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