Cambridge Literary Festival: Oliver Burkeman helps you make time for what counts
Does the idea that you probably don’t have the time to achieve everything you want to in life feel relaxing? Well it could, after reading a new book by recovering productivity guru and self help junkie Oliver Burkeman.
His realisation one day as he sat on a bench in New York that he could not possibly achieve all of his work deadlines set him free to be less of a perfectionist and - paradoxically - achieve more by accepting imperfection.
“I was desperately stressed about the week’s work, even more stressed than usual, trying to figure out what productivity techniques would enable me finally to do every single thing I have thought I had to do by the end of Friday, and I just had this sudden understanding that, oh, it was impossible,” says Oliver.
The dawning idea that all our lives are finite and that the amount of things that can be achieved is limited has helped him reassess his perfectionism.
Since then, Oliver reveals has been on a journey towards a more meaningful life and has now written a new book Meditations for Mortals: Four weeks to embrace your limitations and make time for what counts.
Designed as a month-long “retreat of the mind”, it offers daily wisdom, and inspiration to help create a saner and more relaxed way of living.
Oliver says: “I talk about myself as a recovering self-help junkie which has that slight Alcoholics Anonymous sense of not ever expecting to be fully recovered. Rather, I think I have always been really drawn to the promise that some technique or some system could enable me to finally get on top of everything and meet every single demand that was made of me, and allow me to pursue all of my ambitions.
“It’s such a seductive thought, especially in the modern world, where there’s such an endless supply of demand and opportunities.
“But I’ve really changed, partly through writing books like this one, so I don’t feel that little thrill anymore, like, oh, maybe this is the silver bullet. I wouldn’t ever tell anyone they shouldn’t experiment with some new system for changing or organising your life, but don’t think that it’s going to save you from tough choices, or that you can somehow find a way out of what it means to be human through a method like that.
“That’s the sort of illusion that is so tormenting, because then you beat yourself up because you haven’t found it yet - as if it must be there. And when you see that it isn’t, and when you see that you always going to have to not do all the things you wanted to do, and that the work you bring into the world is never going to be as perfect as you can imagine it being, I personally find that really motivating and liberating. Because then I might as well do it anyway.
“I might as well not wait around until I’ve got the perfect qualifications, or until all the other little things are out of the way, I might as well just plunge in there.”
The book proposes a guiding philosophy of ‘imperfectionism’. It asks how can we embrace our limitations? Or make good decisions when there’s always too much to do? What if being truly productive means letting things happen, not making them happen?
This is perhaps not the self-help revelation needed by the procrastinators of the world or people who think “It’ll do”. But Oliver reckons it could speak to all of us if we haven’t fully accepted the limits on our time.
“It’s incredibly easy to find all sorts of ways to not quite face up to the fact that if you’re a finite human. This is it right now. It’s not a dress rehearsal,” he says.
“You’ve got to use the time you have, not only put things off into the future. And actually a lot of self help and productivity and change your life books make the problem worse because they offer ambitious systems and ways of setting goals and all the rest of it. Then you tell yourself, great, this is brilliant. I’m really excited. As soon as I get a quiet week, I’ll put it into practice. And then you get a quiet week and it never happens, or you think like I’m going to make a total fresh start, and everything is going to be perfect from now on, and then three days in, when it’s not perfect, you throw in the towel.
“So I wanted to try to do something that would act against that and dispel that illusion and encourage people to take action right away.”
The way to start living with this new philosophy isn’t to make a plan to get up an hour earlier every morning to cram in more activity because time is running out. Instead, he suggests having a go at one meaningful thing today, without any promises about doing it regularly.
“Is there one thing you’ve always wanted to do? Perhaps write a novel or get into gardening or patch things up with an old friend, or leave your job? If so, just do 10 minutes of something related to that thing today. It doesn’t need to be a big thing. It doesn’t need to be marching into your boss’s office and quitting. It could be calling up one friend who you think might have something useful to contribute and inviting them to coffee. It could be walking outside into the patch of weeds that passes your garden at the moment and just staring at it for 10 minutes and seeing what comes up. It can be very tiny.”
The one revelation he hopes readers will take away from the book is this: “There’s no possibility of doing most of the things you want to do. There’s no possibility of performing at the perfect level you can envisage, or always having completely harmonious relations with everyone And therefore, it’s actually really energising to stop worrying about it.”
Oliver Burkeman will be in conversation with Catherine Carr at the Cambridge Literary Festival on Tuesday 17 September, 9pm, at the University Arms Hotel.
Tickets are available from cambridgeliteraryfestival.com, priced £15.
