YouSaid · the spoken record

Oliver Burkeman

lines on the record: 94
first: 2022-03-14
most recent: 2022-03-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I love this kind of conversation. And I think obviously you learn from it completely. But so I think what I'm talking about is sort of... Yeah, I guess it is exposing myself to New avenues of thinking that are not sort of jumping off from things that I've already thought about. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah. This kind of conversation is great.”
2022-03-14 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Finally Stop Procrastinating: Oliver Burkeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, no, totally. But it is just the honest answer it is something that I. I don't feel sort of satisfied about in terms of the apportionment of my time. What”
2022-03-14 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Finally Stop Procrastinating: Oliver Burkeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A very good question. No, there are definitely, I definitely aspire to make more space in my days, especially for reading. Because it gets squeezed out by doing things related to writing and books. It actually gets hard to sort of keep that. Section of time for just sort of the exploration of ideas in that way. On the other hand, I want to say that things like Becoming a parent, even things like moving back from New York to the UK, like there are certain ways in which you learn that are not book-based learning and you just sort of are dragged forwards in your education, whether you like it or not. And I think in those ways, it's more a question of seeing what you're being taught and that you are learning than needing to make more time. Learning, but that's an interesting question”
2022-03-14 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Finally Stop Procrastinating: Oliver Burkeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kind of evaded that question by saying by giving you an example of something where I'm not holding back because I'm actually doing them.”
2022-03-14 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Finally Stop Procrastinating: Oliver Burkeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It sort of speaks to imposter syndrome and things like that and not launching into things until you feel that you're ready. Recently since the book was out, I've been giving more sort of talks and speeches than I ever have done in my life before. And I've sort of been forced into not holding back on that because the invitations come in and I say yes to them. And then it's like, oh my God, I got to do this. That is something where I feel perpetually un Ready. And if it was up to me, I would Probably have left it some more. I mean, it was up to me. But if I'd felt that it was up to me, I would have left it some more years to sort of get really good at doing that. And I'm not ready, but it seems to be going okay.”
2022-03-14 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Finally Stop Procrastinating: Oliver Burkeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, this is definitely one that speaks to me. I mean, obviously I put the questions in because they speak to me. But this is this difficulty that I think we all have, but I really have had with realizing that on some level everyone is winging it.”
2022-03-14 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Finally Stop Procrastinating: Oliver Burkeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and that help other people and lift other people upright. It's not that when I talk in the book about cosmic insignificance, and I sort of mean that, right? It's like from the perspective of the cosmos, no, it doesn't matter, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't matter. It can matter to. People here today”
2022-03-14 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Finally Stop Procrastinating: Oliver Burkeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Every day mundane things can be meaningful, and it's quite possible that the most fulfilled people on the planet are precisely the ones you never hear from because they're doing low profile things. And then I have this theory. Maybe it's insulting to you, this theory, but I have this theory that the more of a public profile someone has, and I have a modest one, so it applies to me too. But that's probably to that degree is like they're screwed up in some way because they have some problem with not being ordinary. And then, you know, the Hollywood A-list.”
2022-03-14 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Finally Stop Procrastinating: Oliver Burkeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so, yeah, I can imagine that it's an interesting issue for sort of people who look up to you, specifically, for example, thinking that it's actually like they've got to emulate you in order to be doing something meaningful rather than be inspired by you, which is a different point, right? Because actually very, very”
2022-03-14 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Finally Stop Procrastinating: Oliver Burkeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Purpose that the universe had laid down for you because there kind of isn't one. And that's actually liberating, as I keep saying, you know, it's a reason to sort of experimentally do the things that seem to you like the coolest things to do. Then what you can do is you can use a definition of mattering according to which so much that we do matters, right? I think it's difficult for people to remember that like I don't know, I don't want to use a definition of a meaningful life that rules out some very mundane things like caring for a sick relative, cooking nutritious meals for your kids, making your neighborhood a slightly more beautiful place to live in. Like we don't want a definition of the meaning of meaningful lives that says none of those things are meaningful, surely.”
2022-03-14 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Finally Stop Procrastinating: Oliver Burkeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really get sort of Depressed about whether you can really have an impact on things because it has to be something that lives for millennia after you're gone or something. And when you realize how little most of it's going to matter quite soon, some people do go down that into despair and horror. But I think that is a reason to be like, why not take the risk? Like, why not do the bold things? It's like the stakes are a lot lower than you thought the universe doesn't really care. You don't need to worry about whether you're fulfilling your...”
2022-03-14 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Finally Stop Procrastinating: Oliver Burkeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There is a sort of inbuilt bias that most of us have, not just the ones who are megalomaniacs, but almost all of us, to think sort of subliminally of history as having led up to like our bit of history, right? And then to think of the decisions that we take and the things that we're doing as fundamentally the most important things that are going on in that bit of history. And on some level, we probably have to, right? Just to sort of short, to be able to get up in the morning. You can't think of yourself as this kind of tiny pimprick of light in the middle of eons of darkness of the cosmos from the Big Bang to the when the universe ends or whatever. But actually, you can really get bogged down in that. You can really be like, well, you can spend a long time mired and indecision about things because you've built the stakes up in your head to an enormous degree.”
2022-03-14 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Finally Stop Procrastinating: Oliver Burkeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't really think any of us. I think, I mean, I think what I want to say about this is if you adopt this cosmic time scale, right, if you love the history of like the cosmos or even just the planet, no human life or even anything that is done in a human life, you know, almost nothing will outlive us. And the things that do outlive us like, you know, people inventing great scientific breakthroughs or something, even then the period that these have been relevant if you look at the cosmos is still like a tiny blink of an eye.”
2022-03-14 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Finally Stop Procrastinating: Oliver Burkeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Two and a half thousand word researched article. You'd just be like, okay, I've just got to do it. In a way, I'm sort of training myself out of that now. And I think that isn't perfectly okay and it's fine. But it isn't sustainable. I think that to really over the long haul be able to do something like writing I've found requires that I have acquire this ability for sort of dogged persistence rather than cruising to the deadline.”
2022-03-14 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Finally Stop Procrastinating: Oliver Burkeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think deadlines have their role, right? And I would have got nowhere without deadlines in newspapers because they sort of helped me sort of bust through perfectionism and stuff because it was just literally, you know, I did these things on a, I would write these kind of features for the Guardian where I had to like that the idea came to me or was given to me at like 10.30 in the morning and 5 p.m. They needed a”
2022-03-14 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Finally Stop Procrastinating: Oliver Burkeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Embarrassingly small work days on it Regularly done day after day after day, so much more productive, like in terms of the actual output deadline.”
2022-03-14 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Finally Stop Procrastinating: Oliver Burkeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That then became very intimidating, and they got all sorts of psychodramas going on with it because it was something they were willing to sort of do for a little bit, leave aside, come back to. And I think this applies to, especially applies to anything that is like brain work, but I think it applies to pretty much all kinds of endeavor, right? There's often a huge benefit in being willing to say, well, I'm going to work on this for a tiny amount of time today. and I'm going to stop even if I'm on a roll, right? When my time is up, I'm going to stop. And then I'm going to come back. It makes it something that you can sustain day after day after day. If you do the opposite of incrementalism, right? If you give this sort of absolutely center stage in your life, then if it goes well, great. But if it doesn't go well, it becomes this kind of huge, intimidating thing. And I've found that if I'm working on a book, say really sort of almost embedded.”
2022-03-14 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Finally Stop Procrastinating: Oliver Burkeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is the idea that there are contexts where really being willing to make progress on the basis of little and often gradual progress to do a tiny bit at a time and not kind of binging on the things you're trying to achieve can be really powerful. Again, I'm sorry to keep coming back to writing as an example, but the work that I'm drawing on there from a psychologist called Robert Boyce who studied academics who write and trying to figure out like who are the ones who actually get a ton of papers published and a ton of books written and who are the ones who get mired in like procrastination and paralysis. And he found that the really productive people in that sphere were the ones who made writing a modest part of their daily life, right? It occupied like a couple of hours maybe as opposed to the ones who made it into this huge thing.”
2022-03-14 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Finally Stop Procrastinating: Oliver Burkeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The faster things get, the more offensive it is when they still only take a few seconds, when there's a few seconds delay. If we're using the word in another way to mean having a sort of hunger for things to change in your life or change in society, you're not willing to sort of sit around and be a doormat while things when you could change things, then sure. I think that's a different kind of impatience and I'm sure it has a role.”
2022-03-14 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Finally Stop Procrastinating: Oliver Burkeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At the fact that you have limited control over how fast the world goes, how fast something happens, then no, I mean, it's just wild, right? We now are much more impatient. Like if a web page takes five seconds to load, like you can feel it. It's ridiculous. But if somebody says, yeah, I'll put that stuff in the mail and you'll get it in three days. You're like, that's fine.”
2022-03-14 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Finally Stop Procrastinating: Oliver Burkeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Depends how you define it, right? So, in the book I'm talking about impatience as wanting things to go faster than you can have them go. So then I'd say like, no, there's never any, even if you're sort of... Driving somebody to the hospital because they're going into labor or something, right? I mean, it's like you should do that really fast. You should be urgent. You should prioritize that. And you should go drive as fast as is practical. But even then, it's probably not worth feeling frustrated that you're stuck in traffic or something, right? I mean, so if impatience is that kind of frustration.”
2022-03-14 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Finally Stop Procrastinating: Oliver Burkeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“uncomfortable because you're not in charge anymore. You can't race through the day in the way that you were accustomed to doing. But it is so Useful because getting through that discomfort to what lies on the other side is so empowering, I think patience is really a kind of a superpower in the modern world. And in the context of a painting, what happens is you literally see things in the painting that you hadn't seen in the first 45 minutes. I mean, it's bizarre. In the context of work, creative work, business, I think it's more just that like when everyone is racing as fast as they are today, there's actually real power in being able to resist that and let things take the time they take and think about something for a few more days if that's what it takes. Like you actually can.”
2022-03-14 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Finally Stop Procrastinating: Oliver Burkeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Useful is that all of us who are sort of moving at this speed need to experiment a little bit with what it feels like to just Slow down to the speed that things take. And it takes my time and it takes. I need to read slowly and focus. I'm just going to like, yeah, it's not going to feel great at first, right? Because we are wired for racing through things. And it doesn't feel great at first, but it is a path to a much deeper kind of engagement with the world. One of the things I do in the book is I write about this exercise that I did that is recommended by an art historian at Harvard University who I went to interview. She has all her students choose a painting and go and look at it for three hours. Like sit on a little bench, whatever, and just look at that painting for three hours. Take notes if you want, but you're not allowed to get up. And she knows it's like it's completely insane for almost anybody today to envisage doing something like that for three hours. But that's why she suggests it. And, you know, for the first hour, it's incredibly...”
2022-03-14 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Finally Stop Procrastinating: Oliver Burkeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Should be kept as a sort of strictly kind of medical idea. But I think that's really, it resonates with me because I feel like it's very tempting in this world that feels like there's so much stuff to stay on top of. And it moves at such a tempo. There is this notion that the only solution is for you to go even faster than it is to be able to encompass all of that. And this is not going to work because you're never going to be able to, you know, there is an infinite supply, right? There's an effectively infinite number of emails you could receive, demands your boss could make, opportunities you could pursue, businesses, you could stop, whatever. So getting faster at going through an infinite supply, you don't get to the end of that because it's infinite. So Stephanie Brown's advice to her clients, and I think it's very...”
2022-03-14 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Finally Stop Procrastinating: Oliver Burkeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sense. I'm drawing on the work of a therapist called Stephanie Brown, who was herself an alcoholic, got sober with AA, then started being a therapist in Silicon Valley, to various people in the sort of first dot-com boom around 2000s. And seeing in them this trait in their addiction to what she called their addiction to urgency, their addiction to speed that reminded her very much of her youthful experiences as an alcoholic, namely that you're sort of life speeds up, you feel overwhelmed. You think that going faster has got to be the solution, right? If you go even faster, then you can cope with all this rush of incoming information, incoming opportunities, whatever it is. So you go faster, but then you find that actually that's just increased the speed of everything and now you need to go faster still. And it's a sort of spiral and you crash. There's controversy about talking about addiction, whether it's...”
2022-03-14 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Finally Stop Procrastinating: Oliver Burkeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm talking there about the sort of acceleration of the culture, the fact that everything moves so fast that we're able to do so many things so much more quickly, travel, communicate, cook food, than we once could and why that, like it's a, if you stop and think about it, it's really weird that all that technology and all that acceleration has not left us feeling more relaxed and chilled out, right? Because it saves time. The world that has 747s in it and microwaves in it and the internet in it ought by rights to feel much calmer because all this time is saved, but of course it doesn't have that effect. Like has that effect on nobody? It makes everybody feel more impatient and rushed. And I think the reason the frame of addiction may”
2022-03-14 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Finally Stop Procrastinating: Oliver Burkeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It can't be that the universe stops somewhere, but it also can't be that it goes on forever. Like, what? And yeah, and saying that there are people who are sort of troubled by these things in some real personal way. And then there are people who are not troubled by those things. And they may be very intelligent and deep people, but they don't have these kind of like, hold on, like, what's it all about? Like, was it anyway, I'm one of the people who does, and it sounds like you are too. But yeah, there would be something nice to not be, perhaps.”
2022-03-14 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Finally Stop Procrastinating: Oliver Burkeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure. I mean, I think, you know, there's a philosopher who died recently, Brian McGee, who talks about the distinction between people who sort of have philosophical problems and don't. And what he means is that from the age of like five, he can remember lying on a field looking up at the sky and thinking like,”
2022-03-14 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Finally Stop Procrastinating: Oliver Burkeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Justify yourself in the eyes of the world, or if you're religious, you know, it would be in the eyes of God, whatever. Don't mean you don't do things. It just means you do them from a different motivation, which is like, hey, I get to do these things, that's great.”
2022-03-14 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Finally Stop Procrastinating: Oliver Burkeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The fact that it's great to be here and great to have these skills and these opportunities I'm not religious, but there is this idea in Christianity that I keep running up against now because people contact me and say, have you thought about this? Because it's clearly related, this notion of grace, that you can't justify yourself by your works in the world, right? You can't sort of achieve salvation by what you do. But you also don't, in this model anyway, you don't need to achieve it either because you're already justified in the eyes of God if you're a religious person. And so the reason that you do things like this, the reason that you then do stuff in the world is, again, it's just like, yeah, it's for the, it's an act of like glorification or worship, right? Or for, as we were saying, like just expressing the fact that it's great to be able to do these things and like, hey, you could never have been born. So it's not a reason to not do things. It's that you're not doing them to try to.”
2022-03-14 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Finally Stop Procrastinating: Oliver Burkeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Totally. Yeah, no, I think that's a great way of putting it. I mean, the way I've sometimes thought about this is like, Sort of ambition and achievement and creation, they don't have to be the thing you're doing, the thing that you need to do in order to get somewhere. They can be the thing you do just to express”
2022-03-14 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Finally Stop Procrastinating: Oliver Burkeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or another that might be appropriate for some people. But there is this fear when I talk about this stuff and write about this stuff of like, oh, wouldn't it lead you to just think, well, why do anything? Wouldn't it all just lead us to be sort of nihilists in that way? And I don't think so for that reason, but I also think let's cross that bridge when we come to it. We're all so driven and so sort of trying to get more and more and more done that there's not a huge risk yet of us becoming so Zen about all these things that we kind of stop achieving entirely.”
2022-03-14 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Finally Stop Procrastinating: Oliver Burkeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's probably very often true of certain kind of very driven people. It's not just that they're sort of trying to bring their gift into the world. It's an odd and not necessarily helpful way of trying to sort out certain like psychological issues they have. So they feel that they have to achieve a certain amount because they were not, you know, given sufficient unconditional love by their parents. So they need it from the world or they feel that, yeah, they need to justify their existence in some way. And then it gets hard to know when to stop. It gets hard to tell the difference between success and things that are truly bringing you happiness. But at the same time, right, you don't want to, it's important to not suggest, I think, that the ideal is to be for everyone, is to be so completely chilled out that all you would want to do is lie in a hammock on a beach and sort of not create things in one way.”
2022-03-14 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Finally Stop Procrastinating: Oliver Burkeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that all of us Have something inside us that we're sort of here, if this doesn't sound too supernatural, that we're sort of here to express and to put out into the world, I think it gets complicated because some people, I don't want to accuse Elon Musk of this, but...”
2022-03-14 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Finally Stop Procrastinating: Oliver Burkeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You can't see the wood for the trees inside your own head, but they can be like, no, very obviously you need to do this and then this. So it's a little bit of that effect as well.”
2022-03-14 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Finally Stop Procrastinating: Oliver Burkeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, totally. And for me, I mean, there's lots of research about how writing down your personal problems, for example, is incredibly like journaling. It works and it's proven to work. It's not necessarily because you come up with solutions, although that can happen. It's because you end up, you sort of have to take this third person stance on your own mental contents. And you have to do that for sure if you're trying to package it in some form that other people can benefit from or can understand. So writing for an audience is absolutely an example of that. There's something incredibly powerful in seeing your issues, your interests, whatever, from the perspective of another person. I think it's related to that thing about how so often in life, you know, our friends can see what we need to do or what's needed in our lives a bit more clearly than we can, because you sort of...”
2022-03-14 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Finally Stop Procrastinating: Oliver Burkeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, or just to understand that, like, you know, yeah, things are complicated and you only sort of congeal over time and sometimes you only understand things in the rear view mirror and you just sort of have to navigate intuitively. You probably do know when you're in a relationship and you don't know if it's love. You probably do know if it feels like it's got forward motion or if it feels terribly stagnant or if it feels, you know, you can sort of intuit these things even if you can't slot them into these kind of rigid categories.”
2022-03-14 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Finally Stop Procrastinating: Oliver Burkeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I became a father, like literally 95% of people who I interacted with who were parents themselves already would say, oh, you should really savor these early months with a newborn baby. It's so special. You should really savor it. And this is true, right? It is incredibly special. You should savor it. But all it did to me was have me thinking, oh my goodness, am I savoring this in the right way? And then, of course. You're certainly not savoring it in that time because you're just like lost in your head. And it's like this, yeah, absolutely. It's another example of it, right? Yeah.”
2022-03-14 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Finally Stop Procrastinating: Oliver Burkeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Around Yeah. It makes you so self conscious that you can't actually give yourself to the experience. That's reminding me of.”
2022-03-14 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Finally Stop Procrastinating: Oliver Burkeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There are certain areas where sort of growth involves discomfort and we're okay with that. And then there are other areas, often involving cognitive activities where we're somehow deeply offended that it feels a bit difficult to do it. But no, it does. The other thing that I always think is extraordinarily difficult is really listening to another person, right? It never really gets super easy, that I think, especially in relationships, right? To really concentrate on what someone is saying and not just to be thinking, oh, but then when they're finished, this is what I'm going to say. It takes effort. And if your response to that feeling of effort is like, I can't feel effort, it must be easy. Then it's going to be much more tempting to just be like checking your phone when you should be listening or something. So just a bit of a willingness to experience mild discomfort. I think it's kind of a superpower.”
2022-03-14 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Finally Stop Procrastinating: Oliver Burkeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One clever trick or something is just to expect a certain amount of discomfort in things that matter, right? Just to sort of expect that Writing. I keep using this example because it's personal to me, but it feels difficult. Cal Newport, who wrote the book Deep Work and Digital Minimalism, who's very good on this, has this argument that what people call writers block, that's just the feeling of writing, right? Because it's a hard thing to do. And sometimes you might get into flow. Great. But most of the time, it's probably going to be a question of like, it's like a little bit hard. And the analogy that people always use is with weightlifting, right? I mean, you don't expect if you don't expect that to feel non-uncomfortable. Not that I have great experience of it, but like you don't.”
2022-03-14 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Finally Stop Procrastinating: Oliver Burkeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've sort of have a sort of ever shifting and never perfectly observed set of personal rules about like when I will turn to my email and when I will turn to the internet and when I will be try to be sort of offline and focused on writing and thinking. But the other side of it, I think, is the distractibility, not just the sort of things that are reaching out to grab our attention, but the fact that we kind of go along willingly with this stuff. And again, you know, it's just my one thesis, but I think the reason that we're doing that is because it's much more comfortable than focusing on hard stuff. Focusing on hard stuff is unpleasant sometimes because it brings us into contact with our limitations and then distraction is much nicer thing to do with that time because it doesn't. So really a big part of this for me, and it's been definitely a slow gradual thing. It's not a sort of...”
2022-03-14 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Finally Stop Procrastinating: Oliver Burkeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's really two parts to this, I think. One is, especially in the modern era, right? One is the source of the distraction. So definitely I don't have social media on my phone. I do that on a laptop exclusively.”
2022-03-14 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Finally Stop Procrastinating: Oliver Burkeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And nobody who ended up watching that hour got up that morning thinking what I'd really like to do today is spend an hour watching people put rubber bands all around a watermelon. So it's just really the question of distraction, the question of how we steward our attention. And again, if you want a break in the middle of the day and someone's doing some stunt involving a watermelon, fine, right? But just bringing consciousness to that fact that when we pay attention to things, we are paying very literally with little chunks of our life.”
2022-03-14 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Finally Stop Procrastinating: Oliver Burkeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was the end of the Facebook Live. But the point that I'm using it to make is that, you know, millions of people watch that. And I'm not like, I don't think there's anything terrible with spending an hour of your life watching people put rubber bands around a watermelon, but they didn't choose to watch it. That's a very clear example of the way in which, especially in the sort of attention economy that we live in now, your attention is incredibly important because what you pay attention to just is your life, right? Over the course of a life, whatever you paid attention to is just Just what your life was And yet it's very easily hijackable and.”
2022-03-14 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Finally Stop Procrastinating: Oliver Burkeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The famous BuzzFeed watermelon. This was like what, five years ago now. Two journalists from BuzzFeed put rubber bands around a watermelon and they just kept adding rubber bands. I think it was like 600 and something rubber bands before the watermelon just exploded.”
2022-03-14 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Finally Stop Procrastinating: Oliver Burkeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Totally. And I mean, there's like philosophical work going back on would you actually want to be immortal if you could? No, and I agree. Yeah, I don't think you would because I think as writing in the book, if you were immortal. Answer to the question should I do X with my day-to-day would always just be who cares? Because if you didn't do it today, you could do it on any number of other days to the Stretching off into infinity. So I think absolutely it's not pleasant to confront our finitude, but life would have no meaning if it didn't stop.”
2022-03-14 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Finally Stop Procrastinating: Oliver Burkeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, no, and I think that, you know, yes, we spend so much effort trying to avoid thinking about costs or trying to avoid incurring them. But again, there's something freeing about seeing that you are always incurring costs, that every decision to spend an hour doing anything is a decision to not spend it doing other things that... Every path you choose, you're declining to choose all these other paths. Painful because it means that loss is built into living a human life. But it's also Like it's so unavoidable. There's nothing that can be done about that. That's just built into being finite. So, in a way, we can relax about that.”
2022-03-14 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Finally Stop Procrastinating: Oliver Burkeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Focus on one, you do it, and then it's finished, and then you bring the next one in, and you do that. It's so tempting to sort of dissipate your energies because I think it makes you feel we're back to the same idea, right? Makes you feel limitless. It makes you feel like you can wrap your arms around the whole world. It stops people in the case of my work. It stops people pestering you because like, where's that thing you said you'd do? And it's very nice to live in that world of sort of multitasking and multiprojects, but it's not the most effective. The”
2022-03-14 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Finally Stop Procrastinating: Oliver Burkeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and actually, I think it's probably the way to accomplish more things as well, right? So. One thing that I found I can't talk on the level of businesses launched, but only on the level of articles and books written, is the degree to which I can do things sequentially and train myself to do one big thing at a time and wait till it's finished before you move on to the next one takes a lot takes kind of guts to do it because it feels better to have a finger in every pie at once. But to the extent that I can do that, to that extent I get more of those things done because you make most of them wait.”
2022-03-14 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Finally Stop Procrastinating: Oliver Burkeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT