E125: How To Finally Stop Procrastinating: Oliver Burkeman

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

FlightStory

Society & Culture, Business, Education

4.6 • 13.2K Ratings

🗓️ 14 March 2022

⏱️ 80 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Oliver Burkeman is the author of Four Thousand Weeks, a book that offers the most interesting perspective on how to manage your time that I’ve ever heard. He was a columnist for the Guardian newspaper for twenty years.

The key lesson of Oliver’s book is what prioritisation really means. Make a list of the twenty-five things you want to do in your life, and then forget items 6-25, try and carve out some time every single day to work on your passion. It seems simple, but if it was more people would do it.

We fill our lives with busywork in order to distract ourselves from the reality that our time is running out. This shocking insight is the key to understanding Oliver’s unique approach to achieve focus, and you might just gain some perspective along the way.

Topics:

Why do you write about happiness?
Happiness and meaning
Embracing our limits
Why do we put our happiness on the future?
Pursuit of efficiency
Living up to your external reputation
Procrastination
How to prioritise
The water melon problem
Why self analysis is so important
Why do we purse ambition over happiness
We’re addicted to the speed of life
Embracing small changes
Embracing our irrelevance
A question from your book
The last guest question

Oliver’s book:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Four-Thousand-Weeks-Time-How

Oliver:

https://twitter.com/oliverburkeman

Watch the episodes on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheDiaryOfACEO/videos

Follow us on Telegram: https://t.me/diaryofaceo

Sponsors:
Huel - https://my.huel.com/Steven
Myenergi - https://bit.ly/3oeWGnl

Transcript

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0:00.0	Are you doing a few things every day that your ancestors would have done what?
0:04.4	250,000 years ago?
0:05.7	All of a burtman.
0:06.7	He's a journalist, a writer, and one of the greatest thinkers I've had the pleasure of sitting
0:11.7	with here on this podcast.
0:13.6	People talk all the time about the importance of learning to say no, right?
0:15.6	There's a subtext there.
0:16.6	They think what that means is if you just learn to say no to all the stuff you don't want
0:19.4	to do, you can spend your time doing stuff you do want to do.
0:22.0	Way harder than that.
0:23.0	You have to say no to things that you do want to do.
0:25.0	We are wired for racing through things.
0:28.0	All of us who are sort of moving at this speed need to experiment a little bit with what
0:31.8	it feels like to just slow down to the speed that things take.
0:36.0	Any action that actually brings things into the world involves a confrontation with your
0:40.3	limitations.
0:41.3	Getting through that discomfort to what lies on the other side is so empowering.
0:45.8	Without further ado, I'm Stephen Bartlett and this is the Diary of a CEO.
0:48.8	I hope nobody's listening.
0:51.0	And if you are, then please keep this true self.
1:00.7	As a journalist, I was quite surprised to read some of the articles you'd written and
1:05.7	that the subject matter wasn't necessarily like always about the news or what's going
	...

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