list is not one of, I'm kind of
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failing at life until such point at which the list is completely finished.
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When you first introduced this idea of bucket and river to reading list in your email a while
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back ago, it reminded me, I actually inspired an article that I wrote on our site about Mark
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Because I think his autofocus, so this is a way to keep track of your to-dos and Forster's
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autofocus method, what I think is ingenious about it is it treats your to-do list like
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Basically, you just create this giant list and you keep adding to it and it can be infinite,
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but instead of categorizing it by due dates and categories and things like that, you just
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pull out your list and then you just go down it and whatever sticks out to you, like you
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do that thing and you work on it for a little bit and then you cross it out.
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If you didn't finish it, you put it at the bottom of the list and you just kind of, yeah,
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You're just kind of going in and picking things out, whatever you feel like doing and it gets
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I've used it before and I find it actually, it can be really liberating.
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One of the things I love about Mark Forster's work is that he's actually sort of constantly
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He has about 50 of these time management algorithms for working through a list and some of them
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And then some of them try to balance that with how do you sort of finish the things that
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are hanging around too long and deal with urgent items and all the rest of it.
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So I think there's definitely something to be said for picking things and saying like,
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these are the ones I'm going to do before I move on to the others.
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But the basic context is always going to be that life is just an endless list of things
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you could be doing and you need some way of working, working that list, not working through
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the list, but just like working it because getting to the end of it is not going to happen
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and it's just going to make you constantly live mentally in the future for that point that
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Okay, so the big takeaway here is to treat your to-read list and your to-do list like
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a river because I think a lot of people think this, but it's not the case that if you work
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hard enough or if you find some perfect organizational system, you're finally going to get caught up
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Because if you think you are, that you're going to get the bottom of these buckets, these
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to-do buckets, you're just going to constantly be stressed out because the buckets just fill
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So instead, you just got to stand by the river, dip in each day, and then do what you can
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and be okay with the rest flowing by you because the flow is never going to end because that's
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Something related you talk about in the book, and this really resonated with me because this
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I've noticed in my life that I've constantly been searching for and working towards an
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And it's funny because my wife just brings this up.
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She's like, remember when you said once you solve this problem, you'd be happy?
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And I find something else to be miserable about.
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How can realizing that you'll always have problems help you get more of the right things done
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Well, almost the way you asked the question, I feel like I can already taste the sort of
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It's like we go through life having like a double problem with our problems.
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Like one is the fact that you've got to take the car in for servicing and the fact that
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you've got to file your taxes and the fact that you've got to figure out some interpersonal
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And then the other is like some idea that we shouldn't have any of these in the begin
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We're supposed to have got to the point in life by now where we don't have these problems.
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And depending on your personality, you'll either like blame the world for still giving
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you this BS to deal with, or you'll blame yourself for not having, you know, become a competent
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
00:24:41.420
Now, that's not the kind of attitude to say, so life sucks, right?
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
00:25:03.180
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?
00:25:10.680
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
00:25:20.560
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
00:25:32.700
And if there weren't those problems, then it could be completely automated, right?
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
00:25:51.840
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
00:26:09.160
So it's really quite strange that we have this notion that in any other area of life,
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
00:26:29.960
And then you get to like dive into and relish and often even enjoy the problems, you know,
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.
00:26:51.800
I've struggled with, but this book was a good reminder that there will always be problems.
00:26:57.520
We're going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors.
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
00:27:14.360
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.
00:27:51.260
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
00:28:09.560
Obviously, you go back a few more decades and it gets very, very tumultuous and anxious
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
00:29:55.260
We had a podcast guest, a professor of philosophy, Brandon Warpke, who wrote a book, Why It's
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
00:30:17.760
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.
00:30:38.100
So when it comes to causes, all these things can be important, but you only have so much
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
00:30:47.560
Related to this idea is letting people, other people, maybe close to you manage their own
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
00:31:01.300
Maybe not everybody, but I have a tendency to be like, well, you got a problem.
00:31:04.960
So how can we overcome this tendency to want to help solve other people's problems and
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.
00:31:36.240
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
00:31:47.840
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
00:32:04.260
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
00:32:25.420
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
00:32:45.380
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?
00:32:58.400
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
00:33:13.740
You can just pick things out and do them and read them as needed or when you feel like
00:33:19.280
Don't feel like you have to solve all the world's problems or other people's problems.
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
00:33:38.500
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.
00:33:50.880
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
00:34:10.800
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
00:34:21.620
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?
00:34:53.260
You might later on in life say, oh, yes, I took these paths and that's what really made
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
00:35:09.020
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
00:35:23.940
If a decision you take leads to misery, you'll never know whether another decision would have
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
00:35:42.100
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
00:36:10.300
Action is the answer typically in a lot of situations.
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.
00:36:21.120
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
00:36:31.140
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.
00:36:43.540
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
00:36:48.280
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?
00:36:56.340
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
00:37:23.300
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?
00:37:33.420
There's a big trend online, especially at the moment in favor of like consistency at
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?
00:38:27.140
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
00:39:00.700
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.
00:39:07.660
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.
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.
00:39:25.220
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.
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
00:43:46.100
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.
00:47:12.540
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
00:47:29.080
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,
00:47:56.360
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,