Oliver Burkeman > Quotes

“Productivity is a trap. Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster. Nobody in the history of humanity has ever achieved “work-life balance,” whatever that might be, and you certainly won’t get there by copying the “six things successful people do before 7:00 a.m.” The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control—when the flood of emails has been contained; when your to-do lists have stopped getting longer; when you’re meeting all your obligations at work and in your home life; when nobody’s angry with you for missing a deadline or dropping the ball; and when the fully optimized person you’ve become can turn, at long last, to the things life is really supposed to be about. Let’s start by admitting defeat: none of this is ever going to happen. But you know what? That’s excellent news.”
― Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

“Who says you need to wait until you 'feel like' doing something in order to start doing it? The problem, from this perspective, isn't that you don't feel motivated; it's that you imagine you need to feel motivated. If you can regard your thoughts and emotions about whatever you're procrastinating on as passing weather, you'll realise that your reluctance about working isn't something that needs to be eradicated or transformed into positivity. You can coexist with it. You can note the procrastinatory feelings and act anyway.”
― Oliver Burkeman, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking

“what you pay attention to will define, for you, what reality is.”
― Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time and How to Use It

“Confronting the worst-case scenario saps it of much of its anxiety-inducing power. Happiness reached via positive thinking can be fleeting and brittle, negative visualization generates a vastly more dependable calm.”
― Oliver Burkeman, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking

“mortality makes it impossible to ignore the absurdity of living solely for the future.”
― Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

“True security lies in the unrestrained embrace of insecurity - in the recognition that we never really stand on solid ground, and never can.”
― Oliver Burkeman, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking

“choosing curiosity (wondering what might happen next) over worry (hoping that a certain specific thing will happen next, and fearing it might not) whenever you can.”
― Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

“Convenience culture seduces us into imagining that we might find room for everything important by eliminating only life’s tedious tasks. But it’s a lie. You have to choose a few things, sacrifice everything else, and deal with the inevitable sense of loss that results.”
― Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

“It’s alarming to face the prospect that you might never truly feel as though you know what you’re doing, in work, marriage, parenting, or anything else. But it’s liberating, too, because it removes a central reason for feeling self-conscious or inhibited about your performance in those domains in the present moment: if the feeling of total authority is never going to arrive, you might as well not wait any longer to give such activities your all—to put bold plans into practice, to stop erring on the side of caution. It is even more liberating to reflect that everyone else is in the same boat, whether they’re aware of it or not.”
― Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

“And here lies the essential between Stoicism and the modern-day 'cult of optimism.' For the Stoics, the ideal state of mind was tranquility, not the excitable cheer that positive thinkers usually seem to mean when they use the word, 'happiness.' And tranquility was to be achieved not by strenuously chasing after enjoyable experiences, but by cultivating a kind of calm indifference towards one's circumstances.”
― Oliver Burkeman, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking

“The world is bursting with wonder, and yet it’s the rare productivity guru who seems to have considered the possibility that the ultimate point of all our frenetic doing might be to experience more of that wonder.”
― Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

“We’ve been granted the mental capacities to make almost infinitely ambitious plans, yet practically no time at all to put them into action.”
― Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

“The problem with trying to make time for everything that feels important—or just for enough of what feels important—is that you definitely never will. The reason isn’t that you haven’t yet discovered the right time management tricks or supplied sufficient effort, or that you need to start getting up earlier, or that you’re generally useless. It’s that the underlying assumption is unwarranted: there’s no reason to believe you’ll ever feel ‘on top of things,’ or make time for everything that matters, simply by getting more done.”
― Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

“The effort to feel happy is often precisely the thing that makes us miserable. And that it is out constant efforts to eliminate the negative - insecurity, uncertainty, failure, or sadness - that is what causes us to feel so insecure, anxious, uncertain, or unhappy.”
― Oliver Burkeman, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking

“our lives, thanks to their finitude, are inevitably full of activities that we’re doing for the very last time. Just as there will be a final occasion on which I pick up my son—a thought that appalls me, but one that’s hard to deny, since I surely won’t be doing it when he’s thirty—there will be a last time that you visit your childhood home, or swim in the ocean, or make love, or have a deep conversation with a certain close friend. Yet usually there’ll be no way to know, in the moment itself, that you’re doing it for the last time. Harris’s point is that we should therefore try to treat every such experience with the reverence we’d show if it were the final instance of it. And indeed there’s a sense in which every moment of life is a “last time.” It arrives; you’ll never get it again—and once it’s passed, your remaining supply of moments will be one smaller than before. To treat all these moments solely as stepping-stones to some future moment is to demonstrate a level of obliviousness to our real situation that would be jaw-dropping if it weren’t for the fact that we all do it, all the time.”
― Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

“Ask yourself whether you are happy', observed the philosopher John Stuart Mill, 'and you cease to be so.' At best, it would appear, happiness can only be glimpsed out of the corner of an eye, not stared at directly.”
― Oliver Burkeman, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking

“There is an alternative: the unfashionable but powerful notion of letting time use you, approaching life not as an opportunity to implement your predetermined plans for success but as a matter of responding to the needs of your place and your moment in history.”
― Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

“Remembering that you are going to die is the best way that I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked.”
― Oliver Burkeman, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking

“Inspiration is for amateurs,’ the artist Chuck Close once memorably observed. ‘The rest of us just show up and get to work.”
― Oliver Burkeman, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking

“The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control—when the flood of emails has been contained; when your to-do lists have stopped getting longer; when you’re meeting all your obligations at work and in your home life; when nobody’s angry with you for missing a deadline or dropping the ball; and when the fully optimized person you’ve become can turn, at long last, to the things life is really supposed to be about. Let’s start by admitting defeat: none of this is ever going to happen.”
― Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

“[Life] is a dance, and when you are dancing, you are not intent on getting somewhere. The meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance.”
― Oliver Burkeman, The Antidote: Happiness For People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking

“For the Stoics, then, our judgments about the world are all that we can control, but also all that we need to control in order to be happy; tranquility results from replacing our irrational judgments with rational ones”
― Oliver Burkeman, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking

“One can waste years this way, systematically postponing precisely the things one cares about the most.”
― Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

“The real measure of any time management technique is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things.”
― Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

“In an age of instrumentalization, the hobbyist is a subversive: he insists that some things are worth doing for themselves alone, despite offering no payoffs in terms of productivity or profit. The derision we heap upon the avid stamp collector or train spotter might really be a kind of defense mechanism, to spare us from confronting the possibility that they’re truly happy in a way that the rest of us—pursuing our telic lives, ceaselessly in search of future fulfillment—are not. This also helps explain why it’s far less embarrassing (indeed, positively fashionable) to have a “side hustle,” a hobbylike activity explicitly pursued with profit in mind.”
― Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

“...it pointed to an alternative approach, a ‘negative path’ to happiness, that entailed taking a radically different stance towards those things that most of us spend our lives trying to avoid. It involved learning to enjoy uncertainty, embracing insecurity, stopping trying to think positively, becoming familiar with failure, even learning to value death. In short, all these people seemed to agree that in order to be truly happy, we might actually need to be willing to experience more negative emotions—or, at the very least to learn to stop running quite so hard from them.”
― Oliver Burkeman, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking

“the noblest of human goals wasn’t to become godlike, but to be wholeheartedly human instead.”
― Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

“In order to most fully inhabit the only life you ever get, you have to refrain from using every spare hour for personal growth.”
― Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

“if you’re procrastinating on something because you’re worried you won’t do a good enough job, you can relax—because judged by the flawless standards of your imagination, you definitely won’t do a good enough job. So you might as well make a start.”
― Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

“It is alarming to consider how many major life decisions we take primarily in order to minimise present-moment emotional discomfort.”
― Oliver Burkeman, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking