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

⏱️ 78 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

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 busy work 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. Follow Oliver: Twitter - https://twitter.com/oliverburkeman Oliver’s book: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Four-Thousand-Weeks-Time-How Follow me: https://beacons.ai/diaryofaceo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Are you doing a few things every day that your ancestors would have done what 250,000 years ago?
0:05.6	Oliver Berkman, 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.
0:13.4	People talk all the time about the importance of learning to say no, right?
0:15.8	There's a subtext there they think what that means is if you just learn to say no to all the
0:18.9	stuff you don't want to do, you can spend your time doing the stuff you do want to do.
0:21.8	Way harder than that. You have to say no to things stuff you do want to do. Way harder than that.
0:22.8	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
0:29.9	need to experiment a little bit
0:31.4	with what it feels like to just slow down to the speed that things take.
0:35.8	Any action that actually brings things into the world involves a confrontation with your limitations.
0:40.9	Getting through that discomfort to what lies on the other side is so
0:44.4	empowering. Without further ado, I'm Stephen Bartlett and this is the driver CEO. I hope nobody's
0:49.9	listening, but if you are, then please keep this to yourself.
0:53.3	As a journalist, I was quite surprised to read some of the articles you'd written and the subject matter wasn't necessarily like always about the news or what's going on or it wasn't gossipy.
1:12.0	It was quite, I don't know existential and deep and about
1:15.2	regret and life and happiness and these kinds of things why did the desire to talk about
1:20.3	and to write and research those topics come from a new?
1:23.0	That's a good question. I mean I think early early
1:26.0	when I was a journalist I was doing whatever I needed to do and a lot of that was kind of news
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from FlightStory, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of FlightStory and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.