Oliver Burkeman on the futility of time management, the danger of accelerated living and why we need to stop putting off 'real life'

An interview with the bestselling author of Four Thousand Weeks and Meditation for Mortals

If there are two people who have changed my life — or encouraged me to configure it differently — then one of them is Oliver Burkeman. (One day I might tell you the other.) I started reading his column, This Column Will Change Your Life — modern philosophy crossed with self-help that didn’t feel like self-help — when I first became a journalist (he also writes vg long-reads on knotty ontological subjects like free will). It ran for over a decade, before closing in 2020 and the back catalogue is well worth a parse.

Burkeman published a handful of smart, thoughtful books in the 2010s, but his 2021 book, Four Thousand Weeks¹ on the fleetingness of life was a huge bestseller. He followed that up with Meditation for Mortals, a month-long “retreat of the mind” on how to live in the present and embrace the things you can’t change. He has also made several radio programmes — one of which, Living With The News, he interviewed me for in 2022 — and writes a newsletter, called The Imperfectionist.

A few weeks ago, How To Academy asked me to interview Burkeman about Meditation for Mortals at The Royal Geographic Society and he was every bit as insightful and wise as I hoped he’d be. I thought some of my readers might find his thoughts similarly galvanizing and so I’ve written up our live conversation, which you can read below. Please note that (with Burkeman’s permission) the interview has been edited for length and clarity. I hope you find something to sate, salve or jolt you into new ways of thinking!

Oliver, it’s a pleasure to be speaking with you, I’ve drawn so much from your work over the last 15 years. When did your interest in chronophobia (our anxiety around time) begin? Have you always been interested in the way we live?

The column that I wrote for The Guardian came about because I had been spotted furtively reading books on how to be more productive around the office and my editor thought she might as well get some content out of this fixation. I can't really understand not being interested in questions like how to be happier, or less anxious, or get more done. So I've been fortunate in my work and writing to be able to address those issues. It enables you to read the embarrassing books that you otherwise wouldn't want to be seen reading, because “it's only for research”.

In Meditation for Mortals, you write that since Four Thousand Weeks came out, people approach you in droves to tell you that they haven’t got things nailed down, that they are still waiting for their ‘real life’ to begin. (As someone who once wrote a book called How Do We Know We’re Doing It Right? I am clearly one of them.) Figuring out how to live a meaningful life is not new to the human condition, but do you think it's taken on a particular urgency in the last 10 years? Are we peak introspection?

It's really hard to say why anything happens at certain points in history. But I have the sense that a threshold got reached where it began to seem clear that more efficiency, more optimisation and more fitting things in, was simply not going to get you ‘there’. And I think this is allied with the rise of writing about burnout as a phenomenon that affects people in their 20s and 30s, instead of just people in their 50s and 60s. It's related to the gig economy and the collapse of paternalistic corporations and hustle culture; all these things that sort of make it impossible to go on believing that with just a bit more self discipline, or a trick that you learnt in a book that you bought at an airport, that you would get there and then everything would be fine. And so maybe there's a deeper question that needs to be asked about what mountain you're climbing, as opposed to just how to climb it more efficiently.

One of the fatally misguided ideas about modern life, you write, is the idea “that reality can ever be controlled”, and “that peace of mind and prosperity lie in bringing it ever more fully under our control”. And it reminded me of one of my favourite Emily Dickinson poems, which I have had taped to my computer for as long as I can remember:

“In this short Life that only lasts an hour

How much - how little - is within our power”

Is there a U curve of control, like the U curve of happiness? A point in which you can be sort of controlling, and just powerless enough? Or is it really control freaky of me to even ask this question?

No, it’s a really good point. The writer who I draw on in the new book is a German social theorist called Hartmut Rosa, who makes this point on a societal level, where societies are trying to control more and more things at an everyday level. And what we find is that the more we exert that control, the less vibrancy there is. Life actually becomes less, as the things that make life worth living get squeezed out. You need, in some sense, to be surprised by the world, or by another person. There's nothing vibrant in a relationship where you know exactly what the other person is going to do at all times. There's nothing exciting about following a football team if you know they're going to win every game they play, right?²

Rosa makes this point that it you need it to be a kind of back and forth. It's not that you want to be completely helpless — that's an appalling situation for anyone to be in, we know that just from history and psychological studies into learned helplessness — it’s that you have to have some power to act on the world, while not knowing how the world is going to respond.

---

“It's incredibly easy to tell yourself that ‘real life’ is coming later: when you finally get the right relationship, or the right promotion, or have kids, or when the kids leave home, or when you buy a house, or just when you get your life in order… [But] if the things that you're putting off are things that you consider to be absolutely central to who you are, and how you want to show up in your life - don’t put them off.”

---

There's a refreshing framing of ‘choice’ in Meditation for Mortals, where you suggest that instead of seeing making a choice as a narrowing of options, you could see it as a “freedom in limitation”. That felt like a lovely counter to the paradox of choice, which is when there are so many options that nothing feels meaningful.

One of the ways we go wrong all the time when it comes to choice and the ways in which we use our time, is that we're trying to avoid this truth that there will always be far more things that you could ever meaningfully do with your hours. It isn't just a question of aspiring to get rid of all the things that you don't really want to do, so you can do the things you do really want to do. It's that there will always be too many things that you really want to do. You have to lean into that truth. Once you do, I think there's a lot of freedom in limitation.

You write that as time is rigged, we need to choose what to fail at. I found this deliciously freeing, so I decided to fail at attending all the pilates classes I booked. I realised that either you had given bad advice or, more likely, I had applied it wrongly. How should one go about deciding what to fail at without just using it as an excuse to…. not do the things you should?

I’m not actually sure you did misuse it. The point about deciding what to fail at is about making a decision. You made a decision. This idea comes from an author called Jon Acuff, to give credit where it's due. The example I tend to give is that if this is a busy time in your professional life and a busy time in your parenting life, then maybe this is not the season where your house is ever going to be very tidy. The difference between constantly trying to have a very tidy house and then failing, versus deciding at the beginning of a period that that’s just not going to be is that an untidy house does not then represent a defeat - because you had already recognised that it wasn’t possible. So if you just decided that you'd over committed by booking a pilates class, and so didn’t go, then I think that’s doing it properly. You decided what to fail at.

Unfortunately my house is very tidy, as I tidy to avoid doing other things, like going to pilates. To go back to what you were just saying about realising that something isn’t going to happen in a season of your life — you write about this idea of living a ‘provisional life’, which is when you put off doing things until your ‘real life’ starts. I thought it was quite sensical to decide that you will do something in 5 years, when life is calmer, quieter, etc. But is that actually a delay tactic? The provisional life in action?

I think it can be. It's incredibly easy to tell yourself that real life is coming later: when you finally get the right relationship, or the right promotion, or have kids, or when the kids leave home, or when you buy a house, or just when you get your life in order. If you're a productivity weirdo like me, then it’s when you've got the right systems in place that life will be smooth sailing and all will be great. And the problem is, that's not how it works! Because time is passing away underneath you.

It’s a little bit forgivable if you're 20, to have the attitude that real life is coming later, but it gets harder and harder to maintain as you get through your 30s. And I can testify, when you get to the end of your 40s, it's like, well, this is a bit ridiculous at this point, to be saying that the real moment of truth is still in the future. If the things that you're putting off are things that you consider to be absolutely central to who you are, and how you want to show up in your life, then don’t put them off.

One of the things that you've written about that I've seen so many people pick up on, is your counter to Inbox Zero, which was a real movement a few years ago. When it comes to e-mails, you write, it's the only job that the better you are at it, the more work you create for yourself. It’s so true! I just think e-mail is broken. I see friends’ phones and they have 25,000 unread e-mails. That’s a lost cause!

The more efficient you become on e-mail — you reply to a lot more people and then they reply to your replies and then you have to reply to those replies — the more of your life it takes up. I do think there are norms developing, though. For a long time, I thought it was only me who was taking several days to reply to certain kinds of e-mail and now I am aware that people are similarly taking longer and longer stretches to reply. The thing that I find indispensable, in order to keep any kind of sanity about email — and this is definitely dependent on your professional situation — is to think about it in terms of: what proportion of my day, or my week, am I going to give to e-mail? Maybe it's half an hour a day, maybe it's three hours a day. Use that time energetically, processing as much e-mail as you can and then stop. Put a boundary around it. You have to stop thinking about e-mail as something that can be completed. And why should it be? It’s not like human communication is ever over.

---

“A threshold got reached where it began to seem clear that more efficiency, more optimization, more fitting things in, was simply not going to get you there… And so maybe there's a deeper question that needs to be asked: about what mountain you're climbing, as opposed to just how to climb it more more efficiently.”

---

Speaking of boundaries — because it is a real buzz-trend at the moment, there’s this sort of concept creep happening, where everything is becoming 'a boundary’; I imagine everyone alone in their own little walled gardens by the end of it — they’re often talked about like they’re this easy thing to just pop up, but I think for a lot of people they are really, really hard to put in place. What would you say is a healthy way to look at boundaries — to hold the line rather than just go along with something — for people who don’t like letting other people down?

Guess what? It's another case of human finitude and limitations. There's a chapter in the new book where I talk about this idea that so many of us go around with, which is that other people are impatient or mad at us at any given moment. When I was late submitting this book, I caught myself entertaining mental images of my editor — who is a powerful and accomplished person at Penguin Random House and has lots of things to do — spending all day pacing up and down his office, wondering why I haven't sent the manuscript in yet. It's extraordinarily self-centered to think in that way! But I don't think it's just me.

The path through this, is that it's not true that you have no responsibility to other people's emotions, or that or that you shouldn't care if people that you care about are upset with you, or want something from you, or are needing comfort from you — but that they are things to be weighed in the balance. Sometimes it may be worth risking somebody's impatience or anger, in order to do something that matters to you more in that moment. And sometimes it might be worth saying, Okay, I'm going to sacrifice what I could have done in order to help this person. Because actually, how I feel about them, or how I feel about keeping my commitments to them, is more important to me.

I will say that anyone who is prone to people pleasing tends to think of other people's negative reactions as not one more thing to be weighed in the balance, but as the deciding factor: this obliterating thing where all your goals and your ideas about how your life should be have to be shelved the moment that somebody might be mad at you. There's a tweet from an author that I repeat in that book, which says, “Great news, I found the solution to my anxiety. All I need is for everyone I know to tell me that they're not mad at me every 15 minutes forever.”

That sounds very sensible, I would like that please. Something that I wanted to ask you about, that I know a lot of people have experienced, is arrival fallacy. So you get the big job, or you go on the big holiday, and you feel kind of… flat. There’s none of that rush of feeling that you expected. Is this a more modern problem, or do you think that arrival fallacy and the hedonic treadmill have existed since the dawn of time?

I think that the hedonic treadmill — which is the idea that once you get something you’ve wanted for a long time, it stops being a special thing — is baked into human evolutionary psychology. We’ve all experienced a version of it. For instance, you get enough economic security to start buying the brand of coffee that you really like instead of the cheapest possible brand of coffee and then within about two months, that special coffee just feels like an everyday essential, no longer a luxury. But I do think there is something about modernity that encourages this notion that we might get to the point where everything is wonderful.

The example that I give in Meditation for Mortals is if you imagine being a medieval peasant in England, in a life where at any moment, plagues, wars or famine could totally overtake your world. I don't think any of those people went around thinking like, Okay, first of all, I'm going to get to the point where everything's secure and certain and then I can start having drunken revels, or create art, or stare up at the stars at night. In that situation, uncertainty was constitutive of your daily experience and you did the other stuff anyway. You found happiness and meaning and all the other things, right in the middle of the chaos.

There's something about what technology (and maybe consumerism) does to us, that encourages us to think that with a bit more money and a few more developments in tech, we might actually be able to get to that place. And I don’t think we can ever can, I don’t think it exists — but the illusion appears stronger than ever.

---

“I understand that people who say “we are human beings, not human doings” mean well, but how we act is how we constitute who we are. What you do in your life, is what your life is”.

---

Tech has brought us to this place of what you call, ‘accelerated living’ which is the most friction-free life we've ever lived, where “convenience has colonized everyday life”. You can get a meal or a manicure or a plane ticket delivered to your door/ inbox in 10 minutes flat. I'm interested in how, when we have the technological means to live at this pace, do we force ourselves to slow down? Because even if we know intellectually that it’s the unexpected moments and the pockets of friction which make life meaningful, it still feels like we are going backwards to relinquish those means of convenience… like a sort of de-evolution.

I agree, it’s really hard to do. Just to dwell on the first part of what you said there— it's so strange how all these technologies of freeing up time have led to more impatience. My theory is that as we get closer and closer to this feeling of being completely omnipotent, every last bit of friction that remains feels more of an insult. You can book tickets on your phone and find out what's happening 4000 miles away, but then you go to drive somewhere and you're stuck in a traffic jam. It's like, why can’t you make the traffic move at the speed you want? It makes it feel even more irritating.

I think anything that you can do to your environment will help. This is classic advice, but if you don’t have certain tech in your house, then it's going to be a lot easier of an evening not to slide into using it. I really like the Kindle that I use for eBooks, because it has a web browser that’s basically impossible to use, so I can’t start surfing Google in the middle of reading. The other thing is just not to expect the experience of slowing down to feel all that good, right at the beginning. Reading is a good example of this. I think people very often feel like they don’t have time to read. Sometimes they really don’t, but what they very often mean is that sitting down to read just feels disagreeable. It’s too slow. But if you think to yourself, Okay, the first 10 minutes of reading is not going to feel restful, then it's kind of fine. Just try not to have this perfectionistic demand that the moment you stop and do something restful, it's going to be a delight. Come at it with a slightly more pessimism.

I laughed out loud when you said that you refused to endorse the adage, credited to The Dalai Lama amongst others, “We are human beings, not human doings”. What other adages or proverbs do you really not like/ find actively unhelpful?

I understand that people who say “we are human beings, not human doings” mean well, but how we act is how we constitute who we are. What you do in your life, is what your life is. So this idea that once you reach the pinnacle of realisation and enlightenment, you would just sort of… float through the world doing nothing, except occasionally going to yoga retreats — that’s not something I want to endorse. The other one [that I am not fond of] is anything that comes into that frame of “if you dream it, you can do it” kind of manifesting.

How do you feel about manifesting? I worry that a lot of the time what people are trying to manifest is being really rich — I think the reason why so many young people want to be influencers now is because they’ve glommed on to the idea (in large part thanks to Kylie Jenner) that it’s a really easy route to millions.

Right. And I think that’s potentially incredibly demoralising and despair inducing. Again, with these things, there's a kernel of truth that is being glancingly got at, which is that there's an important sense in which everything you see in the world that isn't part of the natural environment — every great social movement, every great company, every great building, every billion dollar fortune — was created by somebody just as flawed and messed up as you. So there's no reason why it shouldn't be you. But that’s not quite the same as saying, If you think about it very hard, you will do it. That's not the relationship between thought and the external world that I understand.

You quote a Zen monk, Paul Lumens, on the things that we need to do and haven't done, as “gnawing rats”. You write that making even the smallest steps towards the thing, is less agonising than thinking about doing the thing and not doing it. But what if the rats have become really ferocious? How do you confront them?

Lumens here is talking about avoidance. We structure our lives around the things that we're putting lots of effort into not getting around to, or not thinking about: these annoying rats that gnaw at you in the middle of the night. He says that you can turn them into fluffy white sheep that just follow you around, waiting for their turn to be addressed. The point Rosa makes, that I think is so powerful, is that anything at all that you do to bring one of these things that you're avoiding into an accepted part of your mental world is progress. He gives the example of a woman who had a terrible, junk-filled shed that she couldn't bear to even contemplate. It was stressing her out, she'd wake up in the night thinking about it. And his advice there was just, Go to the shed. Just stand in the shed, look around, no pressure to do anything about it at all.

We like to use the fact that something could be bad, as a reason not to do it. But — and this is a rare occasion when I’m going to be positive about visualisation - even just thinking about picking up the phone to call your doctor, or going to the ATM — not checking your balance, just standing in front of the ATM — even that is something, because what you're doing is you're shifting from putting all this energy into avoidance, to a place where it is part of your reality. I was really struck by that, because it's such a gentle way of doing this. There's an awful lot of self-help where people would say, push yourself to do the thing and I don’t think that works, because it turns life into a fight, and nobody likes to spend their lives fighting with themselves.

oliverburkeman.com

1. the slightly terrifying average human life span

2. tbh would quit like it if my husband’s team won every single game, for purely selfish reasons