The Dark Side Of Being A Perfectionist - Oliver Burkeman

Why do you think that so many of us have such an obsession with being productive? Wow, these these kind of causal questions I always feel like you can answer on so many levels, right? So, this could be an this could be an answer about the Protestant work ethic, about sort of Anglo-American culture and the religious idea that to try to get on the right side of God you have to spend your life being very industrious. Could be like a capitalism that is a capitalism argument, but it could be a sort of late capitalism argument about how we feel that so intensely today. Could be psychotherapeutic about how so many of us are raised with some kind of sense that we need to prove ourselves that we're going to be that we that we get love from the world for through our accomplishments instead of just being ourselves. Um and you know, then there's kind of more positive and less uh less pessimistic accounts like it it we live in times when it's possible for all sorts of reasons that uh for relatively, you know, ordinary people to do exciting and interesting and meaningful things that, you know, in a very different era they might not have been able to. So, it's it's cool to try to figure out how to make sure that happens. I think about all of those things all the time. The Protestant work ethic was something I was intimately familiar with especially in my 20s. Uh I I even used to feel guilty if something had gone well, but I hadn't suffered enough. in the achievement of it. Yeah. It's a particularly malignant version of what we're talking about. Yeah, totally. That um that way in which it is easier it's actually easier to ex- to have it be hard in a in a in a sort of upside down way and that for lots of us I I expect in this respect we are similar, me and you and plenty of people uh in the audience. Um it's actually feels kind of strange or or dangerous or subversive or something to to wonder if something could actually be quite quite easy. Um I read a there was a comment to a New York Times piece that that where the comment went viral uh on social media which doesn't often happen where um uh a woman was was referring to this concept uh that she'd come to call um uh maximum economy of ass about how um actually it often it's the right thing to do to half-ass things. That's where the that's where the idea comes from, right? The idea that you should always be spending as much ass as possible in the in the completion of a task is just makes no sense, right? It doesn't it's not how it's not how it should work. There should be no shame in the idea that if something comes easily to you it should feel easy to do and then you save your your efforts and self-discipline for the things that don't come easy. Yeah, that's a very good point. It's so strange. I I I wonder how much of it is is that. I wonder how much of it again you hit on another one of my favorites, this sort of weird value exchange that lots of us have with the world that if only I make myself sufficiently useful and valuable then I will be accepted. I remember this is total sort of bro-science reflective stuff, but I think in my 20s what I tried to do was I made myself needed to people. I was useful. I was a very useful intermediary which wasn't the same as being wanted, but functionally it ended up being the same. And maybe I could have been, but because all I was trying to do was get to being wanted through being needed I I kind of begged the question and no I wasn't ever able to connect with people on a on a deeper level in any case because of course all of the relationships or many of the relationships I had were transactional because that was the frame that I'd set them in. Um and in whatever existentially psychologically this is the same way that we relate a lot of us relate to the world. If only I can be sufficiently accomplished then I will be wanted and and safe and secure and and desired by the people around me. I will be accepted and and I if I just reach this particular level of status or wealth or usefulness or acclaim or wisdom or intellect or academic achievement or career goal or whatever it might be then there we are. No, totally. That's so well put. And of course I can I can almost hear like a certain kind of commentator critic from from the left basically saying like, "Yeah, that's because we live in a world that makes you feel like you're going to fall off the bottom of the ladder of society unless you do this, right?" So, there are these kind of real circumstantial pressures to act that way. But what's so striking is that people internalize it, they collaborate with it, they do it long after self-generated. I'm my own tyrant here as well. No, absolutely. And they do it long after and when they're not themselves in a position where that's necessary. And so, you end up with this absurd situation where that we have where, you know, the the ranks of people doing really well for themselves in terms of status, upper ranks of corporate life and and and other areas of the world are dominated by uh what what's been called insecure overachievers, right? People who are driven but driven by a deep sense of inadequacy and are not having any fun even though they've supposedly won this um this very competitive race. Yeah, it's it's very bizarre. I've spent a lot of time especially since moving to America Austin's a hotbed for people coming through. I was at a dinner a couple of nights ago where Elon Musk was there. So, yeah, I'm floating around people that are at the top of totem poles that other people seem to think are important or whatever. And maybe everyone thinks it's important, I don't know. Um but in my experience it's if you look at those people as they rise up through this infinite ladder you're selecting for people I think on average that are more miserable than the average person. I think that the higher you get up, what you're selecting for are the pathologies and compulsions and drives that have caused someone to get there. Yeah. Uh so again, it's kind of begging the like the the the the effect is happening before the cause, right? Or like the cause is what's driving people up to the top of that. Yeah, no, that makes total sense and it reminds me in a totally different context cuz here you're talking about I think money and status and and and things like that, but also just in terms of the old-fashioned kind of fame, right? Hollywood movie celebrity. It it's I think it's fairly obvious to most of us if you look closely that celebrities are those people who have a who lack something that non-celebrities have, right? Which is a ability to not need that kind of adulation. Doesn't mean there aren't some very good actors among their ranks and that they end up spreading lots of pleasure and happiness in the world, but like the drive that takes you to the top there is I think a lot of the time is is is filling a void rather than um just expressing joy at being alive or something. Yeah, uh one of my friends Alex says people look to high achievers to try and find something that they have that the normal person doesn't, but they've got it the wrong way round. The people who are the high achievers are lacking something everyone else does have which is an off button. Right. Yeah. And I think that's true. And I I I see it I see it in myself. I'm going through quite a big sort of personal transformation at the moment. Uh trying to feel feelings, trying to sort of focus on emotion and working out why what are these where are these motivations coming from within me? Like really getting sort of deep down to the core of this. Uh and the more and more that I see it it it it appears to me like well, first off, one of the reasons that I wanted to bring you back on is I've been loving The Imperfectionist which is your newsletter that everyone should go and subscribe to. And secondly it seems like much of your work is basically pointing out the ironies and the paradoxes of control and us trying to gain and regain control. And it seems to me that the relationship the primary relationship is between control and our emotions. Our emotional state is perturbed in some way and control I think like solves it somehow kind of helps us to to not feel feelings so much. Yeah, that that's so well I think you've just summarized my entire field of interest We did it. Better than I have managed yet to do. People are always asking me like to describe what I write about and stuff and I now I have a now I have an answer. Um I think that um yeah, I think this is exactly it and there are so many different ways into this, but it's it's essentially a kind of control that we that the control that we crave is a control that you don't get to have as a human being ultimately and that you wouldn't actually want if you achieved it, right? I mean, you you can see this in such simple settings like, you know, if you for me anyway, if I think back about sort of amazing highlights in my life to this point or people I've met who I'm incredibly glad that I'm that I met. Um in in no cases can I sort of attribute that to um a plan that I made and carried out. It happened, you know, even though I've been obsessed with like scheduling and time boxing and trying to figure out how to run my life years. It's it's never as a result of those things that these uh encounters come. It's always you know, in in spite of them. Mhm. Um so, even just something like that, the way that, you know, half the sort of funniest things that you'll talk about if you get together with old friends are when things went in some sense wrong in with some with some plan that you had. There's that old quote, "Almost everything is either a good time or a good story. Um and that that that that really sums it up. And there's I there's a really interesting historical perspective here. We don't need to go into massive detail, but like I was um I was reading uh section of book by a Zen teacher called John Tarrant um where he makes this really interesting point that like in medieval times, you would not have fallen for the notion that this kind of control over your life was possible, right? You'd be even if you were pretty powerful in medieval times, but especially if you weren't, you'd go through your life and like any day there could be a plague or a marauding army or um you know, famine. Uh you wouldn't have any understanding of the science of of what brought these things about. You wouldn't have been able to predict them. Y- y- if you'd if you'd made your life conditional in the way that we do and you said like, "Well, I'm not going to start building this cathedral until um until we've got all these threats out of the way and I feel like I'm in charge of things." Then nothing would ever have been done. Um so I do think there is this sense in which the modern world like tricks us basically, makes us feel like it must be possible um either through you know, digital technology or psychological technologies, self-help and stuff or something. It must be possible somehow to get this kind of handle on our lives. And then you set about trying to get the handle on your life instead of doing stuff. Yeah, I I think about that all the time that basically we at some point in the last 100 years, humans believed that we had complete control over the environment. And what that led to was a unrealistic expectation of certainty and a particular aversion to anything that looks like a perturbment of of that. Uh um whereas like you say, previously like, "Hey, if you don't have germ theory, chop the leg off." Like we you know what? Just we it's I'm sure that people weren't happy about having their legs chopped off, but like this is just what you do. Like do the bloodletting, get the leeches on me. Like whatever, start the cathedral. Who's the guy that did Is it Gaudi? Is that the dude that did uh the uh Sagrada Familia in uh Barcelona? I believe that's the name of the Barcelona cathedral, yeah. Yes. Uh and that's still going. And he started that in like 198 1908 or something. And it's you know, it's taking 100 years it can take 150 years to finish or something like that. And um yeah, I I our control and like solipsism and sort of narcissism and egotism as a society, the sort of collective unconscious of everyone of like, "Yeah, we've got this. We've got this world thing sorted. We can predict the weather. You know, we can fly around the world." Yeah. But that degree of certainty has allowed our sights our preferences to just expand quicker than our ability to control the things they're expanding beyond. Yeah, exactly. And the the the effect of all those kinds of developments is to make it seem like the moment of arrival at that level of control is getting closer and closer. And that you know apart from anything else, that makes it all the more frustrating when it when it doesn't happen. And it feels it feels uh unfair. Right. Yeah, exactly. It feels like it feels like you ought to be able to have that control. And I don't know if I In my last book I sort of tried to write about this a bit, I don't know if there's been any research done on it, but it seems to me like it ought to be obvious that a certain kind of impatience with waiting in lines or road rage or all sorts of uh you know, anger on social media when people don't just accept your position on things or your presentation of yourself or something must be worse as a result of the fact that 5 minutes later you find out the weather 4,000 miles away in a second on your smartphone, right? That's sort of like, "Look, I'm a god over here, so why don't I get to be a god over here as well?" Um it's much much worse than just accepting that you're not a god, you know, all around. How have you come to imbibe or accept this tension of control in life? I mean, certain kinds of philosophies have been important to me, certain practices. I'm happy to talk about them. I do just want to say at the beginning though that I think that an alarming possibility, it's alarming for anybody who tries to sort of write about this stuff and you know, pass on interesting advice or something. An alarming possibility is that a chunk of it is just life cycle, right? Just I'm the older than I was and the older you get, the more these kinds of things the the slightly the slight worry is that like you can only learn these lessons by just living through life. are kindred spirits here. Before you get into your techniques, I've heard this I I wrote it. And it's incredibly uh disenchanting as a fledgling productivity guy. You know, the first 2 years of this show I was obsessed with productivity. Pomodoro technique and David Allen comes on and all of the every all the things all the things. And then I want I wrote it down in my notes and then I had to write about it longer. And I said how much of the personal development that we congratulate ourselves for is just a byproduct of getting older? Like how much and especially I'm someone that adores agency and intentionalism. And I love this idea that I make things happen. And I certainly do. You know, I've ended I'm Last time we spoke I was in the UK, now I'm in America. I made that thing happen. That was a you know, real hard orthogonal turn and I did it. I made the thing happen. But like real existential realizations and stuff, how many of them just come along for the ride and you're there, you know, sort of whipping yourself or whipping something else into I do the meditation and I must read the more books and the blah blah blah. It's like it's kind of like a you know, when they do studies with drugs and they say, "Well, look at how much better people got when they took the drug." And it's like, "Yeah, but how much better would they have got had they not taken the drug?" It's just a byproduct of time. And I think yeah, and I think that's it's so true. I don't think it I mean, the the sort of maybe this is a rationalization, but the place I've ended up as someone who does sort of writing and talking and stuff in this space of like hopefully having something useful to say is that actually the I can be of use to people for of um that I'm sort of a half step ahead of both age-wise and just maybe in like insights cuz I get to spend my days reading about this stuff instead of only my spare time um and thinking about it. So I think that there's definitely a a situation and I've had been on the other the receiving end of this too, right? Where there's some insight that is waiting to to germinate in you and that can totally be helped along. Um it can happen, you know some months or maybe a year sooner than it than it otherwise would have. Um so I think there's some real validity there. So yeah, who knows about the course of direction? When I say that I think that you know reading a bit more into Taoism for example was really important to me. Maybe it wasn't. Maybe I'd made the change and Taoism was just the thing I wanted to read about. Retroactively justifying whatever it is that you did. Okay, so give us give us some of the things that you do. Tension of control that we have in our lives. What are some of the practices or insights that you rely on most? Well, again, so I'll just I guess it starts by talking about a circumstantial change, but um but uh uh but becoming a parent will certainly uh is certainly one very powerful way of um making it clear to yourself that you don't really have uh very much control and that um both that you can't sort of plan a day um and then have it unfold exactly as you you want. Also that you kind of are glad of that at least most of the time, not not all the time and maybe not in those first few months. Um uh and also that you don't really need it, right? Cuz you find ways to kind of um you know, start the writing once the day clears up enough for you to get a couple of hours rather than fixating on the notion that you always need to begin at 7:30 and work for um 3 hours undisturbed because that just might not be an option. So on the level of sort of practices for managing my life, I guess that has meant um I mean, all sorts of things that uh that try to sort of lend some structure, but in a very very flexible way. So um I'm trying to think of something specific now, but um you know, I I I know it works for some people, but I've sort of largely moved away when it comes to just sort of planning a day of work from any kind of um uh sort of strict time blocking approach. Um the the challenge then obviously is to make sure that you don't just end up reacting to everything and doing none of the intentional stuff. So I go through different phases with that. Sometimes it's a question of um uh you know three tasks that definitely will get done in the course of the day. Sometimes it's just something like, "Well, I'm going to spend 3 hours I I I wrote this newsletter ages ago where I sort of uh gave this um a whole name and uh you know, you've got it if you come up with a rule or a technique, you've got to you've got to have proper branding. Name first, explain later. That's the rule. Branding, right. So I I called this the 333 technique and I just said, "Look, something I find useful is to think about each day I'm going to do like 3 hours or try to do about 3 hours on my main creative work um three different kind of maintenance activities including kind of you know, working out, including email, things that just need to happen for me to keep the the thing myself running well. And then three sort of random smaller tasks that have probably been uh hanging around for ages and and really just need to be done. I I think that I don't care about the specific technique. I think what's really what I've really come to appreciate, I'm not sure how to express this, but is this is this idea that um I I guess it's just the truism that little and often is a good way to address your tasks in life, but it's just this it's just this notion that any practice that I can get into that fairly reliably means I'm going to do a very small amount of writing, but almost every day. Uh anything that means I'm going to do am I going to actually complete three of these uh urgent or important tasks instead of tell myself I'm going to complete 12 of them. Anything that can lead to that sort of gradual compounding and accumulation is always better than than anything else. You see, I think all productivity discussion just um sort of ends up tending back towards these kind of truisms, right? It's like little and often. Uh consistency is important, but that's not the same as like uniformity. It's not a good approach to consistency to um to to sort of be so rigid. rigidity. Right. Being willing to see the whole thing as open-ended so that like next week you'll change your systems and that's fine. Like just um And then another thing that's made a big difference to me fairly recently is uh taking seriously that that the question of like what what I would like to do. What feel what I feel like doing. It sounds terribly indulgent. I still kind of cringe at the idea that I'm uh speaking this way, but it dawned on me a few years ago that it was really strange and perverse to uh approach a day of the kind of work that I do um with with the idea that you couldn't you weren't going to allow yourself to harness the energy and the fuel of like what you felt like doing. Like you you maybe Are you some sort of like like very strange productivity pervert? Are you supposed to whip yourself into submission, walk on a bed of nails, and then you can do your work while you're doing that. You're not supposed to enjoy it. You Right, right, right. It's so odd. And it's like you you you're you're supposed to use your money sensibly. You're supposed to use your focus sensibly. Like you're not supposed to use your excitement for what you do sensibly. It's very it's very strange. Um and um I've mentioned this so many times, but I'll just very quickly say it again. I was really impacted by a blog post that um the meditation teacher Susan Piver wrote years and years ago. Mainly really just by the title of the blog post, which was getting things done by not being mean to yourself. Um where she pointed out, I think brilliantly, how a certain kind of approach that people think of as like down-to-earth and non-woo-woo and just sort of like going for it, which is epitomized by that, you know, Chuck Close quote um uh inspiration is for amateurs, the rest of us just show up and get to work. It very, very easily, at least in the the wrong hands, like mine, um turns into this kind of uh yeah, this kind of hard-driving thing where no matter how you feel you're going to do the thing you said you were going to do with that particular portion of time, even if it's just an incredibly inefficient way of getting it done, because you know, it it it's just not what any part of you wants to be doing in that moment. There could be another time when you wanted to do that thing, and at that time when you're trying to do that thing, you could be doing something else, which means Yeah, I I don't disagree, and I the just show up and get to work thing, I'm intimately intimately familiar with. I've been listening to a lot of Alain de Botton recently, again, as I try to feel feelings. And uh he has this beautiful section where he talks about why people uh cause themselves to suffer more than they need to. He says, "You're not suffering because you need to, you're suffering because you've become uncharacteristically familiar with suffering." And it's like this sort of set point. Uh and it's so true, and I had Matthew Hussey on the show, dating coach, like probably one of the best dating coaches in the world. And uh he has this It's his new book is is really, really great. It's basically a personal development book masquerading as dating book. He's got this line about self-compassion, which I'm going to read to you. "I struggle to believe I'm worthy of moments of joy and peace without first putting myself through a brutal schedule, monitoring my productivity levels down to the minute. Perhaps some people apply this earn your cookie mindset in ways that lead to healthy achievements. Not me. Mine is a mutation whereby joy and self-compassion are regularly outlawed by an internal tyrant who decides when I've been flogged enough for one day. Just when I'm about to collapse, a voice inside says, 'Okay, give him half an hour of peace before bed, but make sure he knows we'll start again bright and early in the morning.' And you've got this idea of productivity debt, which is basically the same thing." Yeah. No, absolutely. I think yeah. That's so well written. I don't just want to skip on to my my thoughts, but it's the but it's the same idea, right? Yeah, so that I'm talking about this sense that I think people have that you've got a you wake up in the morning and you've basically got to put in a certain amount of output, otherwise you haven't really justified your existence on the planet. Um and the best you can do is like get back up to a zero balance, right? That's that that's the the the best you can hope for. And of course, if you're fortunate enough to be doing things with your work that are, you know, at least meant to be enjoyable and interesting and exciting, then it's in some ways it's worse, because then you get to like say to yourself not only like I've got to put in the work, but I've got to do things like realize my potential. Like like these kind of criteria that are utterly um opaque, and like you're never going to be able to sit back and say, "Great, I realized my potential." Right? Cuz that's just a completely open-ended, there's no ceiling uh to that. So you're going to be able to keep driving yourself forever and ever. I think one thing that might be useful to to mention here is that um on the the general topic of feeling your feelings and self-compassion and all the rest of it is I think something else I realized a while ago now is that there is a really good way to navigate whether a piece of advice or a a way of looking at the world is something that you might need. And that is basically if it makes you just cringe overwhelmingly and you don't want to have anything to do with it because it's all that kind of cuz it seems too new-agey or it seems too um uh you know, it it it's it's it's it's it's it's it's just not it it's it's it's just not the kind of thing you're you're used to or you want to do. And that idea of like leaning into the cringe and saying like maybe the fact that I find uh less so today, but maybe the fact that I have found talk of self-compassion so sort of um that I'm so allergic to it. Maybe maybe that says something interesting rather than that I should just sort of uh leave it aside. So I think that's important to say, cuz otherwise you know, definitely uh especially to self-help books and things like that, they don't tend to be marketed at the people who won't buy them because they are in denial of their need for the thing. Yes, they're written in the language and framed from the perspective and offer solutions in the way that the people who will buy that book will be prepared to take that book. It's not actually going to be harsh truths. It's not actually going to be uncomfortable insights, because if it was sufficiently uncomfortable, no one would buy it. At least no one that it's aimed at. Right. Right, exactly. And just to sort of name the elephant in the room, there's a huge sort of male-female part of this, right? There's a certain kind of emotion-focused self-help book that's just completely aimed at women, and a certain kind of like you know, get to work and kick life in the ass kind of book that is completely aimed at a male readership, and it's probably the They should be reading each other's books. Right. Why do you think it's so hard to cut ourselves some slack? Like that is it a fear that if we do it, we're not going to be we're not going to be as effective? Is it the fact that we've just got this internal tyrant inside of us, those that have high demands? Is it this required for validation? Or is there is there something more fundamental happening when it comes to cutting ourselves some slack? I mean, I think it's all of the above. I think one aspect of it that I notice in myself, and I think other people as well, is there's this very strange sort of um issue with self-trust. There's this very strange way in which um I feel like I can trust myself in the moment, and that's why I have to do all this hard stuff to you know, so that future me will thank me. I have a whole sort of um thesis brewing about how we should stop being so kind to our future selves. Um but uh come to that in a minute, maybe. But but um it it's like there's some there's some kind of worry that if I didn't focus on something or if I let myself relax now, it might all completely unspool somehow. And like 6 months from now, I'd just have completely forgotten about all the all the my priorities in life. And it's and it's and that fuels the refusal to give yourself some slack. It also fuels just worry, right? If you're just a warrior, like I certainly have been and to some extent still am. In the mechanism of worrying about stuff is some notion that like if you didn't you might never remember it again or something. So, I have done literally things as absurd and basic as put a note in my calendar 2 months in the future to say like start worrying about this topic again. Oh, scheduling worrying time is the new hot thing. One of my friend one of my friends schedule every Sunday for 30 minutes. That's when he's allowed to worry about stuff. Hey, I love it. I love it. So, yeah yeah, you put these kind of buffers in and you say well, okay. I don't need to worry that I'm going to completely forget about this aspect of my life, which by the way, I never was going to, but that is what is in implicit in that kind of hard uh attitude. Then I can relax on that topic and, you know, get on with something else. It I I do think there is this really odd notion we we often have about ourselves that if we if we gave ourselves an inch, we'd take a mile and it would all be Mhm. a disaster, which is so strange when you think about it because right now, I trust myself to do stuff. So, I can assume, can't I, that the me in a few weeks time will be a basically as as capable. Yeah, I have this really beautiful frame I stole from the same guy I quoted earlier. He was talking about how people commit crimes in order to become wealthy. And he said, do not sacrifice the thing you want for the thing which is supposed to get it. And he was talking about how people sacrifice freedom in order to be able to achieve money so that they won't have when they have sufficient money, they can then have more freedom. And I realized that happiness and success is a better example. So, I took stole his idea and made it better, I think. And I said uh we presume the reason that we chase success is that hopefully when we have sufficient success, we will finally allow ourselves to be happy. But in the process of becoming successful, we make ourselves miserable. So, we sacrifice the thing we want, which is happiness, for the thing which is supposed to get the thing we want, which is success. I'm like, if if this was some sort of simultaneous equation, which my has fallen out of my brain since I went to school. Um I'm I'm sure that you could cross off on both sides of the the equal sign. You could just get rid of success and you would probably be left with happiness somehow. Um and I I think about that all the time. I think about that all the time. What are we doing to What are the unnecessary miseries that I'm putting myself through in order to achieve a thing to create the state that I'm denying myself right now? And Yeah. You know, that you're right. This fear that okay, well, if I take my foot off the gas, then what sort of Zen blissed-out state will I be in? And you know, there's practical implications. People need to still be able to turn up to work and do all the rest of the stuff. But I like, do you really think you're not going to turn up to work? Like and if your drive diminishes, but your happiness increases, what have you lost? Like what what is And it comes to a question of what is what ultimately matters at the end of the day. Like what are you doing this for? Are you doing this for some arbitrary sense of progress and and success? Or are you doing this for the internal state? And this is why everyone's going to get mad at me on the show because I didn't talk about emotions. Now I'm in therapy and all I want to do is talk about emotions. But it it comes back to trying to find an emotional state that you're happy in, that you're peaceful Right. Right. Yeah, I always the way I always think about it is like we have to keep in mind the fact that if one could be completely happy you know uh on an extremely low income living in a cabin or living in a room above a shop or something. If that if if you were completely happy in that situation, and I wouldn't be, so it's not I'm not saying it's um possible, but I'm saying just as a sort of a a baseline, if you would be, then that would solve the same problem here, right? Okay, like if if you could just be happy uh no matter where you were, then that would be a completely viable alternative way of addressing this whole terrain. So, with that in mind you can then navigate because you because if one is not sort of completely spiritually enlightened person, then I guess you can't be happy in that circumstance. You can navigate against that and be like, okay, well, to what extent is this actually bringing me towards what what will uh make me happy. Um Here my 7-year-old in the background here proving a point I was trying to make about the necessity of interruption and not being able to not being able to switch that what's that idea that you have? Is it like a useful interruptions or enjoyable interruptions or something? What's that term? I don't know about the term. I have written about this. I'm trying to write a bit more about it at the moment. Um just this really interesting point that I I guess, you know, becoming a High quality interruptions. That's it. High quality interruptions. Interesting. I don't know I'm not sure that's mine. Maybe it is. It is. Take credit for it. You took it from uh it was something to do with uh Bruce Tift. It was downstream from Bruce Tift's stuff. Anyway, take it. Take it. It's a it's a it's a have it. I'll take it, but I also Bruce Tift is brilliant and I probably take many things from him. I hope I've attributed most of them. Um I mean one thing that um really struck me when I was going through my sort of very control-oriented approach to time management and trying to sort of schedule the day exactly and all the rest of it is that although this seems like a good thing to do at the time, it seems like it's a the way to um focus on what you want to focus on. One of the things it does is it ends up defining many more things as interruptions than otherwise might and making it worse when um you get interrupted than if you hadn't had this very sort of rigid plan. So, uh you know, the the example I gave and it's funny cuz it's like could happen any second now is that I don't want to I you know, I've got work I need to do and sometimes that means that I'm not spending time with my son as I might like to do if I didn't have the work, whatever. But if I have a system for getting through that work, that defines it as a big problem. Mhm. If he comes into the room after he gets back from school and wants to tell me about his day at school, like something's gone wrong with my with my planning system there, right? If it's in And this doesn't only apply to parents. This is like if if your system for organizing your day makes it more likely that um an interruption uh is painful Yes. then then then it's not necessarily uh a good thing. Also really influenced by uh there's a great book by Zen monk called um Time Surfing, which I've uh he's called Paul Loomans, and I've uh uh written a bit about this. Well, he's got a uh a lovely sort of Zen approach to time management that basically is incredibly intuitive, uh very much based around not uh sort of making and trying to stick to plans. But one of his pieces of advice is um to give what he calls them drop-ins, not um interruptions, to sort of cover the gamut of welcome and unwelcome I Well, so much of this is what what is the story that you tell yourself when a distraction occurs that pulls you away from the thing that Right. you decided was the thing that you were supposed to do. And you're also deciding to tell yourself a story about what this thing that isn't the thing you were supposed to do means about you and about your day. And again, I like that's an awesome example. Two two you can use a son. I don't have a son yet, but I live near a park. My friends know where I live. Sometimes they knock on my door and say, "Yo, I'm going to take the dog for a walk in the park." If I have a system whereby one of my friends with a dog suggests a 12-minute walk, and that is something I should castigate myself for, Right. I have a problem with my system. The problem is not my friend and their dog. Which is not the same as saying that you should definitely go on the dog walk, right? But but but if you've caused that to be more disruptive on an emotional level than it than it needs to be, then then that sort of yeah, comes from you. Loomans makes this argument that you should once you have been interrupted, whether it's welcome or not uh and I think he would probably include internal interruptions here, like um thoughts that occur to you that take you away from what you were focusing on, um that you should give them your full attention at that point, right? He may like if you And this is so true. I'm sorry, I won't keep coming back to the parent example, but like if if I'm really focused on something and I'm interrupted uh by my son, even if at that moment I really do want consciously to say like actually no, I'm focused on this now and not and not switch what I'm doing the best way to do that is to stop, look him in the eyes, have a conversation and then, you know, he feels seen. The the moment has happened. It's been given its opportunity to sort of work itself through and then he goes off. If you do the opposite and just like, "No, just leave me alone." Then like you'll get interrupted 12 more times. Dismissive thing is is not going to work. Yeah. Yeah, and And I think that works also for like, you know, a feeling. If you're feeling anxious about something, right? Stopping and figuring that out and going through it in your mind and taking an action if necessary and then going back to your work is going to be more effective than just trying to sort of keep it on the other side of the door. I realized that that internal tyrant that Matthew talks about um I think comes, at least for me, you might and lots of people listening I think might resonate with this. It's kind of like a a fear of fragility about ourselves that our ability to make things happen occurs on such a knife edge that we need this complex system of levers and pulleys and frameworks in order to get ourselves to do this thing because of what I think is a fundamental unconfidence in our ability to do things without that. And then that's how we get from I must work hard to achieve a thing to I must suffer because it's very, you know, if you work super hard, you suffer. But then you bypass the working hard bit and just go to the suffering bit, which is me running the nightclubs and being super super successful event and it's sold out and everything was great, but I didn't feel like I suffered, so I I I didn't think that it was success. Uh and you you sort of bypass that middle section. And um it's a dangerous it's a dangerous dangerous position to get into. And again, how much of this is here is an emotional state that I feel. It's I have a little bit of fear about the future. Maybe I'm uncertain about what's going to happen with this work project I'm on with. Well, okay, what would happen if you were less afraid about your capacity to complete this thing? Yeah. But because fear is absolutely a motivator to do it, you know, everyone that like me handed in their university assessments, you know, on the morning having just pulled an all night all nighter knows. Yeah. But also like given that we now have much longer time horizons for the stuff that we're working on, like maybe there's an easier way to get there. Maybe you can swim downstream. As opposed to what you're saying. Yeah, no, I I think I think that's really well I think that's really well put. I think that um uh that idea that we that that we think we need all this um driving, otherwise that's the only you know, that's the only base on which we could do it. It's related also to another idea that I do associate with Bruce Tift, who we just mentioned, um that although I guess it's quite a old psychoanalytic thought really. The idea that a lot of us go through life thinking that there are certain kinds of emotions or experiences that were we to experience them, it would sort of annihilate us in some way. It would be like a fate worse than death. So for some people this is humiliation or some people it's failure or just mediocrity, um being abandoned, the opposite of being abandoned, being sort of emotionally overwhelmed by people. There's something that you feel like it would be a total catastrophe and so you've got to direct all your energies to making sure that you work and live in a way that that doesn't happen. Um and of course it wouldn't actually annihilate you. There aren't emotions you can feel that would uh kill you and we know that intellectually. Um And uh Donald Winnicott, the the English psychoanalyst from years ago, had this wonderful insight. This phrase said that that uh the catastrophe you fear will happen is already happened. And that um you know, people who structure their lives around the idea that they must not be allowed to feel failure because then people would withdraw love from them or something like it's cuz that happened to them in their childhood, right? I mean, um it's uh so so on the one hand, understandable that they're on edge about it, but on the other hand, proves that it didn't kill them, right? Cuz here they are. So I think there's a really sort of interesting this it it's so ridiculous in a way, right? To be so fragile or to feel so fragile, to think you're so fragile, and for that for sense of fragility to be associated, I think more often with people who in their public bearings are not like you know, vulnerable seeming. Look at how competent they are. They're getting things done. They're getting more done than 10 normal humans put together. Yeah, I I learned about I've been pretty obsessed with this myth that life's duties will one day be out of the way and then you can kind of start doing the thing that you like. And I know you've been kind of obsessed with this, too. You had this idea from Marie-Louise von Franz about the provisional life. Yeah. There is a strange feeling that one is not yet in real life. For the time being, one is doing this or that, but there is always the fantasy that sometime in the future the real thing will come about. One of my friends, Gwenda Bogel, has a different version for the same idea, which is deferred happiness syndrome. The common feeling that your life has not yet begun, that your present reality is a mere prelude to some idyllic future. This idyll is a mirage that'll fade as you approach, revealing that the prelude you rushed through was in fact the one to your death. Nice and nice and nice and apocalyptic from Gwenda there. That's brilliantly bleak. I love it. Um And that again as well is something that uh just to return to an earlier topic, that's something that uh is impacted by the life cycle, isn't it? Because it's not completely irrational if you're 18 or 22 to to feel that the big moments of your life might be in the future. Still great if you can understand that the present moment is where it's at, but it's not crazy for such a person to to look forward. And then, you know, basically you get into your 40s like me, it um it's a little bit hard to maintain this uh this thought that like uh it's going to be the real moment is coming in the future. Uh and that's what I that basically is what the midlife crisis is, I think, in its original to the Union form. It's this like understanding that that kind of focus, not that it was wrong to spend the first part of adulthood um in this sort of very goal-oriented way and very sort of uh constructing a life kind of of way if that's how you spent it, but but that it it there's a point at which that stops being appropriate because Well, again, bring it let's bring it back to emotions. Like what do you know is a successful route to achieving a life which is at least not killed you? Uh I had this uh idea of the vestigial pattern bias. Basically, the things that you did when you started doing the thing you now do are the things you hold onto even after they've stopped serving you. So a good example would be the classic um solopreneur starts a business and after a while solopreneur needs to delegate and and relinquish control, but they found success doing this thing in the start. I I I did this is a thing, and so they hold onto it tighter and tighter even though the tools that get you from not to 50 are not the same ones that get you from 50 to 60 or from 90 to 95. And yeah, it's also called the Einstellung effect. It's called path dependency. The same reason that we've got a QWERTY keyboard, you know, like um we we do things in a situation, the situation changes, and we don't change our approach. And largely I think that is a feelings-based, fear-based emotional grip onto well, I this thing which is change is scary, and this thing has proven effectiveness previously, so I'm just going to I I if I hold onto that, at least I won't be destroyed. And I think that's No, that's absolutely right. It's better than it's it's better than death. And um I think that's so true. It's reminding me of that. a good That would be such a good tagline. It's better than death. Um it's just reminding me of it really I've been through some of this experience with my own writing over the last years, right? Because I think when I you come up through school and university and you get very much into that kind of doing what you're pleasing people, submitting things, meeting deadlines, um being dutiful, doing it diligently and on time. I carry that over into a job at at a newspaper at a newspaper where um again there's deadlines all the time and I sort of really I could grind it out if I had to. And then as I've gone through writing successive um books, I've gone through this experience where I sort of grinding when you have to has become more and more unpleasant until somewhat in the last book and certainly the thing I'm trying to write at the moment, it just literally stopped working, right? It was just like um you know, and I shouldn't say this cuz I think it might uh unnerve my editors, but it but it is like there comes a point where it's just like, oh, that that just isn't going to work anymore. Um I'm going to have to write this the way I want to write it and at the pace do it out of love, bring my whole self to it, and and actually, yes, were that to cause some awkward problems with the process of um you know, the commercial situation which it's embedded, I would just sort of have to deal with them because it's not in my um gift anymore. Uh maybe it even should be on some level, but just factually it isn't to draw on the remnants of this kind of student age approach This neutron this dying neutron star, In a way I'm very grateful that it stopped working rather than just carried on getting worse and worse and worse because a crisis is a gift in a way, right? You get to be like, okay, I have to change at this point, otherwise there's no more books. I have a exactly symmetrical problem with the gym. So I've trained in the gym for 16, 17 years now. I've spent an awful lot of time in there. Uh I have trained very hard on my own for a decade and a bit. And in the last three two or three years, and I got towards sort of my early 30s, I just couldn't really push myself to where I wanted to on my own anymore. And I was like, this is weird. What I've never had a problem with it before. I've always had motivation to go and get up and go to the gym. And for me, one of the things that works very well is external accountability, physical external accountability. Not just, you know, an app or something. It's like a person that's there. There's my um toe-curling fear of looking silly socially can be weaponized against myself to get myself to do things that I kind of want to do, but I might put off if I don't. So, I just got a coach. So, I train uh three times a week with a PT, and my love for the gym has now reignited. I'm making fantastic gains in terms of strength and all of the other things I wanted to do. And it doesn't feel like a heavy lift at all to me. It feels like I I I get up, me and Nick have a chat in between sets. He's logging stuff. He's making sure that I'm doing the things I said I was going to do appropriately. And that's the thing. And when it comes to uh writing, as well, I've got this book project I'm working on, too. And my solution for that is, all right, I'm going to get a writing partner. I'm going to pay a writing partner to sit on Zoom with me every day that I'm going to write. And I can't not turn up. And if they're looking at the document, I can't They're like, "What are you doing? Why are you not writing in the document?" It's just leveraging what, you know, a particular pathology of mine uh that again, that may that may evaporate. That requirement of social Okay, so, this is a fuel which is very specific at this very particular part of time. I didn't need it previously to go to the gym, but I do need it now. And maybe that's going to be spent in 10 years' time, and I can't use that fuel anymore, and I'll need another another solution. Right. And all of this will be okay because there is no rule that says you've got to figure out the way that this works and then stick with that decade after decade until you die, right? I mean, it's like you can you can change it whenever. The the the meta skill is like surfing your own personality changes and and doing Well, what is it that you're trying What we're trying to achieve here? What we're trying to achieve is the outcome. Not the process. Like the the the the the the dedication is not to how you do the thing. It's to getting the thing done. Yes. And also to something to do with the quality of experience of doing it. I'd want to say that yes, it's not it's not it's not about getting to the end of a book project and saying like, "I did that in this way." Or I really, really sweated blood to get this written, right? And I I still run into this problem as a writer, right? I still run into this thing where I and you see it in certain kinds of like bad writer, actually. Um where they're really kind of insecurely displaying how much research they've done to try to reassure you that like they've done a lot of research. And I can still fall into this little bit. When I was writing my last book, 4,000 Weeks, I I went through this moment early on when I thought like, "I don't feel like I have enough good long stories to tell because there's an idea in contemporary non-fiction that you can't really introduce an idea unless you've told like a 10,000-word story about about somebody Winston Churchill's approach to blah blah blah. Right. And I was just And and yeah, and I was forced into this position cuz I didn't feel like I did have them. I had lots of little anecdotes, but I didn't have any of these big stories. I was just like, "You know what? I'm just going to say the things that I think are true uh in writing and see what happens." And of course, um that is uh that is I think it to the extent of the book did well, it did well for that reason cuz I was actually just writing about the things that the people who Well, the book did fantastically well. And for the people that didn't listen to our first one, they should go and get after they've signed up to the Imperfectionist, they should also go and get 4,000 Weeks. Thank you so much. But I was the Thank you. The I I was really not trying to just to get a massive plug in here. I was trying to say that um you know, all these thoughts I had about how a thing should be done were completely irrelevant to like the people that it was for or um what was that It was all just kind of some notion that if I hadn't spent many, many, many hours doing a certain kind of shoe-leather reporting. I think this is a thing journalists fall into, right? It's like the mark of whether your piece is good is whether it looked like you really, really exhausted yourself putting it together. Absolute nonsense. No. I mean, some of the best insights are shower thoughts, right? You can buy I have in my house in the UK a waterproof pencil and pad of paper that you can it's sort of got the suction cup, and you stick it on the on the shower thing. Uh it's supposed to be for love notes. It's supposed to be so that you and your partner can leave each other like cute cute notes in the shower. Sadly, when I was in the UK, I was living with two other hairy arsed folks. Um so, we'd just write abuse abuse to each other and mean mean comments. That's its own kind That's its own kind of affection. That Yeah, that's correct. We were in a relationship. It was a thruple. And um it was It It's so interesting to think about that like unnecessary suffering. Again, you know, we just castigate ourselves. Here I am whipping myself in the hot sun as the you know, I'm Why am I doing this work? It's in service of God or it's in service of like the productivity or the suffering or something like that. And um again, to come back to uh two people I've been reading an awful lot of recently, yourself and Alain de Botton, I think this a kind of frank acceptance of the fallibility of us, the messiness of our thoughts, the fact that things are fleeting, that we will believe one thing one day, that we're uncertain about stuff. It's it's so It is very refreshing, I think. It's very refreshing to hear someone not not pedestalize their uncertainty uh as like a a humble brag, but just accurately depict the fact that this is the human experience. And the human experience is kind of messy, and we really, really don't know. Um all of us are kind of uncertain. And maybe there's not. Maybe there's some people out there that aren't uncertain, but this isn't for them. Right? This is Right. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And that takes another thing as a writer, certainly, or as a any kind of sort of content creator, I imagine, that you have to sort of be willing to say like, "This is for who it's for." And and not for other people. I think that No, that's such a good point, and it's and it and it's really important to say, I think, as well, that none of that is a recipe for living a more mediocre life or just being passive or none of this is about saying like, "Well, it would be nice if we could do great things, but instead we just have to be a bundle of of nerves." It's like all this process of in my limited experience, anyway, all of this process of coming more and more to face the reality of how things are is the path to doing the most sort of outwardly impressive or, you know, interesting things that you can do in life. Maybe it's not true for everybody, but for me, there's no there's no contradiction between like that desire to be productive in some meaningful way and that desire to sort of face the flaws and imperfections. Yes, I think the same for me, as well. You had this quote which I fell in love with that says, "There are plenty of people who extend far too much indulgence, self-pity, and cheap forgiveness to themselves. Just spend 5 minutes on Twitter if you don't agree. But the good news is that if you're worried about turning into one of them, it's pretty much guaranteed that you won't." Right. That's what you're talking about. It's like what? For the people who this is for, that there will be probably not in my audience. They're like a like unreasonably reasonable, excessively introspective group of group of people. Um but if someone stumbles across this video, they're like, "What are they talking about? What do you mean? Like productivity Like obsession with productivity? I don't know what you mean. Like I just do the thing The thing just happens." And more power to you. Uh but for the people who it is for, Yeah. you don't need to worry about being one of the people that doesn't have this problem because by definition, you have self-selected to be the kind of person that thinks about it. Yeah, exactly. And just as an aside, I think this is something that's so wonderful about I mean, I've only I have this newsletter and obviously do these books. I don't I only sort of dip my toe in sort of digital content in a way, but but I it it it the the the numbers game is so wonderful, right? That I that I in order to have a fairly successful newsletter and to really feel like I've got an an audience, like I need I can reach like an a minuscule percentage of the theoretical audience for something. And the result of that is that all into this way of thinking find me find you. And so, I'm always getting emails from people saying like, "It's really weird. It's like you live inside my head." Like, "How do you read my mind?" And I'm always reassured then, all right, I can just write about my weird hang-ups here because there are, you know, there are some other people in the world with those weird hang-ups, and the internet means that we that we find each other. And then it's all you need. There may be presumably billions of people for whom the things I'm writing is just completely bewildering, but like that's okay. Well, that's I you know, I had this insight. This is from years ago. I thought I had depression throughout my 20s, uh and I think I just had a low mood because I was disrupted sleep pattern, a bunch of other stuff. And Alain de Botton's got this line in a video of his where he says, "Loneliness is a kind of tax we have to pay to atone for a certain complexity of mind." And it made me think about the bell curve of people. And that if you're somewhere closer to the mean of whatever this normal distribution of normal people is, if you're somewhere in that, there will be more people like you. And as you start to move out toward whatever the the tails are, there will be fewer people like you. But that's that that's still okay because the size of the world and the ability to access that means that that's still way more people than you're ever going to need to be able to do. And your alternative is to not fully connect with people who aren't you and who don't have the interests that you do and don't think about the world the way that you do. Or to truly connect with still way bigger of an audience than you need. And this is why I get a lot of questions about what advice would you give to a young podcaster or someone that's starting a YouTube channel and there's this, I'm sure you've seen it, kind of um law, canon, folk wisdom that you need to niche down super hard and you dominate a niche and then once you dominated the niche you you broaden out from there. And if I think it's fundamentally [ __ ] First off because so many people believe that that the blue ocean is now not niching down. Right. And the second thing being that everybody is idiosyncratically varied. Everyone is interested in pickleball and 80s jazz and Brazilian jiu-jitsu and muscle cars and you know they've got it's all World War II documentaries. They've got this weird concatenation of just stuff. It's this Frankenstein's monster of interests. Okay, so you're not going to be everything for everyone, but you can be quite a good bit of stuff for quite a good bit of people. And the most important thing is if you just follow your instincts it's always going to be interesting. You're never going to be held to anyway. This is supposed to be a pickleball podcast and now you're talking about whatever whatever. Yeah. And and finally it's going to be impossible for anyone to compete with because they don't know your instincts. Right? They can see what they what you're doing but they don't actually know why. And so like all of these things it work for me it works. Yeah, no, no, and I think I maybe another way of saying that is that that like the niche is your yourself, right? You are the niche. Right. I like that. You are the niche. It's cool. I suspect it's not original to to my thinking now. Take the memes out of it. Take the Um and yeah, at a certain point of frictionlessness in terms of digital connectivity allowing people to find each other um you know, yeah, you can just be yourself and and be confident that there's a bunch of other people like that. I was reading some advice the other day that's about email newsletters that said that you shouldn't write beyond a certain word count because surveys show that people like stop reading after the first 100 words or something and I just got I got so angry about it. Obviously totally self-interested My thing is longer than that, but it's like, no, if you want a 150 word 200 word email newsletter instead of a sort of thousandish word which is what mine come out as, that's totally fine. You should be subscribing to a different email newsletter. Everyone's happy. Same thing with podcast length. The advice I did a ton of research before I started the show. The advice is no longer than 45 minutes because 45 minutes is the max level of someone's and they want to be able to start it as they're leaving the house and they want to finish it before they get to work. I'm like, no. No. I just I thought it's not long enough. I do an hour and 10 and that feels like about the right time to bring it into land because that's me. Like that's just an arbitrary number. And in person it's about double. It seems to be about two to two and a half hours and I bring that into land then. That's just me and that's just my thing. Uh talk to me about this thing that you're doing with the BBC. First off, you're very gracious in in plying off my compliment about your book. But it seems like I'm going to guess you had an outsized impact in terms of positioning yourself from doing that book because Sam Harris is sort of brought you in now as as some Zen teacher of time management to be used on his app and BBC are now using you for for this sort of thing and this kind of this I think front end of the anti-productivity productivity movement. Cal Newport's kind of been a part of that, but slow productivity his new one is very much sort of swimming in the wake of all of this. Um so yeah, what what are you doing with the BBC thing and what's the the fallout what's the blast radius of 4,000 weeks been like? It's been just so sort of weird in a brilliant way, but like it is so you know, right back to the topics we began talking about it is so nothing that I've been able to control or anything that has followed a plan. You are just sort of um you just sort of increase the circumference of your of who's hearing your message I guess and then it sort of turns out there are some really interesting and people on that circumference or people with big audiences and all the rest of it. So yeah, it's been it's been quite strange really. Uh the the stuff for the Waking Up app has been really fun to do because that's sort of short audio talk um is is just a form that I love. That's perfect, right? For me. And that just happened to coincide with their wanting to broaden out beyond I don't give meditation advice on the Waking Up app. I would not be the right person to do that at all. But to sort of broaden out to other kind of verticals about life and time and productivity and creativity and and all the rest of that stuff. Um the BBC course is for platform called BBC Maestro which um you can either buy individual courses on or or a subscription and then have access to all of them including some people vastly more uh higher profile and famous than than me. Uh there's a there's a course on um thriller writing or fiction writing with them Lee Child. Um there's uh I think there's a cookery thing involving Mark Kermode I think. I'm I don't want to start telling you people who are on this platform who aren't on it. But there's like a kind of extraordinary celebrity roster and then me as well. Um And that was that was again really fun. It was a different operation cuz obviously it's video as well. So we were in this um extremely fancy property in Cheshire for a few days filming with multiple cameras. I know you know all about filming. High production value stuff. I like it. Hey, I I think it's cool. If you were to What's that place? What's that super rich place that everyone go Alderley Edge? Was it there? Bet it was. Uh No, it was sort of I'm trying I'm trying to remember the location. I don't think it actually was, but I don't think the I don't think the area it was in was necessarily super fancy, but the just the property was which is where it all happened was sort of seemed quite amazing. What do you What is What is the What is the course? What are you teaching? Uh it it it's the same material. They call it time management, but it's really time management as a finite human being, right? It's really embracing your limitations and trying to sort of find a way to be productive and creative and sane in the context of time that doesn't involve pretending that it's possible to do absolutely everything that doesn't therefore end up sort of you know eating up all your time trying to stay constantly on top of your email when you should be making real time for the things that that move the needle. So it's I'm trying to sort of I I mean this is what I do in other things as well, right? I'm really trying to stress that this kind of hyper ultra sort of realistic approach to the fact that our time is limited and that our control over time and how it how it unfolds is limited as well. That really facing up to that is the path towards you know, actually making progress on things, beating procrastination, um making time first for the things that you actually want to make progress on. Um rather than that it's some sort of admission of defeat and that you've got to keep chasing this next thing. So it's interesting in the context of a course. I'm really conscious of the fact that I think people can misuse these kinds of courses to kind of um procrastinate some more, right? And design their perfect time management system when they should be doing stuff. So it's almost a course aimed at sort of getting people to stop watching the course. Yeah, stop watching the course and go and do things. You're too young, but there was a TV show when I was a kid called Why Don't You Turn Off The Television Set And Go And Do Something Less Boring Instead? And it's basically that's the Wow. that's the idea, right? We've got to take this productivity material and uh sort of crucify it and burn it on the use it to cause people to do a sort of bait and switch to get people to actually do things. Yeah, a couple of friends in internet marketing have a tagline where they say sell people what they want, teach them what they need. Right. So you can bring them in. It's perfectly ethical to bring somebody into the door thinking that they're going to learn to do time management and then kick them out of the building saying, right, now just go go and live life. Stop Stop worrying about how much [ __ ] time you My point is that will be good time management in the highest sense as well. Uh there it is. Oliver Burkeman, ladies and gentlemen. Oliver, I adore your work. I adore your writing. I love your energy. Where should people go if they want to keep up to date with all the things you're doing? Uh just oliverburkeman.com is where stuff about my books and where to sign up for the newsletter. That's that's the main place really. Hell yeah. I appreciate you. Thank you, mate. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure. What's happening, people? Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that episode, you will love my full-length podcast with Dr. Andrew Huberman which is available right here. Go on. Tap it.