What if the key to a remarkable life isn’t doing more—but doing less, better? In this episode, Peter McGraw welcomes author Oliver Burkeman to explore themes from his latest book Meditations for Mortals. They dive into the beauty of limits, the folly of perfectionism, and why embracing imperfection might be the most productive thing you can do. Tune in for kayak metaphors, scruffy hospitality, and practical wisdom for the Solo life.
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Listen to Episode #243 here
Meditations For (Single) Mortals
Welcome back. A focus of the Solo movement is helping people, single or not, live a remarkable life. To do so, they may need to bend or break the “rules”. After all, most of the rules are made up anyway, and they’re constantly being revised in light of new information. Our guest helps people live remarkably through his writing. He has helped me focus my thinking about time, productivity, and embracing the limits of being human.
His latest book, Meditations for Mortals, builds on the ideas from Four Thousand Weeks, which we had a book club about. This new book guides readers through a four-week practice to help them live with more intention and ease. I know that many of you in the Solo community are huge fans of his work. Maita, for example, mentioned that his Imperfectionist newsletter, especially the 70% edition, had a big impact on her. Steve pointed out that the wisdom of this book is something that he has learned through trial and many errors. Please welcome Oliver Burkeman.
It’s great to be here. Thank you very much for inviting me.
In the book club with Laura Grant and Amy Gahran, Laura called you The Burkeman.
That’s great. I’ll take it. The very cool nickname I should have had in high school, but was denied.
Before we begin, I want to thank you for writing Four Thousand Weeks. I listened to it. I bought the audiobook, which you narrated.
That’s right.
The Concept of Finitude & the “Insecure Overachiever”
There’s something intimate about that, hearing the words of the author through his voice. I listened to it driving back from Los Angeles to Colorado. This idea of finitude was incredibly useful to me, especially as someone who, in many ways, fits the exact target market of your messages. Anybody who knows me from tuning in to the show would probably agree. Let’s start with the concept of finitude and how you would describe this ideal reader of your work. Who needs your work the most?
This is a relatively easy task because the answer is me as well. I’m doing what all authors of advice books do, or books that have advice in them, which is grappling with my own problems and maybe sharing a little bit of what I’ve learned. I’ve only learned it because I had or, to some extent, have those problems. Finitude is the state of being finite or limited. It’s a way of encapsulating the situation that we all find ourselves in as humans.
The most obvious aspect of this is our limited quantity of time on the planet. Four Thousand Weeks is very rounded down to get a nice number with lots of zeros, but it’s approximately the average life expectancy in the developed world. That’s not the only aspect of finitude. There’s a broader question of our limited control over the reality in which we find ourselves. There is limited ability to understand what the heck is going on in the world. There is limited ability to understand other people, to predict to know what’s coming in the future, and to dictate how a day unfolds. There are all of these different ways in which we find ourselves in this limited condition.
Not just limited in time, but limited in control ability.
Limited in time as a quantity, but also limited here in the river of time where we find ourselves. It’s difficult to put these things into words. Anyone’s had the misfortune to try to read Martin Heidegger, even in translation, and the extraordinary ways people have tried to get a grip on what we’re talking about here. It works for our purposes to say limited time and limited control over how that time unfolds. That’s the essence of it.
All of us, in different ways, struggle with this state of being finite. There’s a particular version of that, which is the kind of person I’m writing for, and that is people who end up engaging in all sorts of kinds of attempts to gain more control of over their lives or to become capable of doing more stuff so that they can be effectively infinite in their capacities. As a result, we are very drawn to all kinds of productivity systems, personal development guidebooks, courses, and all the rest of it.
I suspect that a lot of us are what the psychologists call insecure overachievers, and that is people who do stuff and people who our friends think of as driven. It’s not usually people who drift through life doing nothing, but who are driven in a way that is, on some level, based on a sense of having to fill some kind of inner void or deficit, some sense of not quite being good enough unless you do more or unless you achieve and accomplish more. There might be a smattering of what could be called neurotic personalities here as well. Everybody struggles with being finite, but there are certainly people who are much more relaxed about it in their day-to-day experience.
I suppose a bit that I need to bring these two thoughts together quickly is to say that a lot of the ways in which we go wrong with our relationship to time and end up feeling more overwhelmed, more scattered, and more distracted, procrastinating, and all the other things can be seen as unconscious ways to resist the truth of our finitude. The way to get past a lot of those problems and to build more meaningful and peaceful lives is to come to terms, at least a little bit, with that finitude.
The Motivation Behind Productivity & Finding Enjoyment
It’s like you have this Venn diagram of the target market for your books and newsletter. Someone who’s aware of their finitude, and then someone who has this insecure, overachieving productivity mindset that’s partially culturally mediated and partially developed through one’s own life story. I want to put a slightly more positive view of it, for me at least. My tendency to produce has been described by good friends as pathological.
You know they’re good friends when they’ll tell you that.
Sometimes, they even marvel at it. My bachelorhood allows that to take off. I know that you’re a family man. That’s something that comes up in Four Thousand Weeks. Family can provide guardrails. You have to close the laptop. You have to be at dinner. There are things that, if you are going to be a good parent or a good spouse, you ought to be doing beyond producing, making money, providing, and so on.
First of all, it didn’t start with pathology. It started, frankly, as a need to succeed. It was trying to escape poverty. It was trying to create financial and housing security, and then it quickly, thankfully, turned into enjoyment, flow-worthy kinds of experiences, and creative endeavors that I enjoy. With the Solo project, anybody who tunes in knows that this is my most meaningful work. In some ways, this is my family that I’m giving to, not monetarily or emotionally, but information support and so on.
I do find myself at a stage in life where, because of your book, given to me by those same friends who diagnosed me as pathological, I have realized that I don’t need to behave like this anymore. This is not a matter of survival. I don’t have to have a scarcity mindset, and I can continue to produce if I want to, because it’s enjoyable, but not because I have to.
This is exactly right. I get this. It speaks to something that is important to me when it comes to talking about my writing. I think of what I’m doing here, as it applies to me and the public therapy that I’m doing by working through these issues in the written form, as I want and have, to some significant extent, succeeded in living a far less anxious life and a life far less driven by scarcity thinking and all the rest of it.
I also want to rescue some concept of ambition and being ambitious for your life, for other people in your life, for your society, or whatever. I don’t want to accept that the only path to peace of mind is settling for not doing anything cool with your time on the planet. I reject that completely. I also don’t want to accept that to be ambitious requires you to be perpetually, deeply dissatisfied and anguished about where you are, because you consider that it’s where you are getting to that is going to be the meaningful place in the future. That whole thing informs everything I’m doing, and you express it.
Can you go from producing for some reasons that maybe were important or valid at a certain time, but then lose that validity and shift into producing? That’s a fun way to express your being in the world. Maybe produce a little bit less when you go through that transition, but don’t give it up because it was previously motivated differently. That makes no sense. We are here to share the things inside us that we have to share. I feel strongly that this should not be taken in anything we’re talking about here as a counsel of resignation to the idea that everything is rubbish, so you might as well not bother, or anything like that.
That’s incredibly well said. This is what I’m tussling with. It is this idea of how I can let go, recognize I don’t have control in order to feel better about my world and my life, cut down on those anxious moments, especially between 4:00 and 5:00 AM, and yet, still do what I want to do for the right reasons at this stage in life.
The Title “Meditations for Mortals” & the Idea of “Imperfectionism”
You titled the book Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts, not Meditation for Mortals. That’s a very different book. What is the backstory? As an author, I always want to hear the backstory on titles because I know, and most people don’t know this, that the average author does not have as much control over their title as they want, or as much as the reader thinks that they do.
The language in the contracts is that I have the final say over the things that are inside a book and not final say over the things that are on the outside, which are the title and the image. With that said, both of my primary publishers in the US and the UK, which are a deep pleasure to work with, it’s not in their interests to put titles and jacket images that the author hates because then, the author doesn’t do all the very energetic promotion that they need the author to do.
It’s a negotiation.
In this case, I have to say that the title came from me and/or me chatting with my agent at the beginning of the process. It’s my title. If people are mistaking it for a book on meditation, it’s my fault. The origin story of this book was if Four Thousand Weeks was about working through a different way of looking at life and having a different intention for how to live and show up meaningfully for life, what then happens is you realize that having this very clear vision of how you want to do things is not the same as getting around to doing it.
It’s very easy to have all sorts of good and inspiring thoughts for the work you want to do or the way you want to live, and then systematically, for months and years on end, do something else instead. I wanted to zero in on that gap between knowing and doing. I think of Meditations for Mortals, and maybe not everybody needs to, as a book fundamentally about action. Letting go is a big part of this, but letting go, not again to fall back into a tulpa, but letting go to let action happen to remove the psychological inhibitions that so often hold us back from doing things.
The philosophy that I outline in the book, and I give the label imperfectionism, is an umbrella term for thinking about taking action before feeling completely ready, before knowing for sure that you know what you’re doing or that it’s going to go completely successfully, because we never can know those things. There’s something, I hope, active about this.
The structure of the book, which we can talk about or not as you wish, is designed to be an instance of that as well as talk about it. It’s designed to be something that people could benefit from in their real lives with all their emails and deadlines, not at some point in the future when you’ve got all that out of the way and you have a spare month to put this into practice.
There’s this clearing-the-deck phenomenon that happens a lot. I find it in my world where I am. Being pulled in lots of different directions. I’m like, “Let me take care of these emails. Let me take care of this committee work. Let me take care of these things. When I’m done with that, then I can focus on this important thing.” The problem is that you wake up and the deck is unclear again the next day.
In fact, some of what you were doing to clear the decks generated more stuff on the decks. It’s pretty bad.
I have heard this. You probably know the answer to this. There’s a statistic that for every email you send, you receive 1.1 back.
I haven’t heard that, but that feels very persuasive. It would be around there. It’s going to be bigger than 1, but probably not hugely bigger than 1.
One of the things I do like about the title is that you are an avid reader of philosophy. You bring in philosophical topics. You talk about philosophers, especially in Four Thousand Weeks. I think about the most famous meditations book. It was written by someone who’s as close to immortal as you can find, and that’s Marcus Aurelius. I own it. Lots of people who are like us own it. It’s almost required reading for the pathologically productive individual. If I may, one of the nicest things you can say about someone is to compare their book to Marcus Aurelius’ book in a positive way.
I’m enjoying this. Honestly, even if you said it wasn’t quite as good as Marcus Aurelius, I would cope.
Meditation is about perfection. It is about being this great person. If you think about it, it’s hard to be a stoic. What your book does, and it came to me at exactly the right moment, is it’s a book that’s like, “Be easy on yourself. You’re not Marcus Aurelius. Few of us are.” I write in my books a lot. I wrote, “Exactly what I need. No longer need to be perfect. Be good enough.”
That is exactly what I’m trying to say. I’m interested in the idea that that’s not what Marcus is trying to say. There’s a whole interesting conversation we could have there about different interpretations of stoic philosophy. The crucial thing here for me is that perfect doesn’t exist in the real world. To be relaxed in the real world and to act and make a difference in the real world, you have to go some way towards surrendering to perfection to start.
Let’s use an example from your book to give people something less abstract. This is something I don’t do. You talk about scruffy hospitality. This is a nice anecdote.
This idea of scruffy hospitality, the phrase comes from an Anglican priest in Tennessee called Jack King. He writes about how he realized that he and his wife loved having people around for dinner, but they had developed this checklist of providing a wonderful experience for their guests, such as mowing the lawn, tidying the kids’ playroom, picking a lovely recipe, and making everything beautiful.
That was becoming an impediment to inviting people around because it was so much work and took so much time. He decided to embrace this ethos he called scruffy hospitality, which was about prioritizing having people around in conversation, feeding people whatever was in the cupboards, letting the playroom be messy if that’s the way it was, and letting people into their lives in that way.
I use this as the start of a reflection on how very often, not only in the context of dinner parties, although it’s useful there, too, when you let the imperfections show and you no longer focus on trying to present the best possible facade to other people, not only is that a good way to do the thing more often because it requires less preparation and stress, but it’s a gift to the other person. There’s an intimacy that is there.
I talk about this thing I’ve noticed in myself before I came across the idea of scruffy hospitality, which was if we were having friends around to our house and I noticed some mess somewhere, like crumbs under the fridge or something, I would be like, “I got to clean that up because it would look awful if people come around.”
If the shoe were on the other foot, if I were at someone else’s house and I saw this kind of mess, I would not only never dream of taking offense, and how weird would that be, but I would feel oddly privileged because I was being shown their real lives. I wasn’t being kept in the one room they use for entertaining or something. I was being admitted to their real lives. There are lots of other contexts beyond hospitality where that idea of being honest about imperfections leads to better results than trying to burnish them all away is a powerful one.
I am one of those perfectionist people when I host. You walk in and you’re like, “Is this place being staged to be sold?”
I do make the point in the book that if you are someone who takes active pleasure in putting on that show, that’s a different matter. My wife is one of these people, so we have different dinner parties depending on who’s the organizing force. People love the display of it, like people enjoy fashion design and great acting. It’s not that you should always be showing people your least rehearsed side, but if you think there’s some problem with how you usually live or something that has to be hidden, that’s the interesting part.
Also, if it’s holding you back from inviting someone over. That’s the key element. The value of the social connection is much more important than making a good impression in a way that no one cares about. My one anecdote about this is that there was a woman whom I was seeing. I hadn’t seen her for a long time. She came over one day, and I had a sink full of dirty dishes, which I had never had before. She was like, “Is everything okay?”
This was either a step too far in the scruffy hospitality stakes, or that conversation was the beginning of a true connection. Who knows?
What you do in this book is it’s not meant to be consumed all at once. It’s one lesson per day-ish. One of your things is daily-ish, which I like. I want to talk to you about. If it’s okay with you, I want to hit a few of them and get the inside scoop, or if there’s something in particular that is relevant that comes to mind.
I’m going to be honest. I chose a bunch that resonated with me. One early in the book that had a huge effect on me, and it still does, is that we’ve touched on this idea of trying to exert control over our lives. It is this idea of total control that is futile and creates anxiety because things might not work out the way you’ve planned for them to work out. It often takes massive amounts of effort to try to adjust the universe. You use a metaphor of the super yacht versus the kayak. As someone who’s been trying to build a super yacht his whole life, this has been very useful.
The Metaphor of the Super Yacht Vs. the Kayak
This is a pair of images that, likewise, helped me as they came into focus. My argument is that being a human is, in many ways, metaphorically like being in a little kayak on a fast-moving river. It’s very much a question of responding to things in the moment as they happen, using what skills you have to try to keep making forward progress. You don’t know particularly when the white water is coming or when the peaceful moments are going to arise. It’s very vulnerable and risky, but it’s also exhilarating. You’re right there in the midst of the flow of life.
A lot of the time, what we’re trying to do is make ourselves believe that we are on the bridge of a huge super yacht in a beautifully air-conditioned room where we program in the destination that we’re heading to. We sit back while it all unfolds, and we reach our destination. We look forward to that. We feel in control. We feel like we’re getting to that place.
A lot of the ways in which we try to change our lives or make our lives better or more meaningful can often be seen as being about trying to increase that sense of total control, command, and an unwillingness to feel what it’s like to be in the kayak. The way to embody the kinds of lives that we want to have and to be the kind of person to do the kind of work and all the rest of it involves not attaining more control, but surrendering control.
It’s a leap of faith. It involves spending twenty minutes trying to write your novel that you’ve been thinking about for decades, even though you don’t know how to write a novel, you’ve got a job, who are you to write a novel, and all the other problems. That’s not about gaining more control of your life. That’s about letting go of at least a little bit of the desire to be in control of your life.
It’s certainly a much more improvisational approach to life. These things happen, and I react in my kayak. One of the things I have written to myself about in my journal, to try to change this perspective, is that I’m good at reacting. I’m good at problem-solving. The things that I end up worrying about and trying to control often don’t even happen.
That’s true.
You’re spending lots of time building this super yacht, and then you don’t need many of the amenities in it that are there. I like that. Plus, the issue, and this comes out in the book a lot, is that all you have is this moment. The kayak works nicely because you can be on nice, calm waters and moving forward, or you can be in these tumultuous waters and doing your best.
To interject briefly, the other thing that is helpful to me about that image is that there is a direct connection between the kind of vulnerability and riskiness of being in the kayak and the exhilarating liveliness of being in the kayak. There is a direct connection between not attempting to exert a certain kind of control over our lives and feeling like those lives are worth being alive for. There’s something deadening about being on the super yacht.
It’s why these billionaires are so bored.
This is a fascinating topic. What people do when they realize that extreme, immense wealth doesn’t plug the void and what’s needed is a feeling of aliveness is fascinating.
I did a Solo thoughts episode on what I call the matador mindset. I want to connect it to your kayak metaphor. Kayaking is an Olympic sport. I don’t know how it’s judged, but my feeling is that it’s judged like gymnastics. You have technical abilities, but there is some artistic element to how you go about kayaking that is maybe correlated, but independent of your ability to paddle correctly. I could be wrong about that. You might know better than me.
Let’s say that’s how it works.
Let’s assume that’s how it works. I feel like that’s the case. Two kayakers who do their thing, one gets better points. Regardless of what the judges do in the Olympics, the average kayaker would say, “There are two things that happen as I go through these rapids. There’s getting through the rapid successfully and doing it with a sense of panache.”
My version of this is that I try to be a bullfighter in my life. If you think about it, a bullfighter has two jobs. One is not to get gored by the bull. The second one is to entertain the crowd and himself or herself. You have both this idea prowess and panache. You’re an entertainer entertaining the crowd while also surviving. What I do with this idea, and it works with the kayak very well, is that we live in a world where we vacillate between two extremes of boredom and stress.
This kayak metaphor or bullfighter metaphor is useful in both. How is it that you can find a way to create a little bit of challenge in the moment for something that might otherwise be boring, i.e., a faculty meeting, or how do you deal with a very stressful situation that runs the gamut, whether there’d be too many things to do or whatnot? No one wants to see the bull-fighting version of a super yacht.
I’m trying to work out what that would be.
I don’t even know.
That would be like walking across the bull ring in so much protective gear that there was no risk to you whatsoever, and then it’s over.
Maybe it’s like the Matrix, where you no longer have to even fight the agents.
For me, what you’re saying is something both to do with the inherently improvisational aspect of it. Something in that idea of grace or panache is very important here because that’s the moment of life. That’s not just where it’s all leading. It’s not just the outcome.
It’s a nice thing. I like to think about skill and style. Even the bullfighter dresses the part, which is meant to entertain and make the spectacle enjoyable. This is not easy to do. It’s hard to have a matador mindset all the time, but recognizing that you only have so much control over the bull, life ought to be fun, especially if you manage to target market and get good enough at it. You’re not surviving all the time.
The role of fun and some fairly deep conception of what fun is is a central thing here. There’s superficial fun, but there’s a fun that is much closer to being what this should all be about.
That’s why people kayak. This is related to this idea of ones that I like. I’m going to set this up with one of my friends, Jeff, who referred to me as pathological. He likes to say, “Peter, you can follow the rules and be happy, or you can break the rules and be happy, but you cannot follow the rules and be unhappy or break the rules and be unhappy.” You have to choose whether you’re going to follow or not follow, and be comfortable with that result. You talk about this as you need only face the consequences of paying the price.
Facing Consequences & the Illusion of a Problem-Free Life
This is riffing off this wonderful line from the therapist Sheldon Kopp, who said, “You’re free to do whatever you like. You need only face the consequences.” This is a very powerful thought that every choice in life comes with a downside. The problem is not that every choice in life comes with a downside. The problem is how readily we try to avoid looking at those downsides, wriggle about, or become frozen in paralysis, hoping for an option that doesn’t have a downside. Meanwhile, that has a downside because your life is ticking away while you prevaricate.
How freeing it is to fully, or at least somewhat fully, face the facts of this trade-off. I give an example of a friend making the very difficult decision to bring a marriage to an end. This also happens in much more mundane times. Do you want to spend the next hour of the day answering more emails, or do you want to spend it going for a run?
The implication about the way I set that up is that you should always choose the run or something because email is so boring, but there’s an upside and a downside here. If you put one more hour in at the end of the day to email, there’ll be people who won’t get impatient. There might be work opportunities that get moved forward. The downside is that you don’t get that time to participate in a healthy activity that you enjoy. The flip side of doing it the other way is that you’ll get all the benefits of going for the run, but certain people might get impatient with you for not having answered emails.
It’s not that there is a right answer either on that level or on the much bigger level of, “Do I stay in this marriage?” or, “Do I stay in this job?” There may be a right answer for you in a specific situation, but it’s the understanding that you’re choosing which set of problems to incur. We want to be free from the consequences of our actions. We want to be able to do things in ways that never hurt anybody else, who never called us back in our careers, or never have any downside. We can’t have that.
What we can have is freedom in the reality of consequences. You can navigate through your life understanding that there will be a downside to everything you pick. Acknowledging that makes it easier to make a wise choice in the moment because you’re no longer desperately trying to find a way to incur no negative consequences. That is a real, deep, authentic kind of freedom.
I had a very intense mushroom trip. My mushroom trips are well-documented on the show. They are usually joyous, fun, and insightful. This one was filled with rage at myself because I have worked tirelessly to improve my situation in life, and yet I was still behaving with regard to my anxieties as if things were insecure and scarce from many years ago, when I started to wake up in the middle of the night and ruminate.
I was so mad at myself for this. It was like in the movies. I was in front of the mirror, yelling at myself. If anybody could hear this, they would think there’s a madman in that bathroom. One of the things that I came to realize was that I am done trying to improve my external situation in order to manage my internal dialogue. I am done trying to do this because it has not worked. Almost everything has changed for the better, and yet I’m still in the same place between my ears.
That was not the problem, in other words. It was a problem, the external issues, but it wasn’t the sole reason.
That’s right. My life is materially better, and yet I am still in those ways of trying to control, so I needed to let go. Right. That’s the idea. I need to change the way I perceive the world and my place in it, and its goodness, and its threats, in this way. One of the meditations that you had that is relevant to this conversation we’re having at the moment is that there will always be problems. You have a story about this.
Are you referring to the anecdote about Sam Harris?
Yes.
It’s his story. With full credit, I repeat it in the book, and I will repeat it here. In one of the talks, he recounts how he was at coffee or lunch, I forget, with a friend of his. He was complaining out loud to her about all the problems he was facing with his business. I don’t know what the details were. She interrupted him mid-flow and said, “Hold on a second. Are you still under the impression that you’re going to one day get to the part of your life where you don’t have any problems?”
He described realizing with a start that this was exactly the unconscious idea that he’d been operating with, not just that there was an individual problem that you’d like to get shot of, which is often the case because any individual problem can be frustrating, but the sheer fact that there were problems at all is also a double level of the affront.
This is something that I realized had been true of me as well. I was subconsciously working towards this alleged time in my future when there wouldn’t be any problems. Firstly, there is simply no reason to believe that this would ever happen. If anything, one can assume that getting older in life is going to bring a few extra problems rather than fewer ones. More to the point, you wouldn’t want it to be the case.
If you think carefully about it, I argue you wouldn’t want there to be a life without problems. Therefore, living angled in this way towards, “When can I get to the bit with no problems?” and getting very frustrated by the daily challenges of work or life because you’re not yet there is a mistake. There are specific problems that you wouldn’t wish on anybody, and there are plenty of specific, detailed kinds of terrible things that happen to people that one would hope to avoid one’s whole life.
If you think about what a problem is in its most general form, it’s something that needs your attention, something you need to do in the world. To have nothing that you needed to do in the world and nothing that needed your attention would be hell. It’s very lucky that none of us needs to ever worry that this is going to happen. There’s never going to be that time.
Another friend of mine talks about how she was frustrated at all the crises and emergencies she had to deal with in her job. She thought she could do her job so well if she only didn’t have to deal with all these things, and then having the dawning realization that these crises and problems were the job. That’s what she was in the job for. That was the skill that she was bringing to that situation. It’s useful. We would like to have better problems as we go through life, but getting to the point where you don’t have any problems at all is as unwise as well as an unattainable goal to set for yourself.
When I was working on my first book, I was teaching three classes, I had a girlfriend, I was in the heart of all the research I was doing, I had caught a virus that I couldn’t shake, and I was fantasizing about a life with no problems. I don’t know how I stumbled on this, but I stumbled on this Norwegian film called The Bothersome Man. It was launched in 2006. Do you know this movie?
It is ringing a very distant bell. I love the title.
It was the perfect film to watch for where I was in life. The Bothersome Man, the lead character, shows up in this city on a bus. The city is a metaphor for heaven of some sort, in which life is easy. He has a job that’s not challenging. He has a woman who has sex with him. He goes through life, and everything works. He finds this so hollow and is bothered by this. It does not feel right. It does not feel good in this way, so he starts creating problems.
I need to see this film. That sounds great.
The “Done List” Vs. the “To-Do List”
It’s quite good. There’ll be no spoiler there, but that sets the stage for this. It was exactly what I needed, which is, “Peter, if you get your wish and you have a life with no problems, you’re going to be bored immediately. One day, you’ll enjoy it, and then the next day, you’ll start a project that will create problems. You’re going to become a bothersome man, in a sense.” That meditation is super useful. I want to pivot to a couple more that are more productivity-focused. This is one that my friends enjoy. I don’t do it, but I see the wisdom in it, and that is a done list rather than a to-do list.
It could be a to-do list as well. I’m not hostile to to-do lists. This is exactly what it sounds like. It seems almost too simple that it shouldn’t work. It is the very simple idea, in whatever system you use for keeping track of your to-dos or on a piece of paper, to make a list of the things that you accomplish during the day as you accomplish them and to be fairly granular about it and be willing to put rather minor things on that list.
What’s going on here, when it works for people, is that there’s a very basic, natural tendency to compare what you’ve done in the day to the infinite and never attainable space of all the things you could, in principle, usefully do with your time. The moment you achieve something, it’s like it doesn’t exist. It doesn’t count anymore because all that matters is that you haven’t done the next thing.
The done list is a way of switching your perspective back a bit, looking at what you’ve done that day and proving to yourself that the world is, in some small way, a different place than it was when the day began because of your actions. Also, this is subtler, but I find there’s something that it does to the decisions you make about what to do.
When you know that something you’re doing is going to end up on a done list, it pushes you slightly in the direction of making better choices about what you do with that time. You’re no longer stuck in this idea of thinking, “If I power ahead, I can probably do 500 things.” It’s like, “I’m going to be moving a few onto this list. Which do I want them to be?”
As I say in the book, for people who find themselves in a real slough of demotivation, mild depression, or something, it’s a useful tactic here to put the most basic things onto this list, like took a shower or made coffee. It could be things you would never normally count. No one else ever has to see this list. What I have found is that that kind of approach gives you some purchase on the day, and it often snowballs into much more impressive achievements than taking a shower and making coffee. It’s that moving of the focus back onto the ways in which you do have efficacy, you do have agency, and you get things done in the course of the day.
I have started, at the end of the day, reflecting on my day and what has happened. I realize how full it is and how good it is, in many ways. I have to admit I like my to-do list in part because I enjoy that feeling of writing a line through something on the list. There is an art to creating a to-do list. It’s not too big. It’s conquerable. I don’t do the done list.
I don’t know if you’ve heard this. Henry Rollins is a proud Solo. He doesn’t know it, but he is. He has written down every single show he has ever done in his life. He has a document somewhere about the date and the time. He even does it with his radio shows. He’s in his 50s. It must be an enormous document. It must feel rather fulfilling to look through and be like, “Look at all I’ve done.”
It’s making me think I should expand my focus here to include things that I wouldn’t necessarily count as to-dos, like scheduled events and things like that. It’s a way of creating a diary of what you did with your life in a way that is a little bit easier than, “I’ve never made it work to be one of those people who records the places I’ve been, the people I’ve met up with, and all of that,” as if for posterity or something. It amounts to the same thing. It’s interesting.
It’s why journaling is so good. I wish I had started journaling as a teenager to be able to capture all those lost memories and all that fun. I’ll tell you this as an academic. A CV doesn’t cut it. If anything, the CV has the opposite effect.
These are the ten-page documents that academics produce.
The “Daily-ish” Approach to Consistency Over Rigid Habits
Mine is 18 or 19 pages, but it doesn’t have the same gratifying effect, to be honest. In my second book, I tell the same anecdote that you do about Jerry Seinfeld and this idea of Don’t Break The Chain. There’s this story of Jerry Seinfeld. This is true for most standup comedians who are preparing a new standup special. They want to be writing jokes every day, and as much as possible, they want to be testing those jokes in front of audiences, experimenting with the goodness of those jokes, and revising or dropping as needed.
The story is that Jerry has one of those big desk calendars or hanging calendars, and when he does one of those tasks, he puts an X through the day. After three days, there’s a chain of Xs. The idea is to keep doing that every single day, and the culmination of 365 of those Xs results in a great special. You say that’s not exactly the best approach.
The spirit of this is right. The way that Seinfeld approaches his work is sort of like an athlete. It’s fascinating and very great. As I say in the book, I got a chance, when I was with The Guardian, to interview Jerry Seinfeld. It wasn’t about his productivity techniques. It was for other things, but I did sneak in this question about the Seinfeld productivity system. By then, there were apps for executing it digitally and all the rest of it.
He was completely baffled that this had become such a touchstone of productivity advice. I’m not quoting him exactly. He said some wannabe comic had asked him this at a club years ago. What he had meant to say, the way he characterized it to me, was, “If you want to get good at something, do it a lot. If you want to produce a lot of jokes, work on it regularly.” He was staggered that this would be interesting information to anybody. The quote he said to me is something like, “There are people out there who think that you sit at home and do nothing, and the jokes or the career will make itself happen.”
The essence of what he’s saying here is not that you must obsessively create a streak, never break a streak, and put all this pressure on yourself to never break the chain of Xs in your calendar, but you need to show up very regularly with some kind of consistency to get good at stuff. The difference is important because, too easily, people use things like streaks, unbroken consistency, and rigid habits. It’s super yacht thinking. It’s trying to exert this tight control over life. Whereas to do things with a more flexible kind of consistency or daily-ish, to quote Dan Harris, the meditation podcaster, is incredibly powerful and resilient, and it’s going to be far more sustainable given the way life works.
What I love about daily-ish, specifically, which is not Seinfeld’s coinage, but it reflects a lot of what he was talking about, is not just saying do it whenever you feel like it. In a normal week of your life, if you did something like once or twice that wasn’t daily-ish, but then again, there could be busy periods. You might say that 4 times a week was daily-ish, then maybe you’d want it to be 5 or 6 times most weeks. It’s got that give in it, which is critical for enacting something in life, but it isn’t completely loose and free-floating.
You see other versions of this. James Clear has this idea of never letting two days go by without doing some habit you’re trying to inculcate. I’ve seen someone else with a slightly more mathematically-minded approach of trying to get 5 days of 7 in a rolling 7-day calendar. You can see all these different ways in which people try to implement that.
The thing that matters is the idea that you’re going to keep showing up, but you’re not going to condemn yourself and collapse into a puddle of guilt and self-dislike if some days go by when you don’t do the thing. That’s not a sustainable or effective way to inculcate a way of working. The thing I always think about in my own habits and writing, especially, is that, in some ways, the skill that I am cultivating is getting back in the saddle. It isn’t not falling out of the saddle. It’s a more valuable skill to get good at resuming after a day or two off than it is to do everything I possibly can to never fall off.
There’s a phenomenon for people who are dieting where they’re supposed to eat a good meal all the time. They fail for some reason, and then they’re like, “Screw it.” Allowing yourself the occasional cheat meal is the version of daily-ish. I the long run, you’re still going to accomplish what you want to accomplish, and you’re going to feel better when you can’t hunker down that day.
You have a realistic assessment of how willpower and will work. You don’t hold yourself to something impossible that fails at the first hurdle.
We have a bit of a cliffhanger because, at the outset, I mentioned the 70% principle. I’m sure people are thinking, “What is that?”
This is very much in the spirit of the books, but it’s not in them. It’s a topic of one of my Imperfectionist newsletters. This is the idea. I felt like I did invent it, but then it turned out that various other people had come up with it first, so I tried to give them credit. The order in which I came to this was that I thought I invented it, and then I found it elsewhere.
There’s something very powerful about this number, 70%. If you feel about 70% confident in a decision you’re planning to make, that should be the trigger to make the decision. If you feel about 70% happy with some piece of writing that you’re going to put out into the world, that should be the trigger to put it out into the world. It is this practice of holding yourself to a standard, but making the standard be a significant chunk short of what you would consider to be a perfect standard.
It is also understanding, and this is crucial, that although it is a question of going easier on yourself, by definition, because you’re not holding yourself to such a high standard, it takes guts. It’s a muscular stance on life. If you’re the kind of person who wants to develop your skills, get good at things, be resilient, and all these laudable aims, being willing to pull the trigger on things at 70% is one of those things. In many ways, it’s not easier to beat yourself up and hold yourself to 100%, but it is easier to put things off because you’re not yet at 100%.
I grapple with this to this day. Often, the choice that we face in some aspect of life or work is that this could exist in the world at a 70%-ish quality or confidence, or it’s not going to exist in the world. Which do you want? You can go for a while thinking what you prefer is the fantasy, that in a few months’ time, you’re going to get it exactly right. After a while, you do have to be okay with that level in order for it to exist at all. People talk about this as good enough, but in a way, it’s much better. In a sense, to break the rules of mathematics, 70% is better than 100% because 100% doesn’t bring itself into being in concrete reality. That’s what I mean by the 70% rule.
A muscular stance in the world. I like that. It’s why people like deadlines or need deadlines because they might never ship if they’re a perfectionist. You’re like, “I got to get it good enough. I also think the other thing is that someone produces a lot of stuff that no one pays attention to. What is often the best predictor of having something that is good or meaningful or resonates with people is shipping lots of stuff.
That’s true. That also speaks to something else, which is in keeping with the same thing. Again and again in life, but especially when it comes to content creation, to use a bad term, it’s deeply asymmetric. If you put something out that resonates with people, hundreds, thousands, and hundreds of thousands of people could, in principle, be thrilled by it, and it could bring you fame, acclaim, riches, and all the rest of it.
It was a bit different when I worked on print newspapers. If you put something out that doesn’t resonate and there’s a bit of a misfire, you’re not publicly shamed and humiliated by hundreds of thousands of people. It vanishes. There’s no big loss apart from the time you put in. This is another reason why getting things out at 70% is worthwhile. I’m not saying applies to every domain of life, but in many cases, if it turns out that it wasn’t good enough, nobody notices, and you move on.
Let’s wrap. Do you have a favorite meditation that we haven’t talked about, or is there one you want to reiterate?
One of the ones that I have to remind myself about is this idea of being willing to let things be easy. This is an interesting one. I and many people, but I was probably raised to think that if things are worth doing, they’re going to take a lot of effort, maybe be quite grueling, exhausting, and unpleasant. I was raised by pretty enlightened parents in a way that subsequently became very fashionable in parenting advice, which was to praise your kids for the effort they put in, not whether they get straight As or whatever, to show that putting in the effort is what works.
It turns out there’s an unfortunate flip side to this, which is that it reinforces this notion that you’ve got to effort your way through life. I don’t think my parents meant that at all, but it’s part of what I internalized. There is something very powerful in being willing to entertain the possibility that some challenge you’re facing or some big work project you’re embarking on might be easy. It’s not that it necessarily will be, or not that it’ll be without its challenges, but that you don’t need to go into every new moment of life braced for a fight. Quite often, if you do that, that’s when you get a fight from life.
I don’t know who I heard this from, but someone was talking about this notion of success, especially in the world of business, art, etc. To refer to a Venn diagram, what is it that people value, and what are you good at? What comes easily and naturally to you? I have willed my way through academia. I would not say that many of the tasks, especially the research-related tasks, were easy for me to do. I have colleagues who make it look easy, and it’s easy to envy them in that way.
It honestly wasn’t until I got into podcasting that I saw this phenomenon, which is that I’m pretty good at this. It doesn’t take a toll. I’m not wiped out after this conversation in the way that I am after teaching or after working on a very difficult methods and results section of a paper. There is something about having some security in life where you don’t have to do the things you don’t want to do.
There’s a mindset that I’ve certainly had, and it sounds like you may have had also, where when opportunities come your way to do things that you’re good at, the knee-jerk assumption is that somebody, the client, or life is testing you to see if you can reach anew. Let’s say I successfully sell a book proposal to a publisher, and they give me an advance to go and write the book. Some part of my brain is thinking, “What they’re doing is they’re waiting to see if I can pull this off at a new level than I’ve ever done before. They’re expecting me to disappoint them.”
Book publishing is not necessarily the most heartless corner of capitalism, but they’re still profit-making companies. They don’t do this. They do not exist for my personal development. If you get a book contract, if a podcast seems to take off, or whatever it is, it’s because you’re being invited to do something that people think you already can do. You’re being invited to do some more of it because it’s fun for everyone. That is a very hard lesson for me to learn. It’s so important to see that when you get asked to do stuff in the world, it’s because people think you can do it, not because they’re waiting to see you fail in your attempts to do it.
That’s well said. As we close, for someone reading, they have their own set of challenges. I can tell you this. A lot of the people who tune in to the show are your target market. Besides picking up this wonderful book, what’s one small thing that they can do that will help them with their imperfectionism or help them achieve imperfectionism?
This is a great question because it’s very tempting to try to answer that question with a new productivity habit or a new daily practice. Yet, the honest answer has to be that the thing that you could do is one of the things that you know you want to be spending your life doing more of, but you’re not doing. It’s reaching out to some old friend, pursuing a particular creative practice, or making an email outreach for something that could bring you something good in your work.
Find something that you know would feel meaningful and make you feel alive in the world, and do it for 10 minutes in the next 24 hours badly, by all means, and very haltingly and stumblingly because you’re getting started. Is there something like that, and can you do a little bit of it? Not with any guarantee that you’ll do it for 10 minutes every day for the rest of your life or that it’ll become a big part of your life, but let go into the kayak enough to bring that into the world for 10 minutes.
That’s fantastic. Oliver Burkeman, aka The Burkeman, I’m so glad we could talk. I’ve been looking forward to this. I’m indebted to you for the work that you do generally and for this book specifically.
Thank you so much. I’ve enjoyed this conversation.
Cheers.
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About Oliver Burkeman
Oliver Burkeman is a journalist and author known for his work exploring productivity, time management, and the human pursuit of meaning. He wrote the popular This Column Will Change Your Life for The Guardian for over a decade and is the author of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, a bestselling and countercultural take on how to live a meaningful life within the limits of time. His work blends insights from philosophy, psychology, and personal experience, challenging conventional notions of success and control.