How To Be Sanely Productive | Oliver Burkeman

10% Happier with Dan Harris

10% Media, LLC

Dan Harris, Health & Fitness, Mindfulness, Dharma, Mental Health, Meditation

4.6 • 12.2K Ratings

🗓️ 7 April 2025

⏱️ 74 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The liberation that comes from realizing that you’re never going to get everything done.

Oliver Burkeman is the author of the Sunday Times bestselling Four Thousand Weeks, The Antidote, and most recently, Meditations for Mortals. His work has also appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Psychologies and New Philosopher. He has a devoted following for his writing on productivity, mortality, the power of limits, and building a meaningful life in an age of bewilderment.

Oliver is one of many great teachers featured on Waking Up, a top-notch meditation app with amazing teachers and a ton of courses for all levels. If you subscribe via this link: wakingup.com/tenpercent, you’ll get a 30-day free trial—and you’ll be supporting the 10% Happier team, too. Full and partial scholarships are available.

In this episode we talk about:

What the term “imperfectionism” means
The illusion of reaching a point where "everything's done"
Why there’s liberation in seeing how finite we are
Why small, imperfect actions are more valuable than perfect plans
Why overplanning is a kind of avoidance
How to make decisions
The importance of finishing things
Who you should develop a taste for problems
Why effort doesn't always equal value
Why we need to stop protecting other people’s feelings
And the paradox of mattering immensely and not at all

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Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	It's the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.
0:19.0	Hello, everybody. How we doing? I think the biggest lie I regularly tell myself is that I will finally be satisfied. I'll finally be able to relax when I get to the end of my to-do list. But I never get to the end of my to-do list. There's always more shit to do.
0:46.2	My guest today is here to move me and you out of a state of miserable productivity to a state of sane productivity.
0:56.8	His argument is that there is enormous liberation to be had in admitting defeat, in conceding the obvious that we're never going to get everything done. Only then, he says, can we truly prioritize. Oliver Berkman is making his third
1:04.8	appearance on the show today. He's the author of two incredibly popular books on productivity,
1:09.9	both written with one key fact in mind, a fact that most productivity experts conveniently ignore the fact that we're all going to die.
1:20.6	The first of Oliver's books is called 4,000 Weeks. His latest is called Meditations for Mortals.
1:27.4	In this conversation, we talk about what his
1:29.9	term imperfectionism means, the illusion of reaching a point where everything's done, why there's
1:35.9	liberation and seeing how finite you are, how to figure out what really matters given your
1:41.2	finite nature, why small imperfect actions are more valuable than perfect
1:46.0	plans, why overplanning is a kind of avoidance, how to actually make decisions, and the
1:52.1	importance of finishing things, which is interesting, how you should develop a taste for problems,
1:57.9	also interesting, why effort doesn't always equal value, why you need to allow other
2:03.3	people to have their problems, in other words, to let go of excessive responsibility for protecting
2:09.3	other people and their feelings. And the paradox, and this is a really interesting paradox, the
2:15.1	paradox of mattering immensely and not at all. Just to say,
2:20.8	Oliver has some excellent audio courses on productivity for mortals available over on the Waking Up app.
2:27.9	I'm a huge fan of the waking up app, which is run by my close friend Sam Harris. The app has
2:33.0	basic meditation instruction from Sam,
2:35.5	also lots of specific meditation courses from a variety of teachers and life skills courses,
2:41.8	such as the productivity courses from Oliver. Oh, and there's now also a four-part series on
	...

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