Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness Podcast. 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. All of our workman 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 mind-set shifts in his new book, Meditations for Mortals, or weeks to embrace your limitations and make time
for what counts. We talk about some of them today on the show, including why should view life's tasks and problems like a river instead of a bucket, stop feeling guilt over your productivity debt, make peace with your decisions by embracing an unconventional reading of the poem The Road Not Taken, aim to do your habits daily-ish, be more welcoming of interruptions, and practice scruffy hospitality. After the show's over, check out our shownotes at awimp.is-meditations for mortals.
All right, Oliver Berkman, welcome back to the show. Thank you very, very much for having me back. So we had you on back in 2021 to talk about your book, 4,000 weeks, Time Management for Mortals. That's episode number 748 for those you want to listen to that. You got a new book out called Meditations for Mortals. How is this book a continuation of your thinking
and writing in 4,000 weeks? Well, I guess on some level, it continues my kind of fixation on what it means to be a finite human and how we're supposed to deal with that in the way that makes us sort of maximally happy and accomplished and all the rest of it. The real difference here in my mind is that I really wanted to go deep into this question of the
problem Michael actually doing things, right? This idea that it's incredibly easy to have a very clear sense of what you want to have in your life, the projects you want to accomplish, the way you want to show up in your relationships and all the rest of it, and not to actually do it for real. So this book, both in its content and its slightly maybe unusual structure is an attempt to sort of really get into and maybe over that gap from knowing to doing.
Yeah, so one of the big takeaways I got from our first conversation was that you're exploring this idea that human beings have the, we're a paradox. We're finite in time and space. We only have so much time. We can only be in one place at one time. But we also are capable of generating infinite possibilities of things to do. And I think we brought in the philosopher Kikigarard. Kikigarard talked about that and he talks about how this paradox
of being finite but having infinite possibilities, it creates anxiety or angst. And one response is like, we just don't do anything. He's like, ah, what's the point? And I think that is what you're trying to explore in this book, meditation for morals, like how to get over that, how can you actually start getting stuff done? But you start off the book talking about something you've noticed when you've talked to people and just in the online discourse is
people are trying to be super productive. They're getting stuff done and they're talking about how their work isn't just exhausting. They just describe even though they're getting a lot of stuff done, they just feel empty, flat, maybe a bit dead inside. And you bring in this guy named Hartmott Rosa, the sociologist to explain why we might feel dead inside even though we're getting a lot done. What's going on there? Yeah. So, Hartmott Rosa has this whole theory and it's
the name of a very big book he wrote as well called Resonance. And he is trying to sort of do what in many ways all sorts of philosophers have been doing since forever, which is to put language on whatever it is that really makes life feel vivid and alive and worth living. And his argument is basically that what we as individuals and also as whole civilizations, you know, attempt to do by default is to get more and more control over time and space. And this is obviously pretty
obvious in the context of kind of, you know, mainstream productivity culture for one thing. And all sorts of kind of self-development stuff is like trying like be more intentional and have your schedule consist more and more of the things you want it to consist of and get control that way.
But he points out that actually this sort of project of increasing control seems somehow to squeeze out the resonance, the sort of sense of aliveness or vividness that actually is the thing that most people sort of recognize as being like, okay, I'm really fully alive and fully showing up
in this finite life. One very, you know, mundane example that might not resonate with everyone, but it certainly resonates with like productivity geeks or recovering productivity geeks like me is, you know, if you ever sort of get really excited by somebody's new system for organizing your goals and your tasks and, you know, you come up with your 90 day vision and your five-year vision and all the rest of it and you stick it all into a system with a schedule and now you know exactly
what steps you've got to follow the next week to make it happen. That's incredibly exciting for a couple of days. That sense that your seizing control of your life. And then pretty much every time it just becomes like in a couple of days it's like dead. It's like, oh my god, do I have to do all these things now that I've told myself I have to do. It just feels like slogging through a bunch of predetermined tasks and there's no excitement in it anymore because all you're doing is making
your way through a plan that you came up with in the past. There are many, many other examples. That's one that always resonates for me just because I've been there so many times. Now we had a guy on the podcast early this year named Andrew Rude who is a professor theology and he uses Rhoaz's work to explore how it's affecting church congregations. Oh wow. And he wrote a book called Congregation in a Secular Age Applying Rhoaz's Framework.
And something he noted in the book was that he'll go to congregations and on the surface they look like they're thriving. Their membership is growing, they're adding new wings to their buildings, they're developing new programs. But when he talks to the pastors, the pastors say, yeah our members are just depressed. They're just checked out. They're kind of just going through the motions. And Rude's idea applying Rhoaz's theory is that churches have picked up on this idea that in order
to thrive, you have to constantly be growing. If you're not growing, you're dead. It's kind of like the idea we have in our Western industrialized world. And he says what ends up happening, these churches, they feel like they had to constantly just be doing more and more. They had to keep doing the stuff that they were doing to get to the point that they are. But then they had to do more
to keep growing. And like the gains they get are just marginal. And they just feel like I'm just kind of standing in place, even though we're doing lots of stuff and they just become despondent. And like what's the point? I'm just going to go through the motions. Yeah, I can totally see how that applies in that setting. You sort of, you actually do meet with success in a way, right? The congregation does stabilize or get bigger or whatever it might be.
But it's a success that seems to somehow be one at the cost of the whole purpose of what you're doing in the first place. Yeah, and I think I can apply, I think a lot of people might feel that on an individual level. They feel like if I want to grow and keep getting better and better, I just got to do more and more and more. In addition to the other stuff I was doing. And then you end up feeling burned out and then you actually end up not wanting to do anything. Yeah, no,
exactly. And one of the things I'm really sort of getting at in the new book is that it's not just that like this doesn't work and makes life worse, but that actually doing the opposite, right, being experimenting with ways to really confront how little control we have, how little time we have, all the different ways in which we're limited, kind of letting yourself feel the truth of that is not just like something it's, you know, you should do because then you're in touch with
the truth. It's actually the way to get a lot of the things done that you thought you would get done through the systems and schemes for increasing control. There's a sort of sense in which constructive and creative activity kind of just wants to happen naturally. And our big problem is all the things we do to get in the way of it rather than that we don't make it happen. You also talk about this idea of the efficiency trap that we can get into as we try to
control more and more of our lives and try to do more. What is an efficiency trap? This is just the sort of title that I give to this very familiar experience of finding that the ways we follow to try to become more efficient, more optimized, you know, to try to keep up with the volume of stuff that we want to do and that the modern world sort of pressures us to do, reliably sort of make us busier and more busy with the least important things, in fact, very often.
Because, you know, we can go into detail, but the basic headline is just, if you work on making yourself better and better and better at getting through more and more and more things in a given period of time, which is what efficiency essentially is, if that incoming supply of things is essentially infinite, whether it's a supply of emails or demands or family obligations or like ambitions and places you want to travel and all the rest of it, if the supply is effectively
infinite, getting through it faster isn't going to help, right? It's just going to cause you to have more in your plate and to be diluting your attention between more things. It's also going to stop you making the tough decisions you need to make about which things are really worth your time.
So the result of that is that, you know, if you've ever experienced like really deciding to get on top of your email and you really do it and you really succeed, all that happens is that you immediately get much more email because you're replying to more people more quickly and they're replying to you and you have to reply to them and, you know, it has the exact reverse effect. It doesn't get you to that place of, you know, that kind of plateau of effortless calm where you're finally on top of
everything. It has the reverse effect. You see this effect happen with automobile traffic. I think they've done studies, whereas they widened roads. They think, well, this will clear congestion if we widen the road or make the highway bigger, but all it does is just increase the amount of traffic going through. And so it just creates congestion again. Yeah. Injuice demand, it makes the previously congested route more attractive to more motorists. Yeah. So we see that in your email. I'm sure
everyone's seen that you're to-do list. So the more efficient you get, you're just going to get more of that stuff you're getting a fish and add. How is this related to this idea you talk about productivity debt? Productivity debt. Again, I seem to sort of come up with these labels for field. I think it's useful to have a label, but I don't think the feeling is anything new. I think
that it's really useful to sort of pick it out. This is the notion that I think many of us have that we almost sort of wake up in the morning feeling like we're in a kind of moral debt that we've got to pay off. We've got to do a certain amount of stuff. Get a certain amount of stuff done by the end of the day. Be productive to a certain level. Otherwise, we haven't quite earned our right to exist on the planet. We're not quite succeeding minimally as human beings. When I first started
talking about this, people really resonated. It's at least my tribe of people. I don't know whether it's everybody, but people are like, yes, that is exactly what it's like. The best you can hope for in that situation is that by the time it's the end of the day and you're finished, you might be back at a zero balance. If you're lucky, you might have just earned your way back to feeling okay about yourself. This is where I stop and say, in a sense, if you're in a salary profession or
something like that or in any job, you are in productivity debt of a kind. You do owe your employer output in return for your pay. But that's not the same as this kind of existential burden that I think many of us carry that we have to sort of earn our right to exist through productivity. And so one of the ideas I suggest in the book is that actually there are ways of encouraging yourself mindset shift to sort of start the day at a zero balance, not start the day in debt, but start the day
zero thinking like, okay, I'm fine. I'm enough. I'm a good enough person, all the rest of it. Now anything that I do during the day is like extra. And that's because I want to create some cool things in the world. Not because I absolutely have to do it just to sort of plug this void. I think that's a really important switch for any of us who fall into this category that psychologists call insecure overachievers, which is probably a good chunk of people. Yeah. So productivity
that it sounds like it's like productivity original sin. So you just feel like I've been burdened with this thing and I got a and one approach is like, well, I can overcome it myself and you're arguing, it's not like a religious argument, but it could be kind of religious things like, no, just accept the fact that you can't overcome this on your own. Like you can't get yourself out of this hole. You kind of just give up a little bit and by giving up, it's liberating and
you can actually get more done. It's like you accept some grace in your life. Absolutely. And you know, it's not a religious book and I'm not in a any sort of conventional sense religious person, but that's sort of those battling ideas within Christianity between, you know, salvation through works and earning your place in heaven through your efforts. And then on the other side, grace the idea that, you know, your right to exist and your right to enjoy the
world is just undeserved and given regardless of what you do. That's how those ideas have been worked through in the religious context. So it's absolutely. It's all sort of religious because I think something we're trying to do when we follow all these kinds of personal change techniques, even if we do them as entirely as secularists is on some level to sort of save our souls. Okay, so let's talk about how we can shift out of this mindset of we have to get out of
productivity debt. We have to just get as much done as possible and give up a little control in our lives so that we can actually experience life more fully and you give different tactics. And one chapter that's set out to me because I completely related to this is the feeling that many people have in the information age of drowning in information. We all have our two read lists of books. Maybe you've got a bunch of articles on an insta paper that you've,
you know, you saved and you're like, I'm going to read these one day. You got stacks of the New Yorker somewhere of articles you want to read. How does the way we typically approach our two read lists create feelings of, oh man, I'm never going to get through this and it's just I'm drowning.
Yeah, it's such a sort of ubiquitous feeling and I was amazed after I first started writing about this because I'm not a video games person to find that this is totally common as well as a back log of games to play, which is totally blew my mind because I just sort of filed video games away as things that people just do for fun. So why would you ever feel that there was a back log? But of course that's how I approach lots of books and I still do feel burdened by a back log.
So it's a really interesting phenomenon just sort of how ubiquitous it is. I think that this is one of many areas of life where really the solution is not to try to make the situation feel better by getting through more stuff and finding ways to power through more and more of this supply.
But actually by understanding the way in which the situation is worse and we think it is, that actually when you really see how impossibly big the potential supply of things to read is or potential supply of things to listen to or watch, it's just so much bigger than any human could manage, even just the good stuff, the stuff that's relevant to you, the stuff that is high quality, that even that whatever criteria you apply, it's still going to be effectively infinite.
And so the only way to proceed through that, so firstly there's a kind of immediate perspective shift I think from seeing that and being like, oh, okay, getting on top of this is impossible. That's really helpful because now my challenge is not to try to get on top of it, but just to sort of engage with it in the most enjoyable and meaningful way. And the metaphor I use in the book for information is like to see your to read pile or your
video game back log or whatever it is as a river rather than a bucket. In other words, not a bucket, something that contains a whole lot of stuff and your job is to empty the bucket. But just something that is flowing past you or you're standing in the middle of it and it's flowing around you or something and all you need to do, all you ever could do is pick a few items as they pass by that seem like the most worthwhile to pick and not feel guilty about the ones
passing by. Because as I say, you know, we don't feel guilty most of us about not getting through all the books in the Library of Congress. It's only when we sort of draw the boundary a little bit closer to home and say all the articles in our read later app and all the podcasts in our queue and all the books on the list we've been keeping, you know, only vendor these lists become tormenting. But in fact, they're all effectively impossible and that's actually very liberating.
Yeah, because the bucket keeps filling up infinitely. Right. Exactly. All, you know, yeah, the bucket has a hole in the bottom and it's just a flow whatever. Yes. Yeah. The way we're the metaphor. No, the bucket's like it's like those, remember those old magic beer floating faucet fountains. You know what I'm talking about? These are just some that spinsters store in the mall. So it looks like this, this faucet's magically floating above a beer mug.
Oh, yeah. And it's just constantly filling up. Yeah. Oh, and that's what your two-read bucket is like. Exactly. And so yeah, the metaphor is instead of thinking of your two-read list as a bucket, you have to empty. It's just this flowing river you can dip in like I'm going to read this magazine article. And that's fine. That's all I got to do. Yeah. No, exactly. And the reason it's all you got to do is because on some level it's all you could ever do. Yeah.
You know, you can do more than other people. You can dedicate a larger proportion of your week to reading than someone else does. But the place where you empty the supply and you have read everything relevant to your career or everything relevant to your hobby or every thriller that you would enjoy reading, that's never coming. Yeah. Do you think we can apply this mindset to our to-do list as well? I think in the end we have to, right? I mean, this is where people start objecting and saying,
oh, but I have to get through this impossible amount. And then I say, well, if it's an impossible amount, you're not getting through it. So no matter how much you have to, that's kind of a little bit meaningless because you're not going to. I think that, you know, another metaphor here that I've found very useful is that there's the kind of list that you feel you have to get through. And then there's
the kind of list that is like a good example is like a menu, right? So those big menus you get in, well, I know New York City diners, but I'm sure there are lots of other diners, sort of 15-page laminated things that have them, you know, 400 different dishes that you could order. Nobody looks at that list and thinks that at dinner that day they've got somehow get through it all. That would be completely absurd. They get to pick from the list and the sort of abundance of the list is a
good thing because it's like, wow, look at this range of things I could pick from. And actually, if you think about our situation as finite humans, to do lists are kind of inevitably menus as well, right? If there's always going to be more that you could do or feel like would be meaningful and important to do than you are going to do, then actually you're always picking from a menu. You're never successfully, anyway, getting through a list. And I think that can be quite powerful because to me,
anyway, it triggers that sense of like, oh, I get to do this. You know, that's been many people have remarked on. Instead of having to do this, I kind of get to do it. And that doesn't mean that you won't sometimes decide that, you know, you have to file your tax returns. It's just that the fundamental relationship with that list is not one of, I'm kind of failing at life until such
point at which the list is completely finished. When you first introduced this idea of bucket and river to reading lists in your email while back ago, it reminded me, I actually inspired an article that I wrote on our site about Mark Forster's autofocus method. Yeah. Because I think his autofocus, so this is a way to keep track of your to-do's. And Forster's autofocus method, what I think is ingenious about it is it treats your to-do list like a river. Basically, you just
create this giant list and you keep adding to it. And it can be infinite. But instead of categorizing it by due dates and categories and things like that, you just pull out your list and then you just go down it and whatever sticks out to you, like you do that thing. And you work on it for a little bit and then you cross it off. And if you didn't finish it, you put it at the bottom of the list. Yeah. You treat like a river. You just kind of going in and picking things out, whatever you feel
doing and it gets stuff done. I've used it before. And I find it actually can be really liberating. I think it really can. One of the things I love about Mark Forster's work is that he's actually constantly experimenting. It has about 50 of these time management algorithms for working through a list. And some of them are purely intuitive. What do you feel like doing? And then some of them try to balance that with how do you sort of finish the things that are hanging around too long and
deal with urgent items and all the rest of it. So I think there's definitely something to be said for picking things and saying like these are the ones I'm going to do before I move on to the others. But the basic context is always going to be that life is just an endless list of things you could
be doing. And you need some way of working that list, not working through the list, but just like working it because getting to the end of it is not going to happen and it's just going to make you constantly live mentally in the future for that point that never arrives. Okay, so the big takeaway here is to treat your to read list and your to-do list like a river.
Because I think a lot of people think this, but it's not the case that if you work hard enough or you find some perfect organizational system, you're finally going to get caught up on all this stuff. Because if you think you are, right, that you're going to get the bottom of these buckets, these to-do buckets, you're just going to constantly be stressed out because the bucket is just
filled back up. And so it's just a recipe for frustration. So instead, you just got to stand by the river, dip in each day, and then do what you can, and be okay with the rest flowing by you. Because the flow is never going to end because that's the nature of life. Something related you talk about in the book, and this really resonated with me because this isn't the story of my life. I've noticed in my life that I've constantly been searching for and working
towards in an idemic state where I have no problems. And it's made me absolutely miserable. And it's funny because my wife just brings us up. She's like, remember when you said, once you solved this problem, you'd be happy. And then the problem solved. And I find something else to be miserable about. How can realizing that you'll always have problems help you get more of the right things done and also just be happier? Well, almost the way you asked the question,
I feel like I can already taste the sort of relaxation of this, right? It's like we go through life having like a double problem with our problems. Like one is the fact that you've got to take the car in for servicing and the fact that you've got to file your taxes and the fact that you've got to figure out some interpersonal conflict at work. And then the other is like some idea that we shouldn't have any of these in the begin with. We're supposed to have got to the point
in life by now where we don't have these problems. And depending on your personality or either like blame the world for still giving you this BS to deal with or you'll blame yourself for not having you know become a competent individual who's supposed to have no problems. But when you stop to think about it, this really makes no sense, right? The idea that it's going to be a time when all the problems are gone because to be a finite limited human in the world by the broadest
definition of problems is just to have problems. Life is just a sequence of problems. Now that's not the kind of attitude to say so life sucks, right? And there's no fun or something. It's just that if you define a problem generically enough, like everything we do is problem solving. There are definitely certain kinds of problem that afflict people that you know nobody would wish on anyone and that I
hope never to have to experience in my own life and all the rest of it. But the sheer fact of problems, it's just what life is. So I'm a couple of things I mentioned in the book, right? It's like you run into people sometimes, I have a friend who had this moment of realization that you know she thought she could do her job really well if it wasn't for all the problems she had to be dealing with
all the time. And you run into this attitude. But she had this understanding that came to her after a number of experiences that you know no, your capacity to deal with problems, that is the substance of the job. And if there weren't those problems, then it could be completely automated, right? Reduced the steps and set off to go. The thing that we do as humans is solve problems.
And what's so interesting to me about this is there are contexts where this is obvious. Like I don't resent the fact that when I'm writing a book, I have to solve the problem of how to structure it. And there are contexts in which it's downright pleasurable, right? We finish our work day where we've been resenting and moaning about our problems and then sit down and watch like a detective flow where we're engaged in trying to figure out a problem because that's fun or
play a board game where we're trying to essentially solve a problem. So it's really quite strange that we have this notion that in any other area of life, there's going to be a problem free time and sort of answer your question directly. Once you can release that a little bit, that sense, it stops you defining your present experience as like fundamentally flawed because you haven't
got to this future fantasy yet. And then you get to like dive into and relish and often even enjoy the problems, you know, today's set of problems. I love it. Some of my wife tells me whenever I start doing my moaning about that sort of thing. She's like, well, if you don't have any problems, it means you're dead. I'm like, that's a good point.
Yep. Absolutely. I agree with that. That's been helpful. So yeah, it's something I'm struggling, I've struggled with, but this book was like a good reminder that there will always be problems. It's just part of being alive. We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors. And now back to the show. So we're constantly adding stuff to our to-do list and our personal lives. There's things to do. Always do around the house, things to do for the kids,
planning vacations. That's piling up. But then these days, I feel like there's a lot of pressure that we have to take action to alleviate not just our problems, but the world's problems. We have to be for causes and we have to, you know, do all these different things. Why do you think this pressure exists to be an active do-gooder in everything? It's really interesting the way it's changed just over my adult lifetime. I mean, I think there are a number of different things to
want to some extent. It may be true that we are living now through a period of greater real systemic world crises than before or that we realize it more. You know, I go back and forth. On some level, maybe it's always felt like there's a sort of crisis of democracy and gulfing the planet and the crisis of the climate and economic crises. But there does seem to be like maybe we are living in them slightly more acute times in many ways than people were doing a few decades ago.
Obviously, you go back a few more decades and it gets very, very tumultuous and anxious and again. But the other part of it is the way the attention economy works, right? The fact that if you're a person who thinks you have any obligations at all outside your own forewalls, if you're in any way sort of globally or societally oriented, you're instantly going to be urged by
every campaign group, every organ news organization, every social media platform. You're going to learn about more human suffering and more events and more scary currencies than anyone in history ever was exposed to. And you're going to find everybody who's campaigning for something presenting their cause as the number one thing to which you absolutely must give your attention. Otherwise,
everything in the world will go catastrophically wrong. Just because that's the incentive of the attention economy, I think it's really interesting how even very responsible news organizations, I'm not talking about like sources of misinformation are incentivized to just slightly exaggerate every, every, every story that they report because it has to sort of hold its own in that online arms race
for attention. So I make the case in the book, borrowing partly from the work of David Kane, who writes the Raptitude blog, that, you know, part of being a good citizen in the modern world is actually having the ability to withdraw your attention from things as well. It's being willing to say, okay, I care deeply about these eight causes in the world, but I'm going to pick this one
and give it some of my time and money. And I'm not going to feel bad about neglecting the others, not because they don't matter, but because that's the only way that a human can actually effectively make a contribution on that kind of level towards going on. Yeah, it's recognizing your finitude. Yeah, exactly. We had a podcast guy, a professor of philosophy, Brandon Warpky, who wrote a book, why it's okay to
mind your own business. Yeah. And he makes that same case. Like there's so many different things you could care about, but you only have so much time and you can only be one place at one time. So you have to pick one or two things that you're going to devote yourself to. And that will actually allow
you to get stuff done. Yeah, no, exactly. And I mean, this is just simply the same idea, whether it's applied to being a good citizen or getting through your to-do list or, you know, doing fun stuff in your life, right? It's like it's, it's, it's, there's a direct relationship between being able to withdraw energy and focus from some things and being able to have it available to give it to some of us. Yeah. Okay. So when it comes to causes, all these things can be important, but you only have
so much time and energy you can devote. So be okay with just, I'm going to focus on this one, and I'm going to do my best with that. Related to this idea is letting people, other people, maybe close to you manage their own problems. I think another tendency we have not only do we want to add our own stuff to our to-do list, but when we see someone having a hard time, like we want to make their problems, our problems, maybe not everybody, but I have a tendency to be like, well,
you got a problem, I got to help you out. So how can we overcome this tendency to want to help solve other people's problems and add it to our to-do list? Yeah. I mean, this is people pleasing, right? On one level or another, it's the idea that something is a miss if someone's cross with you or if someone's sort of feeling distressed and you haven't done something about it or if someone's impatient or, if you've manifested not to different ways, I think lots of people go through
live worrying that other people might be mad at them. Other people, it's more like they can't bear to see somebody struggling with something before weighing in. Obviously, on one level, it's important to remember that you're not helping someone necessarily grapple with their problems if you are
sort of constantly stepping into take the burden off their shoulders in that way. The other thing that I sort of try to examine in the book is this sense that we often relate to other people's feelings as if they're sort of much more important than anything else and that we have to make sure
that other people's feelings are okay, whether they're feelings about us or not. And actually, when you really sort of think about the limitations that we have when it comes to making a difference to other people's insides, it's another case of seeing that these are just more things to be weighed in the balance. As finite creatures, we go through life making trade offs all the time. If I spend this hour on X, I can't spend it on Y. If I neglect these emails for an hour, I can go and
have a walk in the hills and that'll be wonderful. On the other hand, people might get impatient and mad that I hadn't responded those emails. So both of these things are real. The pleasure of the walk and the problem of the impatience and all you're doing is weighing them and saying, you know, like, am I willing to incur the burden to me of the fear that someone might be impatient, say,
in order to get the benefit of the walk in the hills? Or is this one of those occasions where actually, you know, it's my boss and I'm going to choose to focus on making sure he's not impatient and and I'm willing to full go the fact that I could have spent the next hour walking in the hills. Okay, so we're talking about some things we can do to overcome this feeling of productivity debt and angst that we might have with our to-do list. So one is don't think of your to-do list or your
to-read list as buckets. You have to empty each day, but they're just rivers. It's always going to be there. It's always going to be flowing. You can just pick things out and do them and read them as needed or when you feel like you want to do it. Don't feel like you had to solve all the world's problems or other people's problems. But let's talk about just taking action. Let's say we got this river in front of us of things we could do or things we could read. It can still feel
overwhelming. She's like, well, which one do I pick? And you start waffling because you're like, well, if I choose this one, then I'm going to miss that on that one. You have this chapter about how Robert Frost poem, famous poem The Road Not Taken can help us get out of this analysis by paralysis mode. So what can we learn from Robert Frost poem? Well, this is this very famous poem that I'm sure many, many listeners will be familiar with, you know, about two paths diverging in a
yellow wood. I think most Americans have to study it in high school at some point. And the usual way that this poem is interpreted is that, you know, it's about how you should choose the roadless and then that's the path that will make all the difference, all these lines in the poem that sort of suggest that being unconventional and striking out on your own journey is what you need to do. But as the poet David Or has shown in a really fascinating book about that poem,
if you read it closely, that's not what Robert Frost is saying at all. He's saying repeatedly that when you come to these kind of decision points in life and you're trying to choose what to do, again, whether it's a big life choice or which of the following to-do list items should I spend the next half hour on, you know, you can't know in advance which is the path that is going to make the difference. You can't even know in hindsight because you will not have the counterfactual,
right? You didn't go down two paths for that hour you never could. You might later on in life say, oh yes, I took these paths and that's what really made the difference. But that's a little bit like when you know, you get those people interviewed in the newspapers who've lived to 110 and they say it's like, you know, whiskey and cigars, what made it right? You never know whether it's a what they attribute the longevity to. And it's like, you'll never know if that's despite or because of, right?
It's like there's no, you'll never know whether the decision that you took, whether if it decision you take leads to happiness, you'll never know if another decision would have led to more happiness. If a decision you take leads to misery, you'll never know whether another decision would have led to more misery. And I think that ultimately this is quite freeing because what I think Frost is getting at, I will put it this way, what I take from Frost is that there is intrinsic meaning
making in deciding, in choosing a path. And especially if you do that on a very sort of modest level, right? Choosing a path for the next hour, choosing a path for the next week, it isn't something where the stakes have to be terribly high. But what you do is you get into this habit and this practice of being decisive in life, not being decisive by thinking you've chosen the right answer, but just being decisive. And I think that will see you a lot further than, you know,
trying to analyze the exactly correct decisions. Yeah, action is the answer typically in a lot of situation. Well, not all the time, sometimes not doing anything is the best thing. But you never know. So you just, you know, consciously choosing to not do anything. I think that's important, right? It's like, yeah, sometimes the right thing to do about a difficult decision is give it a few days, but to decide to do that, not just to sort of end up doing that because you're torn
and agonized by indecision. Okay. So just, you never know, you can't know completely whether your decision or indecision is going to what's going to, the result's going to be so you might as well just do something, just make the conscious decision. Right. Oh, go, do you have anything else you want to say about that? No, I was going to say, because you're in some sense, you're deciding all the time anyway, right? Yeah. I mean, in some sense, we're choosing as many people, including
Monk Manson, have written very well about this right word. We're always choosing. So the real question is whether we do it consciously and with a little bit of reason and wisdom or not, not choosing how to use an hour is really not an option for us. Another bit of advice, it's not a system, but again, it's just a way to change your stance and how you approach the things you got to do in your life is committing to doing things daily-ish. That can help you start taking more action.
How so? I love this phrase. It comes from Dan Harris, the meditation teacher, and podcaster, and it's what he says when people ask him how often they should meditate, right? Daliish. Some people sort of hate this, right? There's a big trend online, especially at the moment in favor of like consistency at all costs. What really matters is showing up every single day.
And there's truth in that, but there's also a dark side, right? Which is that a real sort of obsessive fixation on rigid consistency becomes very sort of you have sort of fight with yourself to make yourself do it. If you miss a day, it can have outsized damaging implications because you then tell yourself the whole thing's ruined because you didn't do it every single day. You can end up sort of going through the motions as if checking the box on the counter that day
is somehow more important than the thing it is that you're trying to create. And what I like about daily-ish is it's like it's just enough pressure. It's like you know that if you only do something twice in a week, you didn't do it daily-ish. It's not just doing it whenever you feel like it. And you know in a busy time, maybe four times a week is going to count. And then the rest of the
time maybe it should be five or six, right? It's got that kind of give in it. And what I really like about this is that it's a rule that serves you and serves the thing you're trying to bring into being, whether that's a meditation practice or writing or anything else, as opposed to the situation where you end up serving the rule, which I think is a place that people, I speak from experience, who are sort of a little bit fixated on the perfect morning routine and all the rest of that.
It's a place we get to very easily, where actually somehow the most important thing is that we get up at 5am and get precisely 30 minutes of sunlight and drink two glasses of water. Well, no, the most important thing is your health and your energy. And that might be the best way to do it most days. Going back to a religious metaphor, when Jesus talked about the Sabbath,
you know, the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. So these things we establish for ourselves, whether they're routines or whatever, we got to remember that we didn't create these just so we can do them. They're there so they can help us become a better person and have a more fruitful life. Yes. And I do sort of refer to the religious history of these rules in my,
the Christian history of these rules at one point in the book. And I'm a little bit annoyed that I've realized I have not used that specific quotation about the Sabbath because it's exactly the point. There's something that I've done in my life. So I used to be really like I got to have a routine morning routine and a nightly routine that I got to follow to the tea. But I, like you said, it's so fragile. Like if you mess up or you don't do it, you feel like your whole day is shot.
So something that I shifted to a couple of years ago instead of having like a routine, I have just a daily checklist. So there's things I want to get done during the day. It doesn't matter when I do them. Yeah. As long as I get them done. So if it's like meditation, if I can't get it in the first thing in the morning, well, if I got like five minutes during the day, I'll just do it there. Yeah. That's great. And it reminds me of something I did
especially when our son was really, really young, like newborn. And you know, two-thirds of one's discretionary time is instantly wiped out. And I took to having like a, what I thought of as a running order, right? It was like with the first hour of discretionary time that I have this today, I'm going to do some journaling, but a meditating and a bit of exercise. But but those discretionary times could come at, you know, 4 a.m., 7 a.m., 11 30 a.m., just totally
unpredictable when they would come. But I would know what the sort of one, two, three things I wanted to do with that time were when they arose. Yeah. I think having kids, that's what caused the shift in me too. Because it's easy to be like, well, I got this really great awesome strict morning and evening routine. We don't have these little people who barf and go pee and need a cup of water. It fits funny. I mean, you know, obviously, everybody's different and having kids is not for some
people and for other people they wish it wasn't. It can't be in all the rest, but if you spend any time in sort of YouTube productivity culture, it is there's so much that is dominated by kind of young men who are still a few years away from having kids and telling you how to, you know, exactly nail your morning. I'm afraid I don't have a lot of time for that. These days both both metaphorically and literally. Okay. Yeah. Same. So do things dailyish.
And remember these things you've established for yourself. They're there to serve you. You're not there to serve them. And try a checklist. If a morning or evening routine is not working for you, I think a checklist because they provide, as you said, enough flexibility, but enough structure that allows you to bend, but not break. Yes. Exactly. Another thing you talk about is this time management principle that people have seen. We've talked about this in the podcast
is time blocking. So you block off time for uninterrupted work, but you argue that trying to be uninterruptible could make you miserable and it can also cause you to miss out on life and relationships. How so? Well, yeah, I'm sort of trying to sort of tread a kind of balanced line here. So one section of the book I talk about how trying to safeguard a ring fence three or four hours
in the day for focused work is a really good battle tested technique. But on the other hand, I think, yeah, trying to be sort of absolutist about your control over your time and say, this is how everything is going to unfold for the next 14 hours or whatever. It just creates a lot more opportunities for when things get are unpredictable for that to cause stress and to sort of be deeply unwelcome and to throw you off guard. I think to some extent our modern world
and our work requires silence and focus and the ability to shut out interruptions. And to another extent, it requires us in a different way. It requires us to be available and not to think that we know before an email comes in or before somebody suggests doing something that like we actually know how time should best unfold and anyone who has a different view or for reality has
a different view. That's a problem. So I sort of advocate and try to practice a sort of twin track approach where yes, there are small bits of my calendar that are very time blocked and it's really like I'm going to do everything I can to make sure they're undisturbed. And then the rest of the time, I'm trying to go with the flow a bit more and be okay with that and still maintain some agency and autonomy within the sort of chaos and cacophony of real life, not to keep defining
everything that happens. It's different from my plan as somehow a problem. Sometimes it might be a negative, but very often it's something positive that I couldn't have predicted. So don't always think about a friend dropping by unexpectedly or if you're working from home and your kid totals into your office to show you a picture, don't feel like it's an annoyance
because you can just embrace the interruption. Right. Or maybe sometimes you're on a deadline and actually it is going to be necessary for you to turn in a calm and friendly way to your child and look them in the eye and say, I'm going to have to be with you in an hour rather than now. That can be okay. What I advocate against is a productivity system or an approach to time management that turns every interruption or every visit from your child into your workspace as a
problem. It's like if you're following a very strict schedule, then you're creating all these kinds of walls, conceptual walls for other people to run into and cause a problem. Whereas, yes, sometimes you might have to do that, but you have to do that because of the work demands it in that moment, not because that's how you are approaching your whole work life. All right. So the trick is to find a balance and there's no system or hard rule that's going to
help you find that. It's just something you have to, it's a skill that you have to develop to figure out, okay, how many of you... Right. And look, if you... Yeah. Yeah. If you have a lot of autonomy over your time and your work is in some sense, knowledge work creative, I think four hours of protected time is a great rule of thumb, but that's it. It's a rule of thumb. Yeah. We're just navigating this all the time. Another sort of self-help or productivity advice that you
take aim at is this idea to be kind to your future self. So you got to save money, save for retirement, you got to skip the cake today. So your future self will thank you. But you argue that maybe we just need to tell our future self to take a hike sometimes. Why is that? Well, there's a huge focus in personal development at the moment, especially it seems to me on thinking carefully about making choices now for the benefit of your future self. And obviously it has wisdom to it.
But I think that the kind of people who are attracted to that kind of advice in the first place are much more likely to be too good at deferring gratification than not good enough. Right. There are people in the world who need to sort of get their act together and think more about the future, but they're not people who are kind of already into personal development stuff. I think what we who
are into that stuff need to remember is that you can go too far. You can make it so that you're constantly doing everything for the benefit of a future self that in some sense will never exist because when you get to that future there'll still be another future self to focus on
until one day there isn't. And so it's actually important to be able to claim to like cash in some of your preparation as well to be able to say on a given day like actually I'm going to do something that is fun today because I have created the life in which I'm able to do that instead of always sort of postponing that into the future. Yeah, I've seen this. I think I've seen some
personal finance people talk about this when it comes to saving for the future. And one argument they make is like well if you save too much like if you're just really aggressive with your savings you're like well I'm doing this for my 70 year old self. They remind you it's like well when you're 70 years old you're not going to be able to hike the Appalachian Trail or to do some strenuous dream activity you always had because you're just going to be old. So it's like do that now
if you can when you're 35 or 40. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I think that's I think that's why I was with so again you're not saying like you're not trying to be like what's the the grasshopper in that parable where you just don't care at all about the future. But you don't want to be an aunt either we're like a drone just constantly saving stuff it's all about finding a balance. Right and you got to ask who you are and which counter pressure you're more likely to need and you know as I say
I just think there's a big self selection bias. If you are listening to this podcast if you are interested in my book if you read this kind of stuff the risk that you might pay no attention whatsoever to your personal development or the future seems very slim whereas the risk that
you might go too far seems a little bit more you know on the cards if you see what I mean. One last principle you talked about that resonated with me one thing that can help us to feel like we're living life more fully having more flourishing life and not be so stressed out is embracing scruffy hospitality what's that and how can it help us have a more meaningful life.
This phrase comes from a Tennessee pastor Jack King who described in his own life how he sort of really enjoyed with his wife hosting people for dinner but the sort of checklist that they went through to get the house ready and the meal to be fantastic and the lawn to be mowed
became so onerous that they kind of didn't want to invite people around anymore and so he sort of went full on in the other direction to what he calls scruffy hospitality which is just inviting people around to have what's in your cupboards with the houses it is and to sort of allow yourself
to drop the facade and what he found and I think what other people find and to the extent that I've practiced myself what I've found is it's not just okay in many ways it's better in many ways there's more connection when you sort of let the facade drop as I say in the book you know even before I
encountered the phrase I had noticed before that if we were having friends round and I saw like crumbs under our fridge or something like that I'd be terribly I'd be oh my goodness got a cap for tidied that up before visitors arrived but if I saw it at someone else's house like it would
take a lot for me to get judgmental about it I just wouldn't I'd just be like oh you're letting me into your real life you know here we are for real in your real life this isn't some show you're putting on for me so you know no shade to people who really love putting on a very glamorous dinner
party I think that could be a great hobby in itself but we shouldn't make these facades sort of necessary precondition of relating because I think it makes relating less of a vivid and an enjoyable experience yeah I think one of the examples you gave was you don't sweat it if you're
five-year-old these are dukey in the toilet because other people are probably doing that if you'll see that they're like well my kid does that too right it's like I mean it's like they know you've got a kid right it's not it's not yeah exactly and they know and if they've got kids too they've
have that they know that that happens it's like whatever exactly nobody's actually judging you or if they are that the problem is with them yeah exactly well all over this is a great book a lot of great advice working people go learn more about it in your work the book meditations for mortals
out in early October in the US and wherever you buy your books and everything about this is also my website all of a bookman.com where you can sign up for the news letter to yeah the newsletters fantastic I highly recommend our listeners sign up for that well all of a berkman thanks
time it's been a pleasure thank you very much but I really enjoyed it my guess there's all of a berkman he's the author of the book meditations for mortals it's available on amazon.com of booksters everywhere you can find more of me should be at his work at his website all of
a berkman.com also check out our shennows at a.m. dot is slash meditations for mortals we find links to resources we delve deeper into this topic well that wraps up another edition of the a.m. podcast make sure check out our website at artofmanlez.com we find our podcast archives as well as
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