Are we disciplining ourselves out of happiness?

Perfectionism for me has always been a kind of central part of what I'm struggling with

That sense that I'm kind of on the back foot, that I need to put in just a little bit more

maybe a lot more effort and self-discipline, find the perfect organizational system

and like then, then I would finally get into the driving seat of my own life

It's becoming very obvious that this ever-accelerating treadmill isn't going to lead finally to this moment of wonderful calm and peace of mind

There will always be too much to do. You're never going to feel completely ready

You're never going to be able to feel confident about what's coming in the future

So if you set out on some big project of scheduling your time very, very, very strictly

not only will you probably fail and get very stressed, but even if you succeed, you'll fail in a way

because there'll be some lack of spontaneity to that life, to that sense of just having to carry out

these instructions that you've given yourself that is somehow at odds with what we really value from being alive

And so that's why I think we need a way of understanding and thinking about work and productivity

that does not treat getting on top of everything as the goal

My name's Oliver Berkman. I'm an author and a recovering productivity geek

and I wrote the book Meditations for Mortals, four weeks to embrace your limitations and make time for what counts

I think it's almost true by definition that there can't be one system

I'm going to follow this like perfect morning routine or whatever it might be

and then I don't really need to think about it because then it's just going to sort of run life on my behalf

We have to be honest about the fact that we're talking about perspective shifts We talking about a very gradual process of learning to see the world in a different way The thing we don realize about being finite humans is that our situation is actually much much worse than we think it is

and that this is tremendously good news. We have this tendency to feel like mastering the situation of being a human

in the 21st century is like a really difficult challenge. But I think actually when you turn your attention to things closely

you can see that it's not really difficult to get on top of all your to-dos. It's actually

completely impossible. And in that transition from really difficult to completely impossible

there's a moment of real kind of relief and relaxation. There's a sense of a weight being

lifted from one's shoulders. The Zen master Giu Kenet, her philosophy of teaching students

was not to lighten the burden of the student, but to make it so heavy that he or she would

put it down. We're absolutely deluged with advice on lightening the burden, right? Every new

productivity system is supposed to lighten the burden. And there's something so powerful about

remembering the senses in which actually the condition of being human is just always to feel

like there's more that you could do, like there's more that you could know, that you're going to be

vulnerable to distressing emotions at any moment, all the rest of it. And then you can just put that

burden down and walk forwards with a spring in your step and actually try to do a few things

that matter and make life more rich. A lot of us today wake up each morning with a feeling of

what I describe as productivity debt. The sense that you've got to work really hard during the day

to pay off this debt of getting things done. Otherwise, you won't quite feel like you're an

adequate and acceptable human being. And that is hugely self-sabotaging, apart from anything else because the standard

for how much stuff would be enough just drifts upwards. So it gets harder and harder to meet because the amount of things we could do is infinite Attempt instead to start from the idea that you don need to do anything with your day

to justify your existence on the planet. You may need to do it in order to earn your wage or your salary, absolutely

but you don't need to do it for these existential reasons. One tactic that is surprisingly helpful, given how simple it is

is just keeping a done list of the accomplishments that you complete

It's possible then to see all the things you do do as kind of payments into the credit of this account, right

What if you started at zero balance and everything you did during the day was something extra that you could have not done

but you did do. If you're in a really bad motivational moment

just sort of lower the bar for what counts as an entry on this list

I mean, you could include made coffee, got dressed. Like you did do these things

And what you find, again, is that these things snowball quite rapidly into much more satisfying days of bigger accomplishments than that

The three to four hour rule reflects a pattern that you can see in the routines and rituals of so many authors and artists, scientists, mathematicians, composers all the way through history

Alex Pang details a lot of this in his book Rest, where they, to an astonishingly uniform degree

dedicate about three or four hours a day, no more, to the core work of their lives that requires sort of deep thought

and quiet and focus and reflection. There's also lots of evidence to suggest that

you actually are going to make more progress on focused work if you constrain it in this way

it's tiring to focus in this fashion you need time to replenish also there's an aspect or many

aspects of the creative process that are actually going to be doing their work once you've stopped

once you in the rest of your day and you relaxing this is not only about being decent when it comes to people lives outside work Like this is better for the work as well

So many of us feel beset by distractions in the modern world

but it's telling that the whole idea of a distraction really requires you to assume that you know in advance

which things that might fill the next hour, the next day, which things are good things

and which things are unwanted things that should be eliminated. But you can take this much too far

And actually, a lot of approaches to productivity, I think, encourage us to take it too far

encourage us to try to exert total control over how the next period of time is going to unfold

They define more things as distractions and interruptions and make the experience of being distracted or interrupted worse

if I'm working from my office at home and our son bursts into the room to tell me excitedly

about something that's happened at school that day. There are certain times when I'm doing

something where I have to say, look, I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to chat with you about this

later. Sure, absolutely. But if I'm using a system for scheduling my day that defines that period of

time as like a focus stretch and then makes it into a problem when it wouldn't otherwise have

been a problem. That's a terrible way to live. That's basically taking things that life ought

to be about, like moments of connection with one's family and making them wrong just because

they clash with this like plan I had. So I think it's really important not to go too far in the

direction of trying to eliminate everything that could possibly count as an interruption

and then find that you've kind of eliminated half of the best bits of life