Moment 63 - How To Get Any Task Done: Oliver Burkeman

00:00In your book, you talk about embracing radical incrementalism. What does that mean for you? This is the idea that there are contexts where really being willing to make progress on the basis of little and often, right, kind of gradual progress to do a tiny bit at a time and not kind of binging on the things you're trying to achieve can be really powerful. Um, again, I'm sorry to keep coming back to writing as an example, but the the work that I'm drawing on there from a psychologist called Robert Boyce who studied, um, academics who write and figured trying to figure out like, who are the ones who actually get a ton of papers published and a ton of books written and who are the ones who get mired in, um, like procrastination and paralysis and he found that the, the really productive people in that sphere were the ones who made writing a, um, a modest part of their.

00:55Daily life, right? It occupied like a couple of hours maybe, as opposed to the ones who made it into this huge thing that then became very intimidating, and they got all sorts of like psychodramas going on with it because it was something they were willing to sort of do for a little bit, leave aside, come back to, and I think this applies to, especially applies to anything that is like brain work, but I think it applies to pretty much all, all kinds of endeavor, right? There's often a huge benefit in being willing to say, well I'm going to work on this for a tiny amount of time today, and I'm going to stop even if I'm on a roll right when my time is up I'm going to stop and then I'm going to come back. It makes it something that you can sustain day after day after days if you do the opposite of incrementalism right? If you give this if you give this sort of absolutely center stage in your life then if it goes well great, but if it doesn't go well it becomes this kind of huge intimidating uh thing and I've found that you know if I'm. Working on a book, say really, sort of, almost.

01:56Embarrassingly small work, daysys on it, regularly done day after day after day, so much more productive like in terms of the actual output about deadlines. because when I wrote my book, I think this, the deadline of having to send it to the publisher just hung over me and was like forcing me to, okay Steve, today you have to write three, you know, 3000 words yeah.

02:18I think deadlines have their role, right? And I, you know, I would have got nowhere without deadlines in newspapers because they sort of kept, they sort of helped me sort of bust through perfectionism and stuff because it was just literally, you know, it's, I did these things on AI would write these kind of features for the guardian where I had to like, um, that the idea came to me or was given to me at like 1030 in the morning and five PM, they needed a two and a half thousand word researched article. You'd just be like, okay, I've just got to do it.

02:47But, um, in a way I'm sort of training myself out of that now and I think that just to make it isn't a, it's perfectly okay and it's fine, but, but it but it isn't sustainable, I think that, you know, that the, to really over the long haul be able to do something like, like writing, I've found requires that I have acquired this ability for sort of dogged persistence rather than, you know, cruising to the, to the deadline.