‘We are fully in time… we are time’

Do you have an overarching view of or approach to time?

Although this can sometimes sound a bit pretentious, I am engaged in working out a philosophy of time as I keep writing, talking and thinking about it.

All that really does is bring me back to insights that philosophers and spiritual authorities have had before me. Some of what I've stumbled into is encapsulated in Heidegger's work around being in time, or quite closely allied with both Zen Buddhist and Daoist understandings.

Maybe one has to discover these things for oneself. I don't think I've got an original approach to time, but perhaps I'm expressing it in a way that resonates with people in this time. This notion could be a bit too spiritual to count as psychological, but it's that we are fully in time and perhaps in some sense, we are time. We are fully in our lives, we belong to reality. 

A lot of what we are trying to do with time management and productivity is trying to master our time, to get out on top of something that we actually are. There's something that we do in our relationship with time that feels like it separates us from the world, when in fact we are already a completely interdependent and interconnected part of the world. That's the idea at the deepest level, and I'm not sure it's even susceptible to psychological research of a scientific kind.

Has that overarching view changed over time?

Certainly, I feel like what's happened to me is that I have pushed the other way of relating to time to an extreme that maybe other people don't always push it to. If I've gained any insights, it's entirely been as a result of being such an extreme efficiency-obsessed, time-management-obsessed, productivity geek, that I've been able to get to the end of my belief in that approach.

Writing The Guardian column, 'This column will change your life', was very useful in this regard – I got to test out so many different philosophies of time and time management, to read so many books on this stuff. Once you've tried 100 time management and productivity methods, to bring yourself the peace of mind and the freedom from anxiety that you think you're looking for, and none of them work… well, then you're in a good position to say, 'maybe I'm asking the wrong question here. Maybe I need to look at something more internal'. 

To what extent did you turn to the psychological research?

I do think a lot of what I'm doing here is in some sense psychotherapeutic… not that I have those qualifications, but it's a process of internal development that I'm talking about. But I'm going to be brutally honest and say that I used, and continue to use, psychological research in a completely mercenary way. It's about sparking thoughts in my mind, starting a conversation. You'll see me writing about psychology research in a way that says, 'Hmm, this is an interesting finding. Let's suppose that it was completely true, and all the ramifications that it seems to have were real, what then would follow?'

Whereas of course, somebody who cared more about the psychological research would stop at that point and ask, 'Is it true? Was this a well designed study? What does this tell us? What are the limitations of what this can tell us?'

I pretty blatantly don't do that. I cherry pick the research that seems to support the kinds of things that I'm interested in exploring and arguing.

I do think I'm honest about that. I don't give the impression that I'm making a research-backed case, when I'm not. I think that's the crucial thing.

Having said that, there are a bunch of researchers I have turned to. I remember writing about the work of Daniel Gilbert on the idea of making irreversible commitments, as opposed to reversible ones. If you're obliged to make a final choice of something instead of being given the option of changing it, that seems much more associated with wellbeing and lack of second-guessing of oneself.

I also keep stumbling across the research of Kathleen Vohs… in fact, quite a lot of what I'm interested in comes from management and business school research. But I'm more likely, in an average chapter, to be drawing on a Buddhist writer, maybe a philosopher like Henri Bergson, or William James. These are people who were connected with the world of research, but building a case off the research is a kind of science writing which, done well, is brilliant… it's just not what I think of myself as doing. 

How do you see the link between time and memory?

Wow, this is interesting. The main thing that comes to mind is simply the well-known truth that time as we remember it seems to speed up as we go through life. The preceding week when you're 40 feels like it went by much quicker than a week when you were 20, or when you were 12. I'm told that if you get to be 80, it really feels like the weeks go by in a flash.

I've always been very interested in that idea, and in the idea that a way to combat that in your life is to seek novelty. It does seem to be vividly true, in personal experience. If you do new things, go to new places, if you travel somewhere for three days, that exists in your recollected memory as a real chunk, a real chapter of experience. Whereas the last three days in one's regular life vanish without trace.

I'm persuaded that sense seems to have something to do with the quantity of information being processed. We don't really have a way of thinking about time in memory in a remembered way, except by using other things as a proxy… it is very difficult to put hard edges in thought on time except using spatial metaphors, except using the sense of how much happened in a certain time period, as opposed to the time itself.

I'm forever quoting Henry David Thoreau: 'It is not enough to be busy. The ants are busy. The question is, what are we busy about?' Do you see any signs that the cult of busyness is abating?

This is a very difficult question for me to answer because my perspective is so self-selecting… I hear from everyone who is questioning the cult of busyness, but this does not mean that very much is happening to the cult of busyness in the world at large. But I do think that there is this sense of reaching the end of the road with a certain way of managing time: namely, the attempt to squeeze more and more stuff in and to deal with overwhelm by doing more. We're realising this actually only leads to doing even more. All else being equal, making yourself more efficient simply attracts more inputs into your life that you then have to deal with.

In the anti-work movement, that's there. And in the conversation around millennials and burnout – the idea that burnout is something people encounter in their 20s or their 30s would have been baffling to people when that term was first talked about as something that you got to maybe just before the end of a professional career.

Sheer activity and tasks completed is a completely meaningless metric. It means nothing at all, to have done a lot of things. The question is only on what things. Almost all of the useful, worthwhile, meaningful things that any of us could ever do with our time – personal, professional, or changing the world at a global level – we're never going to do.

There is simply no reason to believe that just because something feels like it matters, there must be time available to do it. So I'm urging people to lean into that mismatch. If that's the case, then you don't need to worry about trying to get everything done with your time – that ship has sailed, that battle is lost. And it's precisely accepting defeat that enables you to move forward, into a world where you're pouring your finite time, energy and attention into a handful of things that that count. 

On a related note, I've heard a few people say 'what I was being asked to do at work was simply not possible'. But it's usually in the context of having had some kind of breakdown, followed by a career change. Do you hear more positive stories of people who have managed to follow an alternative path in what you call 'the accelerating world'?

I think some kind of breakdown might be essential. I don't mean that I'm wishing that people have a traumatising time, or do serious lasting damage to their bodies, or to their relationships, bank balances or anything like that. But hitting the end of the road in some way is actually essential, and it's the beginning of everything positive.

There's a lovely quote from Elizabeth Gilbert, where she says 'I don't know of any real personal change that didn't begin with someone getting sick of their own bullshit'. You do have to try to achieve this kind of salvation through productivity, this sense that you're going to do more and more stuff, that you can keep up with the accelerating world, when in fact keeping up just makes your world accelerate even further… you have to get to some kind of breaking point with that.

I write in my book 4000 Weeks about going through a sort of intellectual epiphany on a park bench in Brooklyn when I suddenly realised the amount of things I was trying to do by the end of the week was an impossible quantity – there wasn't a way of making it all fit in. I found that incredibly liberating and freeing. It was only an intellectual epiphany though… it took me many, many years to live into it more fully. I'm still a work in progress in that respect. 

If people have to go through that themselves anyway, what's the benefit of books which tell them their path isn't working?

It can be a bit of a catalyst. It can bring to the fore changes in someone's attitude to time that were just below the surface. Or it can give them permission. That's strange to me – who am I to give anyone permission – but people really benefit from the idea, 'Oh, it's not just me who thinks this is a crazy way of living?' 

What I don't think a book like mine or anyone else's can do is bring that whole idea into existence from nothing. It's the final push into the fruitful and productive existential crisis that we probably all need to go through, with regard to the accelerating and increasingly impossible culture that we live in.