Oliver Burkeman writes for The Guardian, where he wrote a popular weekly psychology column called “This Column Will Change Your Life.” He is the New York Times bestselling author of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals.
What’s the big idea?
Stop trying to plan the perfect moment. Too much of life is wasted trying to build and control the “right” circumstance for making a change or beginning a long-intended plan. Instead, acting on what matters in this finite life is better started today, imperfectly, than on any someday.
Below, Oliver shares five key insights from his new book, Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts. Listen to the audio version—read by Oliver himself—in the Next Big Idea App.
1. You’re never going to get on top of everything.
You’re never going to sort your life out—and this is fantastic news. It’s incredibly easy, as individuals and as organizations, to spend all our time chasing the fantasy that in a few months or maybe a few years, we’ll finally master the situation of being human in the 21st century. We’re going to find the productivity system that lets us do everything; we’re finally going to solve our imposter syndrome by figuring out how to do our jobs or be excellent parents or spouses; we’re going to fix our procrastination issues; we’re going to get to the part of life where we don’t have any problems to deal with, and so on. As an ironic and tragic result, we hold off from taking the boldest action right now on the things we care about most.
My book outlines a philosophy I call imperfectionism, which takes it as a given that there will always be too much to do, that you will never feel completely “ready” to meet new challenges, that you might always be a bit of a procrastinator, that the future will always be unknowable and uncertain, and so forth. Once you accept that, you’re free to act, imperfectly, but right here and now in reality. It’s all about giving up the distracting quest to feel completely in control and secure, which, in fact, drains the vibrancy from life, and instead pour your finite time, attention, and energy into a handful of things that truly count.
2. Everything is a matter of trade-offs.
One of the main reasons we don’t get around to what we care about most is that we tell ourselves there are things we have to do instead: things we’ve signed up for, things people are waiting for, projects we’ve sunk too much time or money in, things our culture demands of us. But to quote psychotherapist Sheldon Kopp, “You are free to do whatever you like. You need only face the consequences.” This isn’t the corny old self-help idea that you’re free to become a billionaire just by visualizing lots of money or free to realize your dream of becoming an astronaut by plastering your bedroom wall with images of space. It’s the down-to-earth point that in every moment of life, as finite humans, all we are doing is choosing one set of problems over another.
“There’ll always be an upside and a price to pay.”
If you leave a relationship or a job, delay replying to some emails to spend time with your kids, or make any other kind of choice with your time, there’ll always be an upside and a price to pay. The question isn’t how to avoid any bad consequences or what’s the perfect decision; it’s what is the price you’re willing to pay. Crucially, for anyone prone to being a people-pleaser, other people’s emotions are another factor to weigh in the balance. Is someone going to judge you for your choice or get angry? That’s not a catastrophe. The question is simply whether it’s one of the consequences you’re willing to shoulder to reap the benefits.
3. Finish things.
There are a couple of reasons that we tend to begin a lot of projects and then not finish them, burdening ourselves with all these zombie projects that we can’t seem to conclude. The first is that, for anyone with a perfectionistic streak, the part where you begin a new project feels like walking into virgin snow: it’s wonderful and fresh and it feels like there’s still a chance to bring the work perfectly into reality. Then you start running into the truth that any project will necessarily be imperfect, so it suddenly seems more appealing to start a new one instead.
The other reason is that we hate to feel limited in what we can do, even though we are, and so having fifty things on our plates gives us this sort of furtive payoff of feeling important and super-capable. The truth is that there’s a fantastic surge of motivation and energy that can come from finishing things, from developing the ability to make all sorts of projects wait outside the door, as it were, while you take one of them and see it through to completion.
In the book, I explore various ways of finishing projects one at a time when it really feels like you can’t afford to make those other projects wait. The basic trick is to break them down into much smaller, completable intermediate outcomes, or deliverables, and then finish those. When you get granular enough, you can move from a situation where finishing things is something you get to do every few months to a working life that is spent doing nothing other than finishing things, hour after hour, with all the energy and motivation that completion bestows.
4. Look for the life task.
One day, when Carl Jung, one of the godfathers of psychotherapy, was an adolescent, he was hiding in the shrubbery of his family home. He overheard his father tell a family friend that he was worried about his son’s future because they’d lost their money, and Carl refused to go to school. What would become of the boy if he couldn’t make a living? Jung describes being thunderstruck by the sense that reality was asking something of him, that his life was demanding that he buckle down to his studies, which he immediately did. But the point of this story is not that hard work is always good; plenty of us could do with resting more. The point is that it’s often incredibly useful, especially if you’re feeling stuck or directionless, not to ask what it is that you want from life but what life is asking from you.
“There will always be a path forward.”
What’s the life task that faces you at this moment? Maybe that sounds a little woo-woo, but it’s a powerful reframing that helps you get past all our normal human confusions about what might make us happy or not, and down to the deep intuitive level of what it is you feel you’re here to do. The answer that arises when you ask what life task is facing you will very probably be something difficult and effortful. But it will be possible. It will be something you can do, here and now, with the resources and the talents at your disposal. There will always be a path forward.
5. You have to start from sanity.
We tend to have a certain way we want our lives to be. In my case, I’d like to be calm and productive, energized and inspired in my work, attentive to my family, and doing my bit as a citizen. That’s what I’m here calling the state of sanity. But then we tell ourselves that that’s something we’re working toward in the future, and by doing that, we stop ourselves from attaining it. One example is when you decide that you need more relaxation in your life, so you plan to take a sabbatical in a few months, and meanwhile, you end up working much harder to get all your projects out of the way beforehand. Or you’ve overcommitted yourself with appointments, so you say to yourself, “Look, I’ll get all these done, but in the future, I’m going to make fewer commitments.” And then you dive off into just as many appointments as before.
Instead, starting from sanity means deciding how you want to be in your life and, at least in some small way, showing up in that fashion here and now. It means finding 20 minutes for rest in your day today. It means renegotiating or backing out of some existing commitments, even if that causes a few issues, instead of just promising yourself you’ll do better later. Above all, it means remembering the imperfectionist truth that even if some activity means a lot to you, even doing it for 10 minutes today, however imperfectly, means infinitely more than all the plans in the world for doing it perfectly or regularly at some far-off, hypothetical point on the horizon.
To listen to the audio version read by author Oliver Burkeman, download the Next Big Idea App today:
