The I'm Cal Newport and this is in depth a semi-regular series where I interview interesting people about the quest to cultivate a deep life.

I'm excited about today's episode. It is the first episode in which we have the guest here in person at the studio at the

Deep Work HQ and I will be talking to Oliver Berkman. You probably know Oliver from his mega best selling book 4,000 weeks. We talk about

this book all the time on the podcast. It's a book that took a really

psychologically astute and philosophically sophisticated look at productivity culture

The role of productivity and how we think about our life and the life well lived and how to get past some of the traps that thinking

too much about productivity can ensnare you within. He has a new book out called

Meditations for Mortals that helps you take some of the ideas

from 4,000 weeks and actually embody them in your daily practice. It's more

practical but it's also philosophical and it's

fascinating and I loved it. So I was very excited to have Oliver here what we

talked about the goal of this conversation was to tackle the question,

what is the role of productivity in the deep life?

I think to the outside observer,

there's places where Oliver and I are at odds. He is very suspicious of productivity

systems. He is suspicious of overthinking and trying to be over-organized.

He does believe you do need to be

organized to some degree but that we often take it too far and so what I wanted to

understand because I think this is critical for getting the deep life right is how do we

walk this line of having enough time management organization in our life that it's not

chaotic and stressful but avoid having so much that we become trapped in the pursuit of efficiency for the sake of efficiency,

that we use productivity and as promises to escape the realities of life and while doing so also avoid its wonders.

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