I think it's much more a question of really seeing the trade-offs you have to make, really understanding that you have a finite amount of time, tiny amount of time in a day, tiny amount of time in a life by most sort of cosmic measures, and you definitely won't do all or even many of the things that you could or would like to do.

And so the challenge of time management, the real challenge, I think, is making those decisions wisely, figuring out in some conscious and meaningful way, all the things you're definitely

going to fail at.

I'm Jocelyn K. Gly, and this is Hurry Slowly, a podcast about pacing yourself,

where I explore how you can be more creative and resilient through the simple act of slowing down.

If you've been listening since the beginning of the show last October, we're about to arrive at the moment you've been training for all along, a deep

discussion of time itself. Obviously, the idea of time is baked into the title of this podcast.

Hurry Slowly is a sort of oxymoron that asks you to hold two competing ideas in your mind

at once. And today, I finally tackled the topic of time head on in conversation with Oliver

Berkman, a writer and thinker whose work I absolutely adore.

Mostly because he's a self-help author who's constantly questioning the very notion of

self-help, a fact that's evident in his wry book titles, the most recent

being, The Antidote, Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking.

Lately, Oliver, who also writes a regular column for The Guardian, has been spending the bulk of his

hours and days and weeks, thinking about the nature of time as he works on his

next book, 4,000 weeks. And if you're wondering about the significance of that title, that's the

average amount of weeks that most of us humans get here on this earth. Now, that doesn't really

sound like much, so it's no surprise that most of us get a little anxious about trying to use our time well.

But as you'll learn in this conversation, thinking about every single hour as a precious resource

that we must use wisely or suffer the consequences might not be the best way to think about time management.

Oliver and I dig into why getting more efficient actually just makes you busier,

how the true challenge of time management is really about trade-offs, and the counterintuitive

...