Oliver Burkeman - Designing an employee experience for mortals

Oliver Burkeman:

The meditation teacher who says like, you have to meditate for 20 minutes a day. And the student says, but what about when I'm too busy. And he says, well, then you need to meditate for 30 minutes a day, right? It's true, it embodies a deep truth, but it's not a truth that is comfortable to enact. And I think getting to a handle on that fact that we're all a bit workaholic in the modern era and maybe not all, but lots of us who are not necessarily classic workaholics, and even if it would be okay for us to get up and leave our work behind at 6pm instead of 8pm, we kind of don't want to. We'd rather keep trying to push through to this mythical point where we can say, it's all done. And since that's never happening, we need to learn to step away at a time when it isn't all done.

Culture First music.

Damon Klotz:

I do believe with the way our work and life are overlapping more than ever, talking about these subjects in relation to work is not only refreshing, it’s essential.

Here are five key concepts I want you to listen out for. Embracing your limitations. The idea of waiting for perfect control. How to be aware of the productivity trap. The joy of seeking novelty in the mundane and, you’ll hear Oliver and I discuss whether his term strategic underachievement may have accidentally started the quiet quitting trend.

Before we head over to my conversation with Oliver, I have a request for you:

I have the data on how many times people start and stop these podcast episodes. Our of the hundreds of thousands of people who’ve listened to this show, I know there’s the serial listeners who have consumed every minute and then there’s others who have attempted to finish one of the episodes several times now.

The reason I bring this up is because a few weeks ago Oliver wrote an essay for the New York Times. Stop multitasking. No really, just stop it. It was a powerful essay about the extraordinary power and difficulty of doing one thing at a time. So my ask for you is this, what is stopping you from just listening to this conversation from start to finish and seeing how you feel after? Let me know how you go.

All right, let’s head over to my conversation with Oliver.

Damon:

Today on the Culture First podcast, I'm joined by Oliver Burkeman. Oliver Burkeman, thank you so much for being in conversation with me today.

Oliver Burkeman:

Oh, it's a pleasure to be here. Thanks very much.

Damon Klotz:

We first met last year because I invited you to speak at Culture First, which is the global event that Culture Amp puts on. When I'm shortlisting speakers, there's usually a list of people who kind of enter my inbox in my world who are very much putting out content and writing for the world of work. And then there's this other list of people whose work is maybe somewhat adjacent to the world of work. An example might be an author who's written about mortality. But To me, I think your work cuts through to the very core about the how, the why, the what, the when and sort of the where of work right now. And I kind of just wanted to open up by sort of saying why I found your work so interesting and why I thought it was of interest to an audience of HR listeners and managers. And I think for me, why your work originally kind of stood out is because I feel like your book was written for the type of people who might typically run as far as possible away from self-help books.

Oliver Burkeman:

Hehehe

Damon Klotz:

because it was more of a philosophical approach to time management, which is very much my kind of productivity book. And it did remind me a lot of Alain de Botton's work when he kind of spoke about things like travel, work and love, and he invited you to be in conversation with the topic instead of sort of telling you its definition. So firstly, I just wanted to say thank you for writing a book and for your work that I think is very much a part of the world of work. And I wonder if anyone's ever had that comparison to Alain de Botton’s work before in conversation with your work.

Oliver Burkeman:

Yeah, definitely it's come up and I'm a huge admirer of Alain's work. So it's a really great company to be in. I suppose the part of it that really resonates with me and that I am really trying to embody is, yeah, it's like here we are having this conversation trying to figure out this business of being human, of which, you know, work is an incredibly important central part, as opposed to like, yeah, I've got all the answers and now... you lucky, lucky mortals get to listen to me tell you how to live. Firstly, I don't know how to live, and secondly, it doesn't work anyway. That's a completely ineffective way of dealing with things. If I am doing something, I guess one way of thinking I like to think about it is I'm articulating, maybe making conscious things that we do all already know about our finite capacity, about the nature of work, about the nature of our interactions with other people. It's not news, but it can be news in the sense that we put quite a lot of effort into not thinking about things. And so it's sort of a gentle prod in the direction of thinking about them, I suppose.

Damon Klotz:

Given all that, should we start this episode with the warning for the listeners about the existential overwhelm they might be experiencing while listening to this episode? Should you give your normal sort of listener warning?

Oliver Burkeman:

Yeah, right. The warning is always like you can... My whole job, I feel like, I didn't... Not sure I really chose it, but my whole job is to sort of go around trying to trigger existential crises in people about how short life is. 4,000 Weeks, title of the book obviously is the approximate lifespan of a human in the modern world. but also then sort of running after them as saying like, no, no, this is a really good existential crisis to go through. It's relaxing and it's empowering. It's not something that you should regret having had to experience because when you truly understand how big is the mismatch between our finite capacities and all the things we could in theory be doing, that is actually the beginning of being able to take effective action and do so calmly. It's not a despairing thing at all.

Damon Klotz:

So given that, I guess that listener warning and kind of how I've experienced your work, one of the traditions we have on the show is that there's always a question I ask every guest to kind of lay the foundation of, I guess, your work and in a way that maybe anyone who's listening could understand, but there's a little bit of a catch with this question. Basically, this is the situation. A curious 10 year old has come up to you while you're on a hike in the English countryside and they ask you, what do you do for work? How do you answer?

Oliver Burkeman:

I mean, the honest truth in a very mundane way, my response to that question is I write books. Even that's kind of interesting to me now, I think about it because I do a whole lot of other things and yet I guess that is the bit I think of as the centerpiece or the linchpin or that I'm proudest of or something. If pushed by this inquisitive 10-year-old, I might say that I write books about like, what it's like to be a human or something, right? It's something to do with capturing experience. I'd probably stop there. And then say, where are your parents? What are you doing wandering across the English countryside?

Damon Klotz:

Yes, there's this child out there asking all these people what they do for work because they're already feeling the existential dread about how do they make a good decision about what to do with their career. So let's start with your book, with the book 4000 weeks, your current one. And maybe I can start by, I guess, reading an excerpt from the very first page of the book because... You don't waste any time really setting the scene for people here. So on the first page of the book you've got, scientists estimate that life in some form will persist for another 1.5 billion years or more until the intensifying heat of the sun condenses the last organism to death. But you, assuming to live until you're 80, you'll have had about 4,000 weeks. And the rare few lucky enough to live to 100 will see only 5,000. Now When I read that, I was kind of straight away reflecting in terms of my own experience with this subject, which is a little bit like a coin. On one side, I think some of my friends would describe me as probably one of the most present people they know. I truly find beauty in like the simplest of moments from the way the sun hits a building to the joy of sharing a meal with friends. And, you know, I spent seven of the sort of last eight years overseas living it as an ex-pattern. Honestly, one of the things I missed the most was just being able to do really mundane tasks like driving my grandma somewhere for an appointment.

Oliver Burkeman:

Mm.

Damon Klotz:

And if that is one side of the coin that I reflected on when I first read that in your book, I guess on the other side of that coin is I can often find myself staring into the abyss, absolutely frozen by the fear of this idea that I'm going to die. and it completely stops me in my tracks. So I wonder is my coin analogy of knowing that life is beautiful and it's all the simple things and also this fear that like, holy shit, we only get one go and this is it. Is that a typical response?

Oliver Burkeman:

I mean, I think so. And I don't think that those are, yeah, the coin analogy is good because they are part of the same thing. It's not like you've got to, they're not contradictory. The sort of ability to cherish those very mundane, precious moments sort of rests on an understanding that in some sense they're finite, I think, because otherwise, you know, I'm certainly not the first person to say it, but I do say it in the book, quoting various other people, if life went on. in an earthly sense, you know, forever, it would devalue present moment experience quite heavily because, you know, that feeling that we sometimes fall into of having all the time in the world would be true. We would have all the time in the world and there would be no need to take any given moment seriously. What I really like about the way you describe that just then is that, you know, it gets at something I'm trying to say and maybe sort of Hummel, a reader into seeing, which is that the, the shortness of life is not an argument in my understanding for, um, trying really hard to pack every second of your experience with the most extraordinary things you can think of. Um, that, that attitude actually is still a little bit in denial. That attitude is still a little bit, well, maybe there's kind of a cheat code to the human condition here. And if it isn't that I can live forever, maybe it is that I can have like the most amazing life of anyone. Um, it's actually an argument really for seeing all the value in those, those smaller moments for, or not even having a sense of moments as being big or small. Right. I mean, it's just, it's just that you're here and that's precious and not something to stress out about. Listen, I'm not saying I am totally reconciled to my mortality or anything. I'm, I'm talking in, I've written a book about the kind of person I'd like to be in some, in some ways, but it's. But it's seeing that, you know, this is grounds for relaxing. When you see that there are always going to be more ambitions you could have than you're going to be able to fulfill, more places you could visit than you're going to be able to visit, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. That's an argument for like relaxing back into the few that you're actually doing and really showing up for driving your relative somewhere instead of... spending all that time pining for what you could be doing at the same time.

Damon Klotz:

Yeah, I think it keeps me very regulated holding both of those things on that same coin, you know, being able to appreciate beauty, but also that there is an element of unknown and also, you know, that finitude. And I guess a lot of the foundations for this book, you know, came from a column that you wrote at the Guardian and the column was... Also, I think you should probably work in marketing because you have great copywriting ability. The column was, this column will change your life.

Oliver Burkeman:

Right.

Damon Klotz:

And you said that you spent a lot of your career then kind of explaining back to people that there was a little bit of satire and then it ended up actually becoming educational for you and you became an accidental productivity kind of expert. So I guess, what was it about, I guess, your experience and your work as a journalist that kind of even got you into that moment? where your editor said, would you write this column? And that has now led to this whole career where you're really focusing on these topics of, you know, productivity, happiness and mortality.

Oliver Burkeman:

Yeah, I mean, I guess you can go in either direction, can't you? You can say like, well, I found myself in these situations. I was kind of interested in self-help. My editor saw me reading these books and thought she might as well get some content out of my fixation, or you can flip it around and say that like what we do for work very often, if to the extent that our, you know, socio-economic good fortune allows us to act on it is an attempt to like work out our deepest issues. Right? We use our lives as therapy and totally, I think ultimately, in a legitimate sense. So, you know, if I wanted to talk in slightly new agey terms, I would say that something led me to really focus on wanting to write. And actually looking back at my career, I can see various junctures where I could have maybe made a bit more money in this direction or done something more exciting in that direction, but I chose the thing that would let me write. I also then put myself into a situation where like there were really fast deadlines and where the kind of perfectionistic part of me that could quite happily spend two months writing a 600 word newspaper column had absolutely no possibility of doing that, right? And if a weekly column is due on a Thursday and you don't have a really good idea by Monday, then you just have to go with a bad idea instead. And you learn that you don't really know what good ideas and bad ideas are anyway, because it's just as likely to lead to a successful column or not. And, you know, I had all sorts of hangups about that sort of deadline thing as well. I got very anxious and stressed about it, but it was very useful to sort of learn the discipline. Um, and then, yeah, I managed to finagle this situation where I was writing a column about the sort of issues of time and obligation and struggling to fit things in and feeling like I needed to do more in order to be. Like in order to sort of justify my existence. deep therapy type issues, no more extraordinary than anyone else's, I think, but I was just really lucky to have these opportunities to kind of explore them head on as the thing I was doing with my day job, yeah, which was great. And then, you know, it's very useful just in a more instrumental way to have a sort of short regular column as it is to do a blog or anything where you can sort of experiment and test out ideas and see how they build into the things that might make. larger works like a book.

Damon Klotz:

It is interesting when we find ourselves in a position where we're kind of experiencing some of that live therapy that ends up helping us a lot, but we're kind of doing it in service of others. I know you've been a guest on Stephen Bartlett's show, Diary of a CEO, and he sort of said that a lot of his work on that podcast is really helping him understand things. And even on this show during the pandemic, we did, at the start of the pandemic, we did a series called Working Through It where I was... interviewing experts with the questions that I had every single week for 13 weeks about our experience working in this unknown environment and you know, it really forced me to kind of have to reflect and I was saying the other day I struggled I struggled to listen back to it because I really was working out loud on some of the hardest things that I was trying to you know experience as someone living in a foreign country during a pandemic and um, obviously that column has also played that role for you as well. So it's just interesting when we sort of do some of this work on behalf of trying to serve for others, but ultimately it also does really help ourselves when we spend the time journaling and reflecting on it.

Oliver Burkeman:

Absolutely. And it's just, I'm always amazed at how synergistic it is, how sort of, you know, if you're ever worried about as a writer anyway, if you're ever sort of worried about admitting to some way in which you don't have it together or something like that, I sometimes I'm like, well, if I write about this issue in my email newsletter, will people finally be like, oh, no, this guy's just crazy. But obviously, always that kind of sharing turns out to be really helpful for other people as well. So there is just this like ongoing process of sharing all the ways that we're all in the same boat, basically, that I think is really powerful.

Damon Klotz:

So I wanted to spend, I guess, a large part of this conversation, you know, like I said, when I first invited you to speak at Culture First, it really was because I saw so many of the topics that you were writing about playing out in the workplace. So I wanted to, it'd be very easy for me just to use this as a great chance for us to catch up and talk about, you know, my current thoughts on my own mortality. But I wanted to center this part really on, I guess, There's a group of people out there, leaders inside of organisations who are currently managing mortals and they might not understand how to manage people who are dealing with their mortality. So if you're a leader out there who's currently managing a team of people who are mortal, this section is for you. So I want to just start by, I guess, you talked a lot about acknowledging the impossible number of demands that are placed on us in the modern world of work. What do you say to the person who replies and saying that, look, In my current situation, I actually do have to handle an impossible amount. I don't have any luxury of giving up the struggle to do it all. So that advice just doesn't make sense for me.

Oliver Burkeman:

It's such a totally understandable reaction and it's understandable because like I think it or catch myself thinking it, you know, to this day about my, you know, incoming work. I think the sort of, the tough love way into this is to say if you have an impossible amount on your plate, in other words, if the things that are expected of you, and the standard that's expected is not possible, like for real, then it doesn't matter how much you think you have to do it, right? Because that's what the word impossible means. And it's actually similar to saying, like, well, I absolutely have to make 2 plus 2 add up to 5. Like, it doesn't. And that's not going to be happening. And so it isn't a question of saying, sacrifices and trade-offs. It's about saying, I will be doing that anyway. My situation means that I will be doing that anyway. This organization will be doing it anyway. Something will get deprioritized as a result of prioritizing something else. The only question is whether we're gonna do that consciously and humanely and in such a way that we all get to sort of talk about what's happening and then really focus on what we've chosen to prioritize and not feel too bad about the things that we're going to have to. at least temporarily neglect, or if we're going to exist in this constant state of trying to convince ourselves and each other and the whole organization that in fact there exists some way of prioritizing everything and only sort of shaving off things that were inessential, as opposed to what I think we all have to do as humans and in organizational life, which is see that there are more genuinely meaningful and important things to do with our time than we have time to do. It's not just that if you get rid of the sort of chaff, then you've got all the time you need for what matters. It's that you need to get rid of or back burner, some things that legitimately you could say matter. So, you know, then that person can come back and say, well, it's easy for you to say because, you know. and push this thought experiment to an extreme. Maybe this person feels that they'll be fired and have no ability to live in a home and feed their kids if they don't do the impossible. Then the response is like, yeah, it is easy for me to say. Lots of things are easy for me to say. Doesn't mean they're not true. And in the case of the idea that a finite person cannot do an infinite amount or any impossible amount, that remains true even though it's harder for some people. to have to experience than it is for me. That doesn't actually mean that there's got to be a way around it. So it's kind of bleak, but the bleakness is the beginning of the answer, right? Because if we can, especially as leaders, I think if people can acknowledge and model, and in all these different ways, like not pretend that the people they're managing and leading ought to be able to solve impossible. problems, then everything can change. And then we get to do things that the other kind of impossible, right, which the other objection comes in sometimes, other instruction that comes on a lot of times, like, well, all sorts of technological breakthroughs, things that people thought were impossible. And if people hadn't aimed to do the impossible, we might not have all these amazing breakthroughs, to which the answer is, right, they obviously weren't impossible, not in the sense we're talking here, they were possible. And in almost all cases, if you look into the background stories of how those things came to be, it was because people were willing to not attempt to get their arms around an impossible quantity of things and to focus on these extremely ambitious, but in fact not impossible goals.

Damon Klotz:

So I guess if that's one of the questions that people are holding in terms of there's just so much stuff to do or there's no way I can let anything go,

Oliver Burkeman:

Mm-hmm.

Damon Klotz:

in that same team, in that same organisation, there's going to be a bunch of people who, if we're using your term, are just clearing the decks constantly

Oliver Burkeman:

Mm.

Damon Klotz:

and spending as much time as possible with everything else that's going around as opposed to, I guess, maybe doing the core work of the moment. I know you had some really good examples of clearing the decks in terms of what people are doing in their personal life. Do you have any examples or thoughts on what clearing the decks looks like in the modern workplace right now?

Oliver Burkeman:

Yeah, I mean, you know, clearing the decks, the way I think of that term is it's to do with how you're relating to the activities, right? So it's to do with the sense that these are things you've just got to get out of the way first in order to get to the point where you can start being proactive and start doing the things that you really care about. And obviously, email inboxes are just the most obvious example of that. But really anything that functions in that way as a bucket that collects stuff, right? So it's. It's email, but it can be all sorts of pending requests from people. It can be whole projects that for whatever reason have come to be things that just like you've got to get to the other side of them before you can, before you can get to the, to the next thing. It's the part of the work that people think of as the admin and the paperwork. If they're not, you know, admin professionals, if they're, if they're the stuff that they see as kind of like, well, this is what keeps it all. going and on some level it maybe does, right? It's not that you can neglect that stuff completely, but that if you approach it as first of all each day or first of all in my career, I'm gonna get all this stuff out of the way, you never get there, the decks are never clear and you expend all your energy sort of on the things that by definition you're saying are kind of secondary to the thing you wanna be doing. There's also this kind of mysterious force just on the level of personal motivation. It's not totally mysterious. There are some, there's some sort of research about it. But that. If you focus on clearing the decks, then you're stuck in this mode of like reactivity. Okay. It's like everything is coming at you. You've got to deal with it. And you're never making that change in favor of sort of behavioral activation. You're never doing the thing where you decide to do something first because it's important to you and your priorities. And whenever you can actually flip that, whenever you can begin the day, say, just to give an ordinary daily example by by spending the first hour or something, working on something where you're choosing it and you're deliberately tolerating the anxiety of knowing that the decks are not clear while you do this. It actually seems to make you more effective at clearing the decks too, not ever getting them clear, but dealing with your email and your incoming stuff because there's a total sort of mental switch from just being reactive to being. proactive that then carries forward into those other activities. And it all starts, you know, the reason it connects to my big thesis about being finite is that it all starts from understanding that there's just no reason to believe the decks will ever be clear. There's no law that says you should only get as many emails as you can answer in a couple of hours a day or anything like that. It just doesn't work like that.

Damon Klotz:

Yeah, when it's all said and done, when it's all over, like that inbox, our digital footprint lives on. There'll be still people emailing us, still newsletters that we never unsubscribed to still contacting us. So it's like, you really need to kind of focus on what's in front of you at the moment. And I guess, you know, that's one of the things that you speak about is like not only learning how to say no to things that you don't want to do in the workplace, but also learning how to say no to some of the things that you might be really good at as well. because you're trying to, I guess, shift focus onto different priorities, or like you said, doing some of that work for yourself first, as opposed to their reactionary work. And things like Slack and Microsoft Teams are really good at keeping us distracted and clearing the decks on other people's priorities.

Oliver Burkeman:

Oh, yeah, right, absolutely. And pushing it even further and seeing that in a sense, you already are saying no, you're just doing it kind of implicitly, unconsciously, passive aggressively. And so we're just again talking about like, the switch from unconsciously doing what we must do as finite humans to consciously doing it. And therefore, you know, making some better choices and feeling better about.

Damon Klotz:

Well-being is obviously of great, you know, I would like to think well-being is always of great concern to leaders, but I think over the last few years with the different working environments, the amount of work people are doing for those, you know, people who have been working remotely. And I guess one of the ways that we're finding ourselves, you know, I guess right now is that a lot of companies are trying to find. short term success due to some of the economic pressures, especially, you know, for a lot of people who work at technology companies or startups, there's been a whole bunch of pressure on sort of short term success. And, you know, a lot of tech companies use things like sprints and quick win projects in order to get ahead. And I wonder whether you think this kind of work style and working in in sprints or agile working ways. Is that helping people focus on the task at hand or do you think that this is just another way to get team members to take on even more work in a short space of time and increase the risk of burnout?

Oliver Burkeman:

Yeah, it's a great question. And I mean, I maybe don't know enough to say like, how commonly this is being used in one way rather than another. I think what it makes me see is that for this kind of organizational level, team level strategy, the same thing applies as applies to all sorts of individual time management techniques like the. fabled Pomodoro technique where you divide your work into 25 minute slots and all sorts of other techniques. And it's this, it's that there's nothing inherently right or wrong about most of these techniques. I mean, there are probably a few bad ones on the fringes, but it's entirely a question of the spirit in which they are engaged, right? It's entirely to do with what you're trying to get out of them. And if you, I'll switch back to the team level in a minute, but if you're dividing your time into pomodoros or some other kind of way of time boxing. in order to sort of bring a sane relationship between the time you have and the priorities you want to choose so you can go through that process of mapping them out and then calmly work through them. Fantastic. If you're using it because you think that this now is the method which if you really bring more self-discipline to it than you've ever had before and you really bear down on it, finally you're going to make yourself into the kind of person who is infinitely productive and capable, then that's just. enabling you, right? That's just enabling your issues rather than helping you through them. And I think the same applies to things like sprints because, yeah, if it's all based on this notion that a moment must be seized and a competitive edge must be obtained now in order for it to be plain sailing later, then I think that falls prey to all the same problems and is going to sort of exert all the same anxieties and stresses on the people doing it. It's to get to something specific in the future where we won't have to make tough decisions about time or something like that. And then that will just fuel the fly wheel of anxiety. Do you feel fly wheels? I'm not sure. Anyway, you know, that'll just make the whole ramp the whole thing up. If on the other hand, you know, it's a question of saying the decks will never be clear. We've only got finite capacity, but we choose for the next days, weeks, to bring all our finite capacities to bear on on this challenge. Then you can immediately connect to a kind of spirit of fun, right? That's why you're doing it almost because it's fun to do it, even though we don't like to talk about things like fun in this context. And like... Actually, if you want, based on whatever amount I know about building a successful organization, and there's a certain scale of organization that I don't claim to have experience running or anything like that, but you want to be harnessing the power of fun, right? You don't want to be saying, you have to sort of push back against that and resist it. You want to be getting into that space where the things people want to do that where the energy naturally arises can be allied with the goals you're trying to meet. It's otherwise it's like saying, we're going to try and achieve this milestone without using electricity or something, right? I mean, you want to bring all those forces to bear and that can only really be done with more focus on wellbeing and presence in the moment and, you know, what the big questions of why we're all doing any of this in the first place.

Damon Klotz:

I guess one of the other strategies that companies are using in terms of prioritization and language that I've heard is this idea of doing less but doing better. And I guess by, it's very easy to throw a thousand things at the wall and go, here's all the things that we could do and let's do them all as opposed to picking a few things. Do you have advice for companies, especially if you think about maybe some of the current context of the amount of layoffs happening? around the world, people are going to be finding themselves that there is now definitely less people around to do some of that work, but there is still a high expectation on doing good work in order to keep companies going. What advice would you have for someone who might be working on a team where there is now literally less people around to do that work, but they are being told that they need to do better quality work?

Oliver Burkeman:

I mean, again, I guess it's a question of whether you're focusing on the situation of the person who is receiving sort of incoming stream of demands that exceed their capacities to do those things well. And there, I think, you know, there's a lot to be, this is slightly borrowing from work of Cal Newport, I think really, but there's lots to be said for anything that you can do in your position in organization to start those conversations, the kind of conversations that have to do with saying like, I'm really excited about putting this on the front burner. So naturally we're gonna need to talk about what goes on the back burner as well in order to make that happen. If it's someone with more authority, it can be as a matter of communicating this directly that you do not expect that in communicating priorities, you do expect there to be posteriorities, you know, things that get set aside in order to focus. I think one thing that I don't quite, I'd have to think about how you operationalize this in different contexts, but one thing that is incredibly valuable has been for me is. any sort of strategy that you can implement that allows you a little bit of time to see the results of working in this more, sort of, in this calmer, more finitude accepting way is really powerful. Like if you can build it into your personal practice or to a company's practice to sort of come back and see what happened after a couple of weeks of taking a saner, a more realistic approach to email. Figuring out how many people actually were, you know. how many actual crises really did happen, how people responded to the idea that the response to an email might not be instantaneous, but it would be reliable, you know, it would be within the next day or two days or whatever, and as opposed to it being completely immediate. Anything that you can do to sort of treat this way of working as an experiment in itself, it seems to me always so quick, the evidence that's. that what you fear is going to go wrong if you work in this way doesn't go wrong and that lots of things go right. Of course, if you're the most junior person on a team that otherwise doesn't think this way, this is a challenge. There's no point shying away from that, right? You can't revolutionize the whole thing all on your own. But I think that's the essence of it probably.

Damon Klotz:

One of the other subjects that I wanted to touch on that I think, are you familiar with the term quiet quitting which has been written about a lot over the last sort of 12 to 18 months?

Oliver Burkeman:

I'm certainly familiar with it, but it seems to have many different nuances and definitions. So if we're going to talk about it, I'd love to know what you're meaning by it, specifically, I suppose.

Damon Klotz:

Yeah, I guess it's the way that I'm kind of seeing it being positioned at the moment in terms of the workplace context is this idea that when there was plenty of jobs going around, people might just feel comfortable, you know, going off and finding a new job straight away. But the current idea is, as the economy is shrinking in many different markets, the idea that people are kind of doing enough to get by but like still staying in their current job and kind of not going above and beyond for the current employer. but they might not necessarily have something lined up right now. And in some ways it's a little bit of a pushback to maybe some of the overworking that we saw happening at the start of the pandemic when, you know, the average workday was increasing by not just minutes, by hours in some cases. So I was wondering whether you wrote about this idea of strategic underachievement, which is, you know, identify all the low return activities that you must do to uphold your responsibilities at home or work. and then ask yourself what is the absolute bare minimum that you can do in

Oliver Burkeman:

Yes,

Damon Klotz:

order to make time for them. What matters most? Do you feel any part responsible for this idea of these quiet quitters going around finding the bare minimum to do inside of the workplace right now?

Oliver Burkeman:

Well, gosh, maybe I don't know. One thing that always intrigues me about this idea of quiet quitting is it doesn't seem to, is it always meant to be a prelude to then just kind of eventually resigning? Or is it just meant to be, is it just a way of sort of working to rule and doing lots of other things with your life for as long as you can get away with it? I don't know.

Damon Klotz:

Yeah, I think it's kind of just people a bit checked out and they haven't actually quit the organization, but

Oliver Burkeman:

Right.

Damon Klotz:

they're not exactly trying to achieve anymore. And you know, there's different sort of memes going around that, you know, people who haven't received pay rises or anything for a long time and like, well, I'm just reducing how much I work

Oliver Burkeman:

Right.

Damon Klotz:

down to basically what you're paying me in the market

Oliver Burkeman:

Right.

Damon Klotz:

economy right now.

Oliver Burkeman:

Right. Right. I mean, so there's two, there's two sort of senses in which this idea of strategic underachievement gets used. And one of them is pretty overtly meant in a comical way, this idea of like, you know, if you if you really hate changing the toner on the office photocopier, this is an anecdote from a time when we all were mainly in the office, I suppose. If you really hate changing the tone or on the office photocopy, then just do it once, do it incredibly badly, and nobody will ever ask you to do it again, right? So there's a kind of obnoxious way in which you can push tasks onto other people, not by refusing to do them, but by doing them willingly and then screwing them up. The other sense in which I think this concept has some more, has more value is just, again, coming from the lens of finite capacities, understanding that, you know, you are going to not be operating at 100% on every imaginable dimension in life at any given time. It's not possible for me to give all that I feel I want to give to my writing work, which in this case, you know, it's work I really care about. So it's a little bit different from some of the quiet quitting cases, but, and at the same time, give all the time I want to give to being in the, my. six-year-old son's life, right? Because that would on some level be every waking hour. He'd probably hate that, but you know, in principle, we want to do everything all the time. And so being strategic about which dials you're turning down to what degree for how long is actually really important. If I could say to myself, well, look, for the next couple of months, because of all these important deadlines, and obviously with my... wife's cooperation, if I'm going to be a bit less present as a parent for a couple of months, but then I'm going to consciously switch that balance later on and that makes sense to do it. Like that's a much less stress free and much less stressful and more efficacious way of balancing these priorities. It's like, okay, I'm not actually going to be excelling in like I'd like to in this field right now because that's coming later. And so it's difficult to sort of condemn out. write somebody who says, look, you know, I'm, I think I can get the results that keep me employed in this job by, by dialing that down and upping something else in my, in my life. I think where it clearly becomes kind of. Well, it becomes an issue for an organization, obviously, where it's not sort of possible to understand the results that are coming. And like on one level, if somebody can do their job excellently on a few hours of work a week, there's an argument for saying they should be fully permitted to do so. If they're not doing it excellently, then that's the same challenge as in any other context where somebody's not doing their job excellently. And, you know, the same set of... ways of dealing with that and responding to it seem to be open in the quiet quitting case. I can't help thinking of it from the perspective of the quiet quitter and saying that in a lot of cases, to the extent that this phenomenon is real, this must be not because somebody is saying, well, look, I love my job and I love my personal life, but I've decided to shift the balance. But because they're saying I'm not getting meaning from this job. I can't quite face trying to reorder my life in such a way that I can make money doing something that I love. So I'm just going to ease up on it to the extent possible. The problem is that this is no way to live, right? People have to, and in some ways people in much less fortunate socioeconomic situations have always had to, right? You do lots of jobs in the world that will be great if people didn't have to do. Nobody I assume. loves doing them for themselves, but they're doing them because supporting their family is meaningful to them and, you know, living in the house they live in is meaningful to them for one reason or another. So, you know, the hope would surely be in those cases that you could rethink work in ways that it wasn't something that had to be minimized because it was not meaningful. It still has to be proportionately sized relative to being finite as a human being. But I think, I guess the tough question I'd want to ask myself if I was a leader in an organization with a lot of quiet quitting going on is like, what's missing from that work that makes this the right strategy to take? I don't know. slightly ill-defined thoughts there, but maybe they're thought-provoking in some way.

Damon Klotz:

Well, we won't put on paper that it was your book which inspired all these people to start quite quitting around the world.

Oliver Burkeman:

I do know of a handful of people who have loudly or not unquietly quit as a result, they say, of reading the book. But I think that's a question of helping them articulate things they already believed. I don't think it has this kind of magic power to reduce the workforce of companies. That wouldn't be a very good thing if it did.

Damon Klotz:

I was just imagining these employees were being asked to do these tasks that they don't want to do and they're walking around going, well, I'm actually strategically underachieving on that because this book told me it's a coping mechanism to deal with my own mortality. So I'm actually not going to be doing that today. One of the other subjects that I think that you wrote about, which doesn't really get discussed enough, I think in the workplace is how hard it is for people to actually find time for rest. And you know, if you look at all the different studies based on the amount of time taken off in places like the US versus Europe versus Asia Pacific, you know, the time really is very different based on the sort of the economy and the market that you're working in and when times are tough economically, it's very easy to start working later, let it encroach on other activities that are important to you and maybe even delay things like time off. So my personal take on that is, you know, when the world is asking more from us, I'd argue that leisure and rest time is actually even more important. We'd love to hear your thoughts on how you're seeing, you know, this topic of rest play out. in the current market economy and you know, is there any way to make it easier for people to actually learn that recharge and rest is what we need in order to actually work better and be able to kind of make the most of our time.

Oliver Burkeman:

Yeah, no, I mean, this is absolutely on point and it's always something that I have sort of personally struggled with as well. I think it, in a number of different ways, right? There are big, big socioeconomic forces pushing us against resting. There's also this kind of instrumentalization of rest, where, you know, you even hinted at it yourself about how we need to rest in order to work better. And we do, right? You will work better if you rest. but one hopes that that's not the only reason that we're spending some of our life in recreation, but that it could be for itself, the value of the activity itself. And then thirdly, there's the fact that we sort of collaborate with this. We find it, anyone who's sort of moderately at least driven and ambitious in their lives in the modern world finds it quite hard to rest. It's not just that we're being stopped from doing it. It's that we kind of feel antsy and restless when we try. So I think, you know, yeah, a starting point is to see that, although I don't think instrumental reasons for leisure should be the only ones that they are real, like, you are actually going to produce more at a higher standard, if you're working sufficiently short hours to allow for rest and recuperation and just, you know, to not have to think of your work as this, like, aggravating. oppressive force in your life because you have space around the edges. There's actually really interesting work on the psychology of writers, just to take my personal example, that like, if you can keep the large projects of your of your writing life as only moderate parts of your timetable, you actually make much more progress on them because they don't become these things that trigger huge amounts of psychodrama and procrastination and you know, where the sort of. the thing inside you that just wants to be free, refuses to do any more work on the project because it's sort of dominating your life. If it doesn't dominate your life, you actually make more progress on it. Plus, you know, yeah, if you're exhausted and not thinking straight, then you're gonna work slower and things are gonna go wrong. And obviously, you know, this requires people at every level to both, you know, be willing to let, be willing to be okay with people they manage, not, not being present at their desks or available online past a certain time or as much as, or for quite as many hours as, as previously. It also requires all of us who are doing the rest. So leaders should certainly model that I think, but like it, it. It requires all of us to realize that it's not gonna feel great at the beginning. This is one of the weirdest paradoxes that I've kind of had to embrace in a personal way. It's like, if I think it's right to spend a little more part more of my life, you know, relaxing, reading a novel, going on a stroll, I'm gonna have to accept that for the first part of that time, it's actually gonna feel like I. I'm going to feel like I ought to be doing something else. And you'd have to sort of just ride that discomfort for a while to get through to the part of the experience that is so sort of richly rewarding. And yeah, it's this strange logic you say, that is when we're, when we're very, very busy and overwhelmed, that's exactly when we need the rest. It's that

Damon Klotz:

Hmm.

Oliver Burkeman:

some famous old anecdote is coming to my mind about the meditation teacher who says like, you have to meditate for 20 minutes a day. And the student says, but what, when I'm, what, what, what, what about when I'm too busy. And he says, Well, then you need to meditate for 30 minutes a day, right?

Damon Klotz:

Hehehe

Oliver Burkeman:

It's like, it's like it's true, it embodies a deep truth, but it but it's not a truth that is comfortable to enact. And I think getting to a handle on that, right, the fact that we're all a bit workaholic in the modern era in maybe not all, but lots of us who are not necessarily classic workaholics. And And even if it would be okay for us to get up and leave our work behind at 6pm instead of 8pm, we kind of don't want to. We'd rather keep trying to push through to this mythical point where we can say, it's all done. And since that's never

Damon Klotz:

Yep.

Oliver Burkeman:

happening, we need to learn to step away at a time when it isn't all done.

Damon Klotz:

I think one of the stories a lot of us tell ourselves about our experience with rest in the workplace is that like, you know, there's the, um, you know, one day in the future. And I know you've sort of written about that, like, you know, there'll be time one day, you know, when this thing's done, I'll have time to do this. And I know what one of my dreams is to, is to sit down and write a book. And the way I kind of always picture it is that it's going to be like, um, love actually, I'm going to go out, um, to some place in Italy down by the water. and spend three months writing the book, or I'll go on some sort of writer's retreat in order to do it, where it's like in reality, it's like, that's like you said, it's like if it becomes my identity, then it comes with all these other sort of pieces of pressure and baggage associated with it, as opposed to just writing 300 words a day at the moment in order to write the book, as opposed to making it this huge big dream in the future.

Oliver Burkeman:

Right, absolutely. I think that thing about, and I really feel this, that sort of like, oh, a beautiful setting for three weeks, I'm gonna totally nail this. And it's like, you could not put worse pressure on yourself in that context. And then not just writing 300 words a day, and I think this applies beyond writing, by the way, I think it applies to lots of new things that we want to implement or behavioral change and all the rest of it. Not just that you only need to do 300 words a day. But really, in terms of what you can actually control in the present, you just need to do 300 words, like once, like today. And the same goes for... I've lost your video, but I'm going to keep, I'll start that again, keep talking. The same goes for any kind of priority that you've been neglecting, whether it's a creative work or a certain aspect of work in an organization or nurturing a certain relationship or friendship in your life, right? You can really sort of stress yourself out unnecessarily by saying that from now on, you're going to do something about this every single day. Really, you just need to do something about it once and then take it from there. So I think that's a really important sense in which the desire to cultivate better habits and better systems and practices can actually get in the way of just doing the thing in question.

Damon Klotz:

So I guess as we move on from some of these things where it's about maybe the manager and the employee and how we're currently experiencing our work, one of the other, I think, you know, big shifts that I thought was really interesting with how I was interpreting your work is also about, I guess, the environment that we place ourselves in, in order to feel like we are living a fulfilling life. And you know, one of the biggest trends that we're seeing at the moment is this idea of the workplace and like where people are working from. There was a moment in your book, you have a chapter where you were writing about sort of the happiest person in the world who sort of lives on this cruise ship and has created a lifestyle where all of the mundane tasks are no longer, you know, a worry for that person and then you connected that story to the idea of digital nomads and how they're really looking to like remove themselves from the system in order to control more of their time and I think both of these are examples of people who wanted greater freedom and control but like kind of remove themselves. from a part of society in order to achieve what they were wanting and to maybe increase their happiness in their eyes. And I wonder what you think about, I guess, the workplace as a system, you know, going into an actual workplace, even if it means that we have to deal with some of the more mundane tasks like commuting or chit chat in the office or just like all the little things that may be working from home or being a digital nomad is kind of removing for us. Do you feel like being part of that actual physical workplace system is actually good for us?

Oliver Burkeman:

I think it really is. And by the way, you're referring there to a short film called The Happiest Guy in the World. It's a, The Guy Who Lives on the Cruise Ship. It's a darkly ironic title that the filmmaker gave it because he's not happy, right? I mean, or maybe as I say in the book, maybe he is, I can't quite tell, but I can easily tell that I would be deeply miserable in the supposedly perfect life that he's created for himself. And the same with digital nomads, it's this wonderfully freeing possibility that then seems to lead to a lot of loneliness. I think there's all sorts of evidence to suggest that being held in certain kinds of collective rhythms and rituals of which showing up in the office for most of every weekday or several weekdays a week or something is a sort of archetypal one, that there are all sorts of benefits to this. I write in the book about the Swedish workplace tradition of the fika, which is a sort of coffee break that happens at the same time of day in for everybody in a workplace in in lots of Swedish workplaces. And again, it's like it's the sameness of that time. But the fact that you don't have so much choice about when it happens, it's not really compulsory, but it's kind of expected. All these things are help create. All sorts of benefits, like just the benefit of. talking to other human beings, the benefit of serendipitous creative ideas, the benefit of the janitor getting to exchange words with the CEO and therefore mainly maybe surface some interesting important issue in the organization that wouldn't otherwise come to the attention of the leader. All sorts of ways. And I mean, I'm dancing with hypocrisy here because obviously I don't work. myself day to day in a corporate or an office context with other people. But I do find that other aspects of my life where I have rhythms that I don't necessarily get to choose, certain kinds of collaborative work that I do when I'm putting together things for radio programs and things, and then just the collaborative rhythms of family life where I don't get to choose exactly when to. pick my son up from school because you'd have to do it at school pick-up time, right? All these different ways to the extent that I do have them in my life, I find this in a deep personal way, right? They're very beneficial in all these ways. Now, at the same time, family-friendly workplace policies, work from home, flexibility seems to me to have a lot of very strong benefits. And so I think a lot of it is not to do with... kind of saying, okay, collective structures are the only way forward. So we have to get rid of all our flexible pandemic era workplace policies, and everyone just has to come in between these hours, that's got all plenty of downsides to, to that as well. I think it just is this recognition that there are real benefits to collective synchronization of anything we do in life, including work, even when it's not the kind of work where it's obvious, like, you know, certain manufacturing context, you have to be coordinated, you still benefit from it in in knowledge work and offering opportunities for it. You know, establishing certain incentives for it. I think people come to if it's done in that way, as opposed to sort of imposed in an oppressive fashion, people will come to feel the benefits of it, right? People I mean, I haven't got data on this, but my sense from people I've spoken to, people who are coming in a few days a week to work in sort of hybrid situations, by and large look forward to those days, right? You know, you don't, except maybe if you occasionally go on some sort of strange, isolated meditation retreat in a cabin in the mountains, we don't want to spend our days interacting with nobody. So I think really seeing it as something that's beneficial for the people doing it, as opposed to just something that organizations feel they need in order to have visibility on what people are up to and stuff like that is a really important starting point.

Damon Klotz:

It really is one of the hottest topics when it comes to, I guess, workplace trends right now. Like if you go on Twitter today, there is very prominent kind of leaders and VCs and other people saying, you know, the work from home experiment is over. Like bring in, bringing people back. Like this isn't working. This is not how you grow a company. And then you've got other people

Oliver Burkeman:

Some of them even own Twitter. They don't just say it on Twitter, right? Yeah.

Damon Klotz:

Yeah. I think I've gone nearly, I think I've gone the entire series of this show without ever saying that person's name, which I think is a good thing

Oliver Burkeman:

All right. No need to change that now.

Damon Klotz:

And then, you know, then there's other people who are like, no, like we have technology, we have systems where this is working. And you know, I guess to personalize this, you know, I recently moved to Melbourne and that's where Culture Amp’s largest office is globally. And that's a big shift for me because the last three years I was like a remote employee in the US and in different parts of the world and was working from wherever I sort of found myself due to different circumstances. But now I sort of have this choice where it's like I can go into the office a couple of days a week and I can also do deep work, you know, things like research for the podcast at home. And I'm really experiencing that I've actually, like you said, I kind of benefit from that. Like I love that I've got solitude to get work done when I, when I need it. But also I experienced a lot of joy from the relational aspect of working side by side with people and knowing that experiencing joy and meaning is also about experiencing other people's wins and hearing about what other people are working on. So for me personally, I love the idea of having access to both and, but I know for many people, they're not really getting that choice.

Oliver Burkeman:

Yeah, no, it's difficult and it's sort of, there's a built-in paradox that one sort of needs to acknowledge, I think, which is that if it's all entirely choice-based, then it doesn't really do the job, right? Part of what makes... things we're talking about, the fika or just all the religious traditions of sabbaths or anything like that. There has to be some level of you don't get to choose, otherwise people do it at all different times of day and it doesn't synchronize at all. So yeah, it's a thorny issue because it's a sort of a question of saying, in this organization to this extent, we're actually going to remove a little bit of choice here, but it's sort of for your own good. And that... definitely resonates in an awkward way. I think the place to begin is by understanding how it can benefit individual employees, right? Rather than just being a way that managers and leaders indulge their insecurity about letting that happen. I don't, in some of the more sort of strident, okay, the experiment has failed kind of statements, you kind of think like, well, that you see no particular. sense that the person making those comments is saying, like, we'll all be happier as an organization if we change. It's like, like, I just can't bear anymore, not knowing what people are doing or wondering if they're, like, taking advantage of me or something.

Damon Klotz:

I've got one more topic that I was reflecting on when it comes to some of the big societal shifts that I think you've got some interesting takes on. And then I kind of wanted to finish with this idea of embracing our finitude and advice you have for people. But I saw recently that you've started a series with the BBC on convenience and I wanted to reflect on, I guess, two of the significant shifts that we're seeing in society when it comes to this idea of convenience. We have We have the gig economy that's promising that it was going to be making our life easier and it's allowing us to outsource things that, you know, we don't want to do to others or things that are just we could do, but like there's someone else who could do it for us. And then, you know, that's requiring real humans in order to, you know, make our life more convenient. And then from a technology perspective, I guess what we're seeing is this whole idea of AI dominating the media landscape right now. with this idea that AI will allow us to take all the stuff we don't want to do and spreadsheets and writing and all this other stuff and just make us more efficient. And I'm wondering about your take on whether removing some of these tedious things from our life, are there unintended downsides to this convenience that we're experiencing?

Oliver Burkeman:

Yeah, I mean, that's very much the sort of thesis of the radio series is this idea that we don't really know what we're doing. We think we're just smoothing away things that we don't want to do. And then we realize subsequently that actually we kind of did want some of them. A lot of what we think of as friction in life is actually talking to other human beings instead of ordering food on an app, or it is... it's walking to the, I don't know, to the post office and in that walk, getting to sort of reflect on the work you've been doing and come up with some interesting ideas. Whereas if you could do the whole thing just by straight after you, you know, just sitting at your desk, you wouldn't get those sort of important breathing spaces. It's kind of caring for other people. I give the example in the book of... of using those services where you realize you're too late to send someone a birthday card on the other side of the world. So you like design it on a website and then they mail it locally. And it's fine, sure, better than nothing. But like, actually it always leaves a little bit of a bad taste in the mouth because actually the inconvenience of going and buying a card and writing it and doing it all in time to send it, some part of that is an expression of... our care for the other person. So in all sorts of ways, I think it's very easy to think of, you know, inconvenient things as just something anyone would obviously want to remove. And then actually there's all sorts of downsides to doing so. I mean, the AI topic is just like goes up in so many different directions. If you believe some of the worst predictions for what the AI is going to do to the human race, then the idea that it might take away some. some valued inconveniences from our lives seems like small fry. But if we, I do think that... that just to stay on that level, there are obviously going to be all sorts of unintended consequences on that mundane level. If I just to pick and just to use current AI, right? If I can get the sort of skeleton of some document I want to write automatically generated by chat GPT, and then I am gonna go into that and finesse it and put it into my own voice. Like there are tons of people offering like dodgy online courses now telling you how to do exactly that. You get all your content written automatically and then you just sort of finesse it a bit. But who knows what sorts of unconscious, important creative things and satisfying things are happening in that phase that is being eliminated. I always think as a reporter, as an interviewer, as the guardian, one of the things I would often do is like record a kind of. hour long interview with somebody and then go back and transcribe it. And these days, people sometimes are very surprised at the idea that you would personally transcribe something when it can be done either automatically or cheaply by another human. And I have sometimes used those services too, just to be clear. But actually, there's something really important that happens. I know a lot of journalists, interviewers who transcribe their own interviews because something happens that's important when you're listening back to it, typing it out, and you're sort of thinking about the structure of the piece. So yeah, I think there's all sorts of ways in which getting parts of our processes handled for us by AI could eliminate things that we didn't realize we didn't want to eliminate until they were gone.

Damon Klotz:

Yeah, I think there'll be plenty more to come on that subject in terms of, I guess, how it impacts what we're working on and the decisions that we're kind of making. And yeah, like, you know, you don't want to lose the meaning from the work as well, which is I think is something that we've discussed is that, you know, what you work on, how you choose to work on things, but also the meaning associated with what you're working on is really critical as well.

Oliver Burkeman:

Right, I mean, maybe one day I could get to the point where I could have my email newsletter and my books completely created by artificial intelligence and I don't have to have anything to do with them. I can just go and lie on a beach. I personally would be devastated. Like that's not the goal I'm going for here, to not get to engage with the ideas. Now I know that's a specific thing to me as a writer, but I think it applies in lots of contexts. It's like we're doing this for some reasons that are not just the output.

Damon Klotz:

Well, even in my role, I think one of the things that's really unique is that I have all these different inputs when it comes to what I'm sort of seeing, reading and researching about workplace culture and what's playing out. And it would be very easy for me to outsource to a website where you pay a dollar per hour for someone to do your research for you. Or even I could have put in to chat GPT, what are 15 good questions to ask Oliver Burkeman Berkman about

Oliver Burkeman:

terrifying.

Damon Klotz:

this subject? Right? But I would have lost all of the joy I got from doing all the research and trying to work out how to contextualize parts of this interview for what I'm seeing in the workplace. So I think the craft of work is something that we should always hold really special.

Oliver Burkeman:

Yep, I think that's absolutely right.

Damon Klotz:

So I know in your book you do have these, I guess, 10 tools for embracing our finitude. Was there any one of those in particular that stood out to you that you think helps us in the workplace context of like, I was even thinking about, you know, the idea that like there's always people who might read or listen to your book and be like. I can't believe I can't work at all the places I want to work or all the idea of I've picked the wrong career and I don't have enough time to go do the career that I want to do. Was there any of those around embracing your finisher that you think are more relevant to the workplace compared to our personal life?

Oliver Burkeman:

Sure, yeah, I mean, I think one that springs immediately to mind. And as I say in the book, again, this is partly something I... found from Cal Newport's work and then sort of melded with my own outlook is what I call in the book, a fixed volume approach to productivity. Broadly speaking, whether you're planning your day or planning your organization's quarter or whatever it is, this is an approach that says, first of all, how much time do I have available for work or for a certain kind of work? And then, Secondly, given that volume constraint, what are the most important things to do with that time? So this is, again, just to pick it personally, I might say, I have maybe four hours in the day when I can meaningfully do certain kind of high focus, creative work and maybe a few more when I can do other kinds. Given those sort of mental boxes, which might be literal boxes on a calendar, what can I then... what's most important to fit into that time. Sounds kind of like, well, how else would you do it? But of course, I think most of the time we do do something else, which is we ask ourselves what needs doing today, this quarter, this year, and then we just sort of go hell for leather in an attempt to get it done. And that brings you straight back into all the problems of there's more to do than you'll have time for, you'll generate more things to do as a result of working on them. And that very sort of, this is our capacity This is my capacity for today or for this month. This is an organization's capacity. Let's drop into that diagram based on our best estimates, understanding that it's very, very, very easy to underestimate how long things will take. Let's drop into our diagram what makes the most sense to work on in that time. And then we can see where the trade-offs are and we can deal with them. And maybe we have to renegotiate some commitments and maybe we have to... steal ourselves to letting down that person because we've decided to focus on the goals that came from this person or whatever it is. You're bringing into consciousness what is already true, which is that you are only going to work for a certain amount of time today on a certain amount of things. It's very difficult to express the feeling of this, but there is a shift that goes from... I'm totally overwhelmed and I'm panicking and I'm just trying to sort of flailing my limbs about in the hope that I can stay above water to a kind of engagement with the situation. Might still be bad, might still be a difficult season of your life, might still be a difficult season of a company's life, but you're engaged with it and you're picking up pieces of it and dealing with them and then they're dealt with, and it's a completely different orientation to the same situation.

Damon Klotz:

So I wanted to close out the conversation. I guess you had these really powerful questions at the end in terms of how to meditate on our own existence. And there was one that I think stood out to me just because of, I guess, how I see it play out in the workplace. And there was one that you wrote, which is, you know, are you holding yourself to and judging yourself by standards of productivity or performance that are impossible to meet? and how this impacts our ability to even think about happiness and whether we're, you know, are we working on the right things. And the reason why I think it was important to meditate on personally is also because I actually feel like the word standard is something that in organizations isn't always clear. And that's where a lot of this idea that like, are we spending our time well? That, you know, the gap can increase because the organization hasn't got a really clear standard on what success looks like. So it's nearly impossible for an individual to meet it if it's not clearly met, if there's no performance metrics, there's no goals. And I think one of the, I guess, trends in this space is this idea of job creep where people have crept into a different role by accident, yet they're

Oliver Burkeman:

Mm-hmm.

Damon Klotz:

still being measured on this standard that is somewhere else. And I just wanted to sort of bring it up because I really feel like maybe one of the things that leaders who are listening to this can really take away from this. is to reflect on that question for yourself by are you judging yourself by the standards of productivity that are impossible to meet, but also by accident or on purpose, is this actually impossible to meet inside of your company because you haven't had conversations around what success looks like and whether people are working on the right things or not and is some of this feeling of discontent actually because of this mismatch right now. So I just wanted to sort of, I guess. close the conversation with that reflection because I read it for me personally but I also saw it play out in organisations.

Oliver Burkeman:

Yeah, I think it's really, I mean, I don't have an awful lot to add to what you've said there, but I think it's one thing I suppose is that, right, the feeling that there are standards that must be met, but that you don't know what they are, and they're not clear enough to meet is the most sort of crazy making thing you can suffer in that context. I think that's part of the reason that standards may remain unclear is because there are kind of unacknowledged trade-offs there that people don't want to face and say, well, if we're going to meet this standard in this domain, we're going to have to accept this lower standard in this other domain. And so by keeping them vague, you can continue to, as a manager, as a leader, you can continue to trick yourself into believing that somehow by the end of this quarter or something, you know, we're going to find that all these things have worked. So it's... when things are unclear, there's usually some positive reason why they've been kept unclear, I think, and it can only help us all to lean into that, ask a few more questions and get a bit more clarity.

Damon Klotz:

Well, I must say, I think your work is very timely for the conversations we should be having about the workplace as well as obviously what's been happening over the last few years in terms of where are we working from? Are we making the right decisions? Who are we spending time with? How do we wrestle with this idea of finitude as well as, you know, everything that that's possible? So I know that your books really helped me a lot as I flipped that coin between finding beauty in the everyday and also this existential dread of am I living up to my own expectations and living the best life? So I know it's really helped me and that your content has been really well received by the culture amp and culture first community. So I just wanted to say thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today. Is there any closing thoughts or remarks that you wanted to leave with the audience?

Oliver Burkeman:

No, I mean, that's just to say that that's wonderful to hear. And it's kind of like, yeah, for the, in terms of the meaning of my own work, that's where it all comes from. It's just great to have the sense of articulating things that people have already been thinking in an unarticulated way perhaps, and sort of sharing the slightly absurd journey of human existence in a more, in that way, yeah. I've really enjoyed the conversation.

Damon Klotz:

Yeah, amazing. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Oliver Burkeman:

Thank you.

Damon Klotz: I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Oliver Burkeman. At the start of the episode I gave you a challenge. Were you able to listen from to start to finish. It’s ok if you didn’t. As I reflect on this conversation I’m left thinking about where a book like 4000 weeks is placed in a bookstore. My opinion is that Oliver wrote a book that doesn’t deserve to be added to the self-help or productivity section, because for me, I find that this work is more like philosophy and poetry about our relationship with ourselves, our decisions and how to spend our limited time on this planet. So while the title of the book was about time management, that’s not the only takeaway that I had.

It’s about where and what we pay attention to. Which in my opinion, is one of the only things that we truly have control over in life. When it comes to building a culture first company, these are the subjects that we should be talking about.

Over the last few episodes for everyone who’s made it to the very end, congratulations if you have, I’ve been putting together some actionable takeaways for you.

• During your next team 1:1, whether as the leader of the conversation or a participant, I’d encourage you to have a conversation about the clearing of the decks. What is the work that you’re consciously or subconsciously spending a lot of time on that’s just never going to be completed. The example we spoke about was the email inbox. The only reward for answering emails quickly is the expectation that you can handle more emails and reply quickly.
• Have a conversation about the expectations around how you’re working, and if there’s other high value tasks that you’d like to be focused on, if you’re able to come to agreement on how much time is necessary to clear the decks.

I want to thank Oliver for his writing and for spending some of his 4000 weeks on this planet with the Culture First community.

I’ve been your host Damon Klotz and the Culture First Podcast is brought to you by the team here at Culture Amp, the world’s leading employee experience platform. Learn more about Culture Amp by heading to www.cultureamp.com

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