Why Productivity Will Never Make You Feel Fulfilled | Oliver Burkman | Be Well Moments

0:00Welcome to Live Well Be Well, a show to help high performers improve their health and well-being.

0:10The focus on using time well each day makes you feel like something to survive. When you realise what you were doing, when did you realise you were actually doing this to yourself? So allowing you to use your time well. And I think that I could productively write down my time well. but then that made me think well is that the best way to do it without having these pockets of inspiration without having these moments of joy and novelty and these free time in your diary to actually explore that yeah i mean i think one useful thing that i find here maybe what we're talking about is the distinction between like living in a planned way and living in a spontaneous way and that sense that a lot of us have that neither one is quite enough on its own because planning squelches the life from things but pure spontaneity like you're worried that you might forget all the things that matter and that's what i thought for a long time like okay i've got to find time for both of these and then you start doing weird things like time boxing space for serendipity into your schedule or something right it's completely insane when you think about it in detail but it is but we've both done it yes right exactly laughing because i'm like we've both seen this is the time of day the 90 minute period when i'm going to be completely spontaneous here this is something i find useful and you may not but it might just be how my mind works in a sense you're always acting spontaneously whether you like it or not right so even if what you decide to do with a spontaneous moment is implement your very strict time boxing schedule you are in that very moment making that decision whether you do it consciously or unconsciously unless you're literally like in jail or you know someone's physically manhandling you put that aside you're always in the moment deciding what to do it's just that quite often if you're a certain kind of you know anal person you're you're what you're doing is what you're deciding to do in that moment is carry out your strict plan that you made yesterday so i found this a very sort of liberating realization again it's one of these things not where you change how you live but where you see more clearly how you're already living um i'm always deciding moment to moment um what to focus on where to go whether to keep a commitment i've made whether to show up to a podcast recording or just i don't know just fail completely to do so right it's all technically within my power and all i need to do is sort of be aware of that and be aware that there are consequences of doing one and not the other and etc i think that makes it a lot easier to know when to stick with a plan and when to diverge from a plan if you see that what you're actually doing is the same thing in every moment you're you're choosing how to use that moment and then i think it's very much easier to sort of say well okay my plan for my day is to put a few hours into this project and try to get to this outcome with it and then to do that and then do that and then something else arises and oh okay now i'm just making a decision in this moment about whether that's something to change course for you see what i'm saying i don't know if i'm expressing it properly but like Actually, every moment is a choice.

3:38You're not actually governed by the plan you made yesterday. You're choosing to implement the plan you made yesterday. And so the freedom that we fear losing when we stick to strict plans is actually always there. The serendipity and spontaneity that we're a little bit scared of because it feels so out of control is just, in fact, the basic state of our whole lives. So we're already in that kind of scary situation. and all we ever need to do is try to make the wisest decision about what to do in the very next moment. I don't know if you find that convincing or not. You'll have to tell me. Well, sometimes I feel like I can just go through and add more and more on and be more unconscious.

4:20I feel like the busier I get, the more unconscious I am. That's the way I feel. And actually when I give myself that time, but the pressure to have that time is also quite hard. I mean... For instance, I'm someone who loves to be busy. So I fill myself with more busyness. Is that me moving away from feeling? Yes, probably. Is that why I'm connected to self-compassion? Yes, probably. Because I have to have it as an efficient tool to allow myself to have time off. But it's interesting. You talk about when we free up time in our diary or in our lives, we just fill it with more stuff. And so we live in this weird moment where actually we try.

5:00I think about this now with AI. people are implementing more into their daily lives because of ai's allowing them to free themselves up yeah they're becoming more efficient so we're outputting more i think about this to the show started off the show with just me maybe one other guest five years ago and us just having this conversation back and forth and every week going okay maybe i should record another show now we're doing three shows a week we're putting out more content than ever we've you know gone to youtube we're making it bigger and better than trying to do more than ever before but we've also utilized our systems better yeah so we've obviously brought in more ai tools less people become more efficient but my time is actually smaller yeah yeah and i think the real like i yes i am not here to question your content strategy right but but what i but what i think is really important to connect to and i recognize equivalent things from my own different yeah different domains and stuff but like i think the important question is always like why are you doing it right and and if tools and technologies ai or otherwise enable us to do more of the spend more time like expressing our passions and enjoyment of the world in action that's fantastic and really good if you think and because you're human on some level you probably do there's no shame in it at all that like this expansion process is like it's a trajectory that would eventually get to a point where you'll be like okay now this is the correct size of things and this is the correct scale and we're on all the platforms that count and now we've arrived you know i think that's the bit that one always has to be a little bit skeptical of just because obviously that is never going to be the case and like you know feels like every week i i encounter news of a social media platform that i like literally hadn't heard of its existence so clearly i uh cannot be expected to already be all over that with my thoughts and content you know so there's a point again it's this idea that like what you're ultimately i think what we have to say we're doing when we try to sort of get on top of everything and conquer these mountains of opportunities or of demands whatever they are in each different person's life is say like you're not going to get your arms around it all you're going to have to stop at a certain point you're going to have to let certain people down in some contexts or turn down certain opportunities you know not be on certain platforms right this is just a given it's baked into the world um and then it's just a matter of of making those decisions as well as you're able it's the same with writing a book right you could do it you could keep tweaking it for years until it was even better than you you know you could just that is an that is an absolutely unfinishable project it's finished when you develop the sort of agency and authority to say that's where i'm going to stop and you know that's the only thing we can do i think the problem is yeah when we're sort of chasing this notion that at some point the world is going to tell us that we've done enough and and and reach the sort of the correct place to be able to finally relax thanks so much for listening to hear the full episode there's a link in the description