Want to make time for the things that count? Oliver Burkeman has your time management answers

is Oliver Berkman, one of my favorite writers. You might have come across Oliver through the international bestseller four one thousand Weeks, time Management for Mortals, or his regular columns for The Guardian, But what I love most about Oliver's work is that he flips traditional productivity advice on its head and gives a completely different way of looking at

how we use our time. With his new book Meditation for Mortals four Weeks to Embrace your limitations and Make Time for What Counts, which is out now, Oliver has been thinking a lot about how we can all claw back time for the things that really matter. In this episode, we explore the mindset you should be using when you first approach a task if you wanted to be achieved easily, and why allowing yourself to be distracted can actually create

a positive result. We also chat about the strategy you should be utilizing instead of a to do list if you want to get the most out of your day. Welcome to How I Work, a show about habits, rituals, and strategies for optimizing your day. I'm your host, Doctor Amantha Imber. Oliver's new book, Meditation for Mortals is packed full of wisdom and advice. So I wanted to know of everything that Oliver wrote about, which pieces of advice really stuck with him and changed him the most.

sort of idea. And the third week in there is called letting Go, and it's about the importance of learning to sort of let things happen as a sort of compliment to making them happen, and kind of unclenching from

life a bit. And basically all of that material is the stuff I sort of needed the most at the point that I was putting that together, and you know still now, so all that stuff about, for example, the willingness to let things be easy and not to sort of head into big projects or life stages or anything like that with the kind of assumption that they must be going to be grueling and take a lot of

unpleasant effort. That means a lot to me because it's still one of the ones that I sort of grapple with the most.

do you apply it every day? But I also wanted to know to this book project, and particularly following up on four thousand Weeks, which was such a mega hit around the world, and I mean, you've written several books, and so it wasn't like that second album syndrome they talk about for musicians. Maybe this is like your fourth or fifth album syndrome. But I wanted to know, for this project in particular, how did you apply that advice and did you?

I'd written at the point that it was published. And so yeah, I think there was a very sort of cliched, completely predictable and rather tiresome to talk too much about phenomenon where I sort of froze a bit and thought like, oh dear, now, if I mess up, more people going to be watching. So I did kind of a little

bit to some extent sort of freeze and headlights. And it was interesting because it sort of brought into my writing process a lot of the questions that I was already focused on in what I wanted to put into the book, and it sort.

that it was more doable than I thought. But the basic gist of that was to sort of keep coming back and back and back. I don't think there's a single way to flip the switch, but keep coming back to this thought that maybe what I was ready to do and able to do in terms of the next paragraph in the next chapter was what needed to be done.

I'm actually sort of tensed against the work. It's in my musculature somehow, and catching yourself doing that and just sort of stepping back from it and thinking like, oh, maybe that's not necessary is very powerful maybe to get

a little bit more practical. The other thing that makes a big difference there is the idea of really just thinking about the very next thing and the very next thing, so sort of using methods of productivity, methods of planning the day, And there are lots of different ones that having common this focus on like, Okay, what's the next small, completable thing, the sort of radically doable little task that I want to pick and then put into practice. Now, you can't do things like write a book or even

write a chapter. You can do things like that come up with a rough plan for the first half of the chapter, and that's when I can get it down underneath that threshold of what feels doable, back into that easier way of working.

quite profound when you actually think about it. I want to know, like, how does that one resonate for you, like on a day to day basis. Is it one of those things that you do just keep coming back to, because I was very curious about that.

And he sort of recounts the experience of realizing like, oh, yes, there is kind of something in the stance I've had towards life that implies, yeah, not only that a given problem might be difficult depending on its content, but that I shouldn't have problems. I'm trying to get through to the point in life where there aren't problems. And I sort of explain in the book why this isn't going to happen, and you wouldn't want it to happen, right.

There are certainly specific kinds of problems that you wouldn't wish on anybody, But the sort of sheer existence of problems on some level is the synonymous with having meaningful work ahead of you. But I try increasingly to have some kind of direction, have some kind of vision. I don't it's not purely about just stumbling through the dark, but not to try very hard to link that up

to moment moment action. So I'm really trying, and it's very much a work in progress, but I'm really trying to combine that idea of like having a fairly clear sense of what I'm trying to create here with a very very much more intuitive and spontaneous even sense of like, Okay, what feels like the right thing to do next.

of temporarily localized. We wish we could sort of also be in the future checking up on it, making sure that everything's going to be fine, but we can't, and so worry is this sort of mental discomfort that arises from trying to repeatedly sort of get out there and secure a place in time that we're not actually in

and never are in. And you know, if I wanted to get sort of evolutionary psychology about it, which I don't usually want to do very much, but you know, you could see how perhaps we sort of evolved in an environment where where having that concern and then dealing with it was something that happened in a very short order. Like you hear a sound, you're worried about it, you check it out, you realize it's no threat to your safety.

Now we live in this world that's been called a you know, delayed return environment, where the thing you're worrying about could well be whether how an editor will respond to a pitch you've made sometime in the next four weeks, or whether an attempt to purchase a house will go through at some point in the next two months. You know, all these kinds of slow things. Whether worry just has no to go, It doesn't motivate a quick action to get to deal with the worry, It just sort of curdle.

And I think the thing about crossing bridges is, yeah, there's another way of making the same point. Really we're trying to sort of think through all the things that could go wrong, think our way through what we do, and reassure ourselves that that will have gone okay if that happens. You can't ever be certain that something goes okay until it's gone okay. So trying to cross bridges before you get to them, in that sense, is just a recipe for that kind of unpleasant, anxious state of constantly,

repetitively trying to do it and failing. There are all sorts of ideas in cognitive therapy and elsewhere about you know, scheduling a time of day in which to worry and things like this, and I think it does help some people to do something like that. The version of that that I find helpful is to market date in my calendar maybe three four weeks in the future, to sort

of remind myself to focus again on that topic. And I find that knowing that that's there and it's coming up in the calendar is incredibly powerful in terms of enabling me to let go of it in the present. If it's still a big issue four weeks from now, then I will kick into worrying about it again. I sort of on some level I'm concerned that if I were to stop worrying about it, I might completely forget

about it. Right, And it's wild right as parents, if you're worried about some issue with your child's welfare, like, I'm not going to forget about that, it's ridiculous. But some part of me doesn't trust myself. And it's like, if I let go and just got into the thing I was working on today, maybe like ten years later, I'd be like, oh, no, everything's gone terribly wrong in life because I completely failed to attend to this thing.

So putting that kind of three or four weeks ahead thing in I find really effective because then I can be like, Okay, just in case I completely forget about this important thing, it will come back into my world.

a hypothesis. And the more and more you're like, if everything you worry about you actually just put in the diary to spend some time thinking about a couple of weeks from today, and then every time you get to those things, like nine times out of ten, you're going to think, what was I even worrying about that never eventuated into anything, which I feel then feeds, you know, the like a more sensible hypothesis and theory that actually I worry about things that I don't even need to

be spending time worrying about. So I really I enjoy that.

that this is essentially an endless list. The better technology gets at filtering information, the more stuff we find coming our way that we feel like we really need to read or would be really important for our jobs or something. And I wrote then about how it can be really helpful to see that kind of collection of things not

as a bucket but as a river. Right, So this is just an possibly helpful analogy, not as something you've got deal with an empty but as a sort of flow of things that goes by you, and your only job is to pick a few things that seem interesting and not feel guilty about the ones that go by. And I find that very useful in my own approach

to literally that topic. You know, the four hundred articles that I've got stored in a read it later app If I think that it's my job to get through them, firstly, I won't approach them in the most creatively helpful or enjoyable way. But secondly, also like that's not the end of it. There'll be another four hundred in a short time. So treating them as like, well, what actually still feels compelling and let the rest go is much more powerful.

But the more I thought about this, the more I realize that you know, in a sense, every list of things, even things that feel much more obligatory than a to read pile, every list of things has the same character because if there are more things that you could meaningfully usefully do with a day, then you will be able to actually do with the day. Then you are in fact picking items for now and letting the rest go, whether you like it or not. So to switch screech

of breaks, to switch metaphor into menus. The point there is that we don't get stressed by a rest Most people anyway don't get stressed by a restaurant menu. And if you do get stressed, it's not because you think it's your job to get through the whole list right at a single sitting. The fact that a restaurant menu is long and you get to pick a few things from it is kind of the point of a restaurant

menu and what makes it pleasurable. And you can actually see that the same thing applies to our to do lists, right because obviously a lot of the things we're going to be doing are not necessarily going to be as

fun as eating a delicious meal. But if there's more that we could do than we're going to get to do in a day, then by definition, what you're doing when you look at a do list is picking a few items and choosing a few things that feel most compelling, most important, most meaningful, and not expecting to get through

the whole of it. And there is quite a deep potential shift here, which is summed up in that sort of familiar phrase, But it's that the items on a list, when you viewed like that, stop being things that you have to do and become things that you get to do. You get to pick from a menu, and we do

get to pick from our to do list. Again, we may decide that certain things that we're going to pick us kind of unpleasant, in the same way that I suppose you might pick a extremely healthy side dish and a menu that you didn't particularly like because actually it's part of your long term goal to eat healthily. But there is something really important in letting go of that notion that you've failed unless you get through the list.

And I think that seeing and understanding our list as infinite is the way to do that, because then you're just like, that's not happening.

wherever I feel like it. And the context of quantity goals, I think that if you do any kind of creative work, and that I would define very broadly, there is this tendency to set things up in your mind so that you can never feel like you've done something well enough, or that you've done it to a sufficiently high quality.

So the way that you sort of or the way that I sort of naturally, if I don't catch myself proceeds as a writer, is sort of to sit there staring at the screen waiting for something really good to occur to me finally, maybe it does, and I type it out, and then I sort of judge it again and realize it is in. I delete half of it, and you sort of make this incredibly halting progress over

the page. And it's actually antipathetical to high quality anyway, because the way to get to high quality is to is to allow things to flow and then pick from what flows out. So the idea of a quantity goal is just that it gives the part of your brain that wants to think in terms of goals and progress and productivity something to do. But it's something to do that sort of doesn't get involved in the quality arguments.

So for someone writing, this could be simply a question of like, my next job is to add two hundred words to this, or my next job is to write

for an hour today, or you know. And the most sort of purely quantity form of this is the kind of free writing exercise that I was talking about before, where you might just say, like, I'm setting a timer for ten minutes and the only rule is that I'm not going to stop typing or writing for that ten minutes, and you know that is not going to create the final draft of a publishable book.

That's Amantha dot Com. I feel like this dovetails perhaps into running a done list at the end of the day, and I think it's fairly self explanatory perhaps, but maybe I'd love you to talk about how you use a done list and perhaps what it is in your work.

that away. It's just a question of building this in and making sure that it's got a role, just a role for recording proactively the things that you do as you do them, so that you as well as a to do list or instead of a to do list. You're also creating this list of your accomplishments through the day that gets longer and longer as the day goes on, which I mean to do lists often tend to get longer and longer as the day goes on as well,

But that's a problem. This is a good thing, right, the longer you have done with better, And as I say in the book, you know, it's a very simple intervention, but I think it is so powerful because it invites you to compare your output, not to infinity, which is what we're usually doing, that all the things we could yet do that would be useful if we could do.

obviously is just writing. Is just you know, adding items to a piece of paper, as you go through them. If I'm in more of a sort of a motivational rut, I will sometimes pair this with another approach. So what I'll do is, I'll it's going to sound very silly when I put it into words, but you know, I will in a notebook, on one page, write down a task that I propose to do, do the task, cross it out, and then write it down on a different page as being done. Right, so you have a list of the

things that you're doing. You just added one task at a time, and then a list of the things that you've done. I mean, willing to be told that this is kind of dumb on some level, but I find it it's really it's really helpful for just sort of focusing when you're feeling like you lack focus and just finally

on the done list. I mean, one thing that people have said and that I think I have once or twice found myself as well, is that if you're in a really low place, like if you're really in a kind of like I can't quite make myself get out of bed kind of psychological place in life, which does happen.

So I was really curious as to how do you apply this idea of being open to distractions and interruptions rather than feeling frustrated with them or with children that come in and interrupt work.

not wrong. I'm not sort of against the deep work approach and against time blocking in the sense that he teaches it at all. A lot of this is to do with navigating against one's personality and figuring out where you're most likely to sort of get too rigid and clamp down, and taking the opposite approach as a kind

as an antidote to that. So, but what I'm talking about there is this notion that it's really easy, I think, or for some people people like me, to kind of make things worse for themselves by trying to sort of stick to a schedule so rigid that more things get defined as distractions, and distractions all feel worse when they do happen, or interruptions, and that distraction, I guess, is an internal interruption, and then the other kind is people coming into the room or whatever. So the example I

give him the book. You know, if it's an afternoon when it's not my turn for school pickup and I'm working at home and my son burst into the room to tell me about something that he's done at school that day, there might be contexts where the right thing for me to do is to stop and take a breath and explain that actually I can't listen right now, and I will be free later. That I might be working on something urgent, I might be in a conversation

with somebody. This could happen in the next five minutes. It'll be interesting to see. But I don't want to have a productivity system that has defined this period as so importantly devoted to rigid focus that by definition, that lovely thing that life is supposed to be about is defined as a problem. I'm not saying it will never be something that needs to be managed in that way, But like, don't default to that, don't start from the position that unexpected things happening must be bad. I think

that is a risk of sort of overly investing in schedules. Obviously, there'll be people in the audience here who may say, well, you know, my schedule is you know, there are lots of professional roles in which your schedule is more dictated than that, right, if you've got appointments, if you're working as a teacher, or working in sort of lots of different settings where there's kind of a scheduled aspect to it.

But to whatever extent you have that autonomy, you don't want to use that autonomy to make serendipity inherently the enemy.

One of the ways that I seek to sort of operational is that I guess in my working life is to relate to another chapter in the book where I talk about this kind of three or four hour rule of creativity, where you see all the way through history, great creative people are choosing to spend about three or four hours a day on their core activity if they have the freedom to do that, and then everything else

and the rest of the time. So something I try to do to emulate that is like, Okay, I'm going to try really hard to ring fence several hours in the morning for writing, very few exceptions to that. That tends to work best for my energy. So I'm trying to keep that time free to try to exert quite a lot of control over time. But the crucial flip side of that is I'm not going to try to do that with the rest of the working day or the evening. I'm going to say, okay, after lunch or

however I do it. Then I am just more open to things. Then I'm willing to make more appointments and willing to be I'm going to be interrupted. I'm going to have my phone on the desk so that I can respond to messages. So that, I think is a way of kind of finding the balance between structure and serendipity.

For me, the way that works best is if there are chunks of the day which are not specifically assigned in advanced to specific tasks. But you know, maybe we're all agreeing really here at the end.

opposed to a bucket that is filling up. And it reminded me of this conversation I had with a friend of mine who's in creative fields and does a lot of writing, and she said to me a few years back, she said, I've just had the realization I've done the calculations of how many books I can read in a year and probably how long my life will be, and I've just realized I'm not going to have time to read all the books that I want to read in

this lifetime. And that really stuck with me. And when I read sort of how you talk about sort of there is infinite information out there and for you as a writer, and when you're researching books as well, how do you decide what to read, what to like, dedicate your precious attention to.

try too hard to retain what you're reading. There's this thing a foot everywhere now in sort of personal knowledge management, about how you've got to try to remember everything you read. And I'm just like, maybe in certain you know, if you're training in the law or in medicine, there are context where you have to remember the things that you read.

In that way, the rest of us don't need to do that, right, you can say that if something's relevant, it's going to stick to some extent, and you know, if you forget about it, then that's a filter, right. The fact that something stays or doesn't stay tells you

something about it. It's relevance. So there isn't a sort of answer to how I choose what to read than what I feel drawn to and learning to trust that sort of instinct of what feels enjoyable and interesting and when a book feels like it's like I'm done with it, even though I may never finished it and all the rest of it.

be alerted when new episodes drop. How I Work was recorded on the traditional land of the Warrangery people, part of the Coulan nation.