![]() But the sort of more naïve attempt to just do it goes back with me a very long way.Īnd then I ended up writing this column for The Guardian for so many years that it was sort of with me. And I sort of, I think this - my more recent work and most recent book is sort of about the disillusionment with this kind of attempt to neatly organize and control time and life. And I was always the person with the really beautifully designed exam-preparation timetables - whether I actually was any good at the exam preparation is a separate question, but, you know, the person with the multi-colored felt tip pens and all the rest of that. Oliver Burkeman: Well, a long time ago when I was still at school, I started to be the kind of person who was always looking around for systems of organizing my time. Do you think that emerged from that early life? Where did that come from, or when, how did that start emerging? ![]() Well, I feel like Time Management is a very - is almost a misleading title for this book that you’ve written, because it really is about great, existential questions of meaning. In terms of his early formation around time, he says he relates to an Onion article with the headline: “Dad Suggests Arriving At Airport 14 Hours Early.” He was raised, as he says, “non-spiritual” Quaker, on one side of his family, and also has a Jewish lineage with a background of narrow escape from the Holocaust. Oliver Burkeman’s newest book is Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being. Where he went next is the conversation I have with him this hour: deep into a philosophical, spiritual, and practical investigation of all that is truly at stake in what we blithely refer to as “time management.” This conversation extends an invitation to nothing less than a new relationship with time and our technologies and the power of limits - and thus with our mortality and with life itself. And he himself became a time management and productivity “geek,” until one day, sitting on a bench in Brooklyn, he grasped that no one achieves perfect work–life balance - that in the end, even the most privileged of us rarely get around to doing the most important things. In his longtime column for The Guardian, and books with subtitles like Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking, my guest Oliver Burkeman has long interrogated the possibilities for absurdity in self-help while also honoring the real and deep human longings it meets. ![]() At this time of year, many of us are making plans and resolutions, treating time as we’ve been taught: as part taskmaster, part resource - something we could fit everything we want into, if only we had the discipline. ![]() Krista Tippett, host: What is time? That’s a question for philosophers and physicists, and yet it is also an element by which each and every one of us experiences and orders our days and our lives. ![]()
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