Time and how to use it

Timestamps 

00:00:00: Introduction 
00:02:55: Our relationship with time 
00:04:33: Impact of the pandemic 
00:07:04: Control and time 
00:10:03: Control leads to disillusionment 
00:11:46: Saying no and focusing on just one thing 
00:17:24: Digital distractions 
00:20:59: Limit work in progress 
00:22:01: Kanban workflow management approach 
00:23:32: Question whether you're holding back 
00:25:48: Oliver's career advice 
00:27:10: A short clip from The Uncertainty Experts 

Interview Transcription 

Sarah Ellis: Hi, I'm Sarah Ellis and this is the Squiggly Careers podcast, where every week we discuss a different topic to do with work and share some ideas, actions and advice that we hope will help you and us to navigate our Squiggly Careers with confidence and control.   

This episode is part of our fourth Ask the Expert series.  We're covering a really great range of what I hope are very relevant topics, including Uncertainty, Influence, Storytelling, Success and Leadership; and in this episode, you'll hear my conversation with journalist and writer, Oliver Burkeman, on Time.  Time is just one of those topics that I feel like we all talk about, worry about, want to discover how to have more of, how to use it in a better way, and Oliver's new book, Four Thousand Weeks: Time and How to Use It, is brilliant; just a great mix of practical, pragmatic and philosophical, which I think is very unusual.  And Adam Grant has described it as, "The go-to book on time management", which is some kudos. 

I've followed Oliver's writing since he used to write for The Guardian on things like productivity for a long time, and I feel like he's used this book to bring all of his experience and wisdom and learning together into one place, into a really accessible and enjoyable read.  I would imagine that everyone who reads it will benefit from it in some way, shape or form. 

All of our episodes in this series are supported by The Uncertainty Experts, and this is a three-part interactive documentary that's designed to increase resilience and decrease anxiety.  I took part in the pilot and if you've listened to the Uncertainty episode, you would have heard me talk to Sam and Katherine about it.  I can tell you, it's a learning experience like no other and it really worked, not just for me, but it's been scientifically proven to have a positive impact in terms of how you can figure out and find your way through uncertainty.  If you want to get involved, you can sign up to be part of the next series in November, and we'll add the link to the show notes so you can do that.  And if you use the code, "Squiggly", you get an extra bonus discount too.   

At the end of the podcast, you'll also get the chance to hear a really short clip from one of our Uncertainty Experts, so I'd really recommend just adding two or three extra minutes onto your listen today, because they share very personal, fascinating stories of overcoming uncertainty, whether it's a gang leader who's gone on to become a business leader, refugees who've become CEOs; a real unique opportunity for us to borrow some brilliance and to learn from people who we probably wouldn't get the chance to spend time with normally.  So hopefully, you can just add an extra couple of minutes on to your listen today.  But for now, here's my conversation with Oliver Burkeman; I hope you find it useful. 

So, Oliver, thank you so much for joining us on the Squiggly Careers podcast; I'm really looking forward to our conversation today. 

Oliver Burkeman: It's a pleasure.  Me too, yeah. 

Sarah Ellis: So, I have spent the last four or five weeks reading, re-reading your book, coming back to parts of it.  There's lots of underlining and there's lots of pages turned down, and I was really interested to know, when you were researching the book and through the conversations that you've had, what surprised you most about our relationship with time and how we use it; was there anything that you hadn't expected that you discovered along the way? 

Oliver Burkeman: That's an interesting question.  I mean, on some level I want to say that the whole basic thesis of the book, which is just in a sentence, I think, that we struggle to have this total degree of control over time, to feel like we're in command, that we can do everything that's thrown at us, that we know how the future will unfold, that we're masters of our time.  It was a big revelation to me, firstly that that was my own motivation in struggling with time; and also, how much that seemed to resonate with people, and radically different kinds of people. 

So, not everyone is a schedules and to-do lists weirdo geek like me, but also people who just feel overwhelmed by their work and family life, people who are filled with ideas about all the different businesses they want to launch; all sorts of different kinds of personality and lifestyle, all sharing this sense that you're not quite in charge yet, you're not quite in the driver's seat, but that's going to happen, maybe next month if you really put some elbow into it, but you're not quite there yet.  I've been really struck at how near universal some version of that seems to be. 

Sarah Ellis: And, I was interested to know, because the book came out in August, but I'm guessing you were doing lots of the writing and some of the thinking of the book during the pandemic; did the pandemic impact anything in terms of the content of the book or your perspective or your thoughts; did it change people's relationship with time, do you think; or, are these universal themes that really haven't been significantly impacted? 

Oliver Burkeman: I think they are universal themes, but I think it's all come to a head.  Certainly, this book predates the pandemic, but it did change a lot and it was the spur to get it finished, apart from anything else.  And I think what really emerged from, especially writing the later parts of the book in the midst of lockdown and general pandemic times, was yes, this sense that it's a perspective shift that's enabled a lot of people to see something about how they're using their time that they hadn't previously seen. 

Obviously, just the fact of the pandemic, in terms of all the death and bereavement is an obvious reminder of how fragile life is, especially if anyone close to you has had their lives cut short by it; but also, just more generally, for those of us who are fortunate to have escaped that, we suddenly had to stop doing all sorts of things that we maybe didn't realise how much we'd missed them, certain kinds of socialising.  For me, it was singing in an amateur choir, which I knew I enjoyed, but I wasn't and remain not very good at.  So, I was surprised at how much I missed doing that, when singing in a choir became literally the most lethal thing you could do! 

And then on the other hand, I think it's well attested, lots of people have talked about and there's been news reporting about people finding that certain things they're no longer doing, like commuting or remaining at their desk until 6.30pm just to show that they're hard-working, when actually their job wouldn't need it or something like that, they're quite happy to not do those things anymore.  And some aspects of working from home, for those that have done that, have been really wonderful.  So, it is this moment to think again about what you might want to include in your life when it comes to your use of time. 

Another writer, not me, who I quote in the book, brought up the idea that it's a Marie Kondo thing, right; we can decide what to let back in, now that we're slowing returning to something like normal.  It's a moment to be, "Well, maybe that thing is really important to bring back in.  That other thing, maybe that's gone and that's totally fine". 

Sarah Ellis: That's interesting, because perhaps that brings on this concept of control and how in control of our time, and maybe the choices around our time, we really are.  You mentioned in the book, certainly your family; I don't know whether you would describe yourself as an obsessive planner, but you say you come from a family of obsessive planners, so I don't know whether you were distancing yourself from them, or saying, "No, I'm one of those too", but certainly that resonates with me, because I'm somebody who, I love a plan.  I think plans help us to feel in control; I think they often, certainly when I was thinking about, "Why do I like to have a plan?" I think it helps to give you something to aim for and feel excited about. 

But I suspect it can also get in the way a bit of spending our time in the way that really works, or making changes in the present.  So, I just wondered, because you explore this idea of control and time, from quite a few different angles in the book.  So, do you think we need to let go of the idea that we can aspire to be in control of our time?  Do you think we need to replace that with a different mindset that might be more useful? 

Oliver Burkeman: Yeah.  I think the answer to this is that it's worth saying a little bit about what I mean and what we're talking about by control.  It is specifically, and I think this is embedded in a lot of our anxieties around time, is this desire for us to kind of control, or a control that is premised on something that is not possible.  So, I'm not talking about feeling your papers are pretty well organised and you know what your most important priorities are and you have a certain sense of, "Okay, I'm surfing through the workday fairly confidently here"; there's nothing wrong with that at all. 

But I think that a lot of what we're trying to do and a lot of time-management advice unwittingly encourages us to try to do, is to have the kind of control that is premised on the idea that you can handle everything, that you can get around to all the things that matter, that you never have to disappoint anybody, or drop a ball, or keep anybody waiting; that there doesn't need to be any conflict in your life; that you don't have to make tough choices between different ways of spending your time; that there's no discomfort, etc.  That, I think, is the kind of control that we can't have. 

I think the way to let go of that, or start letting go of that, is really just to see how impossible it is.  I mean, once you understand, as I try to explain in the book based on my own bitter experience, that if you try really hard to get good at getting on top of your email, to be the best person you know at processing email, all that happens is you get more email, because your replies lead to other replies and lead to other replies.  If you see these kinds of patterns that are operating, where trying to become the perfectly efficient, super-optimised person is actually just going to make you busier, and actually busier on less important things, it's actually quite easy to let go of it; because, it's a bit like someone realising that they've been trying to, I don't know, make two plus two add up to five, or jump a mile in the air.  There are just things that human beings can't do. 

So, I think when you see that we live in this world of internet inputs and we are finite individuals and something's got to give, you've got to make tough choices and every decision to use an hour for anything is a decision to not use it for a million other things; I could go on.  Actually, that kind of impossible control, it just becomes less of an alluring prospect, because you achieve disillusionment.  It is a kind of way of admitting defeat, because it's admitting defeat in an impossible project.  But I think it's a really powerful and empowering kind of defeat, because it's then, when you're no longer trying to do that impossible thing, that you can really bring your time and focus and energy onto doing a few meaningful possible things with life, and that's when you can really be building a meaningful life. 

Sarah Ellis: One of the other areas that really stuck with me in the book, which is probably the area I found most challenging, because I read lots of the book and you're either mentally or actually, genuinely nodding along and underlining and going, "I either really agree with that or really want to try that out".  And then, there was one bit that I was grappling with, because I think I couldn't quite work it out and how it would work in reality, so I was like, "That's a good one to put you on the spot with a bit more"!   

It might be that I've not interpreted it in the way that you were intending, but certainly there is this sense in what you're writing around, we have got to learn to make hard choices; and by hard choices, you give some really good examples.  It's not just about saying no to things, it's about saying no to some things that we want to do.  That one I thought, "Yeah, I can get on board with that and I think that's a good nuance, the saying no, that so often people find hard". 

One of the other ideas that comes up is to focus, to focus on maybe one thing, one big thing, rather than multiple things.  And the thing that I found difficult about that is, in all of my career and in the job that I do now, that to me felt like too much of a luxury.  That felt like a luxury that perhaps I'm not in control of and I need to have the multiple things happening, and you might challenge me on that need to have the multiple things, but I need to have more than one thing happening at once, because that is the expectations of the job that I'm doing, or the organisation that I work for.   

So, I'm not in a privileged enough position to say, "I'm just going to choose to do one thing brilliantly"; because if you ask me, "Can you describe something where you could spend the next six months doing one thing that you would really enjoy and could really explore and that would give you a lot of energy?" I can tell you what that might look like, but then the reality of making that happen feels almost like a dream scenario.  It felt very far from practical day-to-day. 

So, I just wondered if we could talk a bit more, mainly so that you could help me, to be honest, about this idea of choices and time; and when we say about making choices about doing one big thing, perhaps what might that look like for listeners? 

Oliver Burkeman: It is an issue, I know.  I mean, I don't think if you looked at my work, you would interpret it as literally doing one thing at a time completely, so let me say a bit more about that.  So, the idea of our choices, I think, is simply the idea that we have to choose, both in terms of how we use a specific day or hour, but also just whether we ever get round to doing something, we have to choose between priorities that are both meaningful and both of them are valuable. 

A lot of people interpret this importance of saying no thing with this implication that, if they got really good at saying no, they could somehow say no to all the things that they don't want to do, then their life would just be completely full of all the things that they do want to do.  But I think even if you are in a position where your work life is full of great stuff that you find meaningful and fulfilling, the nature, especially of the world we live in now, is that you're going to have to say to some things that you do want to do, because there are too many things that you might want to do, compared to the finite time that you have. 

So, when it comes to implementing this in terms of doing one thing, I think it's really important to unpack what that means.  One of the ways in which we try to feel in control of time, that is actually very counterproductive, is that we try to have our fingers in a million pies at once, because then it feels like you're taking care of business, you're tending to all of these different things.   

But what really happens, for almost everybody, is that as soon as one of those projects becomes difficult or challenging, like all meaningful projects will at some point, it's much easier to just bounce off to one of the other ones, instead of sticking with it.  So, the more projects that you have on the front burner, the easier it is to never really make progress on any one of them, because all these other ones are there for you to go and take refuge in when one of them gets difficult. 

But then obviously, if we're going to take this to a really logical extreme, you can't literally do one thing at a time.  So, I think one way to implement the logic of this, whilst accepting that in reality, we all have to do a certain amount of things in the same sort of time period, is if you can nominate one major goal at a time in your work, or perhaps you can nominate one major goal in each domain of your work, and have this very clear mental distinction between the current focal goal and the smaller stuff that has to be kept ticking over; and resist the urge to put more and more into that ticking-over category, because then you just end up where you started, with like 12 big projects at once. 

So, when you say it's a luxury, I think the thing to try to see is that it does trigger anxiety.  To say, "There's five really important things I could be doing with my main focal worktime at the moment, but I'm only going to focus on one of them until it's finished and then move onto the next one", that totally makes us anxious.  And if it's making you anxious, because of a certain circumstance where you'll literally lose your job if you don't do these two things, maybe that's a time to spread your energies.  But almost always, actually tolerating some of that anxiety and doing one project first anyway, is going to lead to greater productivity in the long run.  And in a way, you're always only doing one thing at a time anyway, right?   

So, if you've got project A and project B, both clients are breathing down your neck and you feel like, "I don't have the luxury of just doing one and then the other"; well, probably if you do both of them at the same time, you're going to be just keeping both clients waiting an extra amount of time.  If you did one and then the other sequentially, you might end up in a better position, because one client might be really cross, but the other client might be really pleased, and that might be a better arrangement going forward than two fairly disgruntled clients.  So, it's definitely got to be contextual. 

Then, I think on the level of individual tasks, it's a question of doing one thing at a time in that very literal sense.  Don't seriously try to be having an important phone call about something at work while you're also trying to write out an invoice that you have to send, or something like that.  With a very few exceptions, like vacuuming while listening to a podcast, almost always you can't actually multitask; you're just switching your attention between things. 

Sarah Ellis: And, if people are finding that they are a bit addicted, I don't know if that's the right word, if they're a bit addicted to the dopamine, the kind of chemical release that we get from the pings, the emails, looking at social media, scrolling, all that kind of stuff, what helps to break that pattern?  Have you seen anything in the things that you've read, or perhaps even in your own experiences, which has helped to go, "Let's use technology in a way that helps us with our time, rather than works against us"? 

Oliver Burkeman: Yeah, it's a great question, and part of it is these environmental changes.  If you do not have Twitter on your phone, you're much less likely to check Twitter on your phone, because you're going to have to download the app.  Just so that I had a little bit more control over my own, I'm deciding a little bit more when I sit down and do those things on a laptop.   

There are obviously all sorts of apps blocking your access to the internet at certain hours of the day, or blocking your access to social media in pre-planned ways, and there's nothing wrong with those.  But again, I think this is a thing where a perspective shift is far more powerful probably than that kind of technique.  And I write in the book about how I think part of the problem about digital distraction, part of it is Silicon Valley, these terribly crafty ways of distracting us.  But the other part is that we sort of collaborate; we want to be distracted.  When we're doing difficult, challenging work, or having difficult moments as parents or as partners, whatever, it just feels nicer to scuttle away into distraction. 

So again, this is because these difficult things are meaningful and they push us up against our edges and our limits and we don't get to control how they unfold, and a big creative project might not work, your conversation with your partner that you know you need to have might leave you feeling vulnerable; so obviously, we prefer this kind of, "Okay, I'm in control now, I'm just scrolling through my phone on social media".  And again, I think there's a huge power in just realising, in not expecting it to feel otherwise, not expecting a difficult piece of creative work to feel totally great from the very beginning all the way through; when that discomfort arises being, "Okay, yeah, I can expect this.  This is not a disastrous sign that everything's wrong.  This is actually a sign that I'm doing something meaningful". 

Cal Newport, who I'm sure you've come across his work, has this great observation that there's no such thing as writer's block, but only because what some people call writer's block is just the feeling of it being hard to do writing.  So, I think a lot of this just comes down to the understanding that things that matter to us often trigger discomfort in us for predictable reasons; it's not the kind of discomfort that's going to kill you; it is the kind of discomfort you can just hang out with and be friendly towards.  If you're expecting it in that way, it's just much less likely that you're going to run away in a panic. 

Sarah Ellis: And, there are these ten tools that you do finish the book with.  Is there one that you have found particularly useful?  Like I say, I really connected with this idea of, "Oh, that's interesting, single-use digital devices", it took me back in time and bought me up to date and I thought, "Actually, I can really see how I could do some things different", and like I say, might make me a bit nervous, but I was quite keen to try them out.  Which is one that you have maybe tried in your own work and just found to be really helpful? 

Oliver Burkeman: I've found this idea of limiting work in progress to be really helpful.  This is this idea, again it's a bit related to doing one thing at a time, but it's maybe a little bit more forgiving than the idea of just one thing at a time, which is the idea of using some form of system for organising your tasks and your projects that involves pushing yourself to focus on a handful of them and finishing those before you move on to others. 

The example I give in the back of the book is, a very simple way of doing this is to have two to-do lists; a closed list and an open list.  An open to-do list just means you put everything on it.  Maybe it's got 200 items on it and it's crazy; it just keeps getting longer, whatever.  But then you have this closed list, which has maybe five slots on it.  The practice here would be that you move tasks over from the long open list to the closed list until those five slots are filled.  Then, the rule is that you can't move any further ones onto that closed list until you've freed up a slot by doing one of those tasks.  So, it's like a bottleneck in your system that you're very deliberately choosing to take things through. 

I use a slightly different system now related to this workflow management approach, called Kanban, that you might be aware of.  It was originally a Japanese factory approach, but there's a whole word of what's called Personal Kanban, using this to manage your own individual tasks for people in jobs like mine.  And again, it's just a question of saying, "Okay, I'm not going to literally do one thing at a time, but these are the five things on my plate.  Until one or two of them are done, I'm not going to let other things onto my plate, even if they feel really urgent". 

Putting aside literal emergencies, it's just a question of, "I'm going to live with it, but there's these 12 things that I feel I ought to be doing, because there's these five things I'm going to do first".  Getting good at that kind of steady processing of work is extremely satisfying, because after even just a few days, you realise you're actually meeting more of your commitments and keeping more of your promises and keeping people waiting less, even though you are keeping tasks waiting, as the practice itself. 

Sarah Ellis: And, just before we get to our final question, where we always ask our experts for a bit of career advice for our listeners, you actually ask some really good questions in the book.  You have these five questions that you encourage people to reflect on, and you have a brilliant phrase in there, almost enjoy the experience of questioning yourself about the questions, if that makes sense.  I just wondered if you could share maybe one of those with our listeners, in terms of a question that they could go away after listening to today and just think about and reflect on for themselves that might be helpful? 

Oliver Burkeman: Yeah.  I mean, I think the reason these are done as questions is because I think that really deep answers can come from inside you to the right questions, much deeper than anything I can tell a reader of this book, not knowing the details of their lives.  

So, I guess the one which I think is worth talking about here, and I guess it does lead into my career advice, is this question, "In which areas of life are you still holding back until you feel like you know what you're doing?"  I wrote a piece ages ago to The Guardian that became, I think, one of the most popular pieces I've ever done.  The headline was, "Everyone is totalling just winging it all the time". 

But I think so many people, certainly me in the past, are waiting for the time when they're going to feel as competent as certain people around them, or certain mentors, before they let themselves dive into certain things.  By and large, that's just another manifestation of this idea that you only want to take action when you know you can do it fearlessly and with a feeling of total security.  And, once you see that that's never going to happen, it's much easier to take those actions now; and to remember, the only reason that you're the only person with an inner monologue of self-doubt, as far as you know, is because you can't hear other people's inner monologue's, not because they don't have them. 

Again, it's sort of an approach to imposter syndrome that says, not you're not an imposter, so don't worry about it, but actually we're all imposters.  None of us know what is happening in the next moment.  The most powerful people in the world, presidents of the United States, are as ill-informed about tomorrow as anyone else, because it's tomorrow and it hasn't happened yet.  So, I think that it's just really important to not assume that you're going to postpone something you really care about until you think you know how to do it. 

Also, with all sorts of jobs, maybe it's not a universal truth, but certainly all sorts of creative jobs, starting to do it is how you will get the feedback that allows you to get better at it.  So, it's Catch-22 if you don't start.  And so that, I think, is a really useful thing.  So, the question is, to say it again, because questions are more important than my advice is, "Is there some area of your life or your work right now that you're telling yourself you really want to do, but you're not quite going there yet, because you think you're going to be more ready at a certain point?" 

Sarah Ellis: And, is there anything else additional in terms of career advice that you would like to share with listeners, just as a final way of bringing everything together for today? 

Oliver Burkeman: Well, it probably would have been that as the most important thing; but I think another part, which I do also talk about in the book, is just this idea that I think a lot of us can spend a lot of time trying to do the things that we think we ought to be doing with our lives, either that our parents instilled in us, or that we got from somewhere, or that the culture seems to tell us.  And there's a lovely quote from Stephen Cope, the spiritual writer and he's a yoga teacher as well, I think.  He says, "At some point in our lives, we have to face the fact that nobody really cares what we do with our lives". 

Now, that can be misinterpreted.  Hopefully, you have someone in your life, or a few people, who care that what you're doing with your life makes you happy, and it's useful to do things in your life that help the world a little bit in some way, that are of service in some way.  But I think that's really important.  If there's something you want to do with your life, within certain legal limits, you should probably just do it and realise that the people that you think you're going to disappoint by choosing that path, you're not going to disappoint.  And if there is anyone who's going to be seriously disappointed, maybe bearing their disappointment is a price worth paying. 

Sarah Ellis: Thanks for listening to today's episode.  I hope you found that helpful.  As I mentioned at the start of the podcast, we're now going to finish today's episode with a very short clip from one of The Uncertainty Experts, so you can get a feel for what the interactive documentary has in store for you, if you'd like to get involved.  And as a reminder, there's the link to the documentary, so you can sign up, in the show notes and don't forget to use that code, "Squiggly", because you'll get a bit of a bonus discount as well.  I hope you find it interesting and we'll be back with you again soon.  Bye for now. 

"Katherine Templar Lewis: Hello, I'm Katherine Templar Lewis and I'm the lead scientist on The Uncertainty Experts.  Morgan Godvin was sentenced to 20 years in a maximum-security prison.  But like all The Uncertainty Experts, used the strategy she learned in the shadows to become a leading light.  Morgan left prison with degrees in law and languages to become a human rights activist and has just led a historic human rights victory in the USA, changing laws and saving lives. 

Morgan Godvin: When I was sitting in jail, you have no idea when your next court date is, you don't know if the next guard coming on shift is the cruel one who tortures you, or is one of the kind ones who will leave you alone.  So, there's just this perilous uncertainty.  You have to turn inwards and control all of your internal variables.  

One of the things that helped me most in jail, that I have been doing almost every day during COVID, is to redefine productivity.  It's to, in the morning, redefine what is going to make that day be defined as a success.  And so, every morning, I start the day with this list, and I'm just very rigid about it, and it can be the most simple thing.  It can be something that's going to take me 30 seconds, but I write them on my to-do list and as I do them, I cross them off. 

Katherine Templar Lewis: Now, what Morgan's describing here is a very clever emotional regulation system, because when we get stressed, what's called our fight or flight, our sympathetic nervous system response, kicks off.  It's that horrible feeling, it runs on adrenaline, you get butterflies in your stomach, your heart goes faster.  In that state, you cannot focus or be productive, because the amygdala, the emotional part of the brain, takes over and the prefrontal cortex, the decision-making is out of control. 

What she's doing by making a list and ticking things off, is by actually helping her brain release dopamine, the reward chemical.  It then calms her system, she feels in control and triggers the opposing system, the parasympathetic nervous system, our rest and digest system, where everything calms down and we can focus, be our best, and be our most productive.  So actually, it's a positive coping strategy and when we did The Uncertainty Experts, every single person, myself included, admitted we've all put something on a to-do list that we've already done, just so we can cross it off and feel good about it, but actually that's okay.