Oliver Burkeman
Epigraph
It’s Easier to try
‘It is easier to try to be better than you are than to be who you are.’
– MARION WOODMAN
Introduction: The imperfect life
Just a bit more discipline
Sometimes, it felt like all I needed was a bit more discipline; at other times, I was sure the answer lay in a new system for managing my tasks and goals, which I’d track down just as soon as I got this article on smoothies out of the way.
Anxiety disorders harnessed for productivity
‘Most successful people,’ as the entrepreneur and investor Andrew Wilkinson has observed, ‘are just a walking anxiety disorder, harnessed for productivity.’
Imposter syndrome
But it takes other forms as well. For some it manifests as imposter syndrome, the belief that there’s a basic level of expertise that pretty much everyone else has attained, but that you haven’t, and that you won’t be able to stop second-guessing yourself until you get there.
What’s in a good life?
At the same time, a good life clearly isn’t about giving up all hope of influencing reality. It’s about taking bold action, creating things, and making an impact – just without the background agenda of achieving full control. Resonance depends on reciprocity: you do things – you have to launch the business, organise the campaign, set off on the wilderness trek, send the email about the social event – and then see how the world responds
Retaining what you read
Relatedly, I recommend making no over-industrious efforts to retain what you read, or to put it into practice; instead, trust that if something strikes a chord, it’ll linger through the day by itself.
A good practice to implement here is to write down notes for what you’ve read later in the day. Naturally the bits that hit home are the ones you can remember and write down. On top of that you won’t retain the information precisely so by writing it down later you naturally rewrite it in your own words.
Week One: BEING FINITE
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‘If you find yourself lost in the woods, fuck it, build a house. “Well, I was lost, but now I live here! I have severely improved my predicament!”’
— MITCH HEDBERG
Day One: It’s worse than you think: On the liberation of defeat
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Imposter syndrome? You might believe you need more experience or qualifications in order to feel confident among your peers; but the truth is that even the most experienced and qualified people feel as though they’re winging it, much of the time – and that if you’re ever going to make your unique contribution to the world, you’ll probably have to do it in a state of feeling unprepared.
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The late British Zen master Hōun Jiyu-Kennett, born Peggy Kennett, had a vivid way of capturing the sense of inner release that can come from grasping just how intractable our human limitations really are. Her teaching style, she liked to say, was not to lighten the burden of the student, but to make it so heavy that he or she would put it down.
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Kennett’s insight was that it can often be kinder and more effective to make their burden heavier – to help them see how totally irredeemable their situation is, thereby giving them permission to stop struggling.
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And then? Then you get to relax. But you also get to accomplish more, and to enjoy yourself more in the process, because you’re no longer so busy denying the reality of your predicament, consciously or otherwise.
Day Two: Kayaks and superyachts: On actually doing things
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Almost nobody wants to hear the real answer to the question of how to spend more of your finite time doing things that matter to you, which involves no system. The answer is: you just do them. You pick something you genuinely care about, and then, for at least a few minutes – a quarter of an hour, say – you do some of it. Today. It really is that simple.
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(Don’t get distracted wondering what might be the best thing to do: that’s superyacht thinking, borne of the desire to feel certain you’re on the right path.) Because the irony, of course, is that just doing something once today, just steering your kayak over the next few inches of water, is the only way you’ll ever become the kind of person who does that sort of thing on a regular basis anyway.
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Otherwise – and believe me, I’ve been there – you’re merely the kind of person who spends your life drawing up plans for how you’re going to become a different kind of person later on.
Day Three: You need only face the consequences: On paying the price
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‘You are free to do whatever you like. You need only face the consequences.’ – SHELDON B. KOPP
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At some point, as you seek to spend more of your finite existence in the ways that feel most meaningful to you, the thought will inevitably occur to you that you can’t make a certain choice about your time, however much you’d like to, because the circumstances simply don’t allow it
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Unless you’re literally being physically coerced into doing something, the notion that you ‘have to do it’ in truth means that you’ve chosen not to pay the price of refusing; just as the notion that you absolutely can’t do something generally means you’re unwilling to pay the price of doing it. You could quit your job with no backup plan. You could book a one-way ticket to Rio de Janeiro, or rob a bank, or tell your social media followers your honest views
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The conservative American economist Thomas Sowell summed things up with a bleakness I appreciate, insisting that there are no solutions, only trade-offs.
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The only two questions, at any moment of choice in life, is what the price is, and whether or not it’s worth paying.
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Not freedom from limitation, which is something we unfortunately never get to experience, but freedom in limitation. Freedom to examine the trade-offs – because there will always be trade-offs – and then to opt for whichever trade-off you like.
Day Four: Against productivity debt: On the power of a ‘done list’
See what you’ve done
‘One never notices what has been done; one can see only what remains to be done.’ – MARIE CURIE
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Many people these days report the feeling that they begin each morning in a kind of ‘productivity debt’, which they must struggle to pay off over the course of the day, in hopes of returning to a zero balance by the time evening comes. If they fail – or worse, don’t even try – it’s as though they haven’t quite justified their existence on the planet.
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which means you’ll never get to rest, because how can you ever be sure there’s not a little more potential left to realise?
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There is a religious route out of productivity debt, if you believe in a god who bestows grace – who loves you and delights in you, in other words, regardless of how hard you strive to justify your existence by means of your productivity, goodness, or anything else. But agnostics and atheists get to take a different path to a similar destination: if there isn’t a god, then there’s no authority with the power to demand that you earn your right to exist. You just do exist, and that has to be sufficient.
A Lesson for insecure overachievers
This is the lesson we insecure overachievers could do with getting into our skulls: actions don’t have to be things that we grind out, day after day, in order to inch ever closer to some elusive state of finally getting to qualify as adequate humans. Instead, they can just be enjoyable expressions of the fact that that’s what we already are.
Day Five: Too much information: On the art of reading and not reading
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By 1999, researchers estimated, the quantity of data generated worldwide came to at least 1.5 billion gigabytes. The 2024 estimate is 147 trillion gigabytes. Much of it isn’t in the form of published content, of course, but plenty is – and by comparison, according to one amateur back-of-the-envelope calculation, the entire Library of Alexandria contained around 12 gigabytes
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But the result, as I assume you’d agree if you’ve been active online these last few decades, hasn’t been greater sanity or calm. Since the incoming supply of genuinely interesting stuff is effectively limitless, improving the efficiency with which you discover it just means you’re bombarded with books, articles, podcasts and videos that seem like they might contain a nugget of wisdom critical for your happiness or professional success.
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The challenge, in the words of the technology critic Nicholas Carr, is figuring out how to deal, day in day out, with ‘haystack-sized piles of needles
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‘You will never be efficient enough to [hear] it all before you’re gone.’ Moving more quickly through an infinite incoming supply of something never gets you to the end of it. Because you’re processing more of it, faster, and without ever achieving the satisfaction of reducing it, you’re just left feeling more scattered and stressed.
stress also of nnot having digested it well
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The first is to treat your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket. That is to say: think of your backlog not as a container that gradually fills up, and that it’s your job to empty, but as a stream that flows past you, from which you get to pick a few choice items, here and there, without feeling guilty for letting all the others float by
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‘Every book makes a mark,’ says the art consultant Katarina Janoskova, ‘even if it doesn’t stay in your conscious memory.'
trust reading alone
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The closely related final rule is to remember that consuming information is a present-moment activity, like everything else.
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obscuring the truth that a meaningful life, in the end, has to involve at least some activities we love doing for themselves, here and now
Day Six: You can’t care about everything: On staying sane when the world’s a mess
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Living inside the news feels like doing your duty and being a good citizen. But you can stay informed on ten minutes a day; scrolling any more than that risks becoming disempowering and paralysing, and certainly eats up time you could have spent making a difference.
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Imagine if it was normal for each person to focus ten times as deeply on one or two issues at a time, rather than taking on the emotional burden of dozens … [and] feeling helpless about ‘the state of the world’.
helpless because of so much wrong. everything is fucked
Day Seven: Let the future be the future: On crossing bridges when you come to them
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the days are more fun than the years which pass us by while we discuss them. Act with zest one day at a time, and never mind the rest
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The main way we try to resist this horrifying state of affairs is by worrying. What is worry, at its core, but the activity of a mind attempting to picture every single bridge that might possibly have to be crossed in future, then trying to figure out how to cross it
and analysing risk?
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As the celebrated Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius reassures readers of his Meditations: ‘Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.'
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Now and then, to be sure, the next most necessary thing might be a little judicious planning for the future. But you can do that, then let go of it, and move on; you needn’t try to live mentally ten steps ahead of yourself, straining to feel sure about what’s coming later
Day Eight: Decision-hunting: On choosing a path through the woods
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There’s no need to leap directly from thinking about a career change to marching into your manager’s office to quit. Baby steps are fine; they just have to be real ones.
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(What the novelist E. L. Doctorow said about novel-writing applies to everything else, too: it’s ‘like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.’)
Page 113 @ 19 May 2025 06:09:35 PM
If the speaker in ‘The Road Not Taken’ hadn’t consciously made some choice, he’d have made a different, unconscious one instead – to remain standing at that fork in the path, frozen in ambivalence, waiting for something to happen.
Day Nine: Finish things: On the magic of completion
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Perfectionists love to begin new endeavours, because the moment of starting belongs to the world of limitlessness: for as long as you haven’t done any work on a project, it’s still possible to believe that the end result might match the ideal in your mind.
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Similarly, at the start of any major undertaking, we see it in outline, smooth if a little blurry; it’s only as we dig in that we begin to encounter the flaws, the compromises, and the grunt-work involved. At which point we make the error of assuming that a new endeavour might be free of such imperfections.
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People think finishing things ‘would drain even more of their energy and they get tired just thinking about it’, Steve Chandler writes. They don’t see ‘that leaving things unfinished is what’s causing the low levels of energy’. (He suggests spending one day robotically completing as much unfinished business as you can: ‘Notice at the end of that day how much energy you’ve got. You’ll be amazed.’)
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The trick to finishing things when the prospect seems overwhelming is simply to redefine what counts as finished.
Day Ten: Look for the life task: On what reality wants
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Just recently, though, he’d had the creeping sense that by staying home he was somehow avoiding life. ‘I had the obscure feeling that I was fleeing from myself,’ he writes. Then he heard the friend ask his father: ‘And how is your son?’ ‘Ah, that’s a sad business,’ my father said. ‘The doctors no longer know what is wrong with him. They think it may be epilepsy. It would be dreadful if he were incurable. I have lost what little I had, and what will become of the boy if he cannot earn his own living?’ Jung recalls being ‘thunderstruck’ on hearing these words, and knowing immediately what he had to do. ‘This was the collision with reality. “Why, then, I must get to work!” I thought suddenly. From that moment on, I became a serious child. I crept away, went to my father’s study, took out my Latin grammar, and began to cram with intense concentration.’ The fainting fits returned but he ploughed on anyway, and eventually they ceased. As the Jungian analyst Deborah Stewart explains, Jung had recognised that resuming his studies was the ‘essential life task’ that faced him. His character was being tested – and he understood that if he was going to move forward into his life, instead of avoiding it, it was time to get down to work.
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How can you identify your current life task? That must always be a matter of intuition. But there are two signposts that may help. The first is that a life task will be something you can do ‘only by effort and with difficulty’, as Jung puts it – and specifically with that feeling of ‘good difficulty’ that comes from pushing back against your long-established preference for comfort and security.
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The second signpost is that a true life task, though it might be difficult, will be something you can do. If you only have fifty pounds in the bank, your life task won’t require the immediate purchase of thousands of pounds’ worth of movie-making equipment (although it might involve doing something to raise the cash). If you’re the single parent of three small children, it won’t involve working eighteen-hour days for a tech start-up; and by the same token, if you’re unable to have children, it won’t involve becoming a biological parent.
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That can’t be the case with a life task, which emerges, by definition, from whatever your life circumstances are.
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It’s what’s being asked of you, with your particular skills, resources and personality traits, in the place where you actually find yourself.
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On some level, I think we always already know when we’re hiding out in some domain of life, flinching from a challenge reality has placed before us. The purpose of a question like ‘What’s the life task here?’ is just to haul that knowledge up into the daylight of consciousness, where we can finally do something about
Day Eleven: Just go to the shed: On befriending what you fear
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‘We cannot change anything unless we accept it.’ – C. G. JUNG
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It’s an old story: some task, or some entire domain of life, makes you anxious whenever you think about it, so you just don’t go there.
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If you really do have an alarmingly low bank balance, or the pain really is something serious, confronting the situation is the only way you can begin to do something about it; and there’s no better strategy than avoiding your inbox to ensure that someone will, eventually, lose patience with your failure to reply.
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I learned this way of thinking about avoidance from Paul Loomans, a Dutch Zen monk who explains it in a lovely book entitled Time Surfing.
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The advice here is: go into the shed. Don’t do anything yet, just look around. Observe and take stock. Make the space your own. And […] the first solutions will present themselves. A number of items will change hands and be donated to others. Other things will wait until that Saturday afternoon when you say to yourself, ‘And now it’s time to clean out the shed.’ You don’t dread it any more, but are actually looking forward to it.
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I talked about it with J, the man I live with, and he suggested three hours. Three hours! The very thought gave me an anxiety attack. How about two hours? Two hours! The very thought … One hour? More reasonable, but still not possible. Half an hour? Getting closer but still too much. Fifteen minutes? Fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes. Now there was a figure I could imagine. A nice solid amount of time, an amount of time I knew I could live through every day.
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Befriending your rats is a gentle strategy, but there’s nothing submissive about it. It’s a pragmatic way to maximise your room for manoeuvre, and your capacity to make progress on the work you care about, by becoming ever more willing to acknowledge that things are as they are, whether you like it or not.
Day Twelve: Rules that serve life: On doing things dailyish
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Deep down, you know that doing something twice per week doesn’t qualify as dailyish, while five times per week does, and in busy periods, three or four times per week might get to count. So you’re still putting some pressure on yourself. But, crucially, what you’re not doing is expecting the rule to somehow force the action.
no more than two days off
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And that’s the key distinction here, I think: the unstated appeal of a lot of productivity advice, very much including the Seinfeld Strategy, lies in the bewitching idea that there might be a rule, or a set of rules, that would force accomplishment to occur, rendering it inevitable and automatic.
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He owes it to talent, and maybe a modicum of luck, and then to the willingness to keep showing up and developing that talent, more days than not, in the unpredictable context of his real life. Obviously, the goal was never a chain of red Xs. It was making people laugh.
Day Thirteen: Three hours: On finding focus in the chaos
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If rules should serve life, rather than the other way around, it follows that you shouldn’t expect there to be many one-size-fits-all rules for making the most of your time
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If you’re a ‘knowledge worker’ – that is, if you spend your days doing things with computers and words and ideas, as opposed to, say, building houses out of bricks – then you’ll make the most progress, and cover the most ground, if you limit yourself to about three or four hours of intense mental focus each day.
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Several of these examples come from Alex Pang’s book Rest, where he mentions countless others, and assembles research that helps explain why: because intense focus uses up energy; because it’s more effective to focus intensely during only your peak hours, rather than half-heartedly all day; and because creativity appears to depend partly on processes taking place in your brain while you’re not focusing.
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The first is to try – to whatever degree your situation permits – to ringfence a three- or four-hour period each day, free from appointments or interruptions. The equally important second part is not to worry about imposing much order on the rest of the day: to accept that your other hours will probably be characterised by the usual fragmentary chaos of life
Day Fourteen: Develop a taste for problems: On never reaching the trouble-free phase
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‘Beyond the mountains, more mountains.’ – HAITIAN PROVERB
Week Three: LETTING GO
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‘Life completely unhindered by anything manifests as pure activity.’ – KŌSHŌ UCHIYAMA
Day Fifteen: What if this were easy?: On the false allure of effort
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And in one sense, for finite humans, life certainly is a tough challenge: you’ve got severely limited time, and limited control, necessitating hard choices and a tolerance for imperfection and uncertainty. But it’s equally true that often the real challenge, in building an accomplished and absorbing life, is learning to let go. Not making things happen, through willpower or effort, but cultivating the willingness to stand out of the way and let them happen instead
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I realise that sounds like the worst kind of denial of human limitation, as if you could get your way merely by commanding the universe to fall in line with your desires. In fact, though, it can be surprisingly effective – because it functions not as a mystical command to the universe but as a reminder to yourself not to fall into the old habit of adding complications or feelings of unpleasant exertion where neither need exist
Day Seventeen: Don’t stand in generosity’s way: On the futility of ‘becoming a better person'
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You just need to find where you already feel warmth or tenderness, then go from there. And your penchant for Mexican food is as good a place to start as any other.
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This is why I can wholeheartedly recommend a personal policy I learned from the (vastly less problematic) meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein, and that I seek to follow myself, which is to act on a generous impulse the moment it arises.
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The simplest way to do that is to move fast. ‘Each time the thought to give arises, act on it. Then notice what happens,’ Goldstein counsels, adding that ‘in my experience, generosity never leads to remorse’.
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All else aside, the fact that you felt the desire in the first place suggests that you already possessed the values you were chastising yourself for lacking; only someone with morals can beat themselves up for lacking morals.
Day Eighteen: Allow other people their problems: On minding your own business
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‘People-pleasing is a form of assholery … because you’re not pleasing anybody – you’re just making them resentful because you’re being disingenuous, and you’re also not giving them the dignity of their own experience [by assuming] they can’t handle the truth.’ – WHITNEY CUMMINGS
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‘Great news! I found the cure for my anxiety!!’ the author Sarah Gailey once announced on social media. ‘All I need is for everyone I know to tell me definitively that they aren’t mad at me, once every fifteen seconds, forever.'
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Once I’d accepted a deadline or signed a contract, there was another person in the world who might be growing impatient that I hadn’t finished yet, or who might be disappointed with what I produced – and the thought of their harbouring any negativity towards me felt hugely oppressive
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What I eventually figured out – not that it ever seems to get particularly easy – is that other people’s negative emotions are ultimately a problem that belongs to them. And you have to allow other people their problems
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Before we go any further, it bears emphasising that the people you’re worried might be angry with you or bored by you or disappointed in you almost never are.
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According to stereotype, people-pleasers are self-effacing types, and yet there’s something strikingly grandiose about the notion that your boss, client or coworker has nothing better to do than pace up and down all day thinking bad thoughts about you – or that your presence at a social gathering has the power to ruin it for anyone else.
Page 197 @ 29 May 2025 09:56:31 AM
Taken at face value, the news that somebody is upset because you’re not behaving as they wanted you to behave is just that: a report on the state of their emotional weather. You might or might not choose to act on such a report, but that’s an entirely separate matter. Every decision is a question of trade-offs, as we saw on Day Three, and other people’s emotions are one more thing to be weighed in the balance
Day Nineteen: A good time or a good story: On the upsides of unpredictability
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‘It helps if you can realize that this part of life when you don’t know what’s coming is often the part that people look back on with the greatest affection.’ – ANN PATCHETT
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Almost everything that happens, according to an adage of uncertain origin, is either a good time or a good story. Either things go right, or they go wrong; and surprisingly often when they do go wrong – although of course not invariably – life ends up unaccountably better as a result
Day Twenty: Set a quantity goal: On firing your inner quality controller
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We operate on the assumption that any idea we come up with probably won’t be good enough, so we subject it to the scrutiny of a beady-eyed inner gatekeeper, and only reluctantly, if it first meets the gatekeeper’s stringent standards, allow it out on to the screen, or the page, or into the brainstorming meeting.
Day Twenty-three: How to start from sanity: On paying yourself first
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‘Operating from sanity’, on the other hand, means embodying a certain kind of orientation towards life first, one that treats the present moment as a place where peace of mind might, in theory, be attainable – and then going about your life from that orientation, rather than treating the activities of your life as things you’re doing in order to one day reach it.
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his book Anti-Time Management, Richie Norton boils this philosophy down to two steps. One: ‘Decide who you want to be’. Two: ‘Act from that identity immediately
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The signature behaviour of the operator-from-sanity, by contrast, is what the creativity coach Jessica Abel calls ‘paying yourself first with time’: spending a little time on what matters to you most immediately, instead of waiting, because you understand that even thirty minutes spent Actually Doing the Thing today are more valuable than hundreds of purely hypothetical hours in the future.
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Deal with a backlog by isolating it.
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Free up time by renegotiating existing commitments, not just planning to make fewer.
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Treat your to-do list as a menu
Day Twenty-four: Scruffy hospitality: On finding connection in the flaws
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A perfectly kept house is the sign of a misspent life.’ – MARY RANDOLPH CARTER
Day Twenty-five: You can’t hoard life: On letting the moments pass
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‘The nature of finite things as such is to have the seed of passing away as their essential being: the hour of their birth is the hour of their death.'
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mornings, carrying a flask of hot coffee, I get to stroll along a lane with spectacular views across a valley to the heather-topped ridge beyond. In winter, the pink light of sunrise pours itself slowly over fields buried in snow; regularly, in spring and summer, a barn owl swoops low across my path. It’s a magical landscape, and one that I’ve loved since childhood
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better described as a clenching or a gripping, an attempt to grasp hold of what’s happening so as to mine it for as much value as possible
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Among spiritual traditions, Buddhism is uniquely insightful when it comes to this specific form of suffering – how we make ourselves more miserable than necessary, not just by railing against negative experiences we’re having, or craving experiences we aren’t having, but by trying too hard to hold on to good things that are happening exactly as we wanted them to.
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Our attempt to grip on to fleeting experiences expresses the desire to store them up, use them for future purposes, freeze time in its tracks, or in some other way to resist the truth that this is it
the uncomfortable truth
Page 268 @ 05 June 2025 09:20:32 AM
Contrast these efforts to grab hold of experience with the spirit of the Japanese tea ceremony, in which fleetingness is understood not as a threat to what’s unfolding, but as the source of its value.
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Japanese statesman Ii Naosuke explains: Great attention should be given to a tea gathering, which we can speak of as ‘one time, one meeting’ (ichi-go, ichi-e). Even though the host and guests may see each other often socially, one day’s gathering can never be repeated exactly. Viewed this way, the meeting is indeed a once-in-a-lifetime occasion
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This is not to say that life becomes a matter of unbroken good cheer; after all, it’s sad that a beautiful moment arises then vanishes. But it’s the flavour of sadness conveyed by the Japanese phrase mono no aware, a wistful pathos at the transience of things, the kind of poignant sadness that deepens an experience instead of detracting from it.
Day Twenty-six: Inconceivable: On the solace of doubt
Page 279 @ 06 June 2025 04:28:13 PM
Where could you take useful action on an important project, today, despite not really knowing how to proceed on it beyond that initial step? What issue in your life could you patch up – what relationship could you mend, what behaviour could you alter – without fully grasping what went wrong in the first place?
Day Twenty-eight: What matters: On finding your way
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(As we saw on Day Four, we often use productivity to try to earn back the right to belong.)
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Our very being is inseparable from our context, or as Thich Nhat Hanh puts it, we ‘inter-are’; my existence would be wholly impossible without countless people and things I standardly think of as separate from myself.
Epilogue: Imperfectly onward
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What if I’ll always have anxious reactions – the clench in the stomach, the sharp intake of breath – to minor events that don’t warrant them? My first response is to feel crestfallen; but soon thereafter comes relief. I get to give up on that futile struggle, which means I needn’t wait for it to be won before diving into reality.
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