Author interview with Oliver Burkeman

January 22, 2025

This exclusive interview with journalist and author Oliver Burkeman appeared in our Winter 2023 magazine.

For more than a decade, Oliver wrote a weekly column for The Guardian called This Column Will Change Your Life, in which he sought to discover the secrets of human happiness, helpfully distilling what he learned into funny and practical advice.

He officially gave up the search, in newspaper column form anyway, in 2020 and is now the author of four best-selling non-fiction books.

In a box curated around TIME, we couldn't ignore Four Thousand Weeks, his wonderfully gentle but compelling book about finitude. We spoke to Oliver in November 2023 to find out more.

Photo: Oliver Holms

Presumably it was during the decade you wrote your Guardian column that you started to question your pursuit of hyper-productivity? Was there a single moment of clarity or a growing realisation that your approach to life, and your understanding of time, might be flawed?

I think it was both a single moment and a growing realisation. I write in the book about a very important single moment on a park bench in Brooklyn when I was even more anxious and stressed than usual about all the things I had to do and trying to figure out what combination of time management techniques I could use to finally get through everything, and being struck by the thought ‘oh, it’s impossible’.

I realised in that moment, at least on an intellectual level - the deeper realisation took longer and is still ongoing to some extent - that there will always be too much to do and there’s something very liberating about accepting that and then deciding what would be the most useful, meaningful, important thing to do rather than spending your life in this futile scramble for a future moment when you’re going to be able to do it all.

Equally, when you write a newspaper column for years and one of the things you do is test out all sorts of productivity systems and time management techniques, after the hundredth technique you begin to wonder if maybe there isn’t a silver bullet you’re going to discover one day.

So, you kind of become disillusioned in a very positive sense of that term. I gradually lost the illusion that there was a technique out there that could spare me from the fundamental fact of being a finite human.

A key part of what you advocate in the book is accepting that we can never do all the things we think we want to do or should do in life. Are there some things you’ve consigned to the ‘not enough time in my life for this’ pile that you’ve found particularly liberating to let go of?

I’ve probably given up on ever being an impressive chef but really it’s more a question for me of giving up this overarching quest to get my arms around all of it. So, it’s not a matter of, say, giving up friendships but giving up on cultivating more than a modest number of them. It’s not about giving up travel, it’s about understanding that there will always be thousands of destinations I won’t get to go to. So, it’s more about withdrawing from delusions of omnipotence in any area rather than specific activities, I think.

Are there some activities you now make time for that you didn’t particularly value or seek to do before?

We moved from New York to the North York moors so I’ve created a situation where I have to go hiking because I would feel absurd living in this landscape and not hiking in it.

I’ve also recently got back into making paper pop-ups like the pages of pop-up books, which I’m mentioning just because there is something almost embarrassing to admit about this. It’s something I used to love doing as a child and I just find it deeply absorbing but I would not have made time for it earlier in my adulthood because I’m never going to make money from it and I don’t think I’m ever going to be very good at it at all. But there is something I find really enchanting about it and I’m trying to give more time to things I find enchanting.

Knowing what you now know from your research, are you able to live consistently in the spirit of the book or do you still find yourself getting snagged on old patterns? How do you get back into the right mindset?

I love this question because on the one hand I absolutely do not live consistently in the spirit of the book. I really have this feeling that the book is smarter than I am. I wrote it to articulate the advice I needed to hear and part of that writing was stepping into that mindset and that way of life more wholeheartedly. But I am still not perfect at it and I think being accepting of one’s imperfections in that regard is in the spirit of the book.

So, I don’t want anybody who reads this to think they’ve got to struggle to try and embody this all the time. I’m just asking people to take a more clear-eyed look at how things actually are in their lives. This way of thinking isn’t a lifestyle that you’ve got to struggle to live perfectly, it’s an attitude of realism and self-forgiveness and being down to earth about things.

For many of us, a greater awareness of mortality as we reach midlife stimulates a shift in thinking and a rearrangement of our priorities. Your book gave us a whole new insight into what those shifts might look like: the real value of patience, embracing atelic hobbies, the importance of sharing temporal grooves with others for example.

Do you think these are things we can only really understand the value of once we reach midlife and beyond? Is being young fundamentally incompatible with the ideas explored in your book?

I’ve been really struck by the fact that people who are significantly younger than me do seem to resonate with this book, and I think that’s partly because we live in such an accelerated culture that if you get into the idea of productivity and trying to become fully optimised and all of that in your early twenties, you could go on a wild ride and only be in your mid-twenties by the time you begin to realise that these claims are not all they’re cracked up to be.

And if that describes somebody reading this or reading my book, I think they’re in a very lucky position because they’ve seen something it took me a lot longer to see.

But I think these kinds of insights do come most naturally to us as we approach what Carl Jung called the second half of life.

There will be people reading this who have got much more life experience than me because they have more years under their belt and people who have reached wiser insights earlier in life than I did. All I can really hope to do, for people for whom these insights are maybe just beginning to take shape, is speed that process by articulating them in a certain way.

What are you working on next? Can you tell us anything about it?

I’m working on another book about exploring the idea of embracing our finite natures, not just through the lens of time but more generally, and it’s growing out of the email newsletters that I’ve been writing called The Imperfectionist.

And finally, you mention in the book that over the last decade or so people are increasingly reporting feeling impatient and restless when they pick up a book but rather than this being because we have less time to read or because we’ve lost our ability to focus, it’s actually because we just can’t speed up how fast we read without losing meaning.

No question about this other than to say, yes!

This is exactly why we felt we needed to start Drift + Focus and specifically to be a non-fiction book subscription. It’s our mission to help people commit to the importance of reading non-fiction by slowing down the whole process and turning it into an event with some joy, fanfare and ritual.

I love this. I think you’re doing great work and I’m very happy to be a small part of it.

It sounds like your subscribers don’t need telling this but I think we all need to remember when it comes to reading and slowing down to read that it’s going to feel a little uncomfortable sometimes. It’s not going to feel immediately pleasing to a mind conditioned to speed but the rewards are amply worth it.

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The new book he talks about in the interview is called Meditation For Mortals and is out now in hardback. Paperback due in July 2025.

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