Many of us wake up each morning with something Oliver Burkeman calls “productivity debt.” The bestselling author and journalist explains this term as “a 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.”

It’s becoming very obvious that this ever-accelerating treadmill of productivity isn’t going to lead to a final, perfect destination. There will always be more 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. 

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 path, a sense of having to carry out these instructions that you’ve given yourself that is at odds with what we really value from being alive. And so that’s why we need a way of understanding and thinking about work and productivity that does not treat getting on top of everything as the goal, explains Burkeman. Here, he lays out four guiding principles to lead a better, more fulfilling life.

OLIVER BURKEMAN: 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 a 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.