Oliver Burkeman: Why you’ll never “get on top of everything”
My top takeaways:
1. You’ll never get on top of everything
We fantasise about the perfect system: the bulletproof calendar, the holy-grail routine, the perfect app. But the inbox refills, your to-do list grows like a hydra, and the treadmill speeds up. We often think we need to simply just get better at productivity, and then we’ll be able to tick everything off our list. The truth is that it’s impossible. Which is kind of liberating…
2. Stop treating productivity as a debt
Most of us wake up already feeling behind, like we owe the universe eight hours of work just to justify existing. That’s a lie. Your worth isn’t a balance sheet. Oliver’s antidote for this type of thinking is to keep a “done list”. Every little thing you tick off (made coffee, sent that awkward email) counts as a win instead of proof you’re behind.
3. Control kills spontaneity
When you over-engineer your schedule, you strangle the fun out of living. If your productivity system makes ordinary life feel like an interruption, the system’s broken. The point of all this is to make life richer, not to turn it into a military drill.
4. 3-4 hours is enough
History’s best thinkers – scientists, composers, writers – didn’t pull 12-hour “deep work” marathons. They worked in focused bursts of 3–4 hours and then stopped. That’s where the real progress happens. The rest of the day should be for recovery, connection, walking around letting your subconscious chew on things. You don’t need more hours, just more focused ones.
5. Accept the weight, then drop it
Oliver takes an idea from Zen: don’t try to lighten the burden, make it so heavy you have no choice but to put it down. There’s always more you could do, more you could know, more you could fix. Accept the absurdity of that, maybe even laugh at it, then focus on what matters. Everything will start to feel a bit lighter.
