Oliver Burkeman on How We’ll Never Have Our Lives Sorted Out — and Why That’s Okay

What if I told you that, when it comes to managing your time and your life, you were never going to get it together — and that was okay? Continuing the thread from our last conversation with Kendra Adachi, today on the show we have the incomparable Oliver Burkeman, who wrote the book Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts, which came out October 8. Literally from the opening page of the book — page one of the introduction, which is called “The Imperfect Life” — Oliver had me hooked with the words “This is a book about how the world opens up once you realize you’re never going to sort your life out.” The hard truth? There will always be too much to do. We will never win the unwinnable battle of conquering our time. But the good news? We will be okay, and Oliver’s book teaches us how. We will, in his words, never reach the end of the trouble-free phase. Our culture has a productivity and busyness obsession, and it all comes down to grasping for control in an uncontrollable world. The book is broken up into bite size chunks — daily offerings over four weeks. Those four weeks are Week 1: Being Finite; Week 2: Taking Action; Week 3: Letting Go; and Week 4: Showing Up. Today on the show Oliver talks to us about why he decided to organize the book this way and teaches us about a concept called strategic underachievement and what he calls JOMO, which is the JOY of missing out, as opposed to FOMO, the fear of missing out. We talk about embracing “imperfectionism” and why people pleasers may struggle with this more; a major fallacy about time that Oliver thinks we’ve gotten terribly wrong; and so much more. Oliver is also the author of 2021’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, the title of which roughly represents the length of a human life. Oliver wrote the weekly column “This Column Will Change Your Life” for The Guardian from 2006 to 2020 and, in addition to Meditations for Mortals and Four Thousand Weeks, is the author of two other books, HELP!: How to Be Slightly Happier and Get a Bit More Done and The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking. You’re going to love him. If you’re looking to be liberated from your to do list, explore a more meaningful life, and take a four week “retreat of the mind” (unless you’re like me and gobble his book up in one sitting), take a listen.

Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts by Oliver Burkeman