The Productivity Myth: Oliver Burkeman On Our Broken Relationship With Time, Embracing Our Limitations & Why More Isn’t Always Better

Everyone feels like they've got too much to do. So you try to find ways to do more of it, which is either clever systems or extra self-discipline. Technologies kind of hold out this amazing promise. With this device or with this system, you know, you're going to be able to do more and more of it. And you're constantly chasing it and you never get to

the point of being able to do all the things. Of course we're pursuing long-term goals. Of course there are things we're creating in the hopes that at a later point we reap the rewards in this way or that. But there's got to be some role for finding meaning in the doing of it. You start to feel that it's only if you kind of do enough stuff that you get to feel good about yourself.

And ultimately that can't be the definition of a meaningful life. One of the great illnesses of today's world is busyness without satisfaction. And by this I mean the proliferation of jobs and careers that fail to provide those who pursue and hold them with much social meaning beyond what they pay, which According to Rucker Bregman, who I happen to have just recorded a podcast with today, 25% of people in modern economies. But this malady extends further than that to a broader crisis of meaning that undermines our ability to live our lives more meaningfully in the day-to-day, which is this epidemic that is fueling chronic states of anxiety, irritability, impatience, exhaustion.

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