Welcome, I'm your host, Greg McEwan, and we're here for part two of my conversation with Oliver Bookman.

He wrote a great, big, successful column for the Guardian for years.

And more recently has attained some notoriety for the book called 4,000 Weeks, Time Management for Mortals.

By the end of today's episode, you will have rewired a certain part of your brain that keeps you caught, stressed all the time,

and have permission to make a different choice. Let's get to it.

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In my book, Effortless, I literally start in chapter one with an image of those rocks, and with an image of too many big rocks, literally,

because the presumption that if you put the most important things first, you will therefore fit everything in is wrong, that is wrong.

Even while the metaphor is still helpful and basically right, but the most important things in first, but it's what do you do next when you discover,

well, actually you don't have enough time to do everything, even the essential things.

The weird thing to me is I think we must have been writing these things basically during the same period of time, because when did Effortless come out?

Two years ago. Yeah, and so did 4,000 weeks. Yeah, so our brains were in a similar place, the lockdowns were happening.

So help listeners get to something actionable with this as the framework, with this as the reality,

throwing out the idea that you have limitless time, with throwing out the idea that efficiency is the answer. What do you do instead?

I think it's important to begin an answer that by saying that I do think the perspective shift is the thing that matters the most.

The mindset shift is the most important part. Right. I think anyone listening to this is going to be smart enough once they have a taste of that mindset shift to see which specific ways in which they run their day, schedule their tasks.

Our consistent with it and which of them are sort of pushing against it in an unhelpful fashion, but broadly speaking, I've found the kinds of techniques and approaches that are most consistent with this when it comes to my own work, which is a relatively solitary kind of work.

And I'm only talking about work here, but is anything that involves sort of conscious limitations on working progress, right?

Anything that any form of workflow system that brings the number of things I'm actually trying to complete at the moment down to a smaller number.

So this is the kind of stuff that Sejim Benson has written about in his book, Personal Can ban. It's the kind of stuff that it's in the background. I think of a lot of Cal Newport's work.

What one approach to this that I find very useful is what I refer to in the book as fixed volume productivity, which is only a small tweak as I acknowledge on Cal's fixed schedule productivity.

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