In this episode of the Evolving Leader, co-hosts Jean Gomes and Scott Allender talk to author and former Guardian journalist Oliver Burkeman. For more than 10 years, Oliver Burkeman wrote the weekly ‘This Column Will Change Your Life’ column in the Guardian newspaper providing readers with ideas for a better life. In his latest book 4000 weeks, he rejects the obsession with 'getting everything done,' and introduces readers to tools for constructing a meaningful life by embracing rather than denying their limitations.

Four Thousand Weeks (Vintage, 2022)

This Column Will Change Your Life ‘the eight secrets to a (fairly) fulfilled life’. Oliver Burkeman's final weekly column in the Guarding (pubished 4 September, 2020)

 
0.00 Introduction

2.40 Could we have a brief tour of your world and how you became a chronicler of ideas about living a good life.

5.20 When you look back at your Guardian column, what were some of the ideas and people that most stood out to you?

8.11 Tell us why you wrote 4000 weeks. 

10.41 How has our concept of time changed through the ages?

15.43 Can you tell us about the paradox of limitation?

18.09 You describe how the German philosopher, Martin Heidegger argued that our finite existence is bound with time and that most of us spend our time denying this fact either through distraction or denial – what can we take from his thinking by flipping the constraints of mortality?

23.24 How are we using distraction as avoidance, and how could positive distraction be useful?

28.30 Let’s turn to the benefits of procrastination.

32.34 In the context of organisational life, how should leaders think about the idea of inevitable limitations?

37.45  How can the mindset shift that underlies 4000 weeks be applied in an organisation? As a leader, what steps can be taken to normalise a change in philosophy whilst at the same time preventing it from being misused as an invitation to stop making plans for the future?

42.25 This is where we hobbies and family life makes such a difference to our lives – how we’re almost embarrassed to confess we have such a thing as a hobby. Can you talk about paying yourself first?

 
Recommended listening from the Evolving Leader archive:
How Emotions Are Made with Lisa Feldman Barrett Part 1 / Part 2

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The Evolving Leader is researched, written and presented by Jean Gomes and Scott Allender with production by Phil Kerby. It is an Outside production.

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