Hang tight while we fetch the video data and transcripts. This only takes a moment.
Connecting to YouTube player…
Fetching transcript data…
We’ll display the transcript, summary, and all view options as soon as everything loads.
Next steps
Loading transcript tools…
Why you’ll never “get on top of everything” | Oliver Burkeman for Big Think+ | Big Think | YouTubeToText
YouTube Transcript: Why you’ll never “get on top of everything” | Oliver Burkeman for Big Think+
Skip watching entire videos - get the full transcript, search for keywords, and copy with one click.
Share:
Video Transcript
Video Summary
Summary
Core Theme
The content argues that the pursuit of perfect productivity and control over one's time is a flawed and ultimately unfulfilling goal, suggesting instead a shift in perspective towards embracing limitations and focusing on what truly matters.
Mind Map
Click to expand
Click to explore the full interactive mind map • Zoom, pan, and navigate
Perfectionism for me has always been a kind of central part of what I'm struggling
with.
That sense that I'm kind of on the back foot, that I need to put in just
a little bit more, maybe a lot more effort and self discipline,
find the perfect
organizational system, and, like, then
then I would finally get into the driving seat of my own life.
It's becoming very obvious that this ever accelerating treadmill
isn't going to lead
finally to this moment of wonderful calm and peace of mind. There will always be too
much to do. You're never going to feel completely ready. You're never going to be able
to feel confident about what's coming in the future.
So if you set out on some big project of scheduling your time very,
very, very strictly,
not only will you probably fail and get very stressed, but even if you succeed,
you'll fail in a way because
there'll be some lack of spontaneity to that life, to that sense of just having to
carry out these instructions that you've given yourself that is somehow
at odds with what we really value from being alive. And so that's why I think we
need a way of understanding and thinking about work and productivity that does not
treat getting on top of everything as the goal.
My name is Oliver Burkeman. I'm an author and a recovering
productivity geek, and I wrote the book "Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to
Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts."
I think it's almost true by definition that there can't be
one system.
I'm going to follow this, like, perfect morning routine or whatever it might be, and
then I don't really need to think about it because then it's just going to sort of run
life on my behalf.
We have to be honest about the fact that we're talking about perspective shifts.
We're talking about a very gradual process of learning to see the world in a
different way.
The thing we don't realize about being finite humans is that our situation is
actually much, much worse than we think it is and that this is tremendously
good news. We have this tendency to feel like
mastering the situation of being a human
in the twenty-first century is like a really difficult challenge. But I think
actually when you turn your attention to things closely, you can see that it's not
really difficult to get on top of all your to dos. It's actually
completely impossible.
And in that transition from really difficult
to completely impossible,
there's a moment of real kind of relief and relaxation.
There's a sense of a weight
being lifted
from one's shoulders.
The Zen master,
Jiyu-Kennett,
her philosophy of teaching students
was not to lighten the burden of the student,
but to make it so heavy that he or she would put it down.
We're
absolutely
deluged with advice on lightening the burden. Right? Every new productivity system
is supposed to lighten the burden. And there's something so powerful about
remembering the senses in which actually
the condition of being human is just always to feel like there's more that you could
do, like there's more that you could know. You're going to be vulnerable to
distressing emotions at any moment, all the rest of it. And then you can just put
that burden down and walk forward with a spring in your step and actually try to do
a few things that matter and make life more rich.
A lot of us today
wake up each morning with a feeling of what I describe as productivity debt.
The sense that you've got to work really hard during the day to pay off this debt of
getting things done.
Otherwise, you won't quite feel like
you're an adequate and acceptable human being. And that is hugely self-sabotaging,
apart from anything else, because the standard for what how much stuff would be
enough
just drifts upwards. So it gets harder and harder
to meet because the amount of things we could do is infinite.
Attempt instead to start from the idea
that you don't need to do anything with your day to justify your existence on the
planet. You may need to do it in order to earn your wage or your salary, absolutely,
but you don't need to do it for these existential reasons.
One tactic that is surprisingly helpful, given how simple it is, is just keeping a
done list of the accomplishments that you complete.
It's possible then to see all the things you do do as kind of payments
into the credit of this account. Right? What if you started at zero balance and
everything you did during the day was something extra that you could have not done,
but you did do? If you're in
really bad motivational moment, just sort of lower the bar for what counts as an
entry on this list. I mean, you could include
made coffee, got dressed. Like, you did do these things, and what you find
again is that these things snowball quite rapidly
into
much more satisfying days of bigger accomplishments than that.
The 3-4
hour rule reflects a pattern
that you can see in the
routines and rituals of so many authors and artists, scientists,
mathematicians,
composers, all the way through history.
Alex Pang details a lot of this in his book "Rest," where
they, to an astonishingly uniform degree, dedicate about three or
four hours a day, no more, to the core work of their lives that
requires sort of deep thought and quiet and focus and reflection.
There's also lots of evidence to suggest that you actually are going to make more
progress on focused work if you constrain it in in this way.
It's tiring
to focus in this fashion, you need time to replenish.
Also, there's an aspect or many aspects of the creative process that are actually
going to be doing their work once you've stopped, once you're in the rest of your
day and you're relaxing.
This is not only about
being decent when it comes to people's
lives outside work. Like, this is better for the work as well.
So many of us feel beset by distractions
in the modern world, but it's telling that the whole idea of a distraction
really requires you to assume
that you know in advance
which things that might fill the next hour, the next day, which things are good
things, and which things are unwanted things that should be eliminated.
But you can take this
much too far, and actually a lot of approaches to productivity, I think, encourage
us to take it too far, encourage us to try to exert total control
over how the next period of time is going to unfold.
They define more things as distractions and interruptions
and make the experience
of being distracted or interrupted
worse.
If I'm working from my office at home and our son
bursts into the room to tell me excitedly about something that's happened at school
that day. There are certain times when I'm doing something where I have to say,
"Look, I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to chat with you about this later." Sure.
Absolutely.
But if I'm using a system for scheduling my day that defines
that period of time
as, like, a focus stretch
and then makes it into a problem when it wouldn't otherwise have been a problem.
That's a terrible way to live. That's basically taking things that life ought to be
about, like moments of connection with one's family, and making them wrong just
because
they clash with this, like,
plan I had. So I think it's really important not to go too far in the direction of
trying to
eliminate
everything that could possibly count as an interruption,
and then find that you've kind of eliminated
half of the best bits of life.
Click on any text or timestamp to jump to that moment in the video
Share:
Most transcripts ready in under 5 seconds
One-Click Copy125+ LanguagesSearch ContentJump to Timestamps
Paste YouTube URL
Enter any YouTube video link to get the full transcript
Transcript Extraction Form
Most transcripts ready in under 5 seconds
Get Our Chrome Extension
Get transcripts instantly without leaving YouTube. Install our Chrome extension for one-click access to any video's transcript directly on the watch page.
