Madeleine Dore
speaker
42 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Madeleine Dore’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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We tend to worry about the time that we're wasting. And the surest way to waste time is to worry about wasting it. So if we take away the worry about wasted time, maybe we can see the time that we enjoy wasting is actually not wasted time.
Hi, Mike. Thanks so much for having me.
It is a curious thing, isn't it, Mike, that we are told to optimize our lives so that we have more time and then we just fill that with more optimizing of our lives. It's an endless game, it seems. And I think that it is a call for pause or a call for thought because isn't it that we should be optimizing our time so that we have more times for the things that are meaningful or important to us?
And productivity, it can be fantastic. We all need to get things done. But it's the never enough, never quite reaching an end point that can have us on this hamster wheel in our days. And it can contribute to things like burnout and overwhelm and stress and perhaps take us out of our lives.
It does. You can really spiral in these feelings of productivity guilt and you can write off the whole day and deem it a failure because of that one thing that you didn't get done or perhaps several things that you didn't get done. And so I think that where that really can stem from is this idea that in our society, we've tied productivity to our sense of self-worth and
and when we do that it what we do is never enough we never quite reach that feeling of being complete our to-do list is never complete and so i think we're set up to fail a little bit here because we're told that productivity is a measure of our worth but it's never quite enough and so we never quite get there and we pile on these feelings of guilt and shame at the end of the day and so i think it's really about untethering that idea that productivity is the sole measure of our worth
And we can find some other things in our days to count amongst the doing. And so it's always curious to me that you can get to that end of the day and have that guilt feeling and focus solely on the thing that you didn't do and overlook all of the treasures and all of the perhaps moments of connection that you had or the moments of kindness or what you learned, even the mistakes you make.
Yes, I agree. I think that there's many, many categories in between. And even what we deem wasted time, I think is worth getting curious about because we're quick to call ourselves lazy or we're quick to say that we're wasting time. We're quick to say that we're procrastinating. But when we inspect that, we can actually see that
sometimes it's those moments that are incredibly valuable are we procrastinating or are we actually thinking about the problem in a deeper way are we letting ideas sort of roll around in our minds before we take that action and i think it's an interesting thing because we we tend to worry about the time that we're wasting and
If anything, I think the surest way to waste time is to worry about wasting it. So if we take away the worry about wasted time and we get curious about those moments, maybe we can see that the time that we enjoy wasting is actually not wasted time, or we can see that it's thinking time, or we can see that it's an all-important moment of rest and downtime.
Yes, exactly. And something that's been really helpful for me is actually returning to one of my favorite books by Arnold Bennett. It's called How to Live on 24 Hours a Day, and it was written in 1908. And so it's always a gem to kind of return to these texts and see that we've been grappling with these things. quandaries for many decades and centuries even.
And what Arnold Bennett points out is that we cannot waste time in advance. So I think sometimes when we're caught in that productivity guilt feeling or we're worrying about wasting time, we lament the morning that we might have wasted, for instance. And we carry that worry into the afternoon when actually we can't waste time in advance.
So instead, we can have this opportunity to turn over a new leaf. And what that means is that we can see that this moment in front of us is so far unspoiled. Instead of falling further down that spiral that we can fall into, we can turn it over and begin afresh.
It's inevitable. It's life. And so perhaps if we can build in some buffer room in our days and in our plans for those inevitable surprises, distractions and interruptions, perhaps that would be what can lessen that tension.
productivity guilt that we experience because we can see, oh, okay, so I didn't get the thing done that I thought that I needed to do today because of this emergency and interruption. And that's life. And so I'm not solely to blame here. I think there's a fine line in terms of, obviously, there's these things that we want to accomplish in our lives to have a sense of meaning or satisfaction.
And in many senses, we do need to find that motivation within ourselves but i also think that we need to acknowledge when perhaps there's things outside of our control that you know knock over our plans for the day
Well, I do have a suspicion that perhaps people aren't getting as much done as they might portray they are on social media. I think that it's so easy to curate our lives. And even when we look on social media, we know that it's curated. We know that we're looking at a highlight reel intellectually, but it can be difficult to untangle that feeling of comparison where we fall short.
So I think that there's two things at play here. And the first is that there is a level of curation happening and that can mean that we spiral in comparison and we see our real life and our incomplete to-do list. But really it might be that other people also have things that are incomplete. It's inevitable as well where no one is perfect. But the other side of this is that
perhaps there are some people that have a greater capacity for productivity and perhaps they do get more done. Perhaps they have higher energy or more attention or more resources. Maybe they've got more assistance in getting things done.
Maybe they've got a home gym and they're able to kind of get their 30-minute run in early in the morning because they don't have to sort of commute to a gym or something like that. There's all these different tweaks in our lives. And I think that when we're comparing, we have to remember that we're comparing apples and oranges because we're all individuals with variances.
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