Lately we’re turning to productivity apps to manage our most intimate relationships. But what does a Slack-ified life of efficiency actually do to you?
Workplace productivity apps like Slack, Notion, and Trello are encroaching on our personal lives. According to a trending article in San Francisco Standard, new apps specifically for couples and families, like Lovewick and Coexist, are gaining traction in Silicon Valley. These tools promise to balance domestic labour by optimizing everything from your chores to your #couplegoals. But is life a project that needs to be perfectly managed? Could there really be an app for that?
Our guest, Oliver Burkeman is best known as the author of the weekly self-help column “This Column Will Change Your Life” for The Guardian. In this episode, we speak with him about the rise of productivity apps in our personal lives, whether technology can divorce-proof a marriage and what we might be missing when our relationships are too optimized. Oliver’s new book is Meditations for Mortals. He is also the author of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. His newsletter, “The Imperfectionist,” is about productivity, mortality, and building a meaningful life in an age of bewilderment.
Also, Vass and Katrina discuss Vass’ greatest organizational tool: her new pencil case.
This is Lately. Every week, we take a deep dive into the big, defining trends in business and tech that are reshaping our every day.
Our executive producer is Katrina Onstad. The show is produced by Andrea Varsany. Our sound designer is Cameron McIver.
Subscribe to the Lately newsletter, where we unpack more of the latest in business and technology.
Find the transcript of today’s episode here.
We’d love to hear from you. Send your comments, questions or ideas to lately@globeandmail.com.
Vass Bednar: [00:00:00] I'm Vass Bednar and I host this globe and mail podcast Lately. [00:00:03][2.9]
Katrina Onstad: [00:00:03] And I'm Katrina Onstad I'm the executive producer of Lately and welcome back I have missed you've asked I miss your abundant nonstop slacking and it doesn't stop to stop for the summer. It's a new season of lately a school supply season. And for you teaching at a university. It's a new term, A new semester. So, yes, I'm curious. How do you keep organized? What is your secret? You know, there's nothing like a new pencil case to really get the party started. Love it, freshen things up. But am I organized? I probably have a 48 hour planning horizon on life and just sort of cobble together a system with my my Google calendar and A to do list. I don't have a notion board for my life, and I'm sort of scared to think about how really obsessed and fixated I could get if I try to impose a very rigid structure or system to my professional and personal life. But the thing is, people are doing this right. Here's a sampling of what we found on TikTok. [00:01:00][57.1]
Montage: [00:01:03] These are the phone apps that I have been using over the past year that have been the most helpful with my homemaking and runnin g this household. So this is our household command center over here are all the tasks and projects that we need. We're going to start with the daily habits, then move on to weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly.Now, I use this app primarily in the workplace, but I start using it personally. Over here we have the type of tasks we have bills, cleaning, planning, errands and maintenance. [00:01:30][26.7]
[00:01:30] And I'm very intentional about where I spend my time because I track what I'm doing. 24 seven has a daily section, including a journal, and we track a habit tracker and more. So yeah, this is how we organize our life at home. Let me know if you guys want the template. [00:01:42][11.7]
Vass Bednar: [00:01:44] Well, that makes me tired just listening to it, to say, Well, here lately we've become a little obsessed with the stuff with the rise of life management apps. We read an article in the San Francisco Standard titled Marriage Optimized Colon. San Francisco Couples work out their issues with off sites and performance reviews. So this trend is kind of the next level of the slack ification of life, where people are taking those project management tools and systems that they might use in the office and importing them into their personal lives, both as individuals but also in couples and relationship context. I mean, of course, this trend is happening in Silicon Valley families, right? People who are kind of in a perpetual beta mode. But these software programs also need ways to grow. So when firms like Slack and Notion and Trello have kind of exhausted the startup circuit, maybe they're now just finding ways to have a new market by bringing these tools home. We've also noticed a bunch of venture capital money that's starting to flow towards domestic apps, startups like Love Work and Coexist. The global parenting app market is booming. We saw one estimate that said it was a $2 billion industry. So you think of a Venn diagram where one side is productivity apps and the other side are apps for couples and friends. Think of these two things just getting really smushed together. Yeah, and you can see why that smushing is is appealing to people in Silicon Valley, right? We are overwhelmed. Right. They're going to tap into that. We're more open to talking about mental health and work life stressors. And the upside of these tools could be real. I think it could be very helpful. You know, the videos that we saw, a lot of people really swear by them and have found them transformative. They could rebalance domestic labor. That is, to me, the most interesting part of this, especially for women who we know tend to take on the bulk of that work. But then the downside is this optimization of everything in our lives. [00:03:39][115.2]
Vass Bednar: [00:03:40] Absolutely. And I think that's where, perversely, instead of eliminating stress, we kind of reintroduce it right in a different way. Yeah, we've seen all kinds of work become increasingly data fired. In some instances, humans are being pushed as if they are machines, right? With expectations imposed on them by again, software systems. So are we kind of making ourselves into machines through this relentless self optimization? Right? [00:04:05][24.9]
Katrina Onstad: [00:04:06] Yeah. Well, it'll be interesting to see what the attrition rate is for some of these apps and for some of these users. I'm thinking of all the self-help books that many of us have collecting dust on our nightstands or all of these various organizational systems that we might subscribe to and then walk away from with our heads saying home a few weeks later. But of course, we're always going to be looking for these kinds of solutions, right? These are unstable times and we're looking for order. And these apps promise order. And maybe for some people they do deliver a little bit of that. [00:04:33][27.7]
Vass Bednar: [00:04:34] Just like my pencil case, we thought the best person to talk to about this is someone whose work thoughtfully questions are lust for productivity hacks, even though it turns out he kind of loves and uses them himself. Oliver Burkeman is an author and journalist known for writing the weekly self-help column. This column will change your life for The Guardian. He has an aptly named newsletter, The Perfectionist, and he has a new book coming out t his October. It's called Meditations for Mortals. So is Life, a project that needs to be perfectly managed? Could there really be an app for that? This is lately. You write about something called productivity debt. What is it and what was going on when you were articulating that. [00:05:33][59.2]
Oliver Burkeman: [00:05:34] This phrase productivity debt was just sort of my attempt to capture this notion that is very familiar to me, but I think to a lot of other people, too, that you kind of wake up in the morning feeling like you're in debt in terms of the things you've got to do today, and that your job over the course of the day is to try to pay off that debt. And if it goes really well, you might end up back at zero balance. Like that's the best you can hope for in a day of of hard work, whether you know, the office or stuff at home. And it's this kind of default assumption of inadequacy that we sort of got to earn our right to consider ourselves to be acceptable human beings. And I think the good thing about sort of labeling it is that it enables you to see that there is another way of doing things, which is to consider the possibility that you start each day at zero balance and that the things you do during the day sort of add to your credit. Maybe if we're going to keep using this financial metaphor rather than that, you're always on the back foot, always scrambling to try to feel adequate about how much you're doing. [00:06:40][66.0]
Vass Bednar: [00:06:41] And were you feeling that you were on the back foot or waking up in that debt around that time? [00:06:46][5.6]
Oliver Burkeman: [00:06:47] Yeah. I mean, this feeling of needing to catch up feels just like the most the most fundamental feeling of most of my younger adulthood, really. You know, obviously, in some sense that can be true. You have deadlines to meet, you have bills to pay. But it's this sort of existential layer to it where it gets all mixed up with your self-worth. And the idea is that to really equip yourself properly as a member of the human race, you have to have done more than you have presently done. It's no way to live. [00:07:18][30.7]
Vass Bednar: [00:07:19] Not at all. Can we get a bit of a history lesson? Like, where did this concept of personal productivity come from and how did it become such an ideal? [00:07:28][9.1]
Oliver Burkeman: [00:07:30] I mean, there are so many different forces and layers and of course it is the capitalist economy that we live and work in. And of course, to some extent it is a much older thing. You know, the Protestant work ethic, these ideas that are very deep in especially sort of Anglo American cultures about needing to sort of demonstrate your worth in some deep or almost religious sense, thinking about it a bit more narrowly. There was this very clear shift in the Industrial Revolution when the process of industrialization where time came to be seen as a resource that could be bought and sold. And if you were a shift worker in a factory or a mill, you sold it to the mill owner or the factory owner, and then they wanted to get as much value out of that hour as they possibly could. So pretty adversarial and exploitative situation gets kind of transferred among white collar workers and the era of knowledge work. To some extent, it's like the the mill owner and the mill worker are both aspects of our own internal psychology. And so we find ourselves kind of demanding ever more from each of our hours. And of course, as I say, that's real. People need to pay their rents and buy groceries. But there's this layer of it that sort of really makes your whole sense of existence staked on on how efficient and how sort of optimized you can be. And I think where it really begins to lead us astray. [00:08:55][85.1]
Vass Bednar: [00:08:56] Or sort of pushing that pressure into other aspects of our lives, too. And we want to talk about how this productivity mindset is bleeding into our relationships. So recently there was an article from the San Francisco Standard. It really struck a chord widely forwarded, commented on much Mehmed, and it was all about these new tools that people are using to optimize. I'm using that word with a wink relationships and some of this plays out in real life. Marriage offsets Relationship Performance reviews. One couple described a weekend retreat where they had vision boards, bar charts, goals, 19 pages of Google slides. Right? So of course, there's now a company that does this selling marriage retreat packages for for thousands of dollars. But the more widely adopted and cheaper element is kind of life and relationship management apps or software systems. They're becoming more popular whether it's the more widely known players like Slack Notion or new market entrants like couples shared calendar for couples mother AI tool aimed at parents kind of automate repetitive tasks coexist the tagline there simplify housework or Maple which is a Canadian app for family scheduling. Why do you think we're seeing the rise of these kinds of tools now? [00:10:14][78.2]
Oliver Burkeman: [00:10:15] There always is with sort of optimization and efficiency technologies, there is this promise and I think it really is just the promise that with the right. Tool and really dedicated use of it. You might sort of penetrate through to this next era in your in your relationship or your family life, where where it was plain sailing, where you you were on top of everything and you didn't need to worry that you were forgetting about something or missing something. [00:10:43][27.8]
Vass Bednar: [00:10:45] You were mentioning how a factory was structured earlier, and now with technology, there's this blurring of the personal and professional. At least when you left the factory, you weren't still working there anymore. Right. Our workplaces, our phones and in covert are veterans became our offices. Now it seems like we can work on our relationships any time or from anywhere. Putting the promises aside, are we primed for this merging of work and self? [00:11:13][28.2]
Oliver Burkeman: [00:11:14] Yeah. I mean, I just think that there's something about this logic, the ethos of firstly optimization and efficiency, but secondly kind of the goal orientation aspect of that, the idea that what we're doing is to get somewhere, it's reinforced by the economy, by the culture, and it colonizes the rest of life in a really sort of interesting way. So my first thought about using an app to help organize your family life or your relationship is like, there's nothing wrong with that. And if if what it's doing for you is putting all those businesslike aspects of the relationship into a into a particular compartment in your life, then that maybe frees you up to spend the rest of the time just sort of being present with your partner or with your children. But it does seem to be that what happens, and especially when these apps are run by companies that very understandably want to make money and sort of expand what they're doing for you. It actually seems that what happens is that that ethos kind of leaks into the rest of life. And so the risk then is that you start to view your relationship or your family life as fundamentally about getting somewhere, right? Fundamentally about reaching the point in the future where you can say, like, we did it, we built a successful marriage or our kids went off into the world and they're successful adults and that's all fine. But if you do too much, then you're obviously missing just actually being in the relationship or actually being with kids and not only relating to them entirely as adults in training. [00:12:49][95.4]
Vass Bednar: [00:12:51] Well, and online, the backlash is sort of like, hey, we're turning love into work. And anyone who's been in a relationship or is in a relationship now knows that relationships, they are work. But maybe these apps are kind of inherently unromantic. [00:13:05][14.1]
Oliver Burkeman: [00:13:07] Yeah, There's a sense in which relationships absolutely are work. And yet, I don't know. It's not the same sense in which productivity apps are designed to help us with our work. Right? Relationships are not a project. They are work because they're constantly bringing you up against your limits, against your ability to sort of manage your own emotions, against how little control you have over or even understanding of what's going on with other people. [00:13:34][27.3]
Vass Bednar: [00:13:35] You mentioned control. What or who might we be trying to control when we try to apply these technologies to our personal lives? Do you think it's time or the other person? [00:13:47][11.6]
Oliver Burkeman: [00:13:48] I've sort of got a bit of a history as a control freak, but it was all very internally directed, right? I do have a lot of interest in trying to sort of control other people's behavior. But I do feel that if I haven't control how I use my time in the day, I used to think that, you know, that I was terrible failure. And then there are other people, obviously at different degrees of of extreme who who seek to control other people. Then there's just the sense of kind of wanting to control how reality is unfolding in your day, which is so violated when you find that you're stuck in a traffic jam or you know you can't get an answer on the customer service line or something like that. So I think it's very widely varied, but I think what holds it together is this notion that, you know, being a finite human with limited time, limited control, knowing that were going to die, all the rest of it, is that sort of intensely vulnerable situation. Being in a relationship then is even more vulnerable. You have to be open to being hurt if you're going to be open to the enjoyable and rewarding parts of it and compulsively seeking more control. Is sort of a coping mechanism for that vulnerability. It's a sort of not very good coping mechanism because we never actually get to that level of control that we think we want. But it's a kind of a fidgety way of feeling that you're doing something to fight back against how vulnerable our situation really is. [00:15:11][83.3]
Vass Bednar: [00:15:12] So when you were more focused on controlling your own time or making the most of it, what do you think it was that prevented you from letting that seep or spill over to your personal life and your your relationships? [00:15:25][13.0]
Oliver Burkeman: [00:15:27] It's interesting. I'm not sure it didn't keep and spill over. I just think historically, the kind of person whose form of Turkishness is kind of withdrawing and spending time like rebuffing everybody else because I want to try and get through answering my emails as opposed to the kind of person who sort of tries to force other people to do things on their behalf or whatever. So I think one of the things that you see and yeah, I probably have had a little bit this going on is that workaholism, right? Being really focused on work and productivity in work can often be for many people. And I think back in the day to some extent was for me a way of sort of avoiding the whole vulnerable, distressing messiness of relationships. So, you know, you see all these books that promise how to get even more done and how to become so efficient that you can do all all the things. And almost by definition, if you're drawn to one of these books, you need something different, right? You need someone to say like, what is it you're avoiding by trying to become sort of omnipotent in your work? [00:16:28][60.4]
Vass Bednar: [00:16:37] Earlier we mentioned the organizational app notion, and I was noticing that they now have a template. I mean, they have tons of templates, but there's this one in particular. It's called the Couples Planner. So couples can track things like their travel bucket list, their house hunting or major purchase planning, all sorts of things. And for me, all of this seems to be pointing towards that kind of perfecting of coupledom. Now, you're an advocate for perfectionism. Do you think it's possible to actually embrace the imperfect and still be using a tool like this? [00:17:11][34.3]
Oliver Burkeman: [00:17:12] Totally. I think that can be great. The problem is how you relate to the tool. Not that there is a tool and you know, people are always looking for tools to eliminate the difficulties of their doing their work. And And how much more wonderful would it be to eliminate the difficulties of living with another person? Right, right. I mean, that's just like other people are nightmares. And it would be kind of wonderful if you could just sort of make it all go smoothly. Actually, it wouldn't, of course, because the encounters with the non smooth parts are where magic happens on some level. But I can totally understand the appeal. I think it is entirely to do with whether you can stay grounded about what you really expect this thing to do for you. [00:17:49][36.8]
Vass Bednar: [00:17:50] Couples fight and most of these fights do end up, I think at least the studies show they end up being about kind of stupid stuff like dishes and laundry. A Harvard Business School study found that 25% of divorce couples cited disagreements over housework as the main reason for their breakup. An upside of these apps is or could be that if everyone gets on board, they can facilitate better communication around the stupid stuff. Yeah, but do you think an app can really divorce proof a marriage? [00:18:18][28.3]
Oliver Burkeman: [00:18:20] That's a great question. There are various apps and books have been written. Really interesting thoughts about fairly apportioning the household labor. And absolutely I am on board and try my hardest in my own relationship to resist the default old fashioned position of heterosexual relationships. I try very hard to do my share, and I'm aware of the sort of cultural reinforcement of the idea that these things should be woman's work or something. And of course that's really important. The gender equal side of it. The frustration of this should be fairly shared between partners 100%. But it's not like if we got the right sharing arrangement, then it would not feel like too much because it's too much in the modern world, right? We live these lives where both the work input and the household chores, input in the household, maintenance input. The only way to bring sanity to that is once you're sharing them in a fairly fair way, that doesn't breed massive resentment. To accept that quite a lot of them are not going to get done by anybody because it's an infinite supply and you can't get through an infinite supply, even with really cool tricks. [00:19:28][68.2]
Vass Bednar: [00:19:28] Even with really cool tricks. No. Well, for me, here's where it falls apart a little bit. Not that we can't get through the infinite supply, but that managing the art can kind of become its own form of invisible domestic labor. Right? As soon as you have to be like, Babe, did you check the app then the apps not doing the work for you that it's supposed to do? Because what it's not solving for is that cognitive load. [00:19:55][26.4]
Oliver Burkeman: [00:19:55] Right. Right. You're talking about the idea that has been called worry work rate. I think the fact that aside from who's doing a chore, somebody has to keep track of which chores need doing. And that is super interesting because of course if you try to be completely shared on that front, you create a new level of problem which is worrying about who's meant to be worrying about which thing, right? So there's a sort of endless sequence of meta worry about who's keeping track. And I don't think apps in general that are aimed at enhancing productivity in any domain tend to do a very good job of this. They tend to generate overheads. You need to check it if it's a couple based thing. If you're the person who checks it regularly, you then need to make sure the other person checks it. You fall into one of these spirals of what therapists call under functioning and over functioning where like if I know the other person's always going to be checking the app and reminding me, then I'm going to check it even less than I otherwise would. Right? Because why do. [00:20:52][56.3]
Vass Bednar: [00:20:52] That? Because they're my app, right? Maybe your spouse is your app and then they're just also using an app. Yeah. You write in your new book about how we struggle with the people we love to kind of crack the code of intimacy, and this often proves futile. You write, Maybe it's true that you married the wrong person or that you need years of therapy. Yet it's also just a fact that two flawed and finite humans living and maturing together will inevitably push each other's buttons, triggering their buried issues. Can you talk about what happens when we start to allow ourselves to understand the limitations of the people we love and our own? [00:21:30][38.1]
Oliver Burkeman: [00:21:31] I mean, I think this is where the whole game is played, really, right? That. The absurd thing is that we might ever have imagined that we could completely understand either ourselves or another person. And also just how how lifeless life would be if we could write how a sort of total predictability in life is and in other people is absolutely not what you want or what anyone wants. And the sort of idea I was getting up there in the new book, which applies to lots of other domains as well, is like very often we torture ourselves with the idea that we're involved in some very difficult struggle, the difficult struggle to fully understand how to be in relationships, the difficult struggle to fully get on top of all our emails. And liberation is to be found not in finding a way to solve the struggle, but in seeing that it's not very difficult. It's actually completely impossible. And then you can sort of exhale and let your shoulders drop and you can be okay. You change the focus of what you're doing. What you're doing is not trying to get to the perfect relationship. You're trying to get better and better and more capacious. That sort of dealing with all the interesting ups and downs of a relationship. You're getting better and better at making the wise choices about which of your two many things are really worth your time. And it's just a much more engrossing and enlivening way to be because it doesn't offer anything else. It doesn't place the meaning of life always like a few months or years in the future. [00:22:59][87.4]
Vass Bednar: [00:22:59] Yeah, just next weekend we'll get to solving that. Right. Economist Emily Auster is the author of the blockbuster bestseller The Family Firm and other books, You know, for My Zone of Life, this is like she's on everyone's reading list. Okay. Yeah. And she advises parents to use data to make parenting decisions. And she actually advocates for the business of dying of domestic life. She she says you should come up with, like, a family mission statement, long term goals, guidelines for everything from socializing to diet. Why do you think this kind of framework or this approach is resonating with parents? [00:23:39][39.8]
Oliver Burkeman: [00:23:40] I mean, I really like the work of Emily Oster's that I've seen. Yeah. And I think, you know, one of the things that I really am grateful to her and to other people doing related things is the right data. Right. Just like knowing what the real facts are about research in child psychology or nutrition or whatever it might be, and working from a basis of something that may well be the truth instead of, you know, these kind of wild nonsense. I once wrote a long newspaper piece about the sort of baby advice industry because I was just so struck after becoming apparently, yeah, just the amount of stuff where you would try to track down the research reference and find that it was just something that showed something completely different than what was claimed. And people like Emily, for whom that's not the case, for whom you can trust what she's saying, I think the real appeal there is that there is a a handrail. There's something to navigate by. And I think there's a fairly clear distinction between the usefulness of having those handrails versus thinking that the data can comprehensively tell you exactly how to win at life. [00:24:44][63.6]
Vass Bednar: [00:24:45] When I was pregnant, expecting better, it definitely helped me feel like I was winning my pregnancy, right? That I was using the data. She was helping me use data to make like really great decisions. And that was very comforting. Right. That was the guardrail that I needed. Right. But when it comes to this, again, work, this labor of love, this joy of being a parent, do you think we're trying to, like, win at raising children? [00:25:06][21.0]
Oliver Burkeman: [00:25:07] I think it's very hard to resist. Right. I mean, it's like I find it harder getting better at it not to constantly be at least internally to myself, evaluating whether my son is doing something that is like good or bad in terms of how he's spending his time and how much screens are involved and how much candy is involved and all the rest. And a big chunk of that is this really future focused thing that says like even if it's not quite articulated this way, like, are these things going to help or hinder the future happy and successful adults that I'd like him to be? Right. Whereas obviously another important question here is like, is is childhood going well? Is this a meaningful and enjoyable experience right now? I feel like there's this phenomenon where when babies are sort of zero and one, there's some incredibly strict health food protocols being observed and maybe it makes more difference at that time, I don't know. And then by about 5 or 6, there are clear signs of giving up on the parts of the parent. And I think, you know, some of that is actually very wholesome. Some of that is saying, yes, we want to give our kid the best start in life, but ice cream is delicious, too. And it's a question of navigating the sort of the present and the future all the time. Yeah. [00:26:21][74.3]
Vass Bednar: [00:26:22] I guess this way of potentially trying to engineer or plan childhood feels a little bit at odds with what's so extraordinary about children. The wonder, the mass, the wildness. In my case, the trucks. Is there a risk of kind of flattening childhood, you know, not having enough space for what you call delight? You write that life is something to delight in, not merely to be dealt with. [00:26:52][29.8]
Oliver Burkeman: [00:26:53] Yeah. You know, I struggle with it every day. I'm total work in progress, but I think that really is the core of it. Ultimately, I think our jobs as parents are to help our children become who they're meant to be, not not who we want them to be. But also it is to do that being in each moment instead of always to be looking at with one eye to the to the future. And it comes in waves. And there are times when you need to hurry everyone to leave the house. And then there are times when you're just being there, out in the countryside or on the couch or whatever, and just just sort of delighting in being there. You want enough of that? Kind of. Time. That is just time for itself. Because it's not a rich and lively way to live. To be completely always focused on the on where it's taking you and whether you're doing the right things for a future result. [00:27:43][49.8]
Vass Bednar: [00:27:45] So what do you think's getting lost in our relentless quest for optimization? You identify something called resonance. What is that? [00:27:54][8.3]
Oliver Burkeman: [00:27:55] This word comes from a German social theorist called Hartmut Rosa. I think resonance is the idea of being in a certain kind of relationship with reality that vibrates in some sense. We're deep in metaphors here, but I think people get a hunch for what this is. The moments in life that we look back on as really fulfilling, really enjoyable, really like this is why we're here are characterized by this resonance, this sense of a sort of vibrating relationship. And also there's something about the control we spend our lives trying to get more of, both as individuals and as whole societies. That seems to be. Antithetical to that, that seems to make the resonance go away. So it's pretty easy to think of contexts where, you know, absolute predictability is achieved in some way and then it's like it's not fun anymore. If you absolutely know who's going to win a football match like that, football match is not fun. I always had this experience earlier on in my sort of productivity obsession days where you come up with this whole schedule for how you're going to spend every hour of the next two weeks and like 24 hours in, I just be like, this is so lifeless and oppressive and boring. Why do I have to do this? And there's something at odds and habit. Rossa makes this point on a sort of civilizational scale. There's something at odds between our desire to be in control of things and what it is that we really value about being alive. [00:29:27][92.3]
Vass Bednar: [00:29:28] Okay. But I can't put, you know, resonance on my to do list and draw a bunch of hearts around it and kind of call it a day. So how can we keep delight, keep, I don't know, making the space for resonance while still getting the best out of these project management technologies? Or do we actually need to start to choose between them? [00:29:50][22.6]
Oliver Burkeman: [00:29:52] I hope we don't need to choose between them because I kind of love this stuff and so I really hope that I get to carry on kind of geeking out on on apps and systems without it actually sort of making it not possible to live an enriching life of hinted already that it's something to do with the stance you take towards those things, whether you expect them to sort of save your soul or you just expect them to be tools. We live this huge, complicated, wonderful, unpredictable life. And then within that you might well have a projects list of things you're trying to achieve in your work, or even a list of daily habits you want to try to follow as a couple or something like that. And it's totally fine. I think the problem is when they sort of expand to take everything over. So I think that the way to think about things that need doing and productivity is to just leave space, right? Not to claim that you're going to do 25 things after work around the house, but learn to tolerate the anxiety of doing five and leaving the others four for another day. And it's also to do with sort of seeing your role as nurturing something, you know, Alison Gopnik, the child psychologist, has this wonderful contrast of metaphors of the gardener and the carpenter, right? That our job as parents and perhaps also as partners is to keep telling the soil and doing things that in the long run are going to help people have a good experience rather than build structures that, once they're finished, can just be left to sort of live life on our behalf. If I'm not confusing too many ideas. So that sort of idea of like. A few daily habits, a few monthly habits, a few ways that you handle sort of really annoying admin, but doing it so that you get to focus on on life, not so that it becomes life over. [00:31:38][105.5]
Vass Bednar: [00:31:38] You can add this interview to your done list today. Yes, I'm so happy you chose to give some of your finite time to us today. Thank you so much. [00:31:48][9.4]
Oliver Burkeman: [00:31:48] It was a pleasure. Thank you. [00:31:49][0.8]
Vass Bednar: [00:32:02] You've been listening to lately, a Globe and Mail podcast. Our executive producer is Katrina Onstad. The show is produced by Andrea Varsany. And our sound designer is Cameron McIvor. I'm your host, Vass Bednar. And in our shownotes, you can subscribe to the Lately newsletter where we unpack a little more of the latest in business and technology. A new episode of Lately comes out every Friday wherever you get your podcasts. [00:32:02][0.0]
[1853.9]