How to Be a Better Self-Help Author

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I feel like you have an unusual way of thinking about these topics. There's something that ties together the different work that you do and it's not the typical perspective. Do you have comments on what is different between the way you're thinking about this and the way others are thinking about these same topics? For some reason that strikes me as a really hard question to think about myself. I used to use a plugin for Facebook that literally would break the site but just make it crappy. Right I want that for Twitter. Yeah so before we finish up I want to go meta a little bit because I feel likeyou have an unusual approach to self-help books, which in some ways can be

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How can we leverage our own limitations? Why does converting the average human lifespan from years to other units (like weeks) give us such a shock? What are the most useful kinds of reactions to contemplating our own mortality? What causes our feeling that time speeds up as we age? What is the "importance trap"? How should we handle the frustration or disappointment caused by our inability to do everything we want or need to do? Why is patience important in the world today? What information sets are available to us in various communication media? Is there — and should there be — a disconnect between the "meatspace" world and the internet world? Which kinds of self-help advice are actually useful?

Oliver Burkeman's new book is Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, published in the US on August 10, 2021. He is the author of The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking, and he wrote a long-running weekly column on psychology, productivity, and self-help culture for The Guardian newspaper called "This Column Will Change Your Life." His writing has also appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and New Philosopher magazine. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. You can pre-order Four Thousand Weeks and sign up for Oliver's email newsletter "The Imperfectionist" at oliverburkeman.com or find him on Twitter at @oliverburkeman.

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