Time Management for Mortals | Oliver Burkeman

10% Happier with Dan Harris

10% Media, LLC

Dan Harris, Health & Fitness, Mindfulness, Dharma, Mental Health, Meditation

4.6 • 12.2K Ratings

🗓️ 1 June 2022

⏱️ 73 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In a culture that values persistent productivity, one can be left feeling chronically behind.

In this episode, author and recovering time management junkie, Oliver Burkeman encourages us to stop scrambling to fit it all in by exploring the relationship between our mortality and getting things done.

Oliver Burkeman is the author of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. Former guest Adam Grant has called it, “The most important book ever written about time management.” This is Oliver’s second appearance on the show. Burkeman joined us on the show a few years ago to talk about his other book, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking. He also writes a bi-weekly email newsletter called The Imperfectionist.

In this conversation, we talk about:

Why accepting mortality is a crucial step in improving our relationship to time
His conviction that it’s not about being more efficient. It’s about knowing what to neglect
Patience as a superpower and the impatience spiral
The benefits of burning bridges
Becoming a better procrastinator
The benefits of rest
What he calls “cosmic insignificance therapy”
Practical tips, such as the “fixed volume approach to productivity,” the value of serialization, and strategic underachievement.

Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/oliver-burkeman-456

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the 10% Happier Podcast.
0:05.9	I'm Dan Harris.
0:11.3	In my experience, time management is incredibly, diabolically hard.
0:17.1	One of the trickiest aspects of my life, actually.
0:20.0	And I suspect I'm not alone in this.
0:22.1	The culture enforces a sense of always behindness and never enoughness.
0:26.5	It's not uncommon for me to get to the end of my day and feel both fried and like I'm
0:31.3	a failure because I didn't get everything I was supposed to get done done.
0:34.8	And I'm saying this as an alleged happiness expert who has conducted many interviews right
0:39.1	here on this show on this subject.
0:42.0	My guest today is a recovering time management junkie.
0:46.0	That's his description who went way down the rabbit hole on this stuff for many years
0:50.4	and emerged with a really interesting thesis.
0:53.9	Stop trying to get it all done.
0:55.4	It's never going to happen.
0:56.4	There is no such thing, he says, as work-life balance.
0:59.6	There is no time management, Nirvana.
1:01.9	The answer is to accept that we're all going to die, that we have limited time, and so
1:07.0	we need to stop scrambling to fit it all in.
1:09.7	Oliver Berkman is the author of 4,000 weeks time management for mortals.
1:14.0	Great title.
1:15.5	Former guest, Adam Grant, has called that book the most important book ever written about
	...

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