How To Be Sanely Productive | Oliver Burkeman

Dan Harris (0:03)

Hey, hey, welcome to the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm your host, Dan Harris. Today, we're bringing a classic conversation out of the archives and bringing it to you. My guest is Oliver Burkeman, the author of two excellent books that have genuinely changed the way I think about time management, productivity, and mortality. The first is called Four Thousand Weeks, a book about time management that takes seriously the fact that we're all going to die.

The second, which is the book we're going to talk about mostly in this conversation is called Meditations for Mortals. Oliver's central argument, and I have found this both deeply annoying and deeply liberating is that the feeling I have that I will finally be able to relax once I get to the end of my to-do list, a feeling that is deeply wired into my nervous system is actually a lie. It's a forgivable and understandable lie, a structural lie, because there really is never an end to our to-do list. And the sooner you accept that, the saner you are likely to be. In this conversation, we talk about what Oliver calls imperfectionism and why it's not about lowering your standards, why small imperfect actions beat perfect plans every time, why overplanning is actually a form of avoidance, why you genuinely cannot care about everything and you shouldn't feel guilty about that, and a concept that I have thought a lot about since this conversation, which he calls decision hunting. I will let him explain what that means. We'll get started with Oliver Burkeman right after this.

Oliver Burkeman, welcome back to the show.

Oliver Burkeman (1:35)

Thanks so much for having me back on.

Dan Harris (1:37)

It's a pleasure. Congratulations on your latest book. Let me just dive in on the subject of your new book because it's so interesting and really hits home for me in many ways. Just on a high level, what is imperfectionism?

Oliver Burkeman (1:53)

I think imperfectionism is just my umbrella term. You got to have a proprietary concept. I think it's my umbrella term for that orientation towards life. That starts from the perspective of accepting our limitations. It's like instead of constantly struggling to get everything done or feel completely certain about where the future is headed or the rest of it, what if you began from the understanding that there would always be too much to do, that we would never be able to be confident about what the future held, that we would never be able to be confident about understanding fully the other people in our lives, all these different ways in which we're limited.

How could that be a starting point for a sort of active and immersed and calm life instead of the way we usually handle things?

Dan Harris (2:45)

A couple of things are coming to mind as I listen to you talk about your proprietary heuristic, if I'm even using that fancy word correctly. The first thing is that I had even before preparing for this interview and perhaps under the influence of our past interviews, I had been thinking recently about what is perhaps the biggest lie I tell myself, which is that I'm going to achieve a state of everything's done, everything in its right place, and then I will feel fine.

Oliver Burkeman (3:18)

Yeah. No, absolutely.

I think that that is a perfectionism. I should also have said, I think a lot of people think about perfectionism in a very narrow way as just being about wanting to produce perfect work. But all these ideas that the time is coming when we can finally say, our lives are in working order and we can sit back and relax, be on cruise control, all the people-pleasing, the way we try to make sure everyone's happy with us at all times, I think they can all be seen as forms of perfectionism. So I suppose that's what imperfectionism is pushing back against. But yeah, I totally share that illusory fantasy.

Dan Harris (3:56)

I agree with your use of perfectionism and by extension, imperfectionism here. So I'm not quibbling with that at all, but it's like this sense that we can get everything arranged just so, like an immaculate equipoise of some sort, and then we can just eat ice cream.

Oliver Burkeman (4:18)

Or to put it in a different way, I guess, but then we could finally feel like we'd earned our right to exist on the planet. We could feel like we'd done what we needed to do in order to deem ourselves to be okay, and then eat ice cream.

Dan Harris (4:35)

There is some sort of okay-ness out there, but I have to work my ass off and scramble and scramble and scramble to get to it, and it's always receding further and further into the horizon line. Whereas you're saying, okay, no, no, no, let's start with the understanding and the acceptance that things are messy, I'm never gonna get everything done, and they're always gonna be messy, and I'm always gonna have a long to-do list. And can I just move forward calmly and sanely from that acceptance of what seems to be like an inarguable reality?