In the winter of 2014, the British journalist Oliver Burkeman found himself on a bench in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, having a bit of a crisis. A self-proclaimed “productivity geek,” he’d spent “countless hours'' trying to Inbox Zero and Pomodoro Technique his way to accomplishing everything on his to-do list, only to realize, on that morning, that it was hopeless. He was never going to get everything done.
But the moment of crisis was followed by an epiphany. The question of how to most productively spend his time was a means of avoiding more difficult questions, like, “Am I doing the right things in the first place?” or “What do I want to do before I die?” In fact, as Burkeman argues in his new book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, this is what many of us might be doing: using time management as a way to stave off a fear of mortality.
The good news, as he sees it, is that once you do accept that that’s not going to happen, and all the attendant anxiety that comes with not crossing off every item on your to-do list, you can take the energy you spent trying to master time and invest it in doing the tasks that actually matter to you. “I’m aware of no other time management technique that’s half as effective as just facing the way things truly are,” he writes.
GQ spoke to Burkeman about life as a reformed productivity geek, the difference between good and bad procrastination, and the freedom that comes from accepting our limits.
GQ: Tell me if this is a fair summary of your book: Time management is an attempt to fix an incurable disease. We're all terminally ill with mortality, and instead of accepting that, time management is our way to be like, "Well, if I just do this treatment, maybe I will cure it." But we need to let go of that sense that there's a magic pill or some sort of cure out there.
Oliver Burkeman: I think that gets it exactly. It reminds me of one of the quotes at the very beginning of the book, from Charlotte Joko Beck: "What makes it unbearable is your mistaken belief that it can be cured." Then another way that gets said is, “You think it's a problem that you have problems in life.” They add up to this insight that an awful lot of what we take to be suffering or trouble caused by our situation is actually caused by the notion that we ought to be able to find a way out of our situation—that it shouldn't be the way that it, in fact, universally is for everybody.
One of the things that [realization] makes you see is that a given productivity technique or time management technique can be totally fine. I'm not saying don't use to-do lists. Quite the opposite. The really important point here is if you use any technique to try to escape reality or cure the human condition, then it's going to run into huge problems for you. But if you're not doing it in that spirit, then a number of even quite cheesy self-help and time management techniques can totally be useful.
So once you do understand that, what are some of the more effective techniques?
Any techniques that find ways to do one thing at a time. That can mean focusing on one major project in your life at a time, or it can even be on the level of doing one specific task at a time. Obviously, you can't say you're going to write a book and you're not going to do anything else in your life until it's written. But you can have one big work goal that you're targeting, and you can make yourself deal with the anxiety that comes from leaving the other ones until that one has been completed.
There's that example I give about keeping two to-do lists: A limitless to-do list and a very limited to-do list. On the limited to-do list, there are only about five tasks that you're allowing yourself to focus on, and you can't add another one from the limitless to-do list until you've freed up a slot by finishing one.
These are just different ways of trying to oblige yourself to feel the anxiety that comes with facing the fact that you can only do a tiny proportion of everything that you want to do at any given moment. Then also training yourself to see that actually, if you can tolerate that a bit, you get a ton more done than the multitasking alternative. Because that multitasking alternative is a way of making yourself feel in control and not anxious. But it's not a good way of actually moving projects through to completion.
That gets at something interesting: in some ways, tackling one thing at a time sounds like you're doing less, but it can actually allow you to do more. There is something about the power of incremental gains, and doing a little bit every day and how that gets you very far in the long run.
It's another way of saying the thing you were saying about curing the incurable disease. So much of what we do has emotional avoidance as its key motive, rather than bringing our most cherished ambitions and creative work into the world. It's really about not feeling uncomfortable.I try to argue that there's a reason the things you really care about make you feel uncomfortable. The temptation is to endlessly multitask, because then you get to jump from anything that feels uncomfortable into something else. You don't have to stay with it.
There’s also this idea that everything is a practice, and that you're never going to get to the end of these things. You’re always climbing and never really arriving, which is maybe a little pessimistic, but also liberating.
There’s a certain kind of pessimism that runs through all of this stuff. But it's a surrender to how things actually are. It's a defeat that I think you have to accept in order to then do interesting, cool things. It's letting your illusions die. The number of things on your plate that you might like to do is much larger than the ones you'll be able to do. It's admitting defeat, in order to then be in touch with reality and to start putting one foot in front of the other and creating things. So the pessimism and the optimism totally go together.
Once you accept some of these ideas, how have you found that your day to day life changes? What are some of the concrete ways in which you feel like it has helped you?
There's two levels to it. There's the ways in which it changes your attitude to your circumstances, and then there's the ways in which it might inspire you to change your circumstances.
I realize that not everyone can restructure their day, let alone walk out of their job, in order to embody the principles that I'm talking about like this. Clearly, there are plenty of people in the world for whom doing a job that they hate actually is the best option for them, in the sense that their lack of privilege just creates a situation where that's the thing they need to do if they want to keep a roof over their heads.
But I do think that the more important level is the switch of perspective. The perspectival shift has made the biggest difference to my life. Realistically, I still have to answer a whole ton of emails and do a whole ton of things for work that I might not choose to do, but you still have to do. There, the change is not from doing them to walking away from them. The change is from stressing yourself out by imagining that you might one day get top of them all, and then making all sorts of bad choices about priorities as a result of that misimpression, to seeing the truth about the infinite inputs that are coming into your life and the way that becoming more efficient at them tends to just make the problem worse.
Then you say, I'm going to give an hour and a half a day to my email, and I'm going to do everything I can in that period to stay on top of it. But then I'm going to stop at the end of that time. And I'm going to accept that somebody in that inbox is probably going to be impatient with me or disappointed in me or annoyed that I didn't reply. I have to do these things in my life and there are benefits to doing them, but I'm not going to pursue them with the notion of achieving a total efficiency, mastery control that is in fact not feasible to achieve.
In the book you make a distinction between good and bad procrastination—could you unpack that distinction here?
Procrastination is just inevitable. That is a phenomenon that just follows from having finite time and more obligations than you're actually going to have the time to accomplish or fulfill. You can't eliminate it—what you can do is make better choices about what to neglect. That is really the true measure of good time management: is it helping you make good choices about what to neglect?
Good procrastination is seeing that you're going to have to not do most of the things that feel like they matter today, making a good choice on what to focus on, and then just learning to live with that background anxiety that comes from knowing that all these other things are not being moved forward. If you get good at that, you'll get more and more accomplished instead of dissipating your attention among everything, or just distracting yourself with things that you don't value.
Bad procrastination is the act of not getting started on things because you don't want to face the truth about being limited, finite, and having difficult choices to make. It’s a way of holding yourself back from life. In the context of work and creativity, it manifests as procrastination. In the case of relationships, it manifests as commitment phobia. It’s this psychological stance that enables you to hold on to the feeling of being limitless and omnipotent and perfect at the expense of actually doing anything. If you actually write the book or actually paint the painting, it's inevitable that it will fall short of perfection.
Another version of the same thing would be that you never get started on any particular life—a family life, a career—because that would mean closing off certain other ones. In the book, I write about [philosopher] Henri Bergson who talks about why it's nicer to wallow in hope for the future than to act in reality. As long as I'm only thinking hypothetically about the future, I can imagine myself being an incredibly committed parent, spending six months every year on meditation retreats, working incredibly hard to be incredibly successful in my career, and also living the good life, learning to cook, relaxing with novels. It’s happening in a world of fancy where limitation doesn't apply and you can run all those different tracks parallel alongside each other in your mind.
In reality, they're not compatible. You have to start choosing, "Oh okay. If I'm going to be a properly present parent, then that's probably it for long term meditation retreats for the next couple of decades." It's painful because just this lack of fit between what you feel like matters in life, and what you can actually do in life.
In your essay “Why Time Management is Ruining Our Lives,” you write, "In an era of insecure employment, we must constantly demonstrate our usefulness through frenetic doing, and time management can give you a valuable edge." It seems like some of this is structural problems at work. All employment is insecure, so we feel like we need to get so much done.
Yes, absolutely. These are forces that you can't just sort out by changing your attitude. This is so heavily reinforced all the way around. But I think you can get a freedom from it by changing your attitude. Partly because you might then change your circumstances, but partly because you might just be like, "Okay, I do have to do certain things that are basically bullshit. But I don't have to pretend that they offer the path to the meaning of life."
One of the more interesting ideas in the book was this idea about how the invention of clocks changed our relationship to time by making it a resource to be used. This idea of time as a thing to be used, I wonder if that idea has settled differently in your brain or evolved over time since writing that into the book.
It’s really obvious that we do have to think of time as something we use. Even when I was writing the book, I wasn't under any illusions that we could or should just go back to living like medieval peasants. I’m equally sure, to make the same point for a different direction, that there's no reason to believe it's possible or desirable to decide to only live in the moment from now forwards in pure presence or something. So I suppose I'm always thinking about how these two perspectives get integrated in a life.
To some extent, a lot of spiritual writing and spiritual practices do point to integrating these things. They point to adopting a vantage point from which it makes sense both to be treating time as something that you use to achieve goals and as something that you can know yourself to be just present in, in an all encompassing way.
But I guess that's the ongoing question for me. I would like to think that I could say, "Okay, for this number of hours in a day, I'm going to be relentlessly focused on achieving my goals and then I'm going to get up, walk away and just be fully immersed in the moment." But even that would be a kind of perfectionistic attempt to master my time. “These hours are productivity, and these hours are being present." That can't work either. So where I don't have any particular reason to believe one gets to the end of the question. But that's the one I'm asking myself.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
A conversation with psychiatrist Anna Lembke on happiness, dopamine, and the delicate balance between pleasure and pain.
