Burkeman's book is not about making big life changes but incremental ones that can shift how you go about things day-to-day. Image / 123RF
Oliver Burkeman, the author of Four Thousand Weeks, tells Claire Cohen why he never tidies up before good friends come over.
If, like me, you’re the sort of person who panic-tidies their house before having guests over, Oliver Burkeman has a message for you.
“Ask yourself: what’s going on when you try to put on a show for visitors?” he says. “Some people love the performance of it and that’s fine, but I do think there’s a real quality of connection that comes when you let people into how you really live. If there’s any mess in my friends’ houses, I’m not offended but actually feel privileged that they’re happy for me to see their real life. It’s much more powerful to own up to our flaws than to hide them.”
It’s just one example of what the 49-year-old British author of the bestselling 2021 time management guide Four Thousand Weeks calls “imperfectionism” – the idea that, as mortal humans, we’re limited in what we can do with our time, so we should accept what we can’t do and focus on the stuff that really matters.
If that sounds like a slightly defeatist place for Burkeman to begin his next book, Meditations for Mortals, think again.
“It’s this very specific kind of defeat that’s actually really empowering, because it is giving up trying to do something that’s impossible,” he says when we speak over Zoom from the North York Moors home he shares with his wife, Heather, and 7-year-old son. “Yes, it’s a defeat to accept that you’re not eventually going to get on top of everything, but it returns you to reality and lets you actually start doing things. Otherwise it always carries on being later, never now, and then you die.”
Crikey. Helpfully, Burkeman’s book is broken down into bitesize chapters – which makes it easier to read before you shuffle off this mortal coil. The idea behind the book is that you consume one chapter a day for 28 days to undergo a four-week reset, digesting lessons including “On actually doing things”, “Minding your own business” and “You can’t care about everything”.
The theory underpinning it all isn’t that we ought to do less with our lives, but to prioritise the important stuff we end up shelving – whether that’s a creative project or spending more time with our families.
“It’s not about making big life changes but incremental ones that can shift how you go about things day-to-day,” Burkeman says. He’s squeamish about the label “self-help”. “It’s not about having to implement some whole project for personal change, which I’ve tried enough times myself to be really disillusioned by at this point.”
He knows of what he speaks. From 2006 to 2020, Burkeman – a journalist by trade – wrote a popular psychology column called “This column will change your life”, in which he trialled a dizzying number of wellbeing, productivity and time management techniques in the hope of discovering the secret to happiness. In 2021 he published the phenomenally influential Four Thousand Weeks, which explored how we can put our average of 4000 weeks on Earth to best use. Readers rhapsodised about how it changed their lives, and approached Burkeman at literary events to tell him it had prompted them to quit their jobs and relationships.
It changed his life too. Though he was worried about how he was going to follow up Four Thousand Weeks. “I was startled by the success of the last book and felt there were more people watching now if I screwed up,” he says. “I was obliged to confront all the ways in which I still thought I could somehow produce the perfect piece of work or manage my time in the perfect way. There was this realisation that, actually, there were an awful lot of things that I still don’t get around to doing, in terms of nurturing friendships and being a present parent, and I can’t really pretend lack of time is the only reason.”
Meditations for Mortals hits upon a very universal problem. “We go through life feeling, like, ‘Just after I’ve got this next thing out of the way, I’ll do something nice,’ " he says. “That constant process of living a few hours into the future, mentally, comes at the expense of ever really feeling fully alive in the moment.”
So how can we kick the habit and start to lead not only a more efficient life, but a more meaningful one too?
A big step is to tackle our relationship with tech, which feeds this harmful notion that we can always do more. “I think it’s a question of how you let technology into your life. But I don’t claim to be that good at this and I’m still totally capable of being sucked into a social media vortex,” he admits. “I’m impressed and also slightly freaked out by my partner, who is capable of closing the laptop and walking away when she finishes work, because why would you carry on staring at a screen when you were no longer being paid to do so? Whereas I’d spend another 45 minutes tooling around — although I’m getting better.”
He now restricts the purpose of each device – for example, having an e-reader for books, instead of using your phone or laptop where you may get distracted – and limits social media use. He also tries to multitask less and concentrate more: so, if you’re listening to a podcast, just do that and nothing else.
He uses a time management app called Things 3 to keep a “done list”: a visible record of what you’ve achieved with your day, from completing a piece of work to going for a walk. It is, he says, an antidote to being an “insecure overachiever” – someone who’s never satisfied with what they’ve done, always thinking about the next task and who moves the bar higher with every accomplishment.
Burkeman knows a thing or two about that. Most days he gets up to meditate and do “morning pages” – a writing exercise that involves filling three sides of paper with a stream of consciousness, as a sort of brain sweep. Then – as only a freelancer can – he sets a very achievable “no later than” time to begin work, say 9.45am, meaning he feels a sense of accomplishment if he’s at his desk by 8.30am. He works sequentially on projects, putting anything new that comes along to one side until the others are done, even if it feels urgent. There’s also a timer on his desk, which he uses to break tasks down into 20-minute chunks to keep himself focused.
“All sorts of things we wish we did in our lives, we can get done in 20 minutes. If you can meditate for 20 minutes a day, or find 20 minutes to read a novel, you can make a change to the texture of your life in that short amount of time,” he says. All these techniques are, he emphasises, things he does “dailyish”, removing the pressure to stick to them rigidly.
He also wants us to limit ourselves to between three and four hours of intense mental focus each day – arguing that this is the maximum amount of time in which we can make creative progress. This takes the pressure off for the rest of the day.
It’s a pragmatic approach. But it isn’t, I point out, something many bosses will be thrilled to hear. Burkeman says it comes down to what outcome you’re willing to accept. For instance, does your job give you enough meaning – or money – that you’re happy to reply to your boss’s emails after hours? Or would you rather sacrifice your boss’s favour in order to switch off outside work?
“A lot of people have more choice than they want to acknowledge,” he says. “There’s something comfortable about saying, ‘I’ve got to do it this way.’ But actually, maybe you could leave work at a specific time each day and shoulder the consequences. It’s just a question of how you use the room that you do have for manoeuvre.”
Or as he puts it, bracingly, in the book: “It’s almost never literally the case that you have to meet a work deadline, honour a commitment or family obligation. You need only face the consequences.” (If you dare.)
As well as time management, there are chapters devoted to people-pleasing and how – gulp – while we might think we’re being selfless by helping others, doing so is usually motivated by wanting to make ourselves feel better (and can leave them feeling manipulated). He argues we ought to focus on our own priorities instead. “Allowing other people their problems has been huge for me – the realisation that I don’t make myself easier to work with or live with when I’m fixated on trying to make sure everyone else’s emotions are right.”
His American wife, Heather, is more naturally adept at this. “We joke that she’s not my audience,” he says, laughing. “I think some of what I’ve learnt, I got from the different way of doing things that she embodies – she’s naturally focused and has this very clear sense that certain things really matter, and others you don’t need to worry about.”
As for the rest of us, can we reset our habits in just four weeks? “By the time you get to the end of the book, I hope you will have given up on the idea that a problem-free phase of your life is ever coming, but I also hope you will see that as the reset,” he says. “No longer postponing all the good stuff until you’ve got things fixed is, I think, really powerful.”
1. Make a “done” list
Many people feel they begin each morning in a “productivity debt”, which they must pay off over the course of the day. If they fail it’s as though they haven’t quite justified their existence on the planet.
My favourite way of combating productivity debt is to keep a “done list”: a record of tasks already completed today – which makes it the rare kind of list that’s supposed to get longer as the day goes on. Our default stance is to measure our accomplishments against all the things we could, in principle, still do. A done list is motivating because it invites you to compare your output to the hypothetical situation in which you did nothing. Plus, if you’re stuck in a rut, nobody needs to know you added “took a shower” to your done list.
When you start to view each day not as a matter of paying a debt, but as an opportunity to move a small but meaningful number of items over to your done list, you’ll find yourself making better choices about what to focus on, and make more progress since you’ll be wasting less energy stressing about all the other tasks you’re (inevitably) neglecting.
2. Just do it
Repeatedly starting but rarely finishing things is a recipe for misery: fewer worthwhile things get done because whenever you hit a difficult patch, there are other projects to scurry off to. Soon, you become overwhelmed by the unfinished items on your plate.
The trick is to redefine what counts as finished. Think of your days in terms of small “deliverables”. This is business-speak, but so drab that it drains the drama from the act of finishing, recasting it as something you might do over the course of every day.
To define your next deliverable, clarify some outcome you could attain in a single sitting. Then work until you reach it. If you have a difficult email, write and send it, rather than beginning it and then letting it fester in your drafts. For bigger projects, break off a piece: finish the research for the first section of the report; schedule your first session at the gym. Do it, put it on your done list and move on.
3. Dailyish grind
I once asked Jerry Seinfeld about the “Seinfeld Strategy”, the productivity secret said to explain his prolific success. Every day when you manage to dedicate time to your goal (in his case, writing jokes), you mark an X in your calendar. The rule is not to break the chain.
It turned out that the Seinfeld Strategy was a throwaway remark he’d made decades earlier. “I can’t believe this was useful information,” he said. It had come to refer to the idea that you should work on your project every single day. But Seinfeld’s actual position was just that if you want to get good at something, you should do it a lot.
A better rule is to do things dailyish (a term used by Dan Harris, host of the podcast Ten Percent Happier). Dailyish is less of a high-wire act, where one mistake could end everything.
Don’t think of it as “just do it whenever you feel like it”. Deep down, you know doing something twice a week doesn’t qualify as dailyish, while five times a week does, and three or four times might count. You’re still putting pressure on yourself, but not expecting the rule to somehow force the action.
That’s the distinction. A lot of productivity advice lies in the idea that there might be a rule that would make accomplishment inevitable. We yearn for such a rule: we’ll follow it religiously and, in return, won’t have to take so much moment-to-moment responsibility for our lives. Dailyish shifts the focus from your inner drama and back to what you’re trying to achieve.
In any case, does anyone really believe Seinfeld owes his success to a productivity technique? He owes it to talent, luck and showing up more days than not, in the unpredictable context of real life. And the goal was making people laugh.
©Oliver Burkeman 2024. Extracted from Meditations for Mortals (Penguin) published September 17.
Written by: Claire Cohen
© The Times of London
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