How to have a perfectly imperfect 2025

This is The Guardian. Today, how to stop procrastinating and get stuff done this year?

Well, first of all, just recognise that, like, New Year's resolutions don't work, right? Just sort of admit defeat in a grand, ostentatious way, right at the start. This is Oliver Berkman, author, sage, a man who, on more than one occasion, has been called a killjoy. But perhaps realist is more accurate, because Oliver wants to make you feel better about your life. The choices you've made, the resolutions you've broken.

You were never going to do some new thing perfectly every day, every week for the whole of the rest of your life. That's just not how reality works. And then in the rubble of those dreams, you can, in a completely different and very, very sort of beautiful way,

say, well, okay, what's one thing I could do for 20 minutes today that would make my experience of life richer and more meaningful? And even if you never do it one more time after that, you've just used 20 minutes of your finite time on the planet in a good way. And that is the point. Not all these projections about how amazing you're going to be eight, 10 months from now. It's what you could actually do just today.

In his book, Meditations for Mortals, Oliver sets out, day by day, over the course of a month, some simple philosophies for life. The kinds of unpretentious, manageable little tips that could help you finally send that daunting email, or have that difficult conversation with a friend, or start to clear out the spare room. Just make a start, that is it, and realise that you can't control everything that happens next.

He says he's like getting in a kayak. You decide to face your fear. You wrangle the wetsuit on and then just let yourself go. I think a lot of what we do when it comes to using our time is instead to sort of deny that reality and to feel as if we are a captain of a big super yacht, you know, up on the third deck, programming the route into the computer and sitting back while the whole thing just goes according to plan. I think we want to feel that way.

But actually that's just not what it is to be who we are. And a lot of what I'm doing in this book is sort of coaxing you and myself back to that. Let's just accept the reality of being in the kayak. Because in fact, it's a much more alive and lively situation in which to be and accepting it is the precondition for like getting on with some really cool and interesting stuff in life instead of constantly trying to achieve more and more and more control and security.

From The Guardian, I'm Helen Pitt. Today in focus, how to embrace imperfection in 2025.

Oliver, you won't remember, but when I started at the Guardian, back in the mists of time, you were one of the top feature writers at G2, the Guardian's feature section, and I used to be in complete awe of how you worked. You used to be tasked with writing a cover story, 2000 word piece, and you would spend all day faffing about, complaining about the commission,

saying, I'm never going to be able to do this. And you'd put your earplugs in, then you'd put your coat on, you'd go out for a walk. By this point, I'd be looking at my watch thinking, oh, God, all over it. It's like three o'clock. Crack on. And then you would come back. That's the way you keep it with your headphones in. And somehow by five o'clock, you'd turn down this tour de force of a feature. And I was kind of in awe of you, but I got a sense of a man who is maybe a bit frustrated with himself, or an inability to just knuckle down.

Yeah, wow, that's fascinating because you're completely right. I'm slightly sheepish to realize if it was that obvious, I suppose, is what I'm saying. Or maybe you were very perceptive. Let's leave it at that. Let's say that I kept it well hidden, but I do write about this in the

beginning in a new book that getting things done, especially sort of anything that counts as creative work in any way that doesn't just follow a very preset set of steps, is definitely a kind of a struggle and a struggle in which time is, was always really implicated, like there wasn't enough of it. And I was always thinking like, next time, after this deadline's out of the way,

I'll get a couple of days, I'll take a breath and I'll figure this out and I'll go into the next project much more calmly and organized and then it would happen again and you'd be like, okay, just until I've got this one done. That went on for some years.

And I think that is why I find it so interesting that you have reinvented yourself as a productivity guru whose message is that you can't do everything and that we are fallible, inefficient creatures who have a finite amount of time in which to live and to achieve our goals. And in your last book, you've frightened us all by pointing out that the average person has only 4,000 weeks in their entire lives. And almost exactly three years ago, you were on this very podcast talking to my colleague, Hannah Moore, about that book.

which ultimately went on to become a bestseller. What have you learned in the years since about productivity and how the pressure to feel productive really affects people?

I guess the biggest realization, certainly the one that was the biggest relief was that lots and lots of people are a bit screwed up in the same way as me. On some level it's obvious that everyone's too busy. But the specific feeling and what you could do about that specific feeling, I've been really struck by people in widely differing

socioeconomic situations and geographical locations and all the rest of it sort of feeling the same kind of battles. I do think that one of the things that we've seen in the last sort of decade or so

is people complaining of burnout at much younger ages. The whole kind of acceleration of society and of the demands made on us in work, reaching a pitch where you start to feel it at the beginning of your working life, really. You don't have to wait until you're reaching the point of midlife introspection.

My absolute favourite bit in the book is your defence of half-arcing things, which came, I think, from an anonymous comment that you read under an article on the Washington Post website. And I was hoping you could read me the comment and explain why you think it's helpful. It's page 83 in my book. That's what I was looking for, the page number. Thank you.

So the best defense of kind of half-assing things in life, or in this quote, because it comes from a comment on a Washington Post article, it's half-assing. Goes like this, quote, my mom used to get really upset at what she perceived as my half-assing.

Quoke goes on, I'm 48 now, have a PhD in a thriving and influential career, and I still think there is very little that's worthy of applying my whole entire ass. I'm not interested in burning myself out by whole assing stuff that will be fine if I half or quarter ass it. Being able to achieve maximum economy of ass is an important adult. I love that maximum economy of ass.

Yeah, no, it's brilliant. I bring this up in the context of saying that like there's something really powerful, I think it's in a lot of us and it's reinforced by the culture and reinforced even by sort of religious history and all sorts of things that makes us think that if something is worth doing, it's got to be pretty hard and that if we're going to live in meaningful or worthwhile or productive ways, we better sort of assume that it's going to be grueling in a sense.

No pain, no gain. Right. And in myself, I feel this almost, sometimes I've caught myself in the past, you know, it's literally a kind of muscular tension. It's like, well, somehow I need to kind of knot my brow and clench my stomach muscles to sort of power through this difficult job. And the question in that chapter is to sort of, is it possible, scary as it is for some of us, right? Is it possible to consider that?

All sorts of things in life might be easier than we expect them to be. Could you get away with putting in less effort? Not usually because the thing doesn't deserve to be done well, but because putting in less of that kind of grueling effort is the way to do them better.

I must tell you, when I read this bit in your book, I really needed to tidy your bedroom because it was an absolute tip. I thought, I'm not going to tidy it. I'm going to put away the suitcase that has been there for two weeks that I have not unpacked. I'm just going to do that. And I did that. And I was like, ah, great. Now we'll carry on reading Oliver's book. And it felt like I'd achieved something. The room is still a mess, but I feel a bit less slovenly. I'm very glad to hear it. Well, you know, even if you continue to tidy up that room until it's absolutely tidy, that will simply be a process of

single movements like that, wouldn't it? I mean, that's all life. And in the book, you put this under the heading of just going to the shed. Can you just expand on that for us or the idea of just going to the shed?

Yes, it's important to see that one of the reasons we don't get around to doing the things we think we want to do with our time, the sort of overarching theme of the book, is that we are quite deliberately avoiding doing those things. So classic examples where you're worried that you don't have enough money in your bank balance, so you don't check your bank balance when you go to the ash machine or you're worried that

pain you've been experiencing might be something serious. So you don't get it checked out because it would be scary to learn that it was indeed something serious. So all these different ways in which we're sort of do this counterproductive thing. Because obviously if you have got insufficient funds and you need to take some urgent action about that, finding out what the balance is, is the essential first step. So it's not rational, but it's in order to avoid the anxiety and

I was really struck by this idea that I got originally from a Dutch Zen monk and time management writer called Paul Lumens, that just all you need to do.

to get off this path of avoidance and onto the path of actually addressing the things that you want to address is create any kind of internal psychological relationship with the task. So just do anything that sort of accepts that it is already a part of your reality. So the phrase, just go to the shed comes from one of his examples where, you know, if there is a shed that you've become incredibly stressed about clearing all the junk out of and you're just avoiding it,

which is obviously also a metaphor for all sorts of other things in our lives. Just go and stand in it, right? Don't tell yourself you've got to get through the clearing up by the end of the week or you've got to spend three hours getting all the worst done. Just just literally go and stand in it and be there and no longer be in this mindset of pretending that it's not part of your reality because that's actually a really crucial

thing that you've done there, right? You've changed your whole bearing from, this isn't happening, this isn't happening, to, this is in my reality, and now I'll need to take a step and then another step. And Lumen's argues, and I've found it to be true, that if you do that a little bit, the moment will come when you say to yourself, all right, now it's time to clear out the shed, okay? I think a lot of people, myself included, tend not to realize how much of our sort of mental energies go into proactively not thinking about things that we could do with thinking about.

Well, yeah, that and also worrying what other people think. And there was, there was a quote that really spoke to me in the book from the novelist Layla Sales. And this is so true. And she says, it's weird how when I don't respond to someone's email, it's because I'm busy. But then when other people don't respond to my emails, it's because they hate me, which is brilliant, isn't it? And what advice have you got for those of us who spend too much time worrying what other people think?

You know, there are a couple of things that I say about people pleasing in that section as a recovering people pleaser myself. And I mean, the first is, it's just really essential to understand that other people's emotions are one more thing to be weighed in the balance, right? First of all, the people who think about it, you're probably not mad at you. You're probably imagining it. But even if it's true, even if doing something does risk somebody being disappointed or impatient or angry,

Okay, that's a weight on the scale of deciding which action to take, but there are other weights as well. So, you know, professional situations where you might decide to leave some emails from the boss unanswered till tomorrow because you want to go and spend time with your family and you decide there's a negative consequence of each of these options.

my bosses in patience or not spending time my family and I choose that one and then of course there are other people in professional situations where like it's very important to keep your job and you're going to get fired if you don't respond to those emails today so then you make that decision. It's not that there's one right correct trade off it's just that other people's emotions are just one more of these kind of variables to consider. I think what we tend to do as people pleases is think of them as.

a sort of force measure. It's like, I can do whatever I want, except that I can't ever make anyone be mad. And that's not true. You know, there are certain circumstances where you do need to pay attention to them and certain circumstances where you don't. The other thing that I have really learned and learned originally while I was working as a feature writer at Guardian is that

doesn't actually please other people to behave in this so-called people pleasing way. It's just annoying. What I tended to do on multiple occasions when I was stuck in that mindset was delay getting back to editors who'd asked me if I could write something because I was worried that I didn't have the time to say yes to it. So I should probably say no, but I also didn't want to disappoint them. And then, you know, a couple of days of that and you've just delayed them

solving their problem of who to assign this piece to by a couple of days, they would much prefer it. In fact, if I had just said no, and then they could have asked someone else to do it. And the other thing about people pleasing, which I think is particularly relevant at this time of year when many of us have spent a lot of time trying to please others and hosting other people, is this concept you introduced of scruffy hospitality.

Yeah, I love this idea where the phrase was coined by an Anglican pastor from Tennessee called Jack King. And he sort of described how he and his wife loved having guests around to dinner, but they developed this sort of checklist of all the things they had to do to get the house in shape for those dinners to happen. And, you know, mowing the lawn, tidying the playroom, getting the perfect ingredients and how actually like it's prevented them from inviting people around more often because it was so burdensome.

and how they decided instead to embrace what he calls scruffy hospitality, which is saying, come around, but the house is going to be in the state that it is, and we're going to be eating food cooked based on what we've got in the cupboard. And I think the real insight here is not just that you get to see more of your friends this way, but that there's actually something genuinely more intimate and connecting about sort of letting the facade drop. I had noticed this strange thing in my own

thinking about this, right, which is that if we were going to have friends around to our house and I noticed like crumbs under the fridge or something, I would be like, oh, no, better clean that up so that it doesn't look too scruffy. But if I saw that at someone else's house, it would just never occur to me to take offense or to think less of them. And then on some level, I would think more of them because I would feel like granted an inside

path to their real lives. We must be really good friends if I was being allowed to see this. So it's really interesting how this works. And I don't think it just applies to hospitality. I think in all sorts of areas, it's really striking how powerful it can be to sort of be more open and honest about ones, flaws and imperfections and struggles, because other people are going through them too. And then they sort of, there's a greater connection and fellow feeling.

coming up. How to care less about the things that you can't change.

Oliver, there are so many pieces of good advice in the book, but one of them that really resonated with me is your suggestion that you cannot care about everything. And it's just not possible in this modern age of mass communication and 24 seven news. New right that you first started to notice this in 2016, when Britain voted itself out of the EU and Trump was first elected in America. So how can we switch off that feeling that we've got to worry about it all?

Yeah, I think it's really important to see that for very many of us and I really don't think this is just sort of people who work in media. It's really anyone who

cares about all the crises that are happening in the world. That feels like a very important part of the to-do list now, right? It feels like there's things you ought to be doing to try to make the world a better place. And because of digital technology and because of algorithmic content and all the rest of it, you're going to be asked if you think about that for one minute, you're going to be asked to care about everything maximally all the time. And sometimes in quite a performative open way, you've got to care publicly.

Right. Absolutely. Yes. The greatest saints in history before digital communications didn't even know about most of the things that you might feel bad about or feel like you have to do something about or yes, feel like you have to demonstrate that you're doing something about.

And I think it's really important that we allow ourselves to take on board the consequences of our being finite in this domain, too, to feel better about ourselves, but also to be more effective. And the example that I always come back to is this guy, Eric Kaganman, who is a pretty well-off former executive for a sneaker company. And he was profiled in the New York Times under the headline, The Man Who Knew Too Little.

Essentially, when Trump was elected for the first time, he was very opposed to this. And so he just sort of decided to live as if it wasn't happening. He stayed in his home in the woods in Ohio, and he didn't check the news. And when he went to the local coffee shop, which was full of

liberals feeling awful about what had happened. He wore noise canceling headphones, playing white noise, so he wouldn't pick up on any of their conversations. And you can totally imagine, right, that the basic sort of response from the broadly liberal media commentary in America to this was that this man was a sort of a monster of privilege, incredibly selfish, being a terrible citizen, because think about all the people who could not choose to check out from the ramifications of

the Trump administration, like he could think about all the people on the sharp end of the things that very swiftly upon taking office started to do. But I really, like, even at the time, I dissented from that, because it struck me, first of all, that it was not obvious that if he had joined in the conversations at his coffee shop for a start, that this would have in any way helped people who were implicated in the first round of bad stuff that Trump was doing. And secondly, if you read this profile in a bit more detail, you discovered the what he was doing.

with all this time that he wasn't using to doom scroll and to feel vaguely bad and be performative about how he felt bad, was restoring an area of wetlands that he had purchased with most of his life savings and that he planned to return to the public trust once he'd finished restoring it. And I just thought, you know, you could see this person as a monster of privilege and selfishness. Well, you could see here is somebody who understands that his energy and his attention and his emotional energy is finite.

and he's just decided to use it for the thing that he can do to make the world a slightly better place.

one of the things that I personally would like to be better at is being more generous and a lot of people give to charity over Christmas and then that kind of drops off into the new year and there's a there's a tip in your book that I think people might find helpful if they like me are trying to be more generous the rest of the year and it comes from the meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein. Yeah, so I mean I think one of the things that lots of us feel is that we should somehow sort of

be better people. We should be more generous or more compassionate or give more money to charity or something. And I was really struck by Joseph Goldstein's idea that actually he has a personal practice the way he describes it, which is that when a generous impulse arises in him, he makes it his business to try to act on it. Even this great meditation teacher is not saying, I need to become more compassionate. He's saying, let's just take the level of compassion that I already have.

and try to be a bit better at turning it into action in the world. An example that always comes to me about this is how many times in the past I have walked past a homeless person asking for money in the street and thought to myself,

Well, I feel moved to help this person, and I could afford to help this person. But I know that actually it's much more efficient and effective to give money to homelessness charities. And therefore, I'll do that. And then you just forget about it and never get around to it. And the end result is that nothing happened, right? Now, I think it is true in this specific example, that it's more effective and important to give money to homelessness charities.

But if you're not going to do either of them, that's worse than doing the less effective thing. And I think that that happens parallel examples all the time, right? You think about how it'd be nice to sort of send a note to somebody about how much you appreciated something they did and you think like, well, but I really like that person. So I'm going to wait till I can buy a really lovely card. And then as a lot, you don't do it. The things that get in the way of our acting generously are very often not that we don't feel generous. It's that we feel generous and then we get

this perfectionistic thing about like, how should we do this properly? And so what I really like about this idea is just it's just says like, watch out for those things and try to kind of at least sometimes act immediately.

It's true, because as Goldstein says in your book, generosity never leads to remorse. You never, ever regret saying something nice, complimenting somebody's hair, or, I don't know, thanking them for a nice cup of tea, or whatever it might be.

Yeah, I feel like I've been in several situations, not even that long ago. I mean, you know, recent years where I felt like I would like to do that, but I would like to give someone a token of appreciation, but it would be kind of ghost or something. And it's just like, yeah, there are probably circumstances where you shouldn't, but basically in life, people like being thanked for things that they did. And they don't mind if you do it in a sort of slightly awkward way.

A really unlikely hero in your book is the founder of Scientology, Elrond Hubbard. Is Hero taking it too far? I don't know, but I like this. Explain why we should be more Elrond Hubbard. Yeah, I think Hero is taking it too far. But for legal reasons, we should say nothing other than he's kind of an interesting person. What I'm saying in that section is I'm sort of making this point that there's something really powerful about

remembering that every great achievement, every big achievement you see wherever you look, was done by flawed and finite human beings. The idea that there are certain things that you can't do because you're not good enough is in some fundamental way flawed. Now, I don't mean that you can perform open heart surgery if you haven't trained as a surgeon, but in broad terms, if there's something in your domain that is extraordinarily impressive, that could be you as well because the people doing it were just as flawed and finite.

as you. And the overall Herbert example is really just because I have no time for Scientology whatsoever, but he did basically just talk a religion into existence. When you watch these old video archive videos of him sort of laying out the doctrine, which as many people know is a rather wild story involving aliens, billions of years ago, you really have the sense that he is obviously making it up in some sense, but literally like improvising it. He's just sort of

He's just sort of talking it into reality. And I don't say that I admire this. I say that you're way better than that. And you can just go for things. You can just do things saying, you know, you can just do stuff. And I suspect that they will be things most people listen to this, if they did them, that I would admire much more greatly tonight. I told you.

And you end the book by writing that life is something to delight in, not merely to be dealt with. And I wonder, is there anything that you do every day to remind yourself of that? We live in the North York mores now and it's a landscape I sort of deeply love and spend lots of time walking through kind of fairly bleak and barren. So, and it is a very, you know, I'm very, very lucky and it's a very useful way to sort of bring oneself back to the

possibility of delighting in the present moment but as i say in the book you know i'm also completely capable of taking those experiences and thinking like what am i showing up enough for this am i present enough in the moment am i finding a way to guarantee enough of these experiences in the future so there's there's no.

There's no magic bullet. I don't think moving to a place or doing a specific ritual or anything can ever sort of completely eliminate that urge to kind of get more control over things. So I think that the closest I can get to giving a substantive answer to that question is I do some version of what gets called morning pages, writing just long hand off the top of my head, whatever comes up on like sort of three sides of a narrow ruled A,

five notebook, none of these rules have to be followed, it's just the basic idea. I get up early enough most of the time to do that before my son gets up and it's difficult to keep doing it and sometimes I'm sort of ranting and raving in that space but a lot of the time that's the opportunity to come back to the sort of ideas and the perspectives from which I would quite like to live that day and on some level by definition the rest of the day is a experience of getting caught up in

the acceleration of the world and the to-do lists, but it's a really important little sort of bulwark against it going too far out of hand, so I do find that really helpful. Oliver, thank you very much. Thank you, Helen. It's been a pleasure.

That was Oliver Berkman. His book, Meditations for Mortals, is out now. And you can go back and listen to that last episode that he made with us. It's called The Joy of Missing Out. And there's quite a bit of unexpected chat in there about medieval farming, if you're into that kind of thing. Happy New Year from me and the rest of the Today in Focus team. We really appreciate you listening, sending us ideas and feedback, and of course, supporting the Guardian.

Today's episode was produced by Hannah Moore and Rachel Keenan and presented by me, Helen Pitt. Sound Design was by Joe Shanshana and the executive producer was Homer Khalili. We'll be back tomorrow.