S3 Bonus - Oliver Burkeman on Finitude & the Freedom of Letting Go

Welcome to the Zen Habits podcast, where we dive into how to work with uncertainty, resistance, and fear around our meaningful work. This is for anyone who wants to create an impact in the world and cares deeply enough to do the work. I'm your host, Leo Babauta, creator of the Zen Habits blog.

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Hi everybody. So, today we have a special guest, an author named Oliver Burkeman. Oliver is someone who wrote a book that I really loved, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. And Four Thousand Weeks refers to the idea that if we live to be about 80 years old, we've had about four thousand weeks in our lives.

And so that really helps us to see that our lives are finite. And then to confront that limited human lifespan and how little time we really have, and actually embrace that. And he says that that’s the key to living a fulfilling and meaningfully productive life. It's a beautiful book. I sent it to my son-in-law as a Christmas gift.

And Oliver's now come out with a new book. I have, what do you call that, an advanced copy called Meditations for Mortals. This is not actually how the book looks — it's pretty nice looking now in the hardcover. But I really like it because it takes that idea from Four Thousand Weeks and leads us through a four-week series of meditations. A series of things to read, reflect on, and put into action. On being finite, on taking action, and a lot of other things. So, dealing with a lot of the things that we deal with in our lives.

I'm really excited to dive in with him. He's an awesome guy — intelligent, funny, and British. So, you know, pretty refined.

Okay, let's go talk to Oliver.

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Leo

All right, Oliver, it is an honor to have you as a guest on this podcast. I'm a big fan of yours, and I'm so glad you said yes to coming on. Thank you.

Oliver

The feeling's mutual. I feel like I've been reading Zen Habits-related things for a very long time. Not to make you feel old, like I feel.

Leo

Don't worry. I have embraced old as a beautiful thing. So, yeah, I was telling you before we started recording, your last book—was it Four Thousand Weeks?

Oliver

That's right. Yeah.

Leo

Yeah, Four Thousand Weeks. I gave that as a gift to my son-in-law, who is in a phase of his life where he's really trying to focus on what matters and not waste so much time. And so I thought it was such an important book along those lines. I just wanted to say thank you for writing that.

Oliver

Oh, thank you for gifting it. I'm always interested in the concept of, like, does that kind of advice, when it's given from your father-in-law, land well or not? I'm sure you have a great relationship with him, but even so, it's interesting.

Leo

Luckily, he took it pretty well. Yes. Actually, any kind of self-improvement, productivity, or self-help, you know, the type of stuff that falls under that umbrella... I'm not trying to pigeonhole your book.

Oliver

No, no.

Leo

But anytime you give a gift like that, there is a danger.

Oliver

Right, you don't want to give the book that says, like, "How to sort out the chaos of your miserable life" to somebody.

Leo

That's right. "How to stop being such a huge mess."

Leo

So, here's something I'm interested in. That book—when did it come out? Two or three years ago?

Oliver

Yeah, 2021.

Leo

Okay, so a few years ago, and now you've got a new book coming out. I have it in my hands, so I'm one of the lucky few. Meditations for Mortals. And so I'll show this here. You know, this might sound like a little bit of promotion, but I'm actually glad to promote things that I think people in this podcast will really benefit from.

You went from Four Thousand Weeks to Meditations for Mortals, and I could see that you dove deeper into themes that were very present in the last book. But I'm curious for you, what had you write this book? How did you go from that book to this book? Tell me a little bit.

Oliver

Yeah, sure. So, the first thing I find myself saying as the book goes out into the world is that it's not a book about meditation, right? If I'm sort of arrogantly borrowing a tradition, it's not so much the Buddha's as Marcus Aurelius'. I guess it’s meditations in that sense—thoughts and insights, maybe.

For me, the focus of this book, as you say, really looks at those same broad issues of human finitude and limitation, and how we can come to terms with that, and even benefit from embracing that. But for me, I think this book is about going from the state of knowing what it is you want to be doing with your life, and the things you want to be including in your day, the ways you want to be showing up in the world, and actually doing it.

One of the things I found in the aftermath of writing Four Thousand Weeks was that writing a book about time and our experience of time and productivity and efficiency, I really had a strong feeling of like, "Okay, I think I've understood something important here." But it doesn't follow that you're going to live differently. And I think that was even true for some readers who said, "Okay, I really benefited from the perspective shift, but then what?"

So, I wanted in this book to really address this question of action and how to sort of rescue the idea of action from productivity culture and hustle culture and all the rest of it, and explore whether there's a way to embrace ideas of peace of mind, presence, calm, and stillness that are consistent with doing stuff. Because it's important to do stuff, and it's okay to be ambitious and want to do stuff. That's really the territory in my mind.

Leo

I love that. Okay, well, I want to dive into that theme, but before we do, you mentioned a word, and I’m going to say it wrong because I’ve only seen it written until you just said it: finitude?

Oliver

Right.

Leo

Is that the right way to say it?

Oliver

I think so. Several people have accused me of inventing this word. I certainly didn’t. But it’s just the state of being finite, right? So that’s what it means. I think it’s finitude.

Leo

Finitude, okay. It was a big theme of your last book. I’ll confess, I haven’t fully read this book yet, but it seems like it’s a big theme of this book. Tell me how you hit upon that as a theme for yourself.

Oliver

Wow. I mean, obviously—and I’m sure you know this from the inside—anything that looks like advice writing is, on some level, a record of the author’s own struggles, maybe even the advice they need to hear as much as anybody else. We can talk about that, but I don’t think there’s any problem with that, actually. It’s just not always admitted, I suppose.

For me, the finitude thing is really a long, slow process of realizing that wherever I go wrong with how I’m using my time, or where anxiety and worry has consumed me, one way of understanding what’s going on in my life and other people's, is a sort of attempt to not feel what it means to be a finite human. An attempt to not fully inhabit our state of being limited in time, limited in control over that time, limited in how much we can understand anything or other people.

To sort of push against those built-in limits, trying to get to this place where I would finally be on top of everything or know what I was doing. But it’s always in the future, of course—you never actually get there. And how that sort of struggle is really the core of a lot of mental and psychological suffering.

So, sometimes people say, "This is a book about death and mortality." Well, sure, all of this is true only because we die, but there are other people who've done really great amazing writing on, literally, death and mortality. I think of the distinction of finitude being more like... it is what is to be alive given that we die, rather than focusing on death as it were. That's the core of it for me.

Leo

Death is a real limit for all of us. What I hear from your books is that you embrace that limit. You have the idea that there's a limit here, so let's make use of these limits.

Oliver

Absolutely. And I think that one way of understanding all sorts of pathologies of time—procrastination, impatience, anxiety, worry—all the things we would like not to be afflicted by, is that they are all attempts to deny those limits. They're efforts to maintain this fantasy of one day not being in this position. The psychotherapist Bruce Tift talks brilliantly about being “claustrophobic, imprisoned, and constrained by reality.”

The big discovery for me, which I have to keep on making again and again, and which is at the core of this new book, is that actually just completely or even partially admitting defeat and surrendering that struggle is not only more in tune with reality and a path to peace of mind, but it's actually a path to getting more meaningful stuff done.

Because you're no longer distracted by this futile struggle to do everything or feel completely in control. And suddenly it's like, "Oh, wow. Okay, I can just launch interesting projects, commit to relationships, go on trips, and I don’t need to wait for the time when it’s all going to feel like I know what I’m doing."

Leo

Yeah, I'm still waiting for that time. It’s interesting, talking about embracing these real limits. I remember hitting upon a similar idea years ago. I called it “haiku productivity,” because the haiku has a limited number of syllables. You can't write pages and pages of a poem. The constraints force you to choose. I found power in that—forcing yourself to choose, realizing that we only have a certain number of hours in a day. There's power in willing to curate.

Oliver

Yeah, no, exactly. And just to say, when it comes to our situation as humans, you’re already choosing anyway. It’s a question of doing that consciously. A lot of what I’m pointing at is the empowerment that comes from more fully recognizing how things already are. So, it’s not about me saying, “Hey, you should only do one thing at a time.” It’s more about saying, “Do you see that, by definition, you already are only doing one thing at a time?" And what can come from stepping more authentically into that.

Leo

Beautiful. Okay, so taking these realizations of our limits and deciding to choose, and then actually putting it into action. I’d love to dive into this. You know, one thing that was funny when we were looking at what to talk about in this podcast, you put a note to the table of contents of the book as a good place to start, and I read it, and I’m like, "Oh my God, there’s so many topics here that are so incredible." I don’t think I can actually cover all of it, so we’re going to have to choose.

Oliver

Yeah.

Leo

So, here’s how I’d like to start with this. You talked about, you know, the writing that we do, in large part being advice for ourselves, and I love that. You know, you talked about Marcus Aurelius' "Meditations"—from what I understand, it was advice to himself, right? Just reminders of his own mortality and how he wanted to live life.

So in that sense, I’d love to hear how this book is advice for you. And specifically, what I’m curious about is: what struggles do you have around putting this stuff into action? Where, you know, this book is good advice for you?

Oliver

Yeah. So, there’s sort of two levels to that that come to mind anyway. On a high level, it’s been a really interesting and important thing for me to realize that all this good stuff about psychological growth and change and, hopefully, you know, getting better at doing life in some way, is just an ongoing, open-ended process that really requires endless reminding. And to feel no shame about the fact that you fall off the wagon and get back on it, and that that’s just the system working, rather than you not doing it right.

So, the structure of this book, which is in four weeks of short, daily chapters... I don’t really imagine I can control how people read it, but one way you could read it is a chapter a day, for a month—just a short chapter each day in the morning, maybe. It’s designed to have that feeling—to be a sort of “retreat of the mind,” is the phrase that I use. To be something that keeps going at these themes and sort of wears its way into you, under your skin. And so, the structure of it is advice for me, in the sense that embracing that way of doing things is important to me.

Leo

I love that.

Oliver

Then, in terms of the four weeks, they’re loosely designed as a journey that I think I’m on myself. The first one, the first week is called "Being Finite." It’s about confrontation, really, with just the stark facts of what it means to be limited.

The second week is called "Taking Action," and it’s about taking bold and meaningful action in that situation of being a finite person.

The third week is called "Letting Go," and it’s about all the different ways in which actually a crucial part of this is unclenching and getting out of the way of action. So, not making it happen, but letting it happen, the idea that actually a lot of action happens—and the most meaningful things happen—when we allow them to happen naturally. The problem is that we’re in their way with our controlling tendencies, rather than needing to work up the motivation to do them.

And then the fourth week is called "Showing Up," and the implication is that’s the culmination of this journey—to participate more fully and vividly in life. Anyway, that’s a long way of saying, it’s week three that is my problem.

Leo

Week three. Okay. That’s the one I wanted to ask about anyway!

Oliver

The letting go. Definitely. I’m sure I’m not alone among your audience in being someone who is, historically, in my life anyway, definitely intellect-first, brain-first, trying to schedule things right...

Leo

No, I think you’re the only one!

Oliver

Yeah, maybe it’s just me that's just a freak! And to sort of take that top-down idea, and of course, it’s got this very deep undertow of like, "Well, I must do this. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be justifying my existence, or things will go terribly wrong if I’m not really clenching the steering wheel the whole time."

So yeah, that’s where it’s really advice to me. I mean, it’s advice to me in all the weeks, but some of the weeks, I feel like it’s advice that I have managed to internalize. And then there’s parts where I’m still very much internalizing.

Leo

Okay, so let’s dig into this week a little bit—the letting go theme. You talked about a lot of times action flows naturally if we get out of our own way. So, what are some of the ways not only you get in your own way, but like, how we tend to get in our own way? And like, how does that actually work? Because it’s very counterintuitive that letting go will actually let action flow a little bit better sometimes.

Oliver

There’s a really lovely observation, which I quote in there—each of these days has a quotation at the top of it that is closely related—and there’s a quotation in there from the Zen teacher Kosho Uchiyama, who says—I’ll see if I can get this right—“Life, completely unhindered by anything, manifests as pure activity.”

The starting point here is the idea that everything we either understand or intuit about change being constant, and the world being an interconnected web of people and energies and everything, you know, all points to the idea that if you can relax your grip a bit, it isn’t the case that you’ll just end up sitting on the couch all day doing absolutely nothing.

Things want to happen through you. That’s sort of the nature of human psychology, and maybe it’s the nature of reality in some deep and spiritual way—I don’t know. And so, I really think it’s important to see how often the problems we have in building what feels like a meaningful life are really through—it’s not the absence of something, namely motivation or energy or something—it’s the presence of a sort of barrier.

So there may be people who experience, for example, procrastination as just a sort of absence of any energy or motivation. But I think it’s pretty clear, at least for a lot of people who are troubled by that, which is, you know, ultimately everybody, I think, is troubled by some version of it. It’s some emotional struggle that’s going on. It’s an inhibition. It’s something that you’re doing that is getting in the way because your standards are perfectionistic, or because you think the stakes are so high that you don’t dare to act, and there are a hundred different reasons. But they all have that idea of standing in the way.

A couple of concrete examples. There’s a chapter in that week about how difficult it can be—ironically, for a certain kind of person, of which I am one—to allow the possibility that what you’re doing, some challenge you're facing, might be a lot easier than you expected it to be. So, Elizabeth Gilbert has this line about how you have to be willing to let it be easy. And then Tim Ferriss has this sort of question, “What would this look like if it were easy?”

And in all these cases, it's quite scary for a certain kind of person, I keep saying that—a somewhat neurotic, somewhat controlling, somewhat anxiety-inclined person—to actually ask, "What if this were easy?" Or, a related question when it comes to productivity, especially: “What do I feel like doing right now?” Not what the productivity system dictates that I must do, but like, “What do I actually feel like doing?”

And I’m not claiming that you can go through your whole life never doing anything you find somewhat unpleasant. But it’s really quite subversive, I think, for a lot of people to actually allow that possibility. And yet, it makes total sense, because if you do desire to do certain things, what a shame to have a productivity system that is based on systematically suppressing that when you could be co-opting those energies, you know, and letting them power you forward.

Leo

It’s so opposite to how we’re trained. We’re trained to do what we’re supposed to do, not what we feel like doing. It’s like we’re trained from a young age out of that.

Oliver

Yeah, I go on a little rant at one point about the focus on a lot of personal development stuff, about taking decisions that your future self will thank you for. Right? This is like a big deal. And it’s not bad advice—I’m not saying that’s all wrong. But I do think that deferring gratification is what that’s about. It’s like being good at the famous marshmallow test, right? Where you can resist one marshmallow because you’re going to get another one later.

This is all good stuff. But I think that at least for the kind of people who are drawn to that kind of thinking, it’s pretty likely that your problem is the opposite, right? And I certainly think that’s been my problem in life, earlier. Deferring gratification too much, turning your whole life into this kind of relentless grind towards the future point at which you get all the marshmallows and never eating a marshmallow. Which, you know, it’s a sugary snack, so it’s not a great example I suppose.

But if the meaning of life is metaphorically to eat marshmallows, then spending your whole life acquiring them and never getting to the eating point is just as much of a mistake as being so completely irresponsible with your time that you're storing up trouble for the future.

Leo

Yeah, it’s almost like we are taught that tool to delay gratification at a young age, and then every time we see a problem that we don’t know exactly how to solve, we apply that tool. And so we’re applying it pretty much all the time.

Oliver

Right.

Leo

So we never eat the marshmallow. I love that idea.

Okay, so relaxing and letting go... letting things be easy is another thing that is actually not what we're taught. We’re actually taught to devalue what’s easy and only value things if they’re really hard. And so it seems like if you decide “Okay, I’m going to let this be easy”, that's a scary thing.

Oliver

Right. And it has this moral layer, that I think really gets in the way, where we feel like we need to justify our existence on the planet on some level—and I talk about this in another part of the book—it’s the idea of "productivity debt." The idea that you wake up in the morning and you feel like you haven’t quite earned your right to be here unless you get through a certain amount of output in the course of the day.

And that’s associated also on the easiness question with the feeling of effort. It’s pretty easy, and it works in both directions. If you do something in 20 minutes because it comes naturally to you, and it’s no effort, you demean it and think it’s not valuable. So, people who have a natural skill for something are very often prone to not respect that skill because it does come too easily to them.

On the other hand, we’re prone to think that if you spent the whole day really effortfully doing stuff, then that stuff must, by definition, have been useful and meaningful stuff. But maybe it wasn’t, right? And maybe a better day would have been spent, you know, putting in a couple of hours of work and spending the rest of the day at the beach.

Leo

It’s the wrong metric.

Oliver

Right. It’s the wrong metric. And we’re doing it a lot of the time because we’re seeking this state of—it’s quite a religious idea, really—we’re trying to save our souls somehow through our work. It is specifically the religious idea of the Protestant work ethic that has done so much damage to Western culture, anyway.

Leo

Okay, I love all of this. Thank you for sharing all of that. I can relate to a lot of it.

The next part I want to get into is... there's a couple of things here that you touched on...trying to see which part. You'll just have to tell me...

Oliver

No, it's fine.

Leo

Some common problems that people I talk to face a lot, and I’d like to just get your take on them. We're going to do the opposite of your book—your book spaces out this kind of learning, and I'm going to try and cram it all into one podcast.

Oliver

Yeah, it’s very important to be as efficient as possible in life.

Leo

Exactly. We’re going to put as much value into this podcast as possible.

Oliver

Optimize, optimize, optimize.

Leo

I love that we can touch on this, and people can actually go through the journey in your book. By the way, I have an advanced reader's copy, which I’m not allowed to sell—it’s very clear—but I think I can give it away. So, I’m going to give this book away to one of our readers. Is that okay?

Oliver

It is, although I think we now probably have a—I shouldn't make this promise on the recording if I can't back it up—but I think we now have lovely hardback finished editions. And I think we could arrange for a reader to receive one of those, but maybe don’t hold me to that until I check with the publisher.

Leo

Well, I just really like the idea of passing on books. I read them, and then pass them on. So I’m going to give this away to a reader. And if you want to give me a hard copy to give away, too, let me know. So, if you want a copy, email me at [email protected]. I might give you one.

Okay, so here’s a problem that people get a lot. This is going to be really basic for you but a lot of people this. I have a million things. I’m overwhelmed because my to-do list is never-ending. I took a break over the weekend, and my inbox is flooded. I have so many things to respond to, and it just feels like I’m trying to keep my head above water. So feel free to just take that as a going-off point.

Oliver

How to respond when one is in that situation. And it's not that basic. I mean, it's basic, but I get it. And actually an ironic thing I’ve found—it’s a lovely problem to have—but because Four Thousand Weeks did better than I expected, and now there's this book, it’s like I write all this stuff about handling overwhelm, and then I get more overwhelmed putting it out there. And I’ve had to really sort of learn my own lessons again.

So, one is always dancing between perspective shifts and techniques and methods. And I actually think—I have a whole thing about how I think the perspective shifts are ultimately the more practical and actionable things. So I’ll start with that.

I think that when you’re really overwhelmed with a large amount of little stuff in that way, that’s the moment when it’s incredibly easy to think to yourself, “Okay, all these ideas about being chilled out and making choices and being calm are great, but first of all, I’ve just got to get all this email out of the way.” And it’s like, “This will be an exception few days—I’ll just get back in control.”

And, you know, there are people who can do that in a calm way, but for many of us, I think that is really the first wrong step, right? That’s a mistake. It’s right then, in the middle of the overwhelm, that it can be really helpful to stop and take a breath and see that, while it might be an unusual moment in terms of your email inbox, basically what we’re dealing with here are infinite supplies of things. You’re not going to get to the end of the emails or the to-do’s or anything—that’s not how it works for finite humans.

And so, if it is important to address yourself to, for example, email, then the spirit in which one can—and I try when that happens to address myself to it—is not one of, “Let me tighten all my muscles and furrow my brow and really try to get through to the end and then stop.” Because of course, the other thing that happens with email is, you know, half the people you reply to reply back to you. So, it doesn’t stop.

Leo

By the time you’ve done two more emails, the responses are coming in.

Oliver

Exactly. So, a very simple and obvious way to do that—and I’m not telling anyone anything they don’t know, but maybe re-contextualizing it a little bit—is to take a time-first approach and to say, “Okay, 20 minutes of focus on my email, then a little walk around the block, then another 20 minutes of focus on my email.” Something about thinking in terms of little portions of time, I think, is a good and simple way to sort of reframe away from that kind of conquest mode.

And then, I think the other thing is to really try to tune into that question of, “What would I like to do right now?” When you’re in a real psychodrama with this stuff, it can feel like, “Okay, I just don’t want to look at my inbox.” And I’ve done this—you know, you avoid it, and you make the problem worse because you just don’t want to go there. And you think, “What I actually want to do,” you tell yourself, is like, “surf social media,” or, you know, just zone out, whatever.

In fact, if you get a little bit quiet and relaxed and tune into that thought—"What do I want to do, really?”—very often what happens is, “Okay, well, maybe actually what I really want right now is to go on like a 20-minute stroll around the neighborhood and just sort of reset.” And then you come back and say, “Actually, I would like to address myself to some of those emails.”

I think the really extraordinary thing that I find is that when you really deeply connect to that question of what you want to do, you find that actually you do kind of want to be a responsible member of society, and pay your bills, and keep your promises to people, and answer emails.

Leo

It’s not just fear-based.

Oliver

No, exactly. And understanding that what you're doing is swimming in an infinite sea. You're not drinking down a glass of water that you’ll get to the end of. You're just swimming in an infinite sea and applying your energy and attention in the way that seems wisest at that moment.

There’s a whole other interpersonal level to this. A lot of what's going on here, a lot of the time, is the thought that other people are mad at you or something. And that can happen because people are in jobs where if they don’t respond quickly to all their emails, they get a lot of grief. But there is a role here as well for like.... don’t go exaggerating your own importance or the degree to which the world's going to collapse if someone doesn’t get a response to an email for another hour or two, because it's probably not going to.

Leo

Yeah. Well, there might be some truth to it. We take that truth and exaggerate it. It just turns into a big fear of like, “Ah, everyone’s going to be so upset with me.”

Oliver

Right. I think it’s important to be sensitive to the fact that, like me—and I think you are—people with an extraordinary degree of autonomy over how the day goes. And there are definitely people in much sort of tighter situations when it comes to having to be responsive to email. But even there, you don’t have to bring this existential layer of like, “I’m not a good person if I don’t get through all this.”

Maybe in a much more sort of down-to-earth way, the terms of one’s employment are such that you have to answer all emails from a certain person or category of person. But you still don’t have to feel like you didn’t earn your right to exist if you don’t do an impossible amount of that.

Leo

Okay, beautiful answer. Thank you for sharing that.

I’d love to go back to this book, but the angle I’d like to look at it from is: the phase where you were writing it. I’m sure it was a few months ago, at least. So you’re in the phase of creating this book, and in it, I’m sure you’re facing some of the same problems that you’re writing about.

Oliver

Oh, yes.

Leo

And so, I’m curious, of there was anything in the book that you employed to actually create the book? I’ll stop with that question. There’s another thing I have, but that’ll be the follow-up question. Yeah, anything that you used to create the book.

Oliver

Yeah, totally. This is a really on-point and perceptive question because when I say that I’m writing advice for myself and I’m talking about action, obviously trying to write a book is a big creative action where all these issues come up and it becomes very central in everything we’ve been talking about.

So many of them, but I will say, just on the letting-go front. It sounds a little bit like I’m bragging or something, but Four Thousand Weeks did quite a lot better than I was expecting it to do and has been read by quite a lot more people than I would ever have imagined. That led to a completely predictable, very cliched kind of freeze response, right? Where you sort of think, “Oh my God, I’ve got to...".

Firstly, there’s that thing where if you meet a standard, that then becomes the minimum standard that you’ve got to meet next time, which is very oppressive. And then you also just think, “If I mess up this time, lots of people are going to be watching who previously weren’t.”

Elizabeth Gilbert, whose book "Eat Pray Love" was a success on a much bigger scale than anything I’ve ever written, has written very vividly about this. I might not be on anything like her scale, but the feelings are quite similar to the ones she expressed. It's like, "Millions of people have read 'Eat Pray Love', I can't write another book for millions of people, I've got to write it for one or two people."

Leo

Thanks for sharing this, by the way. I think it’s little talked about. I know Elizabeth did talk about it—I’m saying it like I know her, you know, me and Liz. But it’s important to hear about, and I think we can dismiss it as, like, “Oh, those are good problems to have,” but they’re real problems.

Oliver

Absolutely. Both are true—good problems to have, right? Still real. And, one of the things that got me past that phase was doing all sorts of free-writing exercises. You know, where you just set a timer, keep your fingers moving, and cover the page. Of a sort that, honestly, I had always been really disdainful of. I’m like, “Oh, they’re for amateur writers, and I’m a professional. I just sit down and do what I need to do.”

That willingness, in an early stage of this project, to just make a mess on the page—I say early stage because it didn’t remain just a mess on the page; it went through a lot of thinking and reconceptualizing and then work by some brilliant editors—but the willingness to do that, even when literally nobody was ever going to see it, was a layer of... I feel like I’ve, in many ways, gotten past being a cramped and anxious perfectionist. But no, it turns out there was really another level there which was I was still expecting that the first time I sat down to write a sentence, it should basically be a coherent and good sentence.

Leo

That’s fascinating. I don’t think this is talked about enough, but what you’re talking about is exactly what someone faces when they first start writing. Like, “I can’t make a mess. It has to be quality stuff.” Which, as experienced writers, we know that doesn’t make any sense, right?

Oliver

Right. Yeah.

Leo

So they’re facing that, and the exercises to get them over that. You’ve overcome that, and now at this new level of success, it comes back, and you use the same tools.

Oliver

Totally, yeah, absolutely. There’s always another level of that kind of problem. There’s a book called "Deep Free Writing" by a writer called Steven Lloyd Webber, which was very significant at just the right moment. He writes about doing 24-hour free-writing marathons, where he and a friend booked a motel room, took their computers, and just wrote for 24 hours.

Something like that will really snap you out of the idea that what you’re writing has to be good from the start. He’s talking—and I experienced this—about a switch from saying, “I’ll sit at the computer, and once I think of something good to write, I’ll write it,” to saying, “I’ll sit at the computer and write, and maybe one or two of those things will be good.” The idea that you write before you’re confident that there’s any particular good idea to write is a very powerful reframing.

Leo

I love that. So that actually got you over that perfectionist mindset, like “I need to write something of the same quality and to that standard.”

Oliver

Yeah, and I think what came out—I hope—is of the same standard in some sense. But I think it’s more conversational and more candid. It’s more direct and less of a writing performance, as it were. And both styles have their value. I’m not repudiating the last book; I just think this was the next thing that needed to come out of me.

Leo

I love it. Okay, here’s the follow-up question I have. You talked about having some freedom over your time, which is a beautiful luxury to have. But it can also come with some difficulties. Having so much freedom over your time can actually be a difficulty for a lot of people.

I’m curious, for you, someone who is working with finitude and some of these concepts—in the phase where you were writing this book, what did your days end up looking like? Were you writing every single minute of the day? Were you eating marshmallows and going to the beach? Tell us more.

Oliver

Well, we live these days in sort of quite remote hills of Yorkshire in Northern England, so actually the beach isn’t that far—it’s about 45 minutes away. But it’s not the kind of beach people on the Pacific time zone imagine when you say beach. It’s a sort of windswept and freezing beach.

I have a lot of freedom in the middle of the day, basically. But we have a seven-year-old son, and I’m part of the family. A lot of becoming a parent for me has been about understanding both the limits of my control over my time and the surprising benefits of not having that control.

But yeah, there’s a big chunk of most days when I do broadly get to decide the order that things go and where I am when I’m doing them. And I also write about this in the book. What it always comes back to, at least in the good times—there are definitely scattered times when I’m not focusing enough—but what it always comes back to in the good times is three or four hours of really proper, good focus on the main thing that I’m doing, the writing.

And that’s not just writing. It could be walking around up in the hills, making notes, or drawing little nerdy diagrams. All part of my writing process. But it’s not an attempt to do that for ten hours a day, even when I have ten hours to dictate how they go. It’s a gradual recognition that even at the most sort of deadline-approaching, high-stress moments of a project like that, it doesn’t actually help to go all-in for hours and hours and hours.

There’s an academic, Robert Boice, who might have come across, who’s done all sorts of research into academics’ writing habits—university professors—and found that the people who actually produce the most are the ones who make writing into a modest part of their daily routine and don’t just say, “Well, okay, three hours are gone, but I’m on a roll, so let’s keep going as long as I can.” Because you are sort of reinforcing an impatient, rushing urge there. A feeling that you need to get to the end of it. And there’s something very powerful about putting in a few hours and then stopping, even if you don’t quite feel that you want to stop.

And then, as one author whose name I’m forgetting right now—she’s a female novelist whose name is escaping me—has written brilliantly about how, when you stop that period of focus, if you possibly can, you should go for a walk, take a shower, or just not go to your emails. You should leave some little gap. That’s when you’re probably going to get all the best ideas of that session—they’re going to pop up at that point. So, I try to work that way. On a really good day, it’s three or four hours of focus, a walk, and then more administrative things.

Leo

How would you decide what your stopping point is? If you have this idea of wanting to stop before you’ve fully used up all your creative energy, how do you determine it?

Oliver

Well, you can do it with timings. I sort of alternate. Sometimes it’s just, “I’m going to do that many hours.” I guess I alternate partly based on where I am in a book project. Once you’re really at the stage where you’re writing a lot of stuff, I think it’s incredibly helpful to have little outcome goals.

In the book and elsewhere, I’ve referred to them as “daily deliverables,” which is a wonderfully soulless corporate phrase that I actually think is quite helpful because it bleeds all the drama out of it. It’s, “Okay, what’s your deliverable? Off it goes on the conveyor belt.”

And that doesn’t necessarily mean you finish a chapter or something. It could be the structure of a chapter or the brain dump of a chapter. It could be all sorts of more intermediate things. But having a notion of what completion would look like and being able to say, “Okay, yeah, there it is, printed out and sitting on the desk,” that’s really powerful for me.

Leo

Surprising benefits of not having complete control over your time. That's something that you said. Can you share a little bit more about that? I’d love to hear.

Oliver

Yeah. I mean, I think this is a lot of people’s experience of parenthood, but I think it comes in other walks and areas of life as well. It’s not that you're surprised most people enjoy being a parent. It’s that you're surprised that actually, the part where you don’t get to determine exactly what you’re doing at each point of the day is part of the enjoyment very often. Because there’s a sort of sense of being a part of something bigger and being synchronized with the rhythms of, you know, a newborn baby.

That’s long enough ago for me, I think it’s even longer ago for you—that particular intense moment of, like, you really just... when the baby needs feeding, the baby needs feeding. When the diaper needs changing, the diaper needs changing. There’s something... it’s not always pleasant work, but there’s something very freeing about just falling into line with that. Which, again, is something that people find in more traditional religious communities that have those kinds of temporal rhythms, and all sorts of areas of life.

Also, there’s just the much more blunt fact that—and this is a separate section of the book—to define something as an interruption, to say, “I’m not going to be interrupted for the whole of the next day,” is to decide in advance that what you plan to happen is definitely the best thing that could happen for you and the people around you.

Which is a little bit kind of, again, it’s trying to be sort of godlike, when actually a limited human is what we are. I don’t mean that you shouldn’t try to ring-fence a few hours for focus, which is what I was talking about before. But not struggling to ring-fence every single hour is very useful, because it actually just makes interruptions worse, right?

If I’ve decided that from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. I must do this, and no one must interrupt me, it’s a lot more disruptive if my son then comes into my office and wants to talk than if I’m not adopting the attitude that that would be a terrible thing.

It doesn’t mean you have to stop focusing and just be interrupted if you’re in the middle of something important, but it does mean that, you know, you can maybe turn to the person who’s interrupting you, look them in the eyes, and say, “I actually just need a few more minutes on this before I turn to that.”

And, you know, it’s all kind of fluid, and it works nicely. Then you’re back to what you were doing. The point is just that very specific mindset of, “Okay, this is my schedule for the next few hours, and anything that happens that doesn’t exactly accord with that is somehow a problem.” Well, it might be a problem, but it also might not be.

Leo

Yeah, absolutely love that. It reminds me of when I started meditating, and I was like, “I’m going to be focused and meditating,” and anytime someone would interrupt my meditation, I’d be so upset. And I realized that that was the point of my meditation.

Oliver

Right. There’s a quote in that section of the book from C.S. Lewis—obviously writing from a Christian perspective—but he says, I’m paraphrasing, something like: "It’s incredibly tempting to define everything that happens in life, all the interruptions, as somehow a violation of your own real life." And then he says, “In fact, of course, the interruptions are precisely one’s real life, the life God is sending one moment by moment.” And I think that, whether you have God in that understanding or not, it’s a really important perspective to balance the one about, “These are my focus hours, leave me alone.”

Leo

I think that’s a really good place to end. You mentioned the word “soulless,” which is you embraced a soulless technique which I really love. But I think it’s so interesting because the way that I read you, it’s bringing the soul back into all of this.

Oliver

Well, that’s lovely. If the stuff I’m writing is doing that, I’m thrilled.

Leo

And I want to thank you for that. You’ve changed the conversation around productivity, and using our time, and what we’re tackling in life.

Oliver

Well, thank you. I think we’re standing on the shoulders of giants, of whom you are one, because I feel like, ever since I was writing my Guardian column back in the day, I was drawing on and quoting from you. So, it’s really excellent to get to have this conversation at last.

Leo

Oh, beautiful. I will take that credit and also any royalties that you want to share with me. Oliver, thank you for your time. I’ll let you get back to, I think, a festival or a literary festival? I appreciate you taking the time to actually talk with us.

Oliver

Thanks, Leo. It’s been a real pleasure.

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