Podcast #1,029: Treat Your To-Do List Like a River, and Other Mindset Shifts for Making Better Use of Your Time

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When people think about living more fully and making better use of their time, they typically think of finding some new organizational system they can structure their lives with.

Oliver Burkeman says that what you really need instead are perspective shifts — small, sustainable changes in how you view and approach your day-to-day life. He provides those mindset shifts in his new book, Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts. And we talk about some of them today on the show, including why you 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 “dailyish,” be more welcoming of interruptions, and practice “scruffy hospitality.”

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Brett McKay: 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. Oliver Burkeman says that what you really need instead are perspective shifts. Small, sustainable changes in how you view and approach your day-to-day life. He provides those mindset shifts in his new book, Meditations for Mortals, Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts. We talk about some of them today on the show, including why you 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 dailyish, be more welcoming of interruptions, and practice scruffy hospitality. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/meditationsforMortals.

All right. Oliver Burkeman, welcome back to the show.

Oliver Bukerman: Thank you very, very much for having me back.

Brett McKay: So we had you on back in 2021 to talk about your book, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. That’s episode number 748, for those who 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 Four Thousand Weeks?

Oliver Bukerman: Well, I guess on some level, it continues my fixation on what it means to be a finite human and how we’re supposed to deal with that in a way that makes us 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 I call actually doing things. 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 really get into and maybe over that gap from knowing to doing.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So one of the big takeaways I got from our first conversation was that, you’re exploring this idea that human beings, 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 Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard 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, we just don’t do anything.

It’s like, ah, what’s the point? And I think this is what you’re trying to explore in this book, Meditation for Mortals, 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 Hartmut Rosa, the sociologist, to explain why we might feel dead inside even though we’re getting a lot done. What’s going on there?

Oliver Bukerman: Yeah. So Hartmut 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 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 whole civilizations attempt to do by default is to get more and more control over time and space. And this is pretty obvious in the context of mainstream productivity culture, for one thing, and all sorts of self-development stuff. It’s 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 project of increasing control seems somehow to squeeze out the resonance, the sense of aliveness or vividness that actually is the thing that most people recognize as being like, “Okay. I’m really fully alive and fully showing up in this finite life.”

One very mundane example that might not resonate with everyone, but it certainly resonates with productivity geeks or recovering productivity geeks like me is, if you ever get really excited by somebody’s new system for organizing your goals and your tasks and 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 got to follow the next week to make it happen, that’s incredibly exciting for a couple of days, that sense that you’re 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, but that’s one that always resonates for me just because I’ve been there so many times.

Brett McKay: Now, we had a guy on the podcast early this year named Andrew Root, who is a Professor of Theology and he uses Rosa’s work to explore how it’s affecting church congregations.

Oliver Bukerman: Oh, wow.

Brett McKay: And he wrote a book called, Congregation in a Secular Age, Applying Rosa’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.” Like they’re just checked out. They’re just going through the motions. And Root’s idea, applying Rosa’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 the idea we have in our Western industrialized world. And he says what ends up happening in these churches, they feel like they had to constantly just be doing more and more. So 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 the gains they get are just marginal. And they just feel like, “I’m just kind of staying in place, even though we’re doing lots of stuff,” and they just become despondent. Like, “What’s the point?” “I’m just gonna go through the motions.”

Oliver Bukerman: Yeah. I can totally see how that applies in that setting. You actually do meet with success in a way. The congregation does stabilize or get bigger or whatever it might be, but it’s a success that seems to somehow be won at the cost of the whole purpose of what you’re doing in the first place.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And 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.

Oliver Bukerman: Yeah. No. Exactly. And one of the things I’m really getting at in the new book is that, it’s not just that this doesn’t work and makes life worse but that actually doing the opposite, 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. Letting yourself feel the truth of that, is not just something 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 sense in which constructive and creative activity kind of 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.

Brett McKay: 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?

Oliver Bukerman: This is just the title that I give to this very familiar experience of finding that the ways we follow to try to become more efficient, more optimized, to try to keep up with the volume of stuff that we want to do and that the modern world pressures us to do, reliably make us busier and more busy with the least important things, in fact, very often. Because 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 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. It’s just going to cause you to have more on 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 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 it has the exact reverse effect. It doesn’t get you to that place of that kind of plateau of effortless calm where you’re finally on top of everything. It has the reverse effect.

Brett McKay: You see this effect happen with automobile traffic. I think they’ve done studies where they’ve widened roads. They think, well, this will clear up 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 creates congestion again.

Oliver Bukerman: Yeah. Induced demand. It makes the previously congested route more attractive to more motorists.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So we see that in your email. I’m sure everyone’s seen that, your to-do list. So the more efficient you get, you’re just going to get more of that stuff you’re getting efficient at. How is this related to this idea you talk about productivity debt?

Oliver Bukerman: Productivity debt, again, I seem to come up with these labels. 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 pick it out. This is the notion that I think many of us have that we wake up in the morning feeling like we’re in a 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. And when I first started talking and writing 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.” And 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. And this is where I stop and say, in a sense, if you’re in a salaried profession or something like that, or in any job really, 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 existential burden that many of us carry, that we have to 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 shifts, to start the day at a zero balance. Not start the day in debt, but start the day at 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 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 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.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So productivity debt, it sounds like it’s productivity original sin. So you just feel like I’ve been burdened with this thing and I gotta… 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… It’s kind of a religious thing. It’s like, no, just accept the fact that you can’t overcome this on your own. You can’t get yourself out of this hole. You have to 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.

Oliver Bukerman: Absolutely. And you know, it’s not a religious book and I’m not in any conventional sense religious person, but that’s sort of those battling ideas within Christianity between salvation through works and earning your place in heaven through your efforts, and then on the other side, grace, the idea that 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 entirely as secularists is on some level to save our souls.

Brett McKay: 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 stood 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 to-read list of books. Maybe you’ve got a bunch of articles on an Insta paper that you’ve 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 to-read list create feelings of, Oh man, I’m never going to get through this. And it’s just, I’m drowning.

Oliver Bukerman: Yeah. It’s such a 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 backlog of games to play, which 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 backlog? But of course, that’s how I approach lots of books and I still do feel burdened by a backlog. So it’s a really interesting phenomenon, just 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, 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 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 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 backlog 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, 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, only then do these lists become tormenting. But in fact, they’re all effectively impossible, and that’s actually very liberating.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Because the bucket keeps filling up infinitely.

Oliver Bukerman: Right. Yes. Exactly.

Brett McKay: So you keep adding to it.

Oliver Bukerman: Yeah. The bucket has a hole in the bottom and it’s just a flow, whatever. Yes. I don’t know how the metaphor works. Yeah. Exactly.

Brett McKay: No. Remind, the bucket’s like, it’s got those, remember those old magic beer floating faucet fountains? You know what I’m talking about? They used to sell them at Spencer’s store in the mall. So it looks like this faucet is magically floating above a beer mug and it’s just constantly filling up. And that’s what your to-read bucket is like.

Oliver Bukerman: Exactly.

Brett McKay: And so yeah. The metaphor is, instead of thinking of your to-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.

Oliver Bukerman: 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. 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.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Do you think we can apply this mindset to our to-do list as well?

Oliver Bukerman: I think in the end we have to. 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. 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. 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 400 different dishes that you could order.

Nobody looks at that list and thinks that at dinner that day they’ve gotta somehow get through it all. That would be completely absurd. They get to pick from the list and the 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. If there’s always gonna be more that you could do or feel 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, that 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 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.

Brett McKay: When you first introduce this idea of Bucket and River to reading list in your email while back ago, it reminded me… Actually it inspired an article that I wrote on our site about Mark Forster’s autofocus method. So this is a way to keep track of your to-dos 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 and you just kind of, yeah, you treat it like a river, you’re just going in and picking things out, whatever you feel like doing and it gets stuff done. I’ve used it before and I find it actually, it can be really liberating.

Oliver Bukerman: I think it really can. One of the things I love about Mark Foster’s work is that he’s actually constantly experimenting. 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 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 gonna do before I move on to the others. But the basic context is always gonna 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 working it because getting to the end of it is not gonna happen and it’s just gonna make you constantly live mentally in the future for that point that never arrives.

Brett McKay: 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 if you find some perfect organizational system you’re finally gonna get caught up on all this stuff. And if you think you are, that you’re gonna get to the bottom of these buckets, these to-do buckets, you’re just gonna constantly be stressed out because the buckets just fill 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 you know the flow is never gonna 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 an edenic state where I have no problems. And it’s made me absolutely miserable. And it’s funny because my wife just brings this up. She’s like, “Remember when you said once you solve this problem you’d be happy.” And then the problem is 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.

Oliver Bukerman: Well, almost the way you asked the question, I feel like I can already taste the relaxation of this. It’s like we go through life having like a double problem with our problems. Like one is the fact that you’ve gotta 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 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, you’ll either like blame the world for still giving you this BS to deal with or you’ll blame yourself for not having become a competent individual who’s supposed to have no problems. But when you stop to think about it, this really makes no sense.

The idea that there’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, 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 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 a couple of things I mentioned in the book.

It’s like, you run into people sometimes. I have a friend who had this moment of realization that she thought she could do her job really well if it wasn’t for 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, no, 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, reduced to 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. We finish our work day where we’ve been resenting and moaning about our problems and then sit down and watch a detective show, 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 to answer your question directly, once you can release that a little bit, that sense, it stops you defining your present experience as fundamentally flawed because you haven’t got to this future fantasy yet. And then you get to dive into and relish and often even enjoy the problems, today’s set of problems.

Brett McKay: I love it. Something my wife tells me whenever I start doing my morning 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.

Oliver Bukerman: Yep. Absolutely. I agree with that.

Brett McKay: That’s been helpful. So yeah. It’s something I’m struggling or I’ve struggled with but this book was a good reminder that there will always be problems. It’s just part of being alive. We’re gonna take a quick break for a word 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 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 do all these different things. Why do you think this pressure exists to be an active do-gooder in everything?

Oliver Bukerman: 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 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. I go back and forth on some level maybe it’s always felt like there’s a crisis of democracy engulfing the planet and crisis of the climate and economic crises. But there does seem to be like maybe we are living in 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.

The fact that if you are a person who thinks you have any obligations at all outside your own four walls, and if you’re in any way globally or societally-oriented, you are instantly going to be urged by every campaign group, every news organization, every social media platform. You’re gonna learn about more human suffering and more events and more scary occurrences than anyone in history ever was exposed to. And you’re gonna 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 sources of misinformation, are incentivized to just slightly exaggerate every story that they report because it has to 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 Cain who writes the Raptitude blog. That 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 gonna pick this one and give it some of my time and money and I’m not gonna 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 to what’s going on.

Brett McKay: Yeah. It’s recognizing your finitude.

Oliver Bukerman: Yeah. Exactly.

Brett McKay: Yeah. We had a podcast guest, a professor of philosophy, Brandon Warmke, who wrote a book, Why it’s Okay to Mind Your Own Business. 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 in one place at one time. So you have to pick one or two things that you’re gonna devote yourself to and that will actually allow you to get stuff done.

Oliver Bukerman: 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 doing fun stuff in your life. It’s like 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 others.

Brett McKay: 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 gonna focus on this one and I’m gonna do my best with that. Related to this idea is letting other people maybe close to you manage their own problems. Because I think another tendency we have, not only do we wanna add our own stuff to our to-do list, but when we see someone having a hard time, like we wanna make their problems, our problems. Maybe not everybody, but I have a tendency to be like, well, you got a problem, I gotta help you out. So, how can we overcome this tendency to wanna help solve other people’s problems and add it to our to-do list?

Oliver Bukerman: Yeah. I mean, this is people pleasing on one level or another. It’s the idea that something is amiss if someone’s crossed with you, or if someone is feeling distress and you haven’t done something about it, or if someone’s impatient or… It manifests in lots of different ways. I think lots of people go through live worrying, 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 constantly stepping into take the burden off their shoulders in that way. The other thing that I try to examine in the book is this sense that we often relate to other people’s feelings as if they’re 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 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 will be wonderful, on the other hand, people might get impatient and mad that I haven’t responded to 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, 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 it’s my boss and I’m gonna choose to focus on making sure he’s not impatient and I’m willing to forego the fact that I could have spent the next hour walking in the hills.

Brett McKay: Oh, so we talked 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 gonna be there. It’s always gonna be flowing. You can just pick things out and do them and read them as needed or when you feel like you wanna do it. Don’t feel like you have 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, because you’re like, “Well, which one do I pick?” And you start waffling because you’re like, “Well, if I choose this one then I’m gonna miss out on that one.” You have this chapter about how Robert Frost’s 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’s poem?

Oliver Bukerman: Well, this is his very famous poem that I’m sure many, many listeners will be familiar with, 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 it’s about how you should choose the road less traveled. 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 Orr 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 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 can’t know in advance, which is the path that is gonna make the difference.

You can’t even know in hindsight because you will not have the counterfactual. 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 get those people interviewed in the newspapers who’ve lived to 110 and they say it’s like, whiskey and cigars are what made it right. Well, you never know whether it’s the… Or what they attribute their longevity to. And it’s like you’ll never know if that’s despite or because of. 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’ve led to more happiness. If a decision you take leads to misery, you’ll never know whether another decision would’ve led to more misery.

And I think that ultimately this is quite freeing because what I think Frost is getting at, I’ll 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 modest level, 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 trying to analyze the exactly correct decisions.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Action is the answer typically in a lot of situations. Well, not all the time. Sometimes not doing anything is the best thing. But you never know. So you have to…

Oliver Bukerman: Right. Perfect. Consciously choosing to not do anything. I think that’s important. 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 are torn and agonized by indecision.

Brett McKay: Okay. So just, you never know, you can’t know completely whether your decision or indecision is going to… What’s the result is gonna be. So you might as well just do something, just make the conscious decision.

Oliver Bukerman: Right.

Brett McKay: Oh, go ahead. Do you have anything else you wanna say about that?

Oliver Bukerman: No. I was gonna say, because in some sense you’re deciding all the time anyway. I mean, in some sense we’re choosing as many people, including Mark Manson, he’s written very well about this. 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.

Brett McKay: Another bit of advice. It’s not a system but, again, it’s just a way to change your stance in how you approach the things you’ve got to do in your life, is committing to doing things dailyish. That can help you start taking more action. How so?

Oliver Bukerman: 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. Dailyish. Some people hate this. There’s a big trend online especially at the moment in favor of 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. Which is that a real obsessive fixation on rigid consistency becomes very… You have to 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 is ruined because you didn’t do it every single day. You can end up going through the motions as if checking the box on the calendar that day is somehow more important than the thing it is that you are trying to create. But what I like about dailyish 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 dailyish. It’s not just doing it whenever you feel like it. And in a busy time maybe four times a week is gonna count and then the rest of the time maybe it should be five or six. 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 are 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 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 5:00 AM 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.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And going back to a religious metaphor when Jesus talked about the Sabbath. 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’ve 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.

Oliver Bukerman: Yes. And I do refer to the Christian history of these rules at one point in the book. And I’m a little bit annoyed that I have realized I have not used that specific quotation about the Sabbath because it’s exactly the point. [laughter]

Brett McKay: That’s something I’ve done in my life. So I used to be really like, “I’ve got to have a routine. Morning routine and a nightly routine that I’ve got to follow to the tee.” But like you said it’s so fragile, I guess. 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 a routine I have just a daily checklist. So there’s things I wanna get done during the day. It doesn’t matter when I do them as long as I get them done. So if it’s meditation, if I can’t get it first thing in the morning, well, if I get five minutes during the day I’ll just do it then.

Oliver Bukerman: Yeah. That’s great. And it reminds me of something I did especially when our son was really really young, like, newborn and two thirds of one’s discretionary time is instantly wiped out. And I took to having what I thought of as a running order. It was like, with the first hour of discretionary time that I have today, I’m gonna do some journaling, a bit of meditating and a bit of exercise. But those discretionary times could come at 4:00 AM, 7:00 AM, 11:30 AM. Just totally unpredictable when they would come. But I would know what the one, two, three things I wanted to do with that time were when they arose.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I think having kids that’s what caused the shift in me too. [laughter] Because it’s easy to be like, “Well, I got this really great awesome strict morning and evening routine when you don’t have these little people who bath and go pee and need a cup of water.”

Oliver Bukerman: It’s funny. Obviously everybody is different and having kids is not for some people and for other people they wish it was and it can’t be and all the rest, but if you spend any time in YouTube productivity culture it is… So much of that is dominated by young men who are still a few years away from having kids and telling you how to exactly nail your morning. I’m afraid I don’t have a lot of time for that these days both metaphorically and literally.

Brett McKay: Okay. Yeah. The same. So do things dailyish. 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 the morning or evening routine is not working for you I think of checklist because it provides, as you said, enough flexibility but enough structure that allows you to bend but not break.

Oliver Bukerman: Yes. Exactly.

Brett McKay: Another thing you talk about is this time management principle that people have seen. We’ve talked about this on the podcast is, time blocking. So you block off time for uninterrupted work but you argue that trying to be uninterruptable could make you miserable and it can also cause you to miss out on life and relationships. How so?

Oliver Bukerman: Well, yeah. I’m trying to tread a balanced line here. So, one section of the book I talk about how trying to safeguard or ring-fence three or four hours in the day for focused work is a really good battle tested technique. But on the other hand, trying to be 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 are unpredictable for that to cause stress and to 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 we actually know how time should best unfold and anyone who has a different view or if a reality has a different view that’s a problem.

So I advocate and try to practice a twin track approach where, yes, there are small bits of my calendar that are very time blocked and it’s really like, I’m gonna 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 chaos and cacophony of real life, not to keep defining everything that happens that’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.

Brett McKay: So don’t always think about a friend dropping by unexpectedly or if you’re working from home and your kid toddles into your office to show you a picture, don’t feel like it’s an annoyance because you can just embrace the interruption.

Oliver Bukerman: Right. Or maybe sometimes you’re on a deadline and actually it is gonna 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 gonna 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 are following a very strict schedule then you’re creating all these kind 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 the work demands it in that moment not because that’s how you are approaching your whole work life.

Brett McKay: All right. So the trigger is to find a balance and there’s no system or hard rule that’s gonna 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 am I gonna… ” Yeah.

Oliver Bukerman: 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.

Brett McKay: Another self-help or productivity advice that you take aim at is this idea to be kind to your future self. So you’ve got to save money, save for retirement, you’ve 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?

Oliver Bukerman: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. There are people in the world who need to get their act together and think more about the future but they’re not people who are 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 are 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 cash in some of your preparation as well, to be able to say on a given day, like, actually I’m gonna do something that is fun today because I have created the life in which I’m able to do that instead of always postponing that into the future.

Brett McKay: 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 well if you save too much, if you’re just really aggressive with your savings and 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 gonna be able to hike the Appalachian Trail or do some strenuous dream activity you always had because you’re just gonna be old. So, do that now if you can when you’re 35 or 40.

Oliver Bukerman: Yeah. Absolutely.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I think those are wise words.

Oliver Bukerman: Absolutely.

Brett McKay: So, again, you’re not saying… You’re not trying to be like the grasshopper in that parable, where you just don’t care at all about the future, but you don’t wanna be an ant either or a drone just constantly saving stuff. It’s all about finding a balance.

Oliver Bukerman: Right. And you’ve got to ask who you are and which counter pressure you are more likely to need. And, 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 to your future seems very slim. Whereas the risk that you might go too far seems a little bit more on the cards. If you see what I mean.

Brett McKay: 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, have a 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?

Oliver Bukerman: This phrase comes from a Tennessee pastor. Jack King, who described in his own life how he really enjoyed with his wife hosting people for dinner but the checklist that they went through to get the house ready and the meal to be fantastic and that lawn to be mowed became so onerous that they didn’t wanna invite people around anymore. And so he 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 house as it is and to 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 this myself, what I found is, it’s not just okay. In many ways it’s better. In many ways there’s more connection when you let the facade drop.

As I say in the book, even before I encountered the phrase, I had noticed before that if we were having friends round and I saw crumbs under our fridge or something like that I’d be terribly… I’d be like, oh my goodness. I’ve got to tidy that up before visitors arrive. But if I saw it at someone else’s house it would take a lot for me to get judgmental about it. I just wouldn’t. I’d just be like, oh you are letting me into your real life. Here we are for real in your real life. This isn’t some show you’re putting on for me. So, 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 a necessary precondition of relating because I think it makes relating less of a vivid and an enjoyable experience.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I think one of the examples you gave was, You don’t sweat it if your five-year-old leaves a dookie in the toilet, because other people are probably doing that and if people see that they’re like, “Well, my kid does that too.”

Oliver Bukerman: Right. It’s like they know you’ve got a kid. Yeah. Exactly. And if they’ve got kids too they’ve had that experience. They know that that happens and it’s like, whatever. Exactly. Nobody is actually judging you or if they are then the problem is with them.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Exactly. Well, Oliver this is a great book. A lot of great advice. Where can people go learn more about it in your work?

Oliver Bukerman: The book, Meditations for Mortals, out in early October in the US and wherever you buy your books and everything about this is also at my website oliverburkeman.com where you can sign up for the newsletter too.

Brett McKay:Yeah. The newsletter is fantastic. I highly recommend our listeners to sign up for that.

Oliver Bukerman: Thank you.

Brett McKay: Well, Oliver Burkeman thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Oliver Bukerman: Thank you very much, Brett. I’ve really enjoyed it.

Brett McKay: My guest was Oliver Burkeman. He’s the author of the book, Meditations for Mortals. It’s available on amazon.com and at bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website oliverburkeman.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/meditationsformortals, where you can find the links to resources, we delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you find our podcast archives as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you can think of. And if you haven’t done so already I’d appreciate if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify, it helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing this show with a friend or family member who you think will get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the AOM Podcast but put what you’ve heard into action.

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