I have had an ongoing conversation with a few close friends about the tyranny of productivity and the irrational guilt we feel when we don’t check stuff off out “to-do” lists for a given hour, day, week. It doesn’t take a lot of deep reflection to realize the extent to which the parameters of “productive” are arbitrary and contingent. To take one example: even if one concedes that some portion of our hours should be spent in “work” rather than play—let’s call work the stuff we do for money, or the stuff we do that is not immediately gratifying but which moves us forward toward worthy ambitions (I am not married to those definitions, but they’ll suffice)—it’s still ridiculous that the amount of time that we should be “productive” is set by happenstance. In general, Americans feel that if we have worked forty hours in a week, we’re entitled to some “play” time—but that “forty hours” is only because Henry Ford established the eight-hour work day, and the five-day work week was then codified in the 1930s. It’s an idea of productivity based on factories, and less than a century old.
Of course, if you’re a writer, you really can’t work forty hours a week, or at least I can’t. And if I did, I’d produce a lot of excess bad verbiage for which I’d have no outlet, no place to publish. It would be pointless. So making my peace with an erratic schedule of productivity—some days working around the clock, other days indolent and not sure what to do—has been an important struggle. (OK, not always much of one.)
There have lately been some good books to help people think through these issues. Jenny Odell has gotten a lot of attention for her work on “doing nothing.” I subscribe to the charming Idler magazine, out of England. And I have recently read the terrific Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, in which Oliver Burkeman argues that, given that we’re lucky to get 4,000 weeks on Earth, we will never finish all the tasks we set for ourselves (from clearing out the email inbox to running those marathons to … ), so we should embrace our own finitude and stop worrying about productivity. It’s a truly terrific book, and I called him to interview him. Burkeman is former columnist for the Guardian, for which he wrote the column “This Column Will Change Your Life,” about productivity techniques. Here’s an edited version of our talk, conducted on April 21, 2023:
Mark Oppenheimer: What led you to write this book?
Oliver Burkeman: I had the opportunity, through writing the column for the Guardian, to go so far down the rabbit hold of productive techniques that don’t work that you get to the point that you wonder if you are asking the wrong question rather than failing to get the right answer. Elizabeth Gilbert said she doesn’t know of any instance of personal t transformation that didn’t begin with people getting sick of their own bullshit. I spent years trying to find the right way to try to be on control of my time, not disappoint anybody, fulfill the ambitions I thought it was important to pursue. Once you have tried a hundred of them and none of them are the right way, you wonder why you are so invested in that outcome.
MO: Was there a key moment of realization?
OB: That moment on the bench in Prospect Park [that I write about in the book) … I had that epiphany on a week when I had more to do, and being struck by this thought, ‘Oh no, it’s impossible—I am trying to do something that’s impossible to be done.’ And how liberating, that shuft from very difficult to completely impossible. There’s no struggle in knowing something that is impossible.
So I began to allow the possibility that the way froward is making time for some things that matter, and someone will be mad at me along the way.
MO: Has there been pushback from the productivity mavens?
OB: I mean, on the face of it, no. It’s so self-selecting, because most people who are indifferent to or mildly annoyed by something they see don’t respond to a book. I am sure there are many people who look on this viewpoint with pity, that I failed to realize how wonderful my life could be.
The thing coming to mind is that I do think that most people who are very driven in a productivity-type way, there is often some part of the motivation for it that is kind of negative—people trying to make up for something, or they have to do something to feel worthy. So if the arguments are taken as permission to slightly unclench and exhale, people are grateful.
MO: You are, among other things, making an argument for social media sanity. People don’t like that.
OB: Addicts don’t like to be told their addiction is a problem. But I guess maybe one thing different here is that the fact that you can’t do everything is ultimately so indisputably obvious once you look at it. Nobody really doesn’t believe in our finitude, limited time in their day or life. Whereas even I hold onto the possibility I might get the usefulness of social media without leaving it completely.
A curious effect of Elon Musk’s messing around with Twitter is it feels a lot less addictive. I am assuming that wasn’t the intention.
MO: What is it that you’re arguing in your book?
OB: It’s something like the idea much of where we go wrong psychologically with respect to time, getting stressed or anxious or feeling overwhelmed, has to do with trying to avoid fully feeling what it means to be a finite human, trying to escape this condition where there will always be more to do than we have time to do it. We’ll always be more uncertain about the future than we would like to be, and trying to master time causes the suffering, as opposed to not having yet achieved the mastery over time.
This is an argument that I have found, subsequent to writing the book, is a very Zen Buddhist thought—the problem is not the situation we find ourselves in, the problem is to think it’s a problem and ought to be inescapable. The more we can see we are never going to get through the to-do list, the more free we are to put time and attention into building a meaningful life.
The more we can see we are never going to get through the to-do list, the more free we are to put time and attention into building a meaningful life.
MO: And this problem came from the introductions of clocks and standardized time?
OB: I am consciously evasive about causal trains, because I don’t know to what extent capitalism, technology, and the fear of death go into this melting pot. But humanity has always railed against being finite, and it wasn’t until clocks and then industrialization that we could use time itself as one of the ways in which we were going to try to not feel mortal. That idea of time as a resource, as separate from you, a separate resource that you can manipulate, try to “save” time, avoid “wasting” time, depends on a certain idea of time that was not our understanding prior to the late Middle Ages. It’s an alienated understanding of time; it’s not time as the medium in which you are, in which life unfolds—it’s a thing you are in relationship with, and probably an adversarial relationship . There are our lives, then this yardstick running alongside it. That comes with clocks.
MO: Once liberated from this thinking, how can life begin to be different?
OB: What begins to happen is you trade a kind of stressful, futile quest for one kind of freedom for the reality of a different kind of freedom. You trade the sense that maybe in the future, next week or a month or five years time, you have life in working order … for this sense of freedom in time as opposed to freedom from time. There’s wiggle room, room for maneuver, and a certain sense of freedom on the level of the day.
I still have to turn to the email inbox and do some errands, but I no longer think I can get to the end of the inbox.
It’s not like it’s never good to really double down on work for a season,. It’s just understanding that the fantasy of being able to double down on work, and double down on family life, and on hobbies, is a fantasy. You’re going to have to choose.
Our son is six now. It’s almost spooky to me that I came to some of these conclusions enough to have the book proposal together but only began to understand how true some of these things were once I was in the situation that 1/3 to 3/4 of my discretionary time had been completely eliminated by the duties of parenting. I am not sure how I could be a parent in the first place without some inkling of these insights.
MO: What else do you argue?
For me, the breakthrough with how to make this book writable was seeing that in some sense everything is time management. You may not be int in the business productivity sector, but the idea that that sector should have any kind of monopoly on how we best spend our time on earth is outrageous. For me, the way into that deep stuff is wondering about this obsession of mine, but everything has some obsession that is to do with finitude, and is to do with grappling with how to build a meaningful life.
Cursive as summer enrichment
It’s hardly news that cursive writing is dying (heck, handwriting is dying). I am not sure why we’ve let it die. I tried to learn more when I wrote a piece for The New Yorker a few years back, but none of the explanations fully add up. It’s not just that teachers are expected to spend time on other matters, nor only that computers have made handwriting “obsolete.” This is one of those cultural shifts I don’t fully understand. Of course, the fact that children and even college students can’t read cursive has immense consequences: they have to learn a new orthography just to do archival research. Forget reading the papers of Dickinson or Joyce—for my biography of Judy Blume, a living, working writer, I am spending time with her papers, which are filled with correspondence by and to her, in cursive, from fifty years ago, twenty-five years ago, ten years ago, almost up to today, much of which would be incomprehensible to the college students I taught last year.
Anyway, it thus seems to be both good news and bad news that the town of Longmeadow, Mass., next door to my home town of Springfield, is offering, in its catalogue of summer enrichment classes, a class in cursive and calligraphy:
Write to Art: A Cursive Writing, Calligraphy and Art Experience: Entering Grades 3-5 $95
This course is designed to help 3rd-5th grade students have fun while developing their fine motor skills and handwriting techniques by focusing on cursive writing, art, and a little bit of calligraphy. Students will learn cursive writing, including the proper formation of letters. In addition to cursive writing, students will explore the art of calligraphy.To enhance their artistic skills, students will create original works of art using calligraphy and cursive writing. They will experiment with different mediums, such as watercolor, acrylic, and ink, to add color and texture to their pieces. A $10 material fee will be collected by the instructor on the first day.
If I still lived in western Mass., we know what my children would be doing this summer.
Have thoughts on cursive? Type them to me at markoppenheimer@substack.com