Lesson 2: Reset Your Standard to Avoid Self-Sabotage | Oliver Burkeman

When you’re indebted to someone, it’s like carrying a stone in your pocket — a weight that’s hard to ignore. When your sense of obligation expands to the entire world, it can grow into a boulder, dragging you down no matter how hard you try to move forward. Many of us feel this kind of burden — the constant pressure to “do more” to justify our existence. Author Oliver Burkeman offers a different perspective: stop viewing productivity as something you owe and start seeing it as something you build.

In this video lesson, Burkeman shares practical strategies for escaping the crushing weight of “productivity debt.”

Start from a position of adequacy

“Productivity debt” is the existential sense that we don’t deserve to be here because we haven’t done enough stuff. But the standard for how much stuff would be enough keeps getting harder and harder to meet because the amount of things we could do is infinite.

While we may need to do things for our job, we don’t need to do things to justify our existence. Instead, think of your day as starting at a zero balance. Then, everything you do becomes a payment into the credit of this “productivity account.”

Set modest outcomes

The pressure to get things done is real. But so is the impossibility of doing everything you could conceive of putting on your to-do list.

Acknowledge that it’s structurally impossible to do an infinite amount with your day. Then, create a list of things you could do to convince yourself that you’ve done some useful things with your day.

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About Oliver Burkeman:

Oliver Burkeman is a bestselling author and journalist. He is best known for Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (2021), a self-help book on reframing productivity for happiness. He also publishes The Imperfectionist, an email on productivity, mortality, the power of limits, and building a meaningful life in an age of bewilderment.