The Businessman & The Fisherman
A successful international businessman once traveled to a beautiful island. One day he was strolling along a local seaside pier when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellow fin tuna. The businessman complimented him on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them.
The fisherman replied, “only a little while.” The businessman then asked why didn’t he stay out longer and catch more fish? The fisherman said he had enough to support his family’s immediate needs.
The businessman then asked, “but what do you do with the rest of your time?” The fisherman said, “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take naps with my wife, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine, and play guitar with my friends. I have a full and busy life.”
The businessman scoffed, “I am a successful businessman and could help you. You should spend more time fishing and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat. With the proceeds from the bigger boat, you could buy several boats, eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman you would sell directly to the processor, eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing, and distribution. You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then LA and eventually New York City, where you will run your expanding enterprise.”
The fisherman asked, “But, how long will this all take?”
To which the businessman replied, “15 – 20 years.” “But what then?” Asked the fisherman.
The businessman laughed and said, “That’s the best part. When the time is right you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich, you would make millions!”
“Millions – then what?”
The businessman said, “Then you would retire. Move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take naps with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your friends.”
—
The above is an adaptation of a popular story that has been reprinted and retold countless times. The precise origin is uncertain. Its continued propagation is probably thanks to the humorous and effective distillation of the contrast between two different ways of looking at time and success: an ancient perspective still practiced by many cultures, where an individual is simply being in time, verses a hyperactive modern perspective common to late-capitalist cultures where time is something to be measured, relentlessly optimized and exchanged for future outcomes. In our modern world, time is money.
Reconciling Oliver Burkeman & Newport
Since my teenage years, after reading Covey’s Seven Habits, I’ve been interested in time management and productivity books. In the past decade, my professional career experience has been what might be described as a “boiling frog” effect of professional demands — what seems like drinking from a fire hose of information, asks and responsibilities. While there’s arguably a notable increase in productivity influencers on YouTube and social media that may give us the impression that “hustle culture” and “life hacks” are nothing more than a self-perpetuating feedback loop, I’ve written in previous posts that the deleterious impact of the ever-increasing amount of information that the average person consumes on a given day is real, and people have a practical appetite for strategies to curate that information and optimize their time. In short, there is real demand for solutions.
Two of the most interesting books I’ve read in the past year on the subject of productivity and time management are Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity and Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks. Both works grapple with the fundamental reality that our time is finite and that we simply cannot do all the things we want to do in a given day, week or year. Newport prescribes a practical three-pronged approach to living a productive life without burnout:
- Do fewer things at once.
- Work at a natural pace.
- Obsess over quality.
Newport’s productivity book trilogy (Deep Work, A World Without Email & Slow Productivity) can be seen as a logical evolution and refinement of a long lineage of time management classics: Peter Drucker’s The Effective Executive (1966), Alan Lakein’s How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life (1973), Steven Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (1989) to David Allen’s Getting Things Done (2001).
Slow Productivity sometimes reads like a “bug fix” or course corrective antidote to the shortcomings of Allen’s “GTD®” system. Written in 2001, around the time that networked email was first achieving critical mass among an older generation of knowledge workers, Allen’s system strikes me as trivial and obsolete in today’s hyperactive context. GTD is table stakes. It encourages dopaminergic priming behaviors. Something equivalent inevitably must emerge to even engage in modern knowledge work. The design patterns of all time planning and PKMS software — everything from the to-do list app on your smartphone to the latest version of the Microsoft Office Suite are bloated with features that are essentially some variation of the capture -> organize -> plan model. As a software engineer, reading David Allen’s GTD today just seems like a description of a software manual for such products that are a dime a dozen. At best, GTD teases a false promise of “auto-pilot.” It may offer a fleeting reprieve from anxiety by feeling on top of things, but all those tasks are still lurking in the to-do list, regardless of how effectively you file them away. From a systems perspective, whatever variation of knowledge management and planning system you use, and no matter how efficient it may be, you inevitably reach a point where the capturing, sorting, planning and follow-up of ever-increasing inputs overwhelms your system and your very existence, leaving insufficient processing time for actually doing the work. I personally find it inferior to Drucker, Covey and Newport’s approaches that help you develop better heuristics for rapidly identifying the hypothetical 20% of the Pareto principle and efficiently redirecting the rest.
Modern knowledge workers and their managers are playing the wrong game. The remote and hybrid work model has created a morass of digital feedback loops of messages and meetings where participants are rewarded not for their ability to think, plan and execute effectively on long-term strategic objectives, but for their ability to be responsive and reactive to myopic objectives that satisfy a sense of busy-ness.
Burkeman’s work takes a completely different approach. Having spent nearly twenty years writing a column for The Guardian that reviews various popular time management and productivity trends, he’s developed a broad perspective on the subject. Four Thousand Weeks is not just another prescriptive guide to time management and productivity. In fact, it might be considered a critique of time management itself and the “cult of productivity” that pervades the modern information-overloaded landscape of late capitalist culture. Even the title is particularly effective in conveying the finitude of the average lifespan using a measure that we so often use in our work life and time management. He says, “time management as we know it has failed miserably, and that we need to stop pretending otherwise.” He proceeds with an exploration of ways to shift our perspective of time and provides practical ideas for doing so, drawn from the work of philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual teachers who all rejected the struggle to dominate or master it. Burkeman is trying to help the time-management addict become less like the businessman and more like the fisherman.
The History of Time
For the millennia that humans lived predominantly agrarian or hunter-gatherer lifestyles, the average person’s conception of time was quite different. People didn’t so much live by time as they just lived in it, based on the natural rhythm and flow of daylight, chores, activities and season. Even by the early 19th century, clocks were an expensive and rare luxury. The large, ornate and regal grandfather clock is a vestige of that era. If you lived in a reasonably populated area, a large bell clock, church bells or calls to prayer may have marked the day, but otherwise people didn’t really think about time as a “thing” at all.
It wasn’t until the peak of the industrial revolution and the widespread adoption of reasonably affordable mechanical clocks that our perception of time changed to something arguably, well, stressful. Accurate timekeeping was essential to coordinate the transportation and convergence of raw materials, to organize workers and distribute their output in industrial manufacturing. Factories demanded considerable time-management. Workers had to show up to work at a specific time for a new concept called a “shift.” It was a turning point in human history where most people in advancing industrial societies were no longer selling their skills, agricultural harvest or wares, but the very hours of their life measured by the industrial clock, usually in the form of an hourly wage.
It’s not to say that coordinating time via synchronized timekeeping devices wasn’t a revolutionary and useful innovation, but Burkeman argues that out of this post-industrial concept of time, we’ve deeply internalized a set of traditional ideas about how to use our finite time, all of which make us miserable.
Burkeman observes that this misery arises from our desire to avoid the painful reality that our time on earth is finite, and that “most of our strategies for becoming more productive make things worse, because they’re really just ways of furthering the avoidance. After all, it’s painful to confront how limited your time is, because it means that tough choices are inevitable and that you won’t have time for all you once dreamed you might do. It’s also painful to accept your limited control over the time you do get.”
Newport on the other hand, accepts this as an unavoidable social construct to be “hacked,” and suggests creative variations of traditional strategies to rank priorities and focus on far fewer things that are more important, set strict boundaries and say no responsibly while minimizing negative social consequences. By all accounts, Newport’s successful academic career and impressive consistent literary output is testament to his preternatural acumen for maintaining a healthy work-life balance while strictly focusing his professional time on the “deep work” that maximizes value.
Waiting To Arrive
How much of your life have you spent waiting or anticipating to arrive at some future state of success, wealth, achievement, completion, mastery or contentment? Or perhaps you’re just trying to clear your to do list today, or make it through the workweek to Friday afternoon, or even the end of your shift to finally get to enjoy some time for yourself, to do what YOU want to do? This phenomenon is a key concept in Burkeman’s work.
Perhaps it’s no coincidence that I’m approximately the same age as Burkeman and relate to his meditations on mortality — or as he likes to call — our finitude. We’ve passed through the exuberance of youth, where the future seems to have infinite possibility. We’ve confronted the realities and responsibilities of adulthood, careerism, paying the bills, earning trust, making and keeping promises. We’ve reached the plateau of late middle age where we may finally have been lucky enough to have established a bit of confidence in what we’re doing. And, in what seems like a blink of an eye, we realize that we have far fewer weeks ahead of us than behind us and we must scurry like squirrels gathering nuts for the winter, to achieve lifelong goals or acquire enough financial security for a reasonably comfortable retirement. In fact, over the past decade, and especially in the past five years or so since the pandemic, I’ve personally been so focused on my career that I’m often overwhelmed by a sense of “waiting to arrive,” which is in contrast to an earlier phase of my life that I would describe as simultaneously inspired by the possibilities ahead and deeply influenced by spiritual traditions that reinforce the importance of being present in the moment. Now I’m more interested in the latter.
But what exactly is it that we’re waiting for? Burkeman argues that behind this existential dilemma and our rush to tackle every problem head-on, there’s often this hidden belief that one day, we’ll finally reach a problem-free state. Consequently, we end up viewing our issues as two problems: first, there’s the specific problem itself, and then there’s our underlying assumption that we shouldn’t have any problems at all, when in reality a completely problem-free life is impossible, and we wouldn’t want it anyway, since a life without challenges would be meaningless and devoid of anything worth doing.
Purpose vs. Leisure
Merriam-Webster defines leisure as “freedom provided by the cessation of activities, especially time free from work or duties.”
This definition begins with a description of what might be interpreted as idleness, but further qualifies it as freedom from something that is ostensibly involuntary, mandated or compulsory. The following are listed as antonyms: work, labor, toil, exertion, stress, pressure, tension — all of which combine to suggest something rather unpleasant.
But how many of us spend our “leisure time” working diligently for hours on a challenging activity that is, by all accounts, objectively identical to work? Don’t we often consider writing, painting, building, gardening and charitable service “work?” Doesn’t the artist, musician or writer call their passion project, “their body of work?” The modern idea of leisure is thus defined as the antithesis to our modern conception of work, which perhaps points to how much our post-industrial lives are dominated by a conception of work as an activity that we don’t enjoy in exchange for money.
One may be reminded of the folk adage, “if you pursue a career doing what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.” Many people rightly take issue with this oft-cited folk-wisdom. No doubt, many people have had the good fortune of establishing a path that they genuinely love, that satisfies their material needs and rarely ever conceive of “the work” as “laborious”. However, this not only glosses over the assumption that one has access to basic human needs (in a Maslowian sense), but also the complex nuances of social psychology: status, dignity, perceived relative inequality, and what psychologists call “Prevalence Induced Concept Change,” or that humans actually need and actively seek problems, and when not confronted with any immanent ones, have a tendency to blow trivial ones out of proportion.
It’s interesting to compare this to the concept of leisure that significantly influenced the ethical and political philosophies of classical Greek thinkers. Both Plato and Aristotle viewed leisure not as mere inactivity, but as freedom from the necessity to work for basic needs, essential for achieving the highest form of human flourishing, known as eudaimonia. However, Plato’s views on the type of leisure required for eudaimonia and the social groups that can attain it evolved over his career. In the Republic, Plato proposed a more elitist and demanding notion of human perfection, suggesting that involvement in any productive economic activity, including farming, hinders the attainment of virtue and eudaimonia. Conversely, in his later dialogue, Laws, Plato conceded that a lower level of virtue and flourishing could be achieved by practicing farmers, though not by those engaged in craftsmanship or commerce.
Aristotle’s stance aligns more closely with Plato’s earlier view, linking leisure with virtue and eudaimonia. Nonetheless, some of his writings imply that citizens involved in farming might also achieve virtue. This perspective on leisure revisits the ideal of the Homeric hero, allowing activities like warfare and hunting to be compatible with virtue, while simultaneously promoting a notion of virtue suited to the classical polis. Additionally, it rejects an alternative ethos emphasizing the moral value of physical labor, an ethos articulated in the works of the archaic Greek poet Hesiod and embraced by the “middling” class, which, in the fifth and fourth centuries BC, formed the foundation of classical Greek democracy.
Perhaps we can broadly classify leisure and work to have a positive or negative valence based on whether we perceive it as voluntary or compulsory. Good problems are things we solve because we want to. We often call them “challenges” or “puzzles.” Bad problems are things that we perceive to be beyond our limited control, where non-compliance leads to undesirable consequences or that either we don’t want to confront or that threaten some valued aspect of our identity and existence.
Jevons Paradox
A friend recently shared an anecdote describing an incident where a superior walked up to him while he was busily working on a visibly large and demanding task and asked him to take on an additional task as soon as possible. When my friend bristled with, “Can’t you see I’m busy?” the man leaned in sternly with the retort, “when you want something done, ask a busy person to do it.” This is apparently a popular adage that is often attributed to Lucille Ball, but I imagine some variation of it has been around for a long time, simply because it’s true. A shrewd observer may walk into any given situation, identify the person who is most visibly productive and they are most likely to be able to help, or at least point the person in the right direction.
A few years ago I encountered the concept of Jevons paradox in the context of energy ecology via Nate Hagens. Jevons observed that by making something more efficient, it paradoxically leads to more use. One example is the expansion of a congested interstate roadway with more lanes, which leads to more drivers using it and the construction of more destinations along the route. The same often applies to our energy grid, availability of goods, internet speeds and the list goes on. In the field of psychology this is closely related to hedonic adaptation, or that as a person has more of something, expectations and desires rise in tandem, which results in no permanent gain in happiness. Because our consumer-centric culture has achieved such unprecedented levels of optimization, it’s not uncommon to see people reach as state of panic or even lash out in anger when something is not immediate, fast and convenient. Americans, having been pampered by consumer capitalism since the 1950s may find themselves utterly despondent in a long queue. Thank goodness we’ve finally developed smartphones with high speed internet to help us through such dire predicaments.
Burkeman compares this with the popular obsession with time management, which seeks to optimize our use of time so that we can get more things done, which in turn will be met with increased demand to do more until we inevitably reach a point of saturation and become a bottleneck, which is both a process liability and a point of stress. Our time is absolutely finite and inelastic, but we refuse to accept this reality, opting instead to believe that some optimization exists to overcome it.
I find a couple of interrelated concepts from psychology relevant: martyr behavior and strategic incompetence (also called “weaponized” incompetence). They represent two sides of the same neurotic coin.
Martyr behavior is characterized by the tendency to say yes to everything, hoarding responsibility or gradually gaining exclusive control over operational processes or systems. As an individual takes on more control, and depending on their intent, eventually either exercises power and dominance over others, or inadvertently becomes a significant liability to those they serve. Many times, there is no conscious malicious intent — quite the opposite — it’s born from a desire to be helpful, demonstrate value, or please others. It may also be consciously or subconsciously a dysfunctional manifestation of insecurity or desire for control, possibly stemming from trauma of past rejection.
The opposite of this behavior is what’s called strategic incompetence. One way of avoiding responsibility is to either claim an inability to do something you’re perfectly capable of doing or learning to do, or intentionally performing a task so poorly that you won’t be asked to do it again. Like martyr behavior, it may be intentional and strategic or a subconsciously learned avoidance behavior. While I can offer many petty examples that are common in a domestic partnership (like a partner claiming incompetence on a given task that is associated with a traditional gender role), there have been a few situations I can think of, where I intentionally withheld demonstrating an ability because I didn’t want to do it.
Many years ago, I was intent on joining an instrumental music ensemble as a guitarist. After multiple informal requests, I was finally invited to join and worked hard to tastefully complement the already fantastic group of musicians. We had many rehearsals and a few shows until one day the band decided that the music might be more accessible if some songs featured a vocalist.I set up a microphone and sang a new song I had been working on, to the astonishment of my bandmates.
“Dude, I had no idea you could sing!”
It was only then that I revealed that I had served as the lead singer in most of the bands I had been in up to that point and had grown weary of “fronting” on stage. This was an instrumental group with a collective spirit more akin to the jazz tradition that I had come to idealize. Humble brag? Perhaps. But I remember genuinely wanting to focus on improving my proficiency as a guitarist. I didn’t want it to become another “pop” group.
Ethical Navigation
Jevons Paradox, Martyr Behavior and Strategic Incompetence are just some of the potential pitfalls of navigating time management ethically. Martyr behavior and strategic incompetence are widespread and professionally problematic. When intentional, they are unethical. Newport and Burkeman both stress the importance of significantly limiting the amount of work an individual takes on, and to do so ethically means transparency about why you are saying yes or no to a request, which is difficult and takes practice. In a professional context, it is common to be asked to do things that you or your team cannot or should not do for a variety reasons, including competence, workload and ability to reliably deliver on them without sacrificing well-being by working long and stressful hours.
A good example of this is how Newport strictly adheres to certain patterns of communication and quotas. He rarely answers texts or emails. He strictly limits his working hours to spend time with his family. He blocks off large portions of uninterrupted time each day and even schedules extended sabbaticals to write books. When he says yes to something in his teaching and speaking life, he openly shares a public “queue” of things he’s working on, usually only 1-3 things at a time until he completes them, and points the requester to that document to check on the status. Moreover, to avoid the classic trap of administrative overhead on an email or slack loop, when he responds to an asynchronous message, he outlines a clear plan of execution steps that he agrees to on a specific timeline, and manages expectations that he probably won’t be able to respond again until the work is done, directing any further follow up discussion to his timeblocked office hours at specific times that anyone can reserve. He also maintains strict “quotas” on the number of common asks (academic peer reviews, book quotes etc) he will do in a quarter or year.
Taking on more than you can handle is not only bad for your well-being, but bad for your team. When handled ethically, it may disappoint a few folks at first, but builds respect over time, because you gain a reputation for delivering quality results on the the things you agree to. Saying yes to something should always be accompanied by a reasoned analysis of the ask and clear expectations of what you’re agreeing to in writing. Saying no to something requires a tactful, diplomatic “soft no” or “partial no.” You’re not rejecting the request outright, you’re offering the requester a well-reasoned response, an option to wait until you have time, or a recommendation to another path or solution.