The art of choosing what to do

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0:39Challenge you. We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy? And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR, I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show today, how we shape our days. So when you wake up in the middle of the night, do you look at the clock to know whether it's time to go back to sleep? This is psychology professor Anne-Laure Selye. When you wake up in the morning, during the weekend, and you have the whole day for yourself, do you set an alarm clock? Anne-Laure has a lot of these questions.

1:22When you do your yoga in the morning, do you do yoga for a specific amount of time? or do you do it as long as it feels good to do it? And then after work, do you prefer to shop online or go to a brick-and-mortar store? When you spend time with friends, do you decide when you meet and when you will leave them? When you go to the beach, can you just sit and enjoy the view or do you check your watch? And Laura says, depending on your answers, you might experience time one or two different ways and choose to use it in different ways, as events or by the clock. So what are these styles? Clock time people schedule out every moment of their day.

2:09Anna waking up in the morning. A classic clock timer prefers to stick to a schedule that dictates when she wakes up, 10 minutes as she does every morning, then she proceeds to having breakfast for 20 minutes. You get the idea. Naturally. On the flip side, an event timer moves from one activity to another when she wants to, when it feels like the right time to do so. It could be a long breakfast, a short breakfast. She'll have breakfast for as long as it feels appropriate. Now, of course, these are extremes. Most people fall somewhere in the middle. But as technology has advanced, as people and economies have become more interconnected, as work has become more regimented, there is an expectation that most of us live by the clock.

2:56And you'd think that that would be a good thing, get us all coordinated, right? We've been measuring time on a clock in increasingly granular units since thousands of years. I think Stonehenge being the farther back we can go. And now we measure time, we wear time on our wrists or on our phones. Actually, we think we're reading time at least 150 times a day in our modern societies, if only because we are stuck to our phone screens. So for me, as a psychologist and as a scientist interested in how our thoughts are born and how they are articulated and how our emotions are shaped and are allowed to flow naturally or not.

3:43I thought it was fascinating to think, wait a minute, in all this time and this reliance on the clock, no one has looked at what it does to us to keep looking at that thing. That was my research question. And my sense was it cannot be neutral. When is relying on the clock optimal? When is it suboptimal? We mark our lives in hours, deadlines, and milestones. But what actually moves us toward creating the life we want? On the show today, rethinking how we shape our days. Ideas about how we can stop chasing productivity and start asking what's worth our time. For Anne-Laura Selye, the unconscious ways we approach our everyday tasks says a lot about how we see the world.

4:36So let's look at how adopting each of these scheduling styles affects how we feel about the world, how we think, and how we behave. Here she is on the TED stage. So focusing on clock timers, they slice time into quantifiable, independent units that they use to fit their activities into. And it's great to function like that because the time units being independent, you can freely rearrange them over time. So for instance, if as a clock timer I know that I take two hours to shop for groceries and two hours to shop for kids' clothes, I can go to the supermarket in the morning and shop for kids clothes in the afternoon, or do the reverse.

5:19And this arrangement of activities has provided a huge advantage to clock timers. They can be flexible in scheduling and rescheduling activities as much as they want. Now, it also comes with two implications, though. Because the time units are independent, it means that they are not correlated, let alone causally related. So my going to lunch with my friend does not cause me to go to the supermarket afterwards. The second implication is that when you rely on the clock, you put control of your schedule outside of yourself. And we know from psychology that when people do that, they tend to believe that things happen in the world as a result of fate, chance and powerful others more.

6:03Now, if you look at event timers, we're looking at a very different animal. events are interdependent right they look more like a necklace if you need to move one of the events you need to move a whole string of events with it just like if you want to move a pearl you need to move the other pearls with it right and that means that it's likely to be associated with a bigger belief a greater belief that things happen in the environment due to your own doing more. Did this surprise you, any of the things that you found? What surprised was the extent, the magnitude of the effect. That was remarkable.

6:45The feeling of control, it's really important. For instance, I went to an event of entrepreneurs in New York City, and then I asked them, to what extent do you think that your companies shape the world, right? And to what extent do you think that if you're successful, it's due to you versus chance. And sure enough, those entrepreneurs who relied on the clock more thought that their success was due to chance more than those entrepreneurs who relied on event time. So because of these differences in scheduling between clock timers and event timers, we found actually that clock timers recognize causality in the world at large, significantly less than eventimers.

7:27Now, this is very important because it means that since our eventime ancestors were left behind and we increasingly relied on the clock to schedule our activities, we also began to perceive the world as a more and more disconnected place, a more and more random place, a more and more chaotic place. Clocktimers believe the world is more chaotic than event timers. Now, if you think that's bad, there's actually worse. We know that when people locate control externally rather than internally, it tends to make them feel less happy. So we wondered, are clock timers less happy than event timers? Well, if you think about it, event timers rely on their emotions.

8:13They are very attuned to their emotions because they rely on that all the time to decide when to move from one activity to the next, right? Clock timers, on the other hand, they don't need to be attuned to their emotions because they surrender to the clock. The problem is psychologists now know that in order to be happy, we need to be attuned to our emotions. And particularly, we need to be able to savor positive emotions. Okay, that is a critical antecedent of happiness. And what we find is that clock timers are less able than event timers to savor positive experiences. Tell me more about this.

8:51When you say that clock timers can't savor positive experiences as much as event timers. If you rely more on your internal senses and better when you're even time rather than clock time, you savor more. everything so and and we find that literally with food so we find that the more clock time you are the more likely you are to add salt and spices to your food which we suppose is because you find that the spice-free dish is not tasty enough even timers they eat bread they taste every bit of bread. And we found more generally that all the positive emotions that we feel, even timers feel them more, more intensity of every positive emotion and a better ability to sustain that emotion over time.

9:48You and I go hiking. We get to the top of that mountain. The view is incredible. We experience awe. The even time you, let's make you the even time. It's the good role. You take it in, you go, wow, wow. You just take it in, right? The clock time me goes like, wow, okay, all right, time to go down. And we find that consistently. We've found it repeatedly across emotions, across samples, that the more you rely on the clock, the less you're able to savor. And that obviously is extremely sad for well-being. Do you think the person who is relying on the clock is in control? Actually, we find precisely the opposite.

10:32We find that the reason you rely on the clock is because you're not in control. So it's a bit like a crutch. We think that people who tend to prefer the clock have a harder time maybe to connect with their internal sense. We know that some people are less connected to their inner emotions than others. In contrast to what we think of when we think of the clock time person, right? We think of that lawyer very much on top of things, right? Punctual and there and like almost anal about time and super in control, control freak. Actually, not that much. They need that external device to monitor themselves.

11:18Is the takeaway message that you need to listen to your instincts, but also be flexible and adaptive to your surroundings when it comes to how you structure your day and perceive time? The takeaway message is that both clock time and even time are awesome, number one, right? I'm not claiming, we're not claiming that one is better than the other. But indeed, one is better than the other at a given moment. If I need to be in class at nine, clock time is better. I'd better leave Paris at, you know, 7.30 to be trafficked to make sure that I'm in front of that amphitheater on time. Yeah. If I'm on that beach watching that sunset, even time is better.

12:06If I'm playing with my child or my child is playing with another child, even time is better. Children function in even time, little children, until they read time. We teach them to read time. Think of it, right? It always cracks me up when I see parents of very young kids who are like, Honey, five minutes and we're leaving. And you can see the child looking at them like, what does that mean? No clue, right? So a better answer is, honey, you play a little more and then we're going to go. So you can still signal that you have to go soon. But referring to minutes or to clock time, it makes no sense.

12:50The takeaway is think that these two things exist and embrace what feels better for you at a given time. That's Anne-Laura Sellier. She is a professor of behavioral sciences at HEC Paris. You can watch her full talk at ted.npr.org. Today on the show, how we shape our days. I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and you're listening to NPR's TED Radio Hour. Stay with us.

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15:00Learn more at ukg.com slash work. UKG, HR, pay, and workforce management. This message comes from WISE, the app for using money around the globe. When you manage your money with Wise, you'll always get the mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Join millions of customers and visit wise.com. T's and C's apply. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. Today on the show, how we shape our days. Many of us start off our day with a plan. A plan to get through our email, our home repair tasks, or that ever-growing to-do list. And then, just as often, we fail. And we think, you know, I didn't get anything done.

15:52I must be doing this all wrong. There must be a better way. Yeah. I was on some level looking for the silver bullet because I actually was quite interested in learning how to be less anxious and not feel so completely out of control and overwhelmed. This is author Oliver Berkman. Back in his 20s, an anxious and ambitious Oliver was a young journalist trying to meet his non-stop deadlines. I was sort of locked into this mindset where it was always after the next deadline that I was going to finally figure out what I was doing and finally stop just subsisting on pizza and soda and finally stop ignoring my social life.

16:37And I was thinking that there was going to be one system or philosophy or book or technique or gadget that was going to finally deliver me this sense of being on top of things and in control and all I had to do was follow that set of rules and life would be smooth sailing from then on. Oliver tried method after method, from inbox zero to design thinking. And he wrote up his wry critiques of all these methodologies in a weekly dispatch for The Guardian called This Column Will Change Your Life. The name was tongue-in-cheek. And as the years went by, he came to an existential conclusion. If you look around for that for many years and you write about it and you read and test things out and you never find it, I think you begin to think, maybe the question I'm asking is somehow the wrong question here.

17:35Instead of asking how to optimize every day, he decided to ask, why bother? The answer was profound. Our lives are short. Specifically, they're finite, right? And that finitude, that basic limitation really courses through all our lives and everything that we do in our lives. But we spend a lot of time, a lot of effort trying to avoid it, trying not to think about it, trying to feel less limited than we are. And I think a lot of the kind of quote unquote bad self-help and productivity advice is ultimately helping in psychological avoidance rather than the job it should be doing, which is bringing the most richness and depth and meaning to the time that we do have.

18:25Confronting his own mortality and giving up on productivity, ironically, launched Oliver's career as a self-help writer. His first book, The Antidote, came out in 2012. It critiqued positive thinking and encouraged people to, well, feel badly. Perhaps one way of putting it is that it's good to experience failure and goallessness and unhappiness and all these things. But I guess more so that a lot of what goes on in classic positive thinking is really to do with shutting out at least half of the human experience and sort of deeming it unacceptable. He followed up in 2021 with the best-selling 4 ,000 Weeks, the average time he estimated that each one of us gets on this planet.

19:16For those maybe who aren't familiar, 4 ,000 weeks, and I don't say this to be glib, but it is as though the Grim Reaper wrote a productivity book. Yes, the sort of overarching thesis is that both acknowledging and even embracing our limited time and our limited control over how our time unfolds is actually a path to a much more fulfilling engagement with life. I was trying to sort of synthesize all of that in the context of too many emails, endless to-do lists, feeling ever more impatient as the speed of society accelerates, but you're still stuck in a traffic jam or can't get a web page to load, etc., etc., etc.

19:59So it was really a way of relating differently to our kind of absolutely non-negotiable limitations as humans. So that brings us to your latest book, which is Meditations for Mortals, Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts. At first, I thought this was going to be, you know, literally a meditation, sit down, close your eyes sort of thing. But it's not that. Tell us what the book's about. Yeah. For me, this book is much more about the sort of challenge of actually doing the things that you know you want to do with your finite time on the planet, right? It's sort of going from the knowing to the doing.

20:44And so I really wanted to try to write a book that you could sort of read, not wait to implement until your inbox is under control, because when's that going to happen? But sort of read right in the middle of all of that overwhelm and sort of subtly perhaps influence how you handle life right here and now instead of, you know, building up this whole perfectionistic notion of total transformation later, which is actually less effective anyway. So it's actually not really transformation at all. One of the things in particular that you talk about is this idea of having to make choices that it feels like, you know, the world is your oyster, as the cliche goes.

21:30But actually, sometimes you need to sit down and make some hard decisions and ask yourself some hard questions. Would you mind reading us the passage that starts on page 47? Yeah, absolutely. Looking at things this way, indeed, you might argue that making a decision is the defining act of the limit embracing life. As we've already seen, the fact that your time is limited, plus the reality that you can only ever be in one place at any instant, means that in every moment you're opting not to take a thousand alternative paths through life. From each of these paths branch another thousand alternatives, and so endlessly on, like a vast river delta through which you could only follow any one of an immense variety of streams, but only one.

22:18That's why indecision can feel so oddly comfortable. It's a form of postponement, a temporary avoidance of the painful sacrifices involved. Put differently, it's a way of trying to dodge the inevitability of the consequences of your actions. To make a decision, any decision is to take ownership of the situation instead it takes a little willpower but the reward is usually an immediate boost of motivation as you withdraw your psychological energies from denial or avoidance and focus them on action momentum starts to gather and each decision proves easier to take than the last i love that because i am a person who wants it all I'm incredibly greedy.

23:04I want everything in life. And that voraciousness is impossible. It's impossible. And I know you hear a lot from readers about how your thinking and your ideas affect them and how they implement them. What are some of the things you hear about people when it comes to decision making and deciding that productivity might look different than they thought it would? I mean, one of the things I'm at pains to say in that chapter and elsewhere is that this kind of spirit of facing up to decision and being willing to understand that you're always deciding anyway. So the question is, are you going to do it?

23:47The only question is, are you going to do it consciously? Are you going to pretend that you're not doing it? like I'm always at pains to emphasize that I for me this is very much a kind of moment to moment kind of thing it's about little decisions it's about navigating through life in this spirit not necessarily ever making you know grand gesture type type decisions but it but really about sort of the the general bearing now I guess that you know I do hear from people who've who've found that to be useful just on that day-to-day level. But I think some sort of selection bias means that I'm more likely to hear from people who've kind of made big life changes, as they put it, as a result of reading my book.

24:32Now, maybe this is self-protective, but I have a theory that it isn't really just like I came along and changed everything for them. I think that I'm really fascinated actually by this idea of permission it seems like all of us definitely me included are constantly sort of looking for permission from some other source yeah in order to sort of acknowledge what you already know right so when i hear from people and i do hear from people who have left usually certain career paths but you know marriages in one time one time or another and made other big changes or committed to new paths or gone back to university or something like this.

25:17I am pretty confident this was a choice that they were very nearly ready to make. This was something that had been sort of happening underneath the radar of consciousness. And I think where I step in there sometimes or where my writing steps in there is it kind of takes away one option, which was, or one seeming option, which was that there might be a way of kind of just completely avoiding making a decision. I think when you see that you're always choosing any way, it's very relaxing ultimately. It's stressful at first, but then it's like, oh, okay. Well, there isn't a version of this rest of my life that involves not sacrificing.

26:01So the question is, which sacrifice? am I prepared to make? I mean, there's a risk, right? Like there's a risk inherent in that you may not find a relationship that is better. You may have regrets. What do you tell people about that? Well, I think that that sort of points to the deepest part of this for me, which is that, although it is obviously very important, whether you have a happy relationship and a successful career and all of these things, it's sort of ultimately most important that you lived with sort of openness to that possibility, that you took the plunge, that you bet on yourself instead of against yourself, and that you sort of stepped into life in its most intense kind of engagement and that ultimately you would rather have taken that risk and had it not work out than not to have taken the risk at all.

27:14This is reminding me of my own experience with one of my kids who had to decide which college to go to. And he kept being like, well, how do I know if it's the right decision. And I was like, guess what? No decision is ever right. It's just that. It's a decision. And it's up to you to make it and then move forward and try to make it positive. You know, we sat down, we wrote the pros and cons of each of these places. And then I asked him, I was like, let's look at each of your options and think of what it could be. Let's envision it if it goes right. Which one is most appealing then? And I think, good job, mom.

28:04I'd like to think that it helped. Sounds like you're a brilliant mom. It was hard for me. I was like, God, I was like, is this right? I don't know. Again, parenting also not right. Yeah, parenting is a whole, this is a whole domain for all these ideas and dilemmas. Absolutely. I think we're sort of in the terrain here of sort of existentialist philosophy, right? I'm not an expert, but I think it's this idea that actually another version of what you said, Chukid, I think could have been that kind of what makes it the right decision is the spirit in which it's taken, which um which is yeah that the full responsibility is taken for it that that as much as one can that you do it in awareness of what you're giving up and i would add yes i think you're absolutely right like you do it on the basis of the best like reasonably likely case scenario you don't you don't just live do it on the basis of pure sort of defensiveness against the worst case so that's been a big thing for me actually personally you know this idea that what what ultimately matters is that i'm living in a certain way or engaging with life in a certain way and that does matter ultimately more than any individual result that that that comes from that although that could be very very hard wisdom to stomach at many points in life well particularly now when to be a successful author, which you are, requires not just writing books that people like.

29:48It's much more than that. It's having a presence. It's creating, quote unquote, content. It's audience engagement. There's so many slightly nauseating terms that we can throw around about how you, you know, frankly, make a living as someone who writes about ideas. how are you how do you do that yeah i mean stumblingly and imperfectly and uh like i think i have a better appreciation than i did about the fact that like if there were 100 hours in each day and you had a team of 100 you could uh you could find work to be done right so the more i feel my way into that the easier it gets to just sort of be more true to what i'm interested in doing and and write and post things that I feel have life in them for me.

30:40And what you find, what I've found again and again, is that actually that works better anyway. I think people are really hungry for the human and the real and the alive. And I think what that points to for anyone who's involved in this kind of business is actually towards kind of embracing your idiosyncrasies and doing the things that you feel excited to do and not doing the things you feel less excited to do and less focus on the kind of very strategically designed personal brand or picking one niche and then relentlessly staying in it for fear of diluting your message. I'm curious, what is giving you hope right now about how people are rethinking time and where they put their energy?

31:34Because, you know, I'm also just watching people are saying, oh, this is the end of social media as they sort of that there is a sense of disillusionment, but also a sense that you can't exist without it. Tell me what you're hearing. Yeah, it's really interesting. I think what gives me hope is that there is a kind of a seeing through the kind of greatest, most wild promises of this kind of technological change, right? There is a healthy awareness that convenience has come with all these costs. I do think, you know, I was so lucky to sort of be coming of age when personal computer technology was at the stage that it was, full of promise, but still fundamentally kind of, you know, a machine in one room that you went to use for a while and then stopped.