Work Less, Achieve More! - 5 Habits To End Laziness, Phone Scrolling & Boredom

00:00:00.000 | How do I improve my discipline?

00:00:02.140 | My problem is that I have a problem with sticking to my long term plans.

00:00:09.120 | Well, Toby, I think about discipline really more as an identity that you

00:00:17.520 | develop, then I do an approach to a particular challenge, if you can convince

00:00:25.460 | yourself that you are a disciplined person, that that is part of your

00:00:30.300 | conception of your identity.

00:00:32.420 | Then you will be able to, with discipline, pursue many different

00:00:37.700 | important objectives in your life.

00:00:39.700 | So the question is, how do you get to an identity where you see

00:00:42.660 | yourself as a disciplined person?

00:00:43.980 | Well, let me tell you what not to do.

00:00:45.660 | Don't just pick out a random ambitious goal and say, you know what?

00:00:50.620 | I'm going to do this.

00:00:52.020 | I'm going to, I'm going to white knuckle, go after this really hard goal.

00:00:55.780 | And because I need to be more disciplined, that's what you're trying to do.

00:00:59.740 | That's not working.

00:01:00.940 | I'm not surprised it's not working.

00:01:03.020 | If you've not yet convinced yourself, you're a disciplined person, taking

00:01:05.780 | on ad hoc, large discipline, requiring challenges is not going

00:01:09.700 | to be a route towards success.

00:01:11.460 | So what should you do instead?

00:01:13.140 | Well, I think this is where actually the deep life procedure I talk about,

00:01:18.300 | the, the sort of self-awarely overly pragmatic approach to building a

00:01:24.340 | foundation for a deep life that we've been talking about on the show for over

00:01:27.180 | two years is perfect for developing a self-identity as discipline.

00:01:32.540 | So remember, there's two parts to this.

00:01:33.900 | Number one, you identify the areas of your life that are important to you.

00:01:39.740 | We typically call these the deep life buckets.

00:01:42.480 | They differ between different people, but our starter set of these

00:01:45.700 | buckets tends to be craft, what you do, what you create, constitution.

00:01:51.060 | That's going to be your health community.

00:01:52.780 | That's going to be your connections to other people, be it your family,

00:01:55.940 | your neighborhood, the people in the organizations where you work

00:01:59.020 | at your religious institutions.

00:02:01.180 | Uh, they'll often throw in contemplation.

00:02:03.820 | We're trying to capture philosophy, theology, and ethics.

00:02:06.540 | These are all important areas.

00:02:08.380 | Most people's lives, your list might vary.

00:02:11.500 | For each of these areas, the first thing to do is to identify a keystone

00:02:16.820 | habit, something in each of these buckets that you do every day, something

00:02:21.220 | that is not trivial, but is also tractable and you track your completion

00:02:26.060 | of these habits every day.

00:02:27.980 | If you use something like my time block planner, there's a metric

00:02:30.900 | tracking space at the top of the daily planning pages on every day.

00:02:35.100 | You just track those keystone habits right there.

00:02:39.380 | So for example, for constitution, you wouldn't have something there.

00:02:44.140 | Like I'm going to do a 45 minute intense workout because that's too hard to

00:02:48.620 | expect you to be able to do that every day.

00:02:50.100 | That's not really tractable, but you also don't want to say, you know, I

00:02:53.740 | will do one jumping jack when I get out of bed in the morning, like

00:02:58.020 | that's not going to get you anywhere.

00:02:59.020 | So instead you might want to do something like I want to

00:03:00.980 | hit this many steps in a day.

00:03:02.940 | Require a little bit of planning.

00:03:04.580 | Like I walk my kids to school.

00:03:06.020 | I'll probably have to do one more walk in the afternoon in between

00:03:08.180 | meetings and, but it's tractable.

00:03:09.900 | If I think about it, my friend, Brian Johnson, uh, of optimize

00:03:15.380 | fame had this great constitution habit where he had a fixed number

00:03:20.620 | of minutes that he never wanted to go beyond without doing, I

00:03:24.220 | think he would do 10 burpees.

00:03:25.420 | And it was like 23 minutes or 20.

00:03:28.260 | There was some amount of time that he had because he had read somewhere.

00:03:31.020 | If you sit for more than this much time, it starts to be bad.

00:03:33.380 | And so it was just every, whatever it was, 23 minutes, he would do 10 burpees.

00:03:37.180 | And was it a fantastic boom?

00:03:39.780 | Now I think it helps that he doesn't work in the bullpen of a crowded office.

00:03:43.900 | I mean, I, maybe that would be an awesome thing to do, but, but it probably

00:03:48.820 | would draw some interesting attention.

00:03:50.300 | He, you know, he, he works in his own company, so he works at his own house.

00:03:53.140 | Um, but 10 burpees, three times an hour, roughly.

00:03:57.420 | And the way he pitched it to me is it keeps your ability to

00:04:01.060 | concentration, to concentrate like an, like a laser because your body's

00:04:05.820 | always moving, it never gets into a sedentary, but anyways, for someone

00:04:08.620 | who works in their own home, works from home on their own business, very

00:04:12.020 | tractable, very tractable, Keystone habit takes 15 seconds or whatever.

00:04:16.580 | Every time you do it, the fact that I think 10 burpees takes 15 seconds

00:04:20.580 | shows that I don't know.

00:04:22.300 | I don't know a lot about burpees.

00:04:24.060 | Does he still do that?

00:04:24.980 | I don't know.

00:04:26.140 | We should have him on the show.

00:04:27.700 | He should, we should, we should ask him.

00:04:28.820 | I know at one point he was training, he was really into, and I don't think

00:04:33.300 | he'll mind me telling this story because I think he's talked about it himself.

00:04:36.060 | Um, he was really into Spartan racing, the Spartan races because he, yeah,

00:04:42.060 | because he was friends with Joe DeSena.

00:04:43.820 | So he knew the guy who started it and he was making a run at some point for

00:04:48.420 | doing them at a very high level, which requires, it turns out it

00:04:51.820 | requires a lot of training.

00:04:52.900 | Uh, you have to master a lot of these individual disciplines, but

00:04:57.220 | anyways, in his, his house, in the room where he worked, which I think

00:05:03.260 | might've been their bedroom, he had installed into the ceiling of the room.

00:05:07.860 | The, uh, hanging obstacles from the Sparta race.

00:05:12.940 | Like, so I guess you do like Ninja warrior type stuff in that race

00:05:16.060 | where like, you have to like switch you're holding on to like.

00:05:18.820 | Rope knots and whatever.

00:05:21.220 | And yeah, he installed them into the ceiling of the room so that

00:05:24.580 | when he was doing these breaks, he's like, instead of just burpees,

00:05:28.460 | let me jump up and just like do the, whatever hanging challenge.

00:05:33.620 | I'll tell you what you do that for a few months, your grip, strength and

00:05:37.380 | balance, like you just own it, but you don't even, and I guess that's what you

00:05:40.460 | need to do to compete at a high level.

00:05:41.780 | You could just jump up there and boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

00:05:43.660 | And so that's, that's commitment.

00:05:45.420 | He'd probably still work out too during the day.

00:05:47.900 | I would think separately.

00:05:49.420 | Yeah.

00:05:50.080 | Yeah.

00:05:50.660 | So he, and he had a whole thing and yeah, so you still have a workout.

00:05:54.220 | So it was less, this was less about, which, which again is,

00:05:57.180 | I think is an important point.

00:05:58.140 | Like if your keystone habits are not, their job is not to capture everything

00:06:01.700 | you need to do, or it's important for that bucket, it's like getting up and

00:06:05.700 | doing some burpees or whatever throughout the day is a great way of saying you,

00:06:09.380 | you take motion important.

00:06:11.020 | You take your body important.

00:06:12.140 | You think there's a mind body connection, but it's not everything

00:06:16.020 | you need to do for exercise.

00:06:17.260 | You probably need to be doing weights.

00:06:18.620 | You probably need to be doing cardio.

00:06:20.060 | So that's, it's a good point is that your keystone habits are not trying

00:06:23.340 | to take on the weight of everything important in that bucket.

00:06:26.780 | They are just meant to say that you take that bucket seriously and

00:06:29.820 | you're willing to take effort towards that bucket every day.

00:06:32.300 | That's non-trivial.

00:06:33.140 | Now it takes a while to get those keystone habits, right?

00:06:36.140 | You have to experiment a little bit, but you get to the point where

00:06:40.140 | you're knocking off, you have four buckets or five buckets.

00:06:42.340 | You're checking off all those, all those metrics every day.

00:06:44.540 | You see it every day.

00:06:46.220 | You don't want to break the chain.

00:06:47.460 | Right.

00:06:49.280 | That's step one.

00:06:50.340 | You've already now leveled up discipline.

00:06:52.540 | Your identity as someone who's disciplined is now leveled up.

00:06:55.900 | You do stuff that's optional because it reflects your

00:06:59.100 | values, even if it's hard.

00:07:00.700 | Now you're at a higher level.

00:07:02.700 | The next part of my general deep life foundation program is then you

00:07:07.420 | dedicate a one to two month period to each of those buckets one by one.

00:07:13.180 | And overhaul that part of your life when you're focusing

00:07:17.060 | on that particular bucket.

00:07:18.100 | So in the one to two months, you're focusing on constitution.

00:07:20.740 | Now you're getting serious about your health and fitness, and you're

00:07:24.140 | starting to make changes and figuring out like, maybe you're like, I'm

00:07:26.900 | going to start training for this sport.

00:07:28.500 | Like I'll tell you right now, Jesse, one of the things I'm doing.

00:07:31.660 | It's a goal is, uh, before my 40th birthday, which is in June.

00:07:38.220 | So it's coming up.

00:07:39.500 | Um, you might not remember what it's like to be in your thirties.

00:07:43.820 | Of course.

00:07:44.360 | I mean, you've been 40 for literally weeks at this point.

00:07:48.740 | So you probably don't remember, but, uh, my birthday is coming

00:07:52.140 | up as we've talked about.

00:07:53.860 | I want to, this is arbitrary, but I want to be able to once again,

00:07:58.780 | row, uh, 2000 meters on my concept to at a sub two minute, 500 meter pace.

00:08:07.580 | So this just connects me back to my, my, my deep past when

00:08:11.500 | I was rowing for Dartmouth.

00:08:12.700 | I remember the type of splits I could pull.

00:08:15.020 | So like seven and change.

00:08:16.620 | Yeah.

00:08:17.560 | Yeah.

00:08:18.160 | And so I was like, I want to, I was like, I would feel good at the age of 40.

00:08:21.700 | If, because I got, God knows what I could pull when I was 19 doing this, I could

00:08:26.620 | pull, but I'm 30 pounds heavier now.

00:08:28.820 | So it does have an advantage.

00:08:30.300 | Like I can actually, I was a lightweight rower, so I can

00:08:32.540 | now actually move that thing.

00:08:33.380 | But anyways, it's kind of arbitrary, but it's like, it's, it's

00:08:35.860 | hard, but not impossible, but like, I would feel good if I can be polling

00:08:40.220 | sub two minute, 500 splits for, for a 2000 meters, like I'm

00:08:44.340 | training for that right now.

00:08:45.660 | Uh, but that's the type of thing.

00:08:47.900 | Okay.

00:08:48.180 | When you're doing an overhaul of a bucket, you start, you figure

00:08:50.340 | out these challenges, you get your equipment in place, I mean, not to

00:08:52.980 | make a full, full circle connection, but I got that concept too, actually

00:08:56.660 | from Brian Johnson sent it to me as a gift.

00:08:59.740 | So there we go.

00:09:00.380 | Nice gift.

00:09:01.220 | Yeah.

00:09:01.780 | He's a nice guy known for a very long time.

00:09:03.740 | Um, so anyways, that's the type of thing you will come away from doing

00:09:08.580 | the intense focus on the bucket with like, okay, now I'm going to start

00:09:14.100 | training to do this and I've overhauled my diet and I now am joined this

00:09:18.220 | team, this rec, you know, with other dads that we play, whatever.

00:09:21.380 | And so when you, you, you, you give the one to two month focus, you

00:09:24.500 | really are changing your life more substantially to really integrate

00:09:28.540 | that area of value, um, more deeply.

00:09:32.660 | And there's a lot of experimentation in that.

00:09:34.220 | That's why it takes one or two months.

00:09:35.300 | You try some things, it's not really working.

00:09:37.180 | So you change your goals or challenges or habits.

00:09:39.420 | So you find something that's really working.

00:09:40.700 | You come out of that second step, Toby, you're going to be

00:09:43.940 | a much more disciplined person.

00:09:46.300 | Step one, you build that base with the keystone step two, you overhaul

00:09:50.500 | tractable overhauls to experimentation.

00:09:52.500 | All the parts are important to your life.

00:09:53.700 | After that.

00:09:54.740 | Now if down the line, you're like, oh, here's a new long-term plan

00:09:58.860 | that I believe in, let me do some work towards it.

00:10:01.060 | No problem.

00:10:01.620 | That's that's what you do.

00:10:03.900 | You're disciplined.

00:10:04.740 | That's what you're gonna do.

00:10:05.700 | That's what you're going to do.

00:10:06.460 | So once you've changed the identity, then you can take on new challenges.

00:10:10.220 | The only final thing I'll say is even as a very self-disciplined person, if

00:10:14.580 | your challenges don't make sense, if your mind doesn't believe that it's

00:10:18.220 | worth doing or that your plan's actually going to accomplish what it is, you

00:10:21.940 | will still struggle with discipline.

00:10:23.140 | So you have to be selective and careful in laying out what you do.

00:10:27.740 | Your brain is not dumb.

00:10:29.580 | If you're like, I'm going to be a Nobel prize winning novelist because I'm going

00:10:36.460 | to do national novel writing month, three days in your mind's like, this is stupid.

00:10:41.380 | We don't know what we're doing.

00:10:42.820 | This is not a good book.

00:10:44.820 | Um, I'm not going to do this.

00:10:46.460 | And that's not a failure of discipline.

00:10:47.580 | That's a failure of planning.

00:10:48.380 | So that's the only other copy I'll give.

00:10:49.780 | Even after you become a self-disciplined person, uh, you need

00:10:53.300 | goals your mind actually trust.

00:10:56.140 | All right.

00:10:58.500 | Rolling on here.

00:11:00.140 | We've got a question from Luke.

00:11:01.420 | Luke says, could you please work through an example where you break down a

00:11:05.900 | genuinely complicated long-term goal through quarterly, weekly, and daily planning?

00:11:11.420 | So Luke, the biggest problem people have with long-term planning is trying to

00:11:14.620 | actually do too much of the planning up front.

00:11:17.380 | I think a better way of thinking about this is that there is a feedback loop

00:11:23.620 | approach to planning out, structuring and executing longer projects.

00:11:28.380 | Like what I'll often do is if there's a longer term project, like the summer, I

00:11:34.900 | put finish book proposals onto my quarterly plan, like finish them by the

00:11:41.500 | new year, so that was my plan.

00:11:42.700 | I just put that on there, the very high level.

00:11:46.940 | And then when I got to my weekly plan, I started like, okay, this is like

00:11:51.420 | one of my things I want to work on.

00:11:52.580 | Like, let me get started into this.

00:11:53.860 | And it's really, once you dive into something, so on your weekly plan,

00:11:56.780 | you're putting a slight time to it.

00:11:57.820 | It's only then that you really begin to discover its contours.

00:12:00.740 | Oh, how is this really going?

00:12:02.660 | Where do I really need to spend time?

00:12:03.940 | How is this going to naturally break up at the different parts?

00:12:06.300 | And then you can go back and refine that quarterly plan a little bit later.

00:12:10.060 | It's like, okay, what we really want to do then is like this month,

00:12:12.540 | get the sample chapters together.

00:12:15.220 | It gets more specific, but it gets more specific because you get specific

00:12:18.780 | feedback from actually putting boots on the ground.

00:12:21.180 | So go back to my original plan of writing book proposals.

00:12:24.700 | I submitted those last week.

00:12:26.340 | So my original plan of do it by the new year was just throwing a

00:12:31.180 | dart generally in the direction of the dartboard, but I couldn't really

00:12:36.460 | make a good prediction of how long it was going to take and how it was

00:12:39.100 | going to get it done and how it was going to break down into different

00:12:41.180 | pieces until I was actually doing it.

00:12:42.780 | So that's the main thing I'm going to say, Luke, is when you

00:12:46.700 | first start a long-term plan, you should be doing shockingly

00:12:50.260 | little thinking about that plan.

00:12:51.980 | Just get going.

00:12:54.300 | Once you're convinced this is something important to do, start putting aside

00:12:58.300 | time during your weekly planning and that weekly planning will

00:13:01.900 | influence your daily planning.

00:13:03.020 | And let that feedback help you refine and improve those plans.

00:13:06.540 | And don't be mad at yourself when you get the timing wrong,

00:13:08.820 | because it's impossible to do.

00:13:10.300 | You don't get a gold medal for guessing how long a hard

00:13:14.060 | project is going to take.

00:13:15.260 | All right.

00:13:16.420 | You get a gold medal for continuingly to follow the

00:13:19.620 | multi-scale planning process, to let the feedback, refine your plans,

00:13:22.980 | to execute good weekly plans based on your quarterly plans and

00:13:25.780 | the realities of your schedule.

00:13:28.140 | Doing good time-block plans based on your weekly plans.

00:13:30.020 | That is the thing you want to do.

00:13:31.540 | Trust that process, how long things actually take to happen.

00:13:34.060 | Well, I don't know.

00:13:35.260 | Did your family get COVID?

00:13:37.460 | Did you have a giant project dropped on your lap?

00:13:39.820 | You weren't expecting.

00:13:40.900 | Did something blow up two months in that you thought was going to be easy to

00:13:44.540 | complete and you had to go over and start over like, who knows?

00:13:46.700 | You can't predict that.

00:13:47.460 | Why would you expect you could follow the multi-scale process, refine your

00:13:53.140 | long-term plans as, as you unfold your work on them, do that.

00:13:56.820 | And you should be happy with what you're doing.

00:13:59.540 | All right.

00:14:02.300 | Well, that's a lot of me talking.

00:14:03.260 | Why don't we take a call, Jesse?

00:14:04.340 | Do we have a, do we have a call queued up that we can go to here?

00:14:06.660 | Yeah, we sure do.

00:14:07.980 | It's from Laura.

00:14:08.900 | We've got a question about a book that you read.

00:14:12.300 | Hi, Cal.

00:14:13.340 | I've been reading your book, Digital Minimalism.

00:14:16.100 | I'm about over halfway through right now, and I'm looking forward to

00:14:20.020 | decluttering my technology life.

00:14:23.060 | I also saw a book that just came out called Stolen Focus, Why You Can't Pay

00:14:29.060 | Attention and How to Think Deeply Again.

00:14:30.980 | It's by Johan Hari.

00:14:32.740 | I think it just came out this month in January.

00:14:35.580 | And I was wondering if you've read it and what you think about it.

00:14:38.900 | It seems like something that could definitely help with productivity.

00:14:42.020 | Thank you.

00:14:43.220 | Well, Laura, I like Johan's work.

00:14:47.300 | So that's, that's the third book of his that I know about.

00:14:52.540 | Um, let me not bury the lead.

00:14:54.580 | I have not read it.

00:14:55.980 | I have not read Stolen Focus, not because there's something I dislike about it, but

00:15:00.460 | because when you write a book on a topic and you're done with that book, it's not

00:15:05.700 | uncommon that you're, you're kind of done with the topic in the sense that it's

00:15:10.660 | actually very difficult to get motivated to read a similar book.

00:15:14.420 | This is very common among writers, especially writers, even writers

00:15:17.660 | who read very widely like I do.

00:15:19.540 | I just don't want to read something that is covering very similar ground to

00:15:23.380 | something I've written about too, because I've spent a lot of time on those topics.

00:15:28.780 | I'm probably, I'm going to guess.

00:15:30.740 | I know the same people he's quoting.

00:15:33.460 | I know the same stories I've spent years in that world.

00:15:36.500 | So it's, it's, that's entirely a function of just, I'm up to my ears in that topic.

00:15:42.580 | Now, here's what I like about Hari though.

00:15:44.420 | I will say this, um, his approach to books, he has a certain formula that I

00:15:48.580 | appreciate, which is the, the big inversion formula.

00:15:51.940 | You thought X about this big topic, but the reality is Y.

00:15:57.100 | And the reality Y is often something that's going to be a little bit aspiration.

00:16:02.580 | Like, Oh, now that I understand that, that gives me hope.

00:16:04.860 | That gives me a plan.

00:16:07.260 | I love that type of writing.

00:16:09.060 | Uh, that that's a Johan's approach.

00:16:10.980 | So he had this book out called chasing the scream years ago

00:16:14.620 | that was about drug addiction.

00:16:17.940 | And that was an interesting book because, uh, what he was, what he was arguing

00:16:21.740 | there, his big inversion in that book.

00:16:23.700 | If, if I understand it correctly, it's been a while is that we have this

00:16:27.980 | reductive chemical only cultural understanding of drug addiction, right?

00:16:34.500 | So his thing is, okay, the way we are taught about drug addiction is that if

00:16:39.340 | the, the mad scientist kidnapped you and strapped you down, it was like, I'm

00:16:44.300 | going to put heroin into your veins every day, you would be released when

00:16:49.820 | he finally released you from his evil layer.

00:16:51.780 | Um, you would be a heroin addict.

00:16:53.380 | That is the way we understand it.

00:16:54.580 | Like the, these drugs chemically build these dependencies in our

00:16:57.100 | brain, um, and then we can't shake them.

00:16:59.620 | But he said, if that was the case, there should be a lot of heroin

00:17:03.740 | addicted grandmothers in the UK, because in the UK, the standard drug they

00:17:07.820 | give for pain, killing for hip replacement is Demerol, which is just medical heroin.

00:17:12.860 | So we have all these grandmothers in the UK, uh, getting basically a few

00:17:17.020 | weeks worth of heroin as their standard treatment for their hip.

00:17:20.620 | And they come away just fine.

00:17:21.700 | They don't come away, uh, addicted to it or looking for heroin.

00:17:25.180 | And he said that the missing factor in chasing the scream was there's

00:17:28.460 | also a socio-psycho component to it.

00:17:32.220 | So it's not just the chemical going into your body.

00:17:35.460 | It's when the chemical is going into your body as a means of escaping from

00:17:39.300 | something in your life, from pain, from post-traumatic stress, from trauma.

00:17:43.860 | It is the combination of that potent chemical, which gets right into your

00:17:47.260 | brain, plus the psycho-emotional usage of that to escape that creates the

00:17:52.660 | like impossible to shake addiction loop.

00:17:54.580 | So that was chasing the scream.

00:17:55.560 | So like this kind of interesting version, um, inject heroin, the

00:17:59.220 | mad scientist injects into you every day.

00:18:00.780 | You're not going to be addicted.

00:18:01.900 | You start taking the, the pain pills they gave you for your hip after your

00:18:07.020 | hip feels better because you're depressed about losing your job.

00:18:10.420 | And it's like, this helps, I need this to not feel depressed about losing my job.

00:18:13.900 | Then suddenly you can have a life destroying addiction.

00:18:16.780 | So that was chasing the scream.

00:18:17.820 | Then he wrote a book called lost connections that was talking about depression.

00:18:21.980 | And again, he was, he was arguing that there is this biochemical model

00:18:27.500 | of depression that's too reductive.

00:18:29.340 | This idea that depression is just caused by something goes

00:18:32.980 | wrong with neurotransmitters.

00:18:35.460 | It's entirely chemical and you can, we can take pills to try to fix it.

00:18:39.060 | It's all you can do.

00:18:39.940 | And he's like, no, there's a chemical component.

00:18:42.100 | I think his big argument and lost connections is again, there's

00:18:44.900 | a socio-psycho component as well.

00:18:46.820 | Like also, uh, a big source of depression is the things

00:18:52.980 | that are making you feel bad.

00:18:54.180 | Like someone close to you died, like you're really sad about it.

00:18:57.900 | Like you, you're, you feel hopeless about your work situation

00:19:00.540 | that you, you, you've lost some jobs.

00:19:01.980 | You can't get into their jobs.

00:19:02.820 | You're feeling worthless.

00:19:03.540 | He's like the socio-psycho psychological aspect of

00:19:06.060 | depression really matter too.

00:19:07.300 | And if we just say like, don't worry, don't worry.

00:19:09.260 | It's just your chemicals.

00:19:10.140 | We'll give you a pill to fix it.

00:19:11.180 | And don't also say what's going on in your life.

00:19:13.380 | We also let's, let's make your wife better.

00:19:15.060 | He's like, you're leaving most of the tools on the table.

00:19:16.700 | So that's like classic Yohan Harari.

00:19:18.380 | So in stolen focus, he's applying this to distraction and the attention economy.

00:19:22.220 | I don't know the book, the thesis really well, because again, it's too close to

00:19:26.060 | home, so I don't really want to get into it, but I think he's, he's, uh, I think

00:19:30.260 | his inversion there, if I understand vaguely is, uh, you think you're more

00:19:35.780 | distracted because you're like lazy, there's all these new shiny distractions

00:19:41.620 | out there and you can't help yourself.

00:19:42.940 | He's like, that's not the case.

00:19:44.060 | Um, the attention economy has put billions of dollars to steal your focus away.

00:19:49.020 | Like there was this, this Apollo mission size effort to distract

00:19:55.260 | you and you had no chance.

00:19:56.300 | That's what I think he's saying.

00:19:57.500 | And if it is, I agree because I've written a lot about that.

00:20:00.660 | So anyways, he's a, he's an entertaining writer.

00:20:02.780 | I like chasing the stream and lost connections and, uh, people who read, I

00:20:06.740 | get a lot of notes about lost focus.

00:20:08.220 | Um, so obviously lots of people are sending it to me to read, but people

00:20:12.100 | aren't telling me what they think about it.

00:20:13.220 | So let me know if you read it, let me know.

00:20:14.780 | Uh, let me know what you think.

00:20:16.700 | All right.

00:20:17.780 | Number one, pre-block important or timely work on your calendar.

00:20:25.980 | So what happens with time block planning is when you make your

00:20:28.140 | time block plan for the day, you look at your weekly plan.

00:20:31.580 | You look at your calendar because you're going to transfer from your

00:20:33.820 | calendar, any meetings or appointments you have onto your time block plan.

00:20:37.340 | What I suggest is if something is timely or important, you go, once you

00:20:42.300 | know about this thing on your radar, consider going ahead in your calendar

00:20:46.540 | and actually adding non appointment, non meeting blocks onto your calendar for

00:20:52.180 | when you're going to get that work done.

00:20:54.460 | You know, it's, uh, right now, for example, I'm reviewing copy edits for

00:20:59.180 | my upcoming book, slow productivity.

00:21:00.700 | This isn't, it's very important and very timely.

00:21:02.580 | I have a very short amount of time to turn these around.

00:21:05.020 | So what I did is when I knew what date these were coming back, I actually

00:21:08.700 | went in advance and took three big blocks of time and just scheduled

00:21:12.020 | it on my calendar, like a meeting.

00:21:13.300 | And now when I got to those days, I just transfer that work over to

00:21:16.820 | my time block plan for the day.

00:21:18.140 | So pre-blocking time, once you're in a time block discipline mindset,

00:21:23.100 | pre-blocking time is a great way to make sure that you don't, for example,

00:21:27.540 | over clutter your schedule in times when a lot is due.

00:21:30.620 | All right.

00:21:32.340 | My second little different than autopilot, right?

00:21:34.340 | It's different than autopilot.

00:21:36.180 | It was a good question.

00:21:36.900 | Autopilot is your pre-scheduling work that occurs on a regular basis, right?

00:21:42.100 | So if you know, I always have to file a report on the last Friday of the month,

00:21:47.980 | you can figure out when and how you do that work and just set that repeating

00:21:50.780 | your calendar into perpetuity with pre-blocking is for one-off projects.

00:21:55.340 | Got it.

00:21:56.460 | So you're not finding a regular time to work on copy editing because it only

00:21:59.580 | happens once every few years, but you know, that's really important and it's

00:22:02.260 | going to have a short turnaround.

00:22:03.620 | So you go protect that time in advance.

00:22:05.500 | And then because you time block, you know, when you get

00:22:08.460 | there, that'll be safe.

00:22:09.260 | All right.

00:22:09.580 | The second tip time block relaxation into your work day.

00:22:14.100 | Right.

00:22:15.540 | So at first you might just be putting in a half hour.

00:22:18.900 | Uh, break it's in your time block plan.

00:22:22.060 | And when you get there, you know, okay, I'm going to just completely turn off work.

00:22:26.220 | But once you're in the habit of time blocking relaxation, you'll tend to

00:22:31.660 | get more aggressive about this because see, this is the, the advantage of time

00:22:36.540 | blocking from a sustainability point of view, uh, a critique, which I think is

00:22:40.820 | flawed of this approach is that people say, well, this is all about just

00:22:44.100 | optimizing every minute of your day, but time blocking can actually help

00:22:47.620 | you much better do the opposite.

00:22:48.940 | Once you're in the habit of, I put breaks into my day and you

00:22:53.820 | have control over your time.

00:22:55.180 | Now, as your workload gets under control, you can get more aggressive about that.

00:23:00.300 | And you can say things like, you know what?

00:23:01.740 | On Wednesday, I'm going to make very efficient use of the morning and then

00:23:05.820 | block off three and a half hours to go see Oppenheimer in the afternoon.

00:23:08.740 | You can now do that with confidence because you're controlling all of your time.

00:23:12.300 | So when you can control your time, not only can you get more work into your

00:23:15.220 | time, into your day, you can also get more relaxation the day without it

00:23:18.660 | causing trouble, so just introduce the habit of many days during the week.

00:23:23.020 | I put little breaks into it.

00:23:24.260 | Once you have that habit, as you get to periods where your workload's a little

00:23:28.300 | less, you can lean into completely guilt-free, unnoticeable, larger breaks.

00:23:34.020 | And that type of variation of work pacing is something that's going to

00:23:37.820 | make work much more sustainable.

00:23:39.540 | So you're not just trying to fit in work, use time blocks to also fit in relaxation.

00:23:45.620 | Because you can trust that that relaxation is fine, it's scheduled.

00:23:49.140 | You know when the other work's going to happen, nothing bad's going to

00:23:51.580 | happen if you turn off for a while.

00:23:53.180 | All right.

00:23:55.020 | Another advanced tip is when doing admin blocks.

00:23:58.860 | So I'm a big believer of admin blocks.

00:24:00.660 | I talk about this in the introductory material of the time block planner.

00:24:05.260 | For tasks, you want to have one block in which you execute multiple things.

00:24:09.580 | Consolidate tasks, right?

00:24:12.020 | That's standard time blocking.

00:24:14.500 | What I've been experimenting with recently is having smaller admin

00:24:18.620 | blocks, theming the admin work by cognitive context.

00:24:24.460 | So what I mean by that is if you have five different tasks to do that are all

00:24:32.020 | related to different projects or different types of work, it can be more

00:24:36.340 | difficult than you think to go one, two, three, four, five, and execute those.

00:24:40.820 | And the reason why it's difficult is because as you switch from one

00:24:44.100 | task type to another, your brain has to switch its cognitive context.

00:24:47.860 | Oh, we're thinking about this type of project.

00:24:49.540 | Now we have to think about like my kid's little league and some social event.

00:24:52.980 | Well, that's a completely different type of context.

00:24:54.740 | And you will notice the difficulty of this context switching.

00:24:57.860 | You will notice it subjectively as a feeling of resistance, of mental fatigue.

00:25:02.980 | So if you instead theme tasks, so they're in the same cognitive context,

00:25:06.940 | what you'll realize is you get through a much faster.

00:25:09.900 | So if I'm doing four things related to social planning for the family, those

00:25:15.540 | four things, if I do them one in a row is going to go much more smoother because

00:25:18.740 | once I switch into that context, now I can do the three, four, five other tasks.

00:25:22.860 | And it's going to come without that subjective resistance.

00:25:25.340 | And then maybe I have another small block later with a bunch of things

00:25:28.660 | surrounding a particular type of project I'm doing for work.

00:25:32.140 | Oh, I have a lot of things result surrounding a conference.

00:25:34.700 | I'm organizing, let me put a 20 minute block over here where I'm just going

00:25:37.740 | through a bunch of those in a row.

00:25:39.620 | So shorter blocks of themed admin tasks is way more comfortable than having

00:25:46.140 | bigger blocks where you mix together different types of admin tasks.

00:25:48.980 | This is why the single hardest batched admin tasks that most people do on a

00:25:53.580 | regular basis is cleaning their email inbox.

00:25:55.940 | Because if you're just going through your inbox one by one, why is that so hard?

00:25:59.980 | Because you are switching context from message to message.

00:26:03.620 | So even your email inbox, you can break out in the themes and say, okay,

00:26:07.660 | during this admin block, I'm doing some family related tasks and I'm responding

00:26:13.220 | to all emails related to family related tasks.

00:26:16.420 | And then later in the day, when I'm doing tasks that are just related to

00:26:20.660 | this conference I'm organizing, I will then go through my inbox and handle all

00:26:24.300 | the emails related to that conference.

00:26:25.700 | And what you're going to find is those encounters with your inbox are going to

00:26:29.340 | go so much more smoothly because you are not behind the scenes trying to keep

00:26:32.860 | switching your cognitive context.

00:26:35.220 | All right.

00:26:36.620 | My fourth bit of advanced time blocking advice is whenever you put a meeting of

00:26:42.420 | any significant length or complexity onto your time block plan at a short block

00:26:48.820 | after it for just post-mortem organizing, what you learned, making a plan for what

00:26:54.820 | to handle, getting the information for that meeting into your systems.

00:26:57.460 | Never let a interaction based time block be immediately followed by another time

00:27:05.180 | block focused on something different.

00:27:06.620 | You have to close down to work of meetings.

00:27:09.460 | You need 15 to 30 minutes to do this.

00:27:12.340 | Okay.

00:27:12.780 | The meeting is over, but I have 15 to 30 protected minutes to go transform

00:27:17.100 | my notes and the tasks and the put reminders on the calendars.

00:27:20.180 | And if there's followup emails, let me just do them right now.

00:27:22.460 | Now I can completely shut down that thing.

00:27:24.980 | I don't have a ton of open loops hanging in my head as I jumped

00:27:27.780 | from this meeting to the next.

00:27:28.820 | I don't have a ton of open loops in my head as I jumped from this meeting

00:27:31.620 | right into trying to do deep work.

00:27:33.940 | So that should just be instinct when you write a meeting time block that

00:27:37.420 | you put another block under it.

00:27:38.900 | And you can even just, I'll sometimes just a shaded in this little shaded

00:27:43.380 | in block under each of my meetings.

00:27:44.780 | And that's the catch your breath, process everything to

00:27:48.260 | just happen in that meeting.

00:27:49.300 | Again, it's going to make the whole day go smoother.

00:27:52.220 | That, that, that extra 15 or 20 minutes after every meeting makes the whole

00:27:55.380 | rest of the day actually makes sense.

00:27:57.980 | All right.

00:27:59.620 | So that's the same concept.

00:28:00.740 | No, that's the same concept.

00:28:02.980 | That's the same concept that you always suggested with students and answering

00:28:06.580 | all their questions, like after a lecture and stuff, pretty much.

00:28:09.420 | Yeah.

00:28:09.500 | That's a good point.

00:28:10.180 | Right.

00:28:10.580 | I used to recommend the same thing for students that when you're taking notes

00:28:14.020 | in lecture, you clearly Mark everything you didn't fully understand.

00:28:18.220 | And as soon as lecture is over, you see how many of these things can I resolve?

00:28:22.020 | I mean, I guess the first I, so this is from my book, how to

00:28:25.380 | become a straight A student.

00:28:27.140 | And I say, there's, there's multiple lines of defense for

00:28:29.900 | filling in these question marks.

00:28:30.940 | The first line of defense is you ask questions right away.

00:28:33.140 | Wait, I didn't get that.

00:28:35.100 | Can you say that again?

00:28:36.340 | The second line of defense is you go up to the professor right after class.

00:28:39.220 | I'd understand this.

00:28:40.820 | Can you explain it to me?

00:28:41.980 | The third line of defense is some combination of TAs, textbooks,

00:28:47.020 | office hours, and asking classmates.

00:28:50.060 | And the key is do that as soon as possible.

00:28:51.860 | Do not let the questions.

00:28:54.620 | Uh, don't let the questions just sit there as I don't

00:28:57.060 | understand this math technique.

00:28:58.220 | I guess I'll deal with that when I'm studying for the test a month from now.

00:29:01.100 | Close that down.

00:29:02.580 | You want to try to close down and consolidate your understanding of

00:29:05.340 | lectures as soon as possible after you encounter the lectures.

00:29:07.660 | So this is kind of similar.

00:29:08.620 | If you have a meeting process, everything related to it right away.

00:29:12.220 | Don't just let that sit.

00:29:13.340 | And maybe tomorrow I'll remember what to do about it.

00:29:15.660 | Closing loops.

00:29:16.780 | I think is really important for having sustainable cognitive work.

00:29:20.500 | All right.

00:29:23.540 | So that's time block planning.

00:29:24.700 | Good to revisit it.

00:29:25.820 | Enjoy the time block planner.

00:29:27.940 | If you want to find out more, I have a website, timeblockplanner.com.

00:29:30.940 | Um, that has a video where I really go through and show you a lot of

00:29:35.460 | examples of exactly how time blocking works.

00:29:37.580 | You can go watch that video there.

00:29:38.940 | And it has links to where to buy the second edition from Amazon, but I'm just,

00:29:42.860 | look, whether or not anyone buys it.

00:29:44.940 | And a lot of people are, but whether or not anyone buys this, I'm so happy to

00:29:48.460 | have it because it is just a perfected tool for exactly this method of time

00:29:54.420 | management that I have so long sworn by.

00:29:57.100 | All right, let's move on to some questions.

00:30:00.260 | Uh, Jesse, I think all the questions we've chosen today have at least a

00:30:03.300 | tangential connection to time blocking or time management.

00:30:07.340 | So let's get our productivity geeks hats out and put on and get rolling here.

00:30:13.380 | So what's our first question.

00:30:14.500 | Here we go.

00:30:16.580 | First question is from Pumi.

00:30:18.740 | I live my day using time blocking combined with autopilot

00:30:22.540 | scheduling for my mornings.

00:30:24.380 | Every morning I do two hours of my work on my research.

00:30:27.500 | Sometimes, however, I have to stay up late and I miss my morning blocks.

00:30:30.940 | I want to know how to deal with these setbacks.

00:30:33.980 | I feel guilty for the whole day for not executing my autopilot

00:30:37.580 | schedule because I slept in.

00:30:39.140 | Well, we have two different related concepts to differentiate here.

00:30:44.620 | I think that's going to help you find a solution.

00:30:47.740 | So autopilot scheduling, which is what you referenced in your question here is

00:30:53.780 | where for regularly occurring work, you have a set time on a set day and typically

00:31:00.140 | a set location for which you do that works.

00:31:03.540 | The whole idea is to, uh, take the decision of working on this out of your

00:31:09.180 | day-to-day decision-making process.

00:31:10.860 | It's just there on your calendar.

00:31:12.940 | Tuesdays at 10, I go to this library and work on my problem set.

00:31:17.220 | That's just when I do that.

00:31:18.420 | So that's autopilot scheduling.

00:31:20.260 | Now what you're doing is maybe not exactly autopilot scheduling.

00:31:24.060 | What you're trying to do is start each morning with two hours of research.

00:31:27.100 | So it feels like an autopilot schedule because like, oh, it's, it's work.

00:31:30.900 | I do on the same, uh, same time every day, but I would say what you're really

00:31:36.220 | doing instead is what we might call a heuristic autopilot.

00:31:42.260 | So a heuristic autopilot is not a calendar appointment that is set to show

00:31:49.220 | up on a regular basis and you treat like any other calendar appointment, like

00:31:52.940 | a dentist appointment or a meeting.

00:31:54.300 | A heuristic autopilot is a rule.

00:31:56.980 | It's something you're going to write down on the top of your weekly plan.

00:32:00.980 | For example, a, a rule that you think about when you're creating

00:32:05.700 | your schedule for each day.

00:32:06.900 | So I think what you're really doing here is you have the heuristic autopilot

00:32:09.940 | that says when possible, spin the first hour or two of each day working on research.

00:32:15.940 | So some days that's not possible because you, uh, you're up late and you have to

00:32:21.540 | sleep in, uh, but you're not violating an appointment on your schedule.

00:32:26.100 | So if this was an actual appointment on your schedule, if this was a true

00:32:28.500 | autopilot schedule, you would treat this like a real appointment, like a meeting

00:32:32.100 | with your boss and you wouldn't say to your boss, yeah, sorry, I didn't show up.

00:32:35.100 | I slept in.

00:32:35.660 | You would have to go to that, but what you're doing here is more flexible.

00:32:38.580 | So that's why I call it a heuristic.

00:32:39.820 | It's a general rule for how you get a certain thing done.

00:32:42.940 | Like another example of a heuristic autopilot is sometimes when I'm deep in

00:32:48.580 | the problem solving phase of a theoretical computer science paper, I'll have a

00:32:53.020 | heuristic that says, okay, the drive to work every day for the next week, to

00:32:58.140 | the extent possible, use that to think about the problem.

00:33:00.500 | It's not something that's on my calendar.

00:33:03.340 | When I actually drive to work might differ based on the days, but it's

00:33:06.300 | a heuristic, keep this rule in mind each day when you're planning out your day.

00:33:09.900 | Another heuristic autopilot, sometimes I have a lot of tasks that are floating

00:33:14.140 | around for something that's coming up.

00:33:15.620 | I'll say 20 minutes every day dedicated only to working through

00:33:21.420 | tasks related to this upcoming thing.

00:33:23.540 | That's a heuristic autopilot.

00:33:25.060 | And then when I get to each day, I'll say, okay, I have to find where this is

00:33:28.740 | going to fit, but I'm going to try to find 20 minutes where I can work on

00:33:31.420 | tasks and try to do that every day this week.

00:33:32.940 | So I think that's going to help you here.

00:33:34.900 | You really have a heuristic, not a hard autopilot schedule.

00:33:37.940 | And once you know that you shouldn't be so worried that occasionally you don't

00:33:42.060 | get to do research in the morning.

00:33:43.140 | What matters is you're following a heuristic rule of when there's

00:33:45.860 | time in the morning, you do.

00:33:47.060 | Now, if you find that you're almost never actually applying this rule,

00:33:52.060 | that almost always you're sleeping in too late to get this research done.

00:33:56.940 | Well, then you need to change something, right?

00:33:58.420 | That's no longer a good heuristic.

00:33:59.940 | You need to change where the research happens or you need to change your

00:34:02.140 | habits so you're not sleeping in.

00:34:03.340 | That's possible.

00:34:04.420 | But if what we're talking about here is once a week, you don't do morning

00:34:07.420 | research, the other four days you do.

00:34:08.780 | I think it's a perfectly fine example of a heuristic autopilot schedule.

00:34:12.980 | All right.

00:34:15.020 | What is that similar?

00:34:16.100 | Is that similar to when you were writing your, when you were in writing

00:34:19.260 | mode last summer, you would write.

00:34:21.220 | Is that, was that heuristic?

00:34:23.460 | Was that a little different?

00:34:24.300 | No, I think that's a fair point.

00:34:26.420 | Last summer when I was writing slow productivity, it was, you know, try to

00:34:30.740 | write first thing before we go out and do activities, you know, try to write

00:34:34.700 | first thing every day if possible.

00:34:37.020 | And when we were on vacation, so last summer we were up in Vermont, the Mad

00:34:40.540 | River Valley, some days it was, look, we got to get going early in the morning

00:34:44.820 | because we're taking the family out to see something as it's a couple hours away.

00:34:48.180 | And I just want it right that day, but it was okay.

00:34:49.820 | The default is try to just write every morning.

00:34:51.780 | And Julie was understood that schedule.

00:34:54.860 | So she's a lot of mornings be like, yeah, we might go do something in the morning.

00:34:57.540 | I might take the boys to do something brief before we do our larger trip.

00:35:01.260 | And you're right.

00:35:01.940 | It was a heuristic and I couldn't do it every day.

00:35:05.100 | But most days I tried to write first thing.

00:35:07.300 | So that was a heuristic autopilot schedule.

00:35:09.220 | And again, yeah, it's very different than these days, these hours, this

00:35:13.140 | location, I'm always doing this work.

00:35:14.900 | I want to react to something that has been going around the internet recently.

00:35:21.380 | So I'm actually going to share something on the screen here.

00:35:24.260 | So again, this is the deep life.com or youtube.com/calnewportmedia to

00:35:28.900 | watch this episode, episode 262.

00:35:31.060 | I'm loading up a YouTube video.

00:35:33.260 | I won't have the audio on, but I have closed captioning on.

00:35:35.980 | All right.

00:35:36.860 | So this is a video from better ideas, a popular channel.

00:35:39.980 | It's 2 million subscribers.

00:35:41.860 | And the title of this video is how overstimulation is ruining your life.

00:35:47.580 | And we see there's a young man on screen here in the woods.

00:35:51.580 | Looking earnestly at the camera and I have the close captioning on.

00:35:54.740 | So I'm going to play this and read you a little bit of what he's saying.

00:35:57.220 | He's saying during certain periods of my life.

00:36:00.380 | Oh, that's where I said the volume was off.

00:36:03.140 | Uh, the volume was very much on.

00:36:06.060 | Let me turn that off here.

00:36:06.860 | Sorry about that.

00:36:07.460 | All right.

00:36:07.780 | During various periods of my life, I have a very difficult time focusing on

00:36:17.220 | pretty much anything important or difficult during these periods.

00:36:20.860 | It seems almost impossible to break out of the social media limbo where you're

00:36:26.740 | just constantly switching between tabs, refreshing pages, kind of waiting for

00:36:31.700 | something interesting to happen.

00:36:32.940 | Like for someone to post a cool photo or Instagram or something, you're

00:36:37.820 | kind of waiting to be entertained.

00:36:39.260 | But if you actually have to apply yourself, it's extremely difficult,

00:36:43.060 | borderline painful to do so.

00:36:44.660 | And I'm pretty sure almost everyone can relate to this problem.

00:36:48.860 | I'm sure you've seen a lot of videos on YouTube, giving you little tips and

00:36:52.620 | tricks as to how to better focus, including my own channel, but they are

00:36:56.540 | very few videos kind of diving in talking about why it's so difficult to focus on

00:37:01.300 | hard things, you know, like what's the deal?

00:37:05.460 | Why can't we just sit down and do something important with very little

00:37:08.740 | strain?

00:37:09.300 | All right.

00:37:11.460 | So that's the start of that video on better ideas.

00:37:14.140 | And he goes on to get into some of the neuroscience of why we're distracted so

00:37:18.140 | easily when we're trying to work on something hard.

00:37:20.180 | And it's a neuroscience explanation you may have heard before, but essentially

00:37:24.340 | our dopamine system, which generates that urge to do something that's going to

00:37:29.420 | generate a reward.

00:37:30.500 | Keep in mind, we often get that a little bit wrong.

00:37:34.020 | I think in common parlance, we often think about dopamine as being a source of

00:37:39.260 | rewards.

00:37:39.660 | The dopamine itself is what makes you feel a lot of pleasure.

00:37:42.820 | Now, dopamine is what gives you that urge to do the thing that you think is going

00:37:47.620 | to give you the reward.

00:37:48.740 | It's when you have an addiction, it's the dopamine that makes it so irresistible to

00:37:52.220 | grab that cigarette because it wants the other rewards you're going to get when

00:37:56.380 | you actually smoke the cigarette, right?

00:37:58.820 | So what is talked about in this video is this common neuroscience explanation that

00:38:02.980 | the dopamine system is firing up to get those quick hit rewards of seeing the

00:38:09.980 | video that's really interesting, seeing the post that's a little bit scandalous,

00:38:13.660 | seeing the like number jump on something you did earlier, which gives you this big

00:38:17.460 | burst of people like me.

00:38:18.940 | They really like me.

00:38:20.540 | The dopamine system likes rewards.

00:38:22.740 | It wants rewards.

00:38:23.660 | Now, the internet has many rewards lined up.

00:38:26.700 | That system kicks in the play in the play and you feel this irresistible desire to

00:38:31.540 | click, click, click.

00:38:32.180 | You do not get a similar dopamine push for I'm working for our 900 of 10,000.

00:38:41.140 | It's going to take me to finish this really big project because the reward's not

00:38:44.300 | proximate.

00:38:44.820 | And so what's going to win then the complicated deep thing, part of your slow

00:38:50.340 | productivity push to do something big over a long period of time or Instagram or

00:38:56.060 | tick tock.

00:38:56.500 | And he said, yeah, your brain is wired to go for that.

00:38:58.420 | And that's a very hard, that's a very hard challenge to win.

00:39:01.340 | And now what I learned from this video is that, yes, he is right.

00:39:04.740 | There are lots of videos that talk about this same thing, quote unquote, over

00:39:08.300 | stimulation.

00:39:09.140 | People are really feeling it.

00:39:11.020 | And I think young people are feeling it harder because they have more targets for

00:39:15.180 | their dopamine systems.

00:39:16.220 | They've more acclimatized their mind to all of these various rewards.

00:39:20.180 | And they're very good at these various rewards.

00:39:21.860 | There's so much pulling at them that young people in particular are really

00:39:25.300 | finding.

00:39:25.740 | Yes, this is ruining my life.

00:39:27.060 | I can't do anything longterm, deep, cognitively useful, getting bad grades at

00:39:34.060 | school.

00:39:34.620 | I can't advance in my job.

00:39:37.460 | I can't produce something that I really want to produce.

00:39:39.660 | Those of us, my age or older, maybe say I distract myself too much and it slows

00:39:45.620 | down me doing important work.

00:39:47.380 | Young people really do feel like it's ruining their lives.

00:39:50.140 | So what should we do about it?

00:39:52.260 | Well, I thought, well, I can offer my own advice here.

00:39:54.100 | I mean, this is something I've studied and written about for a long time.

00:39:57.140 | Kind of wrote the definitive book on the power of focus and why you should

00:40:01.580 | cultivate it.

00:40:02.300 | I've been thinking and writing articles and books about this for a long time.

00:40:05.420 | So I figured, let me, let me review here on the podcast, my own very complicated

00:40:12.220 | multi-part system for combating online overstimulation.

00:40:15.420 | So get a pad of paper ready because you don't want to miss step nine or 10.

00:40:19.380 | There's a very complicated explanation for how you're going to have to very

00:40:23.180 | carefully navigate the online world.

00:40:25.260 | All right.

00:40:25.500 | So it's gonna be very complicated.

00:40:26.380 | Are you ready?

00:40:26.820 | Okay, here it goes.

00:40:27.580 | Here's my solution.

00:40:28.420 | Don't use things that cause overstimulation.

00:40:32.060 | All right.

00:40:34.780 | Now, I mean, I'm being a little bit facetious here, but, but honestly, the

00:40:37.900 | answer is as simple as that.

00:40:39.940 | Dopamine system is powerful.

00:40:43.180 | So don't give it the targets that it's going to fire up for.

00:40:45.980 | You have to actually remove most of these sources of overstimulation from your life.

00:40:52.220 | If you really want to start thinking and producing original

00:40:56.340 | thoughts at a high level.

00:40:58.660 | There's not these complex habits and careful ways of navigating your

00:41:04.140 | notifications and when you use this and when you don't use this, I'm telling

00:41:07.780 | you this as someone who thinks for a living and studies people who thinks for

00:41:10.940 | a living, the more sources of overstimulation you eliminate from your

00:41:16.300 | life, the easier, and we of course know this type of abstention approach is

00:41:19.740 | effective because we see it with other things that historically have hijacked

00:41:24.620 | the dopamine system and caused a lot of trouble.

00:41:26.860 | We do not tell people who have an issue with smoking, okay, we need to build a

00:41:32.260 | complex system of where you have cigarettes and where you don't, and you

00:41:35.140 | don't want to have it in the car, but you will have it here and we're going to

00:41:37.820 | have a, an app that, that keeps track of how many cigarettes you've had and then

00:41:41.780 | try to restrict, then during certain periods, there's a time lock that locks

00:41:45.340 | off the cigarettes that you can't have it during that period, but you can't have

00:41:47.700 | it on this period.

00:41:48.380 | And, uh, we do a week on, but you don't smoke on Saturdays.

00:41:52.340 | No, we just say you got to quit smoking as the same with a lot of other addictions

00:41:56.340 | like this, that people have trouble with, but we resist applying that type of

00:42:02.900 | clarity and abstention to online overstimulation.

00:42:07.380 | So let me get a little bit more granular about this.

00:42:10.420 | Uh, social media, this is a big source of it.

00:42:13.700 | You got to just basically get this out of your life.

00:42:16.300 | If you have to have some social media for professional reasons, it

00:42:20.460 | should not be on your phone.

00:42:21.540 | It should be on a boring computer.

00:42:23.700 | It's something you should do on a schedule or hire someone to do on your behalf.

00:42:27.820 | It should never, ever be something you go to when you're bored.

00:42:30.780 | Should never be a source of distraction.

00:42:33.380 | It should be, I'm an author and I set up my Instagram post in a

00:42:38.540 | shared document on Google drive.

00:42:40.900 | Here's the photos.

00:42:42.140 | Here's the text.

00:42:42.860 | And I have someone who posts it Fridays and Mondays, or if I have to do that,

00:42:46.580 | I log in the thing on my computer, I post it, and then I shut it back down again.

00:42:51.340 | All right.

00:42:52.940 | So if you have to use it professionally, it's on a computer is boring.

00:42:55.860 | You never use it as a source of entertainment.

00:42:57.580 | You don't scroll online news.

00:43:01.580 | Look, you're not a, you're not a editor at Gawker.

00:43:05.700 | You just get out of that, that world of online news and discussion.

00:43:08.860 | You don't have to be a part of it.

00:43:10.060 | How do you keep up with stuff in the world?

00:43:11.940 | We talked about this earlier in this episode where I gave advice to reading

00:43:15.820 | guy, uh, you know, subscribe to some email newsletters that you read when

00:43:19.540 | you can, that gives you interesting perspectives, listen to podcasts, maybe

00:43:23.300 | listen to a daily news roundup podcast.

00:43:25.460 | If you want to be kept up with more current events, right.

00:43:29.100 | Or listen to something like a saga and crystals, their breaking points

00:43:32.420 | podcast, where they go through 10 stories about what's going on in the world.

00:43:36.580 | Podcasts are fine.

00:43:37.740 | Right.

00:43:38.060 | Because it's, it's something you have to turn on and listen to.

00:43:40.820 | It's not a knee jerk.

00:43:41.940 | It's not a knee jerk distraction that your dopamine system is going to kick into.

00:43:46.340 | No one is like trying to write and halfway through writing like, Oh,

00:43:50.100 | and quickly turn on a podcast.

00:43:51.580 | Tick-tock and do that.

00:43:53.260 | Online news can do that.

00:43:54.500 | Twitter can do that.

00:43:55.500 | Podcasts are fine.

00:43:56.340 | Newsletters are fine.

00:43:57.940 | Maybe even print out the articles you like and read them when you get a chance.

00:44:00.940 | That's fine.

00:44:01.540 | You'll be informed.

00:44:02.180 | Can I get rid of all that online news?

00:44:04.460 | What about YouTube?

00:44:06.220 | YouTube is tricky.

00:44:06.940 | Why is YouTube tricky?

00:44:08.020 | Good.

00:44:09.100 | I think video is the future of independent content creation, but the

00:44:13.260 | recommendations sidebar on YouTube can make it into one of these dopamine

00:44:18.100 | inflaming sources of distraction.

00:44:20.940 | So when it comes to something like YouTube, you have to use

00:44:25.420 | it one way and not another.

00:44:26.780 | So this is maybe the place where I come closest to the navigation

00:44:30.260 | lines that you hear in a lot of these online videos, but I do think

00:44:33.460 | YouTube is a source of information.

00:44:36.260 | YouTube is a become more a source of entertainment, high quality

00:44:40.780 | entertainment that rivals what you would get on TV, but it's also

00:44:44.980 | a giant source of distraction.

00:44:46.180 | So how do we, how do we make sense of YouTube?

00:44:48.620 | Well, here's my, here's my YouTube strategy.

00:44:53.460 | So in order to preserve YouTube as a way to look up instructions for

00:44:56.860 | things, which I think is a great use of YouTube, how do I change

00:44:59.860 | the oil in a Honda odyssey?

00:45:01.380 | You look it up on YouTube.

00:45:03.460 | You can see a video of someone doing it.

00:45:04.900 | It's better than trying to find an article to preserve that use of

00:45:07.660 | YouTube without it making a dopamine inflaming system, get one of these.

00:45:12.660 | Plugins for your browser that you use YouTube on that gets

00:45:17.060 | rid of the recommendations.

00:45:18.020 | So what you can do is you can search for something.

00:45:20.340 | You can see the search results.

00:45:21.300 | You can click on a search result.

00:45:22.420 | You can watch it, but there's no, here's what's coming up next.

00:45:24.980 | Or what about this?

00:45:25.900 | And what about that?

00:45:26.500 | So that one type of plugin alone makes YouTube into a fantastic

00:45:32.980 | library without it being something that you can use as a source of

00:45:36.980 | knee-jerk distraction, because again, when you're working on something

00:45:39.380 | hard, if you have blocked YouTube, you go home, let's go to youtube.com.

00:45:43.260 | You don't see anything.

00:45:44.060 | You have to search for something and find something.

00:45:46.260 | It's not a, it's not a highly salient source of distraction.

00:45:50.380 | Now, what about entertainment on YouTube?

00:45:52.020 | Because again, I think this is actually important.

00:45:54.140 | I'm a believer that video Trump's audio, the future of independent

00:45:57.740 | content is going to be video.

00:45:59.180 | I mean, this is like radio became a big thing until television was around.

00:46:02.420 | And then television just smashed the market share of radio.

00:46:06.180 | It was just so much bigger because humans like to see faces.

00:46:09.220 | Humans like to see visuals.

00:46:11.020 | And I increasingly believe, uh, watching a high quality interview

00:46:16.580 | show on YouTube is better than 99% of the stuff that's on television.

00:46:21.500 | Or that's on a non unscripted streaming services.

00:46:26.460 | And I think that gap's going to close more.

00:46:27.900 | So how do you, for example, watch a show like mine, or maybe

00:46:32.260 | you're, you're a Lex Fridman fan.

00:46:34.100 | You want to watch his interviews.

00:46:35.220 | How do you watch these type of programming as a substitute for

00:46:38.820 | lower quality television with again, not having YouTube be a rabbit hole.

00:46:44.260 | And my answer here is television sets.

00:46:46.980 | I learned this from our YouTube guy, Jeremy, that increasingly

00:46:52.020 | televisions are becoming one of the most common devices on which

00:46:56.300 | this style of YouTube video is watched.

00:46:59.060 | So if you're going to look something up, you have a browser with a

00:47:02.740 | plugin that blocks the recommendations.

00:47:04.820 | If you're going to watch quote unquote, independent, high quality content on

00:47:09.300 | YouTube, you have it on the YouTube app and your Apple TV or fire stick on your

00:47:13.460 | television, and you watch it like you would any other television show in the

00:47:16.700 | same circumstances where you'd watch television, I'm sitting down with a

00:47:20.340 | lunch break, I take out my remote.

00:47:22.660 | I turn on the TV.

00:47:23.500 | I go to the YouTube app.

00:47:24.540 | I searched for the latest episode of whatever, and I put it on the TV.

00:47:27.260 | There's a lot of friction in using a television.

00:47:31.260 | There's also a lot of routine and ritual built into televisions where that's

00:47:35.900 | not part of your dopamine cycle.

00:47:38.180 | When you're in your home office trying to write something, you don't

00:47:40.980 | rush downstairs and turn on the TV and go to Netflix and select

00:47:43.500 | a show and turn it on.

00:47:44.180 | That's too much overhead.

00:47:45.020 | The television, you think about, oh, I'm going to have a meal.

00:47:48.140 | I'm taking a break.

00:47:49.860 | It's a big production to get it going.

00:47:51.580 | So you move high quality, independent media consumption to the television

00:47:56.220 | and looking up to a browser protected, a plugin protected browser.

00:48:01.420 | Now you don't have to worry about something like YouTube being in your

00:48:06.220 | life, being a source of distraction.

00:48:09.020 | Also throw in place better, less dopamine susceptible entertainment

00:48:14.060 | sources to fill the gap that the highly salient, uh, distracting

00:48:19.380 | content is probably filling right now.

00:48:21.660 | Listen to get back into music, go see good movies and read about them

00:48:26.860 | before and after read much more books, high quality streaming content,

00:48:32.180 | high quality podcast, right?

00:48:34.700 | Get your mind used to other sorts of much higher quality content for.

00:48:39.140 | The entertainment and distraction, the lower quality stuff will

00:48:43.020 | begin to seem less palatable.

00:48:45.220 | Same thing happens with food.

00:48:47.460 | You eat a lot of junk food is really addictive.

00:48:50.900 | My God, I just need chips and cookies.

00:48:52.540 | And this makes me feel better.

00:48:53.660 | And what else would I want to eat?

00:48:54.660 | You stop doing it for a while.

00:48:55.980 | You start eating better food.

00:48:57.060 | You start cooking yourself.

00:48:58.180 | You go to the farmer's market.

00:48:59.340 | You're using a high quality ingredients.

00:49:00.820 | Everyone will tell you this.

00:49:02.140 | You start eating well, a Snickers bar, a chips.

00:49:05.300 | Ahoy seems weird.

00:49:06.340 | It's cardboard.

00:49:07.100 | It's fake.

00:49:07.620 | It's too sugary.

00:49:08.420 | You don't crave it anymore.

00:49:09.780 | Right?

00:49:11.820 | So you don't break this connection to junk food by just white

00:49:14.940 | knuckling and eating less, you replace it with better food.

00:49:17.380 | So that's the final part of solving overstimulation is in introducing

00:49:21.580 | flooding the zone with much more quality stimulation so that you lose

00:49:25.660 | your taste for a Tik TOK video.

00:49:29.100 | You lose your taste for an inflammatory online article that someone tweeted

00:49:32.860 | and that you're scrolling through and then clicking the other links.

00:49:34.980 | All right.

00:49:36.660 | So again, this is how I think you solve overstimulation.

00:49:40.260 | If you're serious about it, you get rid of most of the sources of overstimulation.

00:49:43.820 | You stop using social media, you stop doing online news surfing.

00:49:47.780 | You put in a lot of high quality content and in the few places where you might

00:49:51.780 | need to encounter these worlds, YouTube looking things up or high quality,

00:49:55.740 | independent media, you have to do some limited social media for your work.

00:49:59.300 | You do so in a way that makes it so far from being a source of knee jerk

00:50:02.980 | distraction that your dopamine system forgets about it.

00:50:05.180 | So anyways, I appreciated that video.

00:50:07.100 | Overstimulation is a problem.

00:50:08.580 | I'm glad people care about it, but let's just get blunt.

00:50:11.980 | Stop doing the thing that's ruining your life.

00:50:17.220 | Stop smoking, stop eating the junk food, replace it with something better.

00:50:22.940 | Let's not get too cute about this.

00:50:24.300 | Let's not get too fine grained life without the overstimulation

00:50:27.260 | really is a deeper life.

00:50:28.300 | It really is a more intellectually engaged life.

00:50:30.700 | It really is going to be a more successful life.

00:50:32.740 | You are going to produce ideas that astounds you.

00:50:35.380 | Next question is from Gerald.

00:50:37.860 | Do you think that if you don't have at least an informal plan

00:50:40.460 | for every hour of the day, you are losing part of your day to ineffectiveness,

00:50:43.860 | even if it's recreation or family time?

00:50:46.180 | Or do you think having intentions for every part of your day leads to burnout?

00:50:49.620 | Well, Gerald, I mean, I do stand by

00:50:53.620 | time blocking at the level of intensity that I recommend for the professional day

00:50:57.300 | will burn you out if you don't have a break from it.

00:50:59.740 | So if you're locked in, what's next?

00:51:04.300 | Oh, my God, I have a limited amount of time to get this done.

00:51:07.820 | I'm going to let the pressure of that time boundaries

00:51:10.420 | actually motivate me to focus even more.

00:51:12.580 | I mean, that's a very effective way

00:51:15.140 | of producing a lot of cognitive output in a fixed amount of time.

00:51:18.500 | But if you're doing that all hours of the day, you will burn out.

00:51:20.660 | It's just it's just too much.

00:51:23.340 | On the other hand, I think you are right.

00:51:26.180 | If you come to your evenings and say, all right, I'm done with work.

00:51:30.060 | Time to relax and maybe get some stuff done.

00:51:33.020 | You're not going to end up as relaxed as you think stuff is not going to get done.

00:51:37.100 | But more importantly, you're not going to actually commit

00:51:39.180 | to the type of activities that maybe would give you satisfaction or meaning.

00:51:43.100 | You're going to drift from thing to thing.

00:51:45.140 | Your phone is for sure going to insert itself into your time there

00:51:48.900 | and really dominate your attention.

00:51:50.300 | Your head's going to hit the pillow.

00:51:51.540 | You're not going to be particularly happy.

00:51:52.820 | So we need a middle ground between I'm looking at my planner

00:51:56.820 | and I got seven minutes to get these three things done.

00:51:58.900 | And I've just been on my phone for the last four hours.

00:52:02.300 | And I guess I need to go get, you know, a napkin because my eyes are bleeding

00:52:06.980 | from staring at memes on my screen.

00:52:11.460 | We need something in between.

00:52:13.700 | So I recommend sketching a plan.

00:52:15.500 | I use that terminology a lot.

00:52:16.660 | Sketch a plan for your evening.

00:52:18.740 | Sketch a plan for your weekend.

00:52:21.180 | And what that means can vary depending on the specificity.

00:52:24.860 | So it might mean, look, OK, at this exact time tonight, someone's coming over.

00:52:29.140 | I want to watch this show.

00:52:30.180 | And so some stuff might have time.

00:52:32.140 | Other stuff might be more lower grained, like try to like

00:52:35.140 | take care of the tax stuff right after work.

00:52:38.340 | And let's try to exercise.

00:52:41.620 | Here's what we're going to do for dinner tonight.

00:52:43.860 | You know, let's I want to get in some reading time on my book.

00:52:47.340 | So most of it's not attached to times.

00:52:50.740 | It's relatively loose.

00:52:52.580 | But it gives you some sense of I want to do this and that.

00:52:55.580 | And here's what's happening tonight.

00:52:56.780 | And you're sketching a plan for a reasonable night.

00:52:58.860 | And then you do your best to more or less follow that.

00:53:00.540 | And if you miss time, something you added a little bit too much to it

00:53:03.140 | and something took more time, that doesn't really matter at all.

00:53:06.020 | What matters is I had some intentionality with my time.

00:53:10.100 | I thought through, like, what do I want to do tonight?

00:53:12.020 | And I more or less followed that the best I could.

00:53:14.460 | That's the win here.

00:53:15.940 | Not I got through this many things or I'm on top of things.

00:53:19.540 | I said, like, I wasn't adrift.

00:53:21.380 | And these sketch plans can have plenty of downtime, but it's downtime on your terms.

00:53:25.980 | So, well, downtime, I could just sort of look at my phone while I'm eating dinner

00:53:30.140 | or, you know, if we ate early, I could go for a walk on this nature trail

00:53:35.420 | and listen to this this novel I'm really enjoying and really get downtime

00:53:39.460 | that I really enjoy and is really relaxing and it feels really intentional.

00:53:43.020 | Or if I think about it, why don't we start bedtime 45 minutes earlier?

00:53:48.820 | Like I can actually read a book with each of the kids.

00:53:50.740 | And, you know, that's actually really enjoyable.

00:53:52.100 | But I had to think about that if we were just going through the motions

00:53:54.580 | and just looked up and said, it's bedtime, we wouldn't be able to do it.

00:53:56.740 | So I'm a big believer in sketching a plan.

00:53:58.940 | For nonprofessional time, intention is what matters,

00:54:03.500 | but don't care so much about how much you're fitting to that plan

00:54:06.860 | or whether you get everything done.

00:54:07.940 | I just want you to avoid wandering haphazardly during your time.

00:54:12.620 | And there's a difference.

00:54:13.380 | There is a difference on the spectrum from wandering haphazardly

00:54:16.140 | to being incredibly locked in.

00:54:18.580 | There is a gap in between there, which is where I think evenings

00:54:21.260 | and weekends can comfortably exist.

00:54:23.300 | All right, what do we got next?

00:54:26.860 | I like this question. It's from Ricky.

00:54:28.980 | There is one area of my personal productivity system

00:54:32.460 | that I haven't found a good way to handle ongoing activities.

00:54:35.180 | Usually these are things that can sometimes be broken up into projects,

00:54:38.420 | but the overall area is something that you you're never done with,

00:54:41.460 | like getting better at hockey, a hobby of mine.

00:54:43.580 | Any suggestions on how to handle staying on top of these?

00:54:47.740 | So, Ricky, there's a different category of organizational commitment

00:54:52.820 | that becomes relevant here.

00:54:54.300 | And this is what we can call systems, habits or routines.

00:54:58.460 | So it's things that have been worked into your schedule

00:55:01.180 | that you do on a regular basis ad infinitum.

00:55:05.340 | This is just what I do.

00:55:07.540 | I exercise on Monday, Wednesday and Fridays, and I do it after work

00:55:11.460 | and I do it in the basement gym, and that's just what I do on those days.

00:55:15.900 | Or I play hockey with this adult league

00:55:20.620 | on Saturday mornings and I do rink time on

00:55:23.860 | Monday evenings, and then I run two days a week for exercise.

00:55:30.580 | I just do that.

00:55:31.500 | It's not a task that I'm done and I take it off my list.

00:55:33.620 | It's just part of my routine.

00:55:34.660 | So we all have some systems, routines

00:55:38.380 | and habits in our lives where we just get used to doing it.

00:55:41.420 | So how do we install these things?

00:55:44.580 | Well, typically you put them on your calendar.

00:55:47.420 | And or you do some sort of metric tracking on it,

00:55:50.500 | so you have something to check off each day, did I really do this?

00:55:53.060 | So you instill the habit.

00:55:54.620 | There's a lot that's been written on how to instill a habit.

00:55:56.660 | And then once it's there, it will become more of a background part of your life.

00:56:02.300 | It generates a sense of identity, positive feedback,

00:56:05.420 | and then it's more likely to stick in.

00:56:07.460 | The issue is you can only fit so many of these.

00:56:09.460 | So if you don't have any, that's a problem because it's a very powerful weapon.

00:56:13.700 | When you when you when you work something into a background.

00:56:16.300 | Routine in your life, it just happens every week.

00:56:20.260 | You can just look up a year later and typically really cool stuff has happened.

00:56:24.780 | It's the proverbial exercise routine.

00:56:27.980 | You make it a routine.

00:56:29.300 | You stop thinking about it. You just do it.

00:56:30.980 | But then a couple of years later, you say, actually, I'm in pretty good shape.

00:56:33.220 | Like this paid off over time.

00:56:34.620 | I'm glad this is a part of my life.

00:56:36.820 | Another example would be like my five books per month routine.

00:56:41.700 | I just do that.

00:56:42.900 | And now I don't think much about it.

00:56:44.300 | It's just that this is what I do.

00:56:45.420 | I read five books a month.

00:56:46.460 | We talk about them on the podcast.

00:56:48.620 | And that's really positive over time in my life.

00:56:50.700 | But I don't have to think about it.

00:56:51.700 | It's something I've instilled.

00:56:53.100 | But there's a limited number of things you could do.

00:56:55.260 | Maybe a fitness thing, a high quality leisure thing.

00:56:59.940 | There's a few of these you can do where you you're able to regularly put aside

00:57:04.620 | and protect time for a habit, routine or ritual.

00:57:06.780 | And so you want to choose them very carefully.

00:57:10.340 | If you're not doing any, you're leaving a powerful weapon in the armory.

00:57:13.300 | Right. And that's a that's an issue.

00:57:14.660 | But if you have five or six different things, they're going to collide

00:57:17.180 | and you're going to have to fail in your commitment to execute again

00:57:20.980 | and again, that destabilizes your commitment and eventually will dissolve.

00:57:25.020 | So when it comes to these sort of serious, I do it all the time.

00:57:28.580 | Five is probably the limit, depending on how big we're talking about.

00:57:32.060 | And maybe three is more reasonable.

00:57:33.740 | So it's almost like you want to have these slots written up on your wall.

00:57:36.500 | It's a draft.

00:57:39.060 | What do I want to draft?

00:57:39.980 | I have three slots for like major routines I can have in my life outside of work.

00:57:43.380 | What are they going to be?

00:57:45.460 | And if something hasn't earned that place, like I'm going to take that

00:57:48.220 | and replace it with something that's even more valuable.

00:57:49.860 | So you do want to take those seriously

00:57:52.100 | because you only have a limited capacity if you really want to stick with them.

00:57:54.780 | But you do want to be using these.

00:57:57.300 | So sports or athletic pursuit could be one.

00:58:00.620 | Everyone should have something here that has to do with fitness,

00:58:03.100 | probably just doing it again and again relating to fitness.

00:58:06.180 | I really like the idea of having some sort of intellectual

00:58:08.860 | high quality leisure in here, something you do on a very regular basis

00:58:12.500 | above the normal baseline that the average person would do.

00:58:15.100 | That's pushing your mind.

00:58:16.260 | That's that's helping you psychologically or philosophically

00:58:19.580 | or theologically in some sort of regular way.

00:58:22.260 | I think that's really important.

00:58:24.740 | Beyond there, it just kind of comes to your interest.

00:58:27.020 | Maybe it's cooking or maybe it's a craft like with woodworking or knitting.

00:58:31.340 | I don't know.

00:58:31.700 | There's different things you could you could have in there.

00:58:33.820 | Maybe it's programming or microelectronics,

00:58:37.300 | but they have three, maybe four of these things that get serviced

00:58:41.220 | with rituals that you instill as I just do this on these days.

00:58:43.900 | I just always do that.

00:58:45.740 | I think it's part of a deep life.

00:58:47.460 | So that's what I do with hockey.

00:58:49.300 | If I was you, Ricky.

00:58:50.340 | Golf. Golf. Sure.

00:58:52.980 | Yeah, tennis, tennis and golf.

00:58:56.300 | Just read a book about tennis.

00:58:58.820 | How a few, not too many, not too few.

00:59:02.580 | Yeah, I like those.

00:59:05.260 | All right, let's do we have a longer deep plate.

00:59:07.420 | Let's do another. We'll do one more question.

00:59:09.220 | All right. Sounds good.

00:59:10.500 | We've got a question from John.

00:59:12.780 | I'd like to calculate my implicit hourly rate to determine

00:59:15.860 | if I should outsource a task instead of doing it myself.

00:59:19.500 | I struggle, though, when it comes to personal tasks

00:59:22.020 | that would take place outside of work hours like yard work, home improvement,

00:59:25.780 | stuff like that.

00:59:26.860 | For these types of tasks, it's unlikely I would use the time

00:59:29.180 | saved from outsourcing the tasks to do more work

00:59:32.580 | that would earn my hourly rate because it's a weekend

00:59:35.900 | and I don't want to work that anyway.

00:59:37.900 | Yeah, so I've heard about this approach.

00:59:40.580 | This is the approach where you take your salary

00:59:43.140 | and you divide it by the number of hours you work.

00:59:45.780 | And then you say, this is implicitly my hourly rate.

00:59:49.060 | And the idea is in a professional context.

00:59:51.180 | When you're considering whether to do a particular annoying task,

00:59:56.780 | I'm going to format a presentation or

01:00:01.180 | whatever, fly a better flight that's going to save me time

01:00:05.020 | that's more expensive or something like this.

01:00:06.380 | You say, well, how much would it cost for me to hire someone?

01:00:09.780 | How much would it cost for me to take the better flight and then say,

01:00:12.700 | is that more or less than what it would cost me in terms of my hourly rate?

01:00:19.220 | So if my hourly rate is five hundred dollars

01:00:21.980 | and it would take me three hours to do this annoying task,

01:00:24.820 | but I could hire someone for three hundred bucks to do it.

01:00:26.940 | You should hire someone for three hundred bucks

01:00:28.740 | because you're not out three hundred bucks, you're actually saving twelve hundred dollars.

01:00:31.940 | Like that's that's the mentality.

01:00:34.140 | It's a hack or heuristic that people sometimes use in work.

01:00:37.380 | John is asking about trying to use this with chores outside of work.

01:00:40.860 | And he says, ah, the analogy kind of breaks down because it's not as if

01:00:44.660 | the three hours I spend doing yard work is three hours.

01:00:48.940 | I could be earning fifteen hundred dollars working because if I wasn't doing

01:00:52.060 | the yard work on Saturday, I wouldn't be working anyways.

01:00:54.180 | And I agree with that, John.

01:00:56.140 | I don't think the monetary framework is necessarily what you want to use

01:01:01.500 | for evaluating the worth of activities outside of work,

01:01:05.780 | at least in a very specific way.

01:01:08.540 | There is another way where I think money does matter here,

01:01:10.260 | but let's put that aside for now.

01:01:12.020 | Instead, the cost I want you to think about is in

01:01:14.940 | footprint on your schedule and stress.

01:01:19.020 | And so you look at how big of a footprint on my schedule

01:01:23.780 | is this particular household thing going to have if it's highly disruptive.

01:01:27.700 | It eats up the the core of the weekend day

01:01:31.420 | that you otherwise as a family could be doing lots of other things.

01:01:33.740 | That's a heavy cost.

01:01:35.300 | If it's something that's very stressful for you, that's also a heavy cost.

01:01:39.380 | This was like me doing my own taxes.

01:01:42.380 | My issue is not that I am not

01:01:47.020 | quantitative or mathematical enough to understand taxes.

01:01:50.020 | The issue is I'm too mathematical and quantitative.

01:01:52.860 | And so my mind would hone in on the inevitable ambiguities

01:01:58.660 | or inconsistencies in the process of trying to fill out these different tax forms.

01:02:02.740 | And it would drive me crazy.

01:02:04.620 | And at some point, my wife said, you're hiring someone to do the taxes

01:02:07.260 | because most people are like, it's fine.

01:02:08.940 | Like, this is probably fine.

01:02:10.700 | I know what this means.

01:02:12.180 | Fine. And I'm obsessing about, well, wait a second.

01:02:14.700 | How does this match with this?

01:02:15.940 | And is this really?

01:02:16.540 | And I'm trying to figure out the whole thing. It's my type of.

01:02:18.420 | So that's a high stress impact.

01:02:20.580 | So it's very costly to me.

01:02:22.700 | So when it comes to outsourcing or eliminating non-work obligations,

01:02:27.860 | that's the cost that you care about.

01:02:30.380 | But that has a highly disruptive footprint on your schedule.

01:02:33.020 | Outsource or eliminate if you can.

01:02:35.340 | If it has a high impact in terms of your stress level.

01:02:37.940 | Outsource or eliminate if you can.

01:02:41.300 | That's what you should be thinking about, not what your time is worth

01:02:44.420 | or your hourly rate or something like this.

01:02:47.060 | I agree that that doesn't come into it.

01:02:48.900 | All right. So money is relevant here in the sense that outsourcing can take money.

01:02:53.540 | And that's fine.

01:02:55.460 | So you also have to factor in, can I afford this?

01:02:58.060 | I do want to underscore, though, a point.

01:03:00.060 | We talked about this some in the deep dive earlier in this episode

01:03:03.580 | when I was talking with Sarah Hart Unger.

01:03:04.940 | We talked about this a little bit that.

01:03:07.180 | I think we take off the table too quickly, the idea of investing

01:03:11.820 | in elimination of disruptive schedule, footprints and overhead.

01:03:16.860 | We just take that off our list of things where it's valid to spend money on,

01:03:20.940 | even if we could and we spend that same money on other types of things.

01:03:24.340 | We're very comfortable.

01:03:25.700 | Let's say we're talking about, you know, dual income,

01:03:29.580 | middle class, coastal America or something like this.

01:03:32.060 | People are very comfortable with

01:03:33.260 | what will spend more money to have a a nicer car or, you know,

01:03:39.860 | we the environment's important.

01:03:41.540 | So we're going to have a seventy thousand dollar Tesla.

01:03:44.140 | We will spend that's fifty thousand dollars more than we need for the transportation.

01:03:47.300 | But like this isn't we think is important to us.

01:03:49.260 | And that's a good thing to spend money on.

01:03:50.940 | But if, on the other hand, it's a few hundred dollars a month

01:03:54.500 | to take out this yard work chore that just eats up your schedule

01:03:59.220 | and is annoying for your family, you say, I don't want to do that

01:04:02.900 | because technically I could do this and that feels like a waste of money,

01:04:06.340 | you know, and we have these sort of inconsistencies happening all the time.

01:04:10.460 | Well, here's an activity, you know, a kid's kind of interested in this.

01:04:12.540 | We'll spend thousands on this activity.

01:04:14.500 | But the idea that we could hire a laundry service,

01:04:18.100 | I could do the laundry technically.

01:04:20.500 | And so now I don't know, I don't want to do that.

01:04:22.060 | That's somehow a failure.

01:04:22.940 | In fact, that last one is a point that Laura Vanderkam talks about a lot

01:04:26.100 | is many more people could and should be outsourcing their laundry,

01:04:29.580 | but they don't because it's not in this list of psychologically

01:04:33.780 | appropriate things to spend money on.

01:04:35.100 | So I think we were weird and we'll spend a huge amount of money on this

01:04:38.940 | and on these things that have a cost in terms of schedule, impact or stress

01:04:42.780 | outside of work where we're very reluctant to spend money.

01:04:45.260 | And I think we should change the thinking about it.

01:04:47.420 | So I think that's one issue.

01:04:49.940 | The other issue and Sarah talked about this is people don't like giving that advice

01:04:53.300 | because anytime you talk about investing money in anything,

01:04:56.660 | there's this knee jerk response of not everyone has the money for that.

01:05:00.420 | It's true of everything.

01:05:02.340 | It doesn't mean we shouldn't give the advice,

01:05:03.540 | because for a lot of people, it could be helpful.

01:05:05.580 | So that's what I would say, John, is look for forget your hourly rate.

01:05:10.340 | What what is the cost in terms of scheduled disruption?

01:05:14.020 | What is the cost in terms of stress

01:05:16.140 | and be more willing to invest in that than you might have otherwise been

01:05:19.420 | more willing to invest in optimizing outsourcing that you otherwise might have been.

01:05:22.860 | The final thing I want to say is often the solution here is not financial.

01:05:26.780 | It's elimination.

01:05:29.860 | So you have some sort of set up in your life

01:05:34.580 | that actually you could just stop doing this.

01:05:37.980 | You could step down from this position.

01:05:41.020 | You could reconfigure the specific teams that your kids are on.

01:05:44.580 | They're like there's some things you could do

01:05:46.300 | that might have a huge win in terms of schedule, input or stress.

01:05:50.180 | And you don't because it's well, there's some some advantage to this

01:05:53.900 | or someone might be disappointed.

01:05:55.460 | And we don't take elimination seriously enough.

01:05:58.260 | But often elimination is is possible and people forget about it two weeks later.

01:06:03.940 | No one cares, but you've had this big gain as well.

01:06:05.660 | So so outsourcing is one way to get rid of these high cost out of work activities.

01:06:11.700 | Elimination is the other.

01:06:12.780 | And they're both things that we don't think enough about.

01:06:15.940 | And so I'm glad you brought this up, John, because I think it's

01:06:19.660 | I think these are both strategies that we're thinking about

01:06:22.300 | organizing life outside of work, we should all think about more.

01:06:24.420 | I love eliminating things.

01:06:28.020 | My wife actually has to push back on that, but why don't we just stop doing it?

01:06:31.500 | Why don't we just start?

01:06:32.540 | Why don't we just cancel this? Why don't we?

01:06:34.380 | Why don't we do nothing?

01:06:35.380 | And it's a little more complicated than that.

01:06:37.740 | Like kids should be doing things.

01:06:40.420 | Yeah.

01:06:41.260 | But like some sports leagues make your schedule impossible.

01:06:45.260 | And this sports league, they're still playing the sport,

01:06:47.860 | but it's like way more reasonable.

01:06:49.740 | Like, you know, sometimes those type of things.

01:06:51.980 | Having kids play hockey is pretty tough because the ice time is always so like

01:06:54.820 | limited, it's late at night.

01:06:56.260 | It's late at night or early.

01:06:57.420 | Yeah. Yeah.

01:06:58.220 | Hockey, hockey can be a rough one.

01:07:00.780 | That's the one advantage of baseball.

01:07:03.140 | Like it can't be played early in the morning, can't be played late at night.

01:07:05.820 | So at least, you know, unfortunately, it takes a very long time to play.

01:07:08.860 | Well, it's got soccer, too.

01:07:13.220 | Soccer is pretty good.

01:07:14.100 | Yeah, there's no early morning fields.

01:07:17.020 | Rowing is bad.

01:07:18.580 | A lot of early morning.

01:07:20.180 | All right. Next question is from Ruby, a 35 year old banker from London.

01:07:23.820 | I'm taking a few weeks off to recover from burnout

01:07:26.820 | due to a period where my responsibilities kept increasing.

01:07:29.900 | What would you recommend to do to make the most of my time away from work?

01:07:33.340 | So, Ruby, the productivity perspective here.

01:07:37.540 | Is that if all you do during your time off

01:07:40.620 | is recharge and then just go back into this environment

01:07:45.260 | where you were before, give it six months, you'll be back in the same place.

01:07:48.860 | What is important here, this is what I would do with my time off, is figure out

01:07:54.300 | what is the productivity framework I'm going to put in place

01:07:59.460 | so that I have clarity into all of the obligations entering my world.

01:08:03.820 | None of it is being held only in my mind.

01:08:05.980 | I am configuring.

01:08:06.980 | I can see what it is.

01:08:08.340 | What type of work do I have at different different parts?

01:08:10.940 | This is the traditional facing the productivity dragon.

01:08:13.340 | And then I control my time on different time scales.

01:08:16.100 | Here's what I'm doing today.

01:08:17.860 | Here's what I'm doing this week.

01:08:18.580 | Here's how these projects fit.

01:08:21.060 | Now, here's the here's the goal here.

01:08:23.420 | Not that with this productivity framework,

01:08:26.940 | you can optimize your time enough that the the workload

01:08:30.660 | that burnt you out before you can now handle.

01:08:32.380 | That's not the goal.

01:08:33.820 | The goal instead is clarity.

01:08:36.340 | Clarity about what's on your plate.

01:08:39.140 | Clarity about what is reasonable to be on your plate.

01:08:43.100 | Clarity about proposing this, this and this makes sense.

01:08:48.540 | This, this and this is too much.

01:08:51.140 | The productivity system, a good productivity system

01:08:53.980 | can give you the confidence you need to advocate for yourself.

01:08:57.420 | Now, again, this, I think, is one of the.

01:09:01.140 | One of the insidious side effects.

01:09:04.060 | Of rejecting productivity because you associate it

01:09:07.100 | with this optimization over a culture is that, ironically,

01:09:10.340 | it is exactly what your employer wants you to do.

01:09:13.020 | We think about it.

01:09:13.700 | Oh, no, the productivity is somehow part of this base

01:09:15.820 | superstructure, sort of early 20th century Marxist approach

01:09:19.820 | of of trying to exploit more labor from the from the the

01:09:24.380 | the proletariat or something like this.

01:09:26.220 | Right. So we have this sort of grad school, blah, blah, blah

01:09:28.740 | approach to it, actually.

01:09:30.900 | Knowing what you're doing.

01:09:34.060 | Knowing what's on your plate.

01:09:35.740 | Having an extreme clarity about exactly your workplace.

01:09:39.420 | Seeing the matrix of the obligations being thrown at you with clarity.

01:09:43.980 | That's actually what in a lot of these overwhelmed situations,

01:09:47.180 | your employer won't want.

01:09:48.300 | Because it means you can come back and say, I know this is crazy.

01:09:51.580 | We need to cut this in half.

01:09:53.180 | Let me tell you why.

01:09:54.140 | You know, I have my arms around everything and I'm very careful.

01:09:57.020 | I run my schedule very careful and I do very good work.

01:09:59.260 | This is 50 percent too much.

01:10:01.700 | And I have confidence in that conviction.

01:10:03.700 | If you instead fall back into haphazard busyness

01:10:07.380 | because you're trying to reject the the hustle culture, et cetera,

01:10:10.900 | you are at the mercy of these employers.

01:10:14.500 | It's just all stuff.

01:10:15.620 | We're all busy.

01:10:16.300 | You got a bunch of stuff.

01:10:17.220 | Why aren't you doing work?

01:10:18.060 | Why are you complaining?

01:10:19.660 | You're either going to burn yourself out again and again

01:10:21.380 | or give them an excuse to fire you.

01:10:24.220 | So productivity can actually be what you need to prevent

01:10:28.260 | and push back against overload, right?

01:10:30.580 | So this is, again, the whole autonomy frame for productivity

01:10:34.180 | is having your arms around your obligations is what allows you

01:10:36.980 | to do so many different things.

01:10:38.220 | And this is one of the things you can do is it allows you to stand up.

01:10:41.060 | It allows you to stand up and say with a clear voice and conviction,

01:10:44.580 | enough, this is too much.

01:10:47.140 | I know it's too much.

01:10:49.180 | You know that I know that now this is my this is what's reasonable.

01:10:53.780 | And this is what I'm going to do.

01:10:55.940 | And when people know that you have your act together

01:10:59.180 | when it comes to these sort of productivity systems,

01:11:01.220 | it's much harder for them to push back against that.

01:11:03.580 | So that's what I would say.

01:11:04.340 | Rest and recharge, but also get your systems fired up

01:11:07.620 | so that when you come back, you're no longer at the mercy of like

01:11:09.980 | whatever junk your employer is just throwing at you

01:11:11.860 | and hoping you won't notice that it's completely unreasonable.

01:11:14.580 | Yeah, I like what you said at the end of the deep dive, too,

01:11:17.540 | about having options.

01:11:19.060 | Yeah. Yeah.

01:11:19.940 | Productivity is about that's the autonomy frame.

01:11:21.980 | Yeah. If you don't have control over all the different obligations

01:11:25.540 | orbiting you in your professional life, you are at the mercy of whim,

01:11:30.580 | your boss's mood, your personality, what you can get away with.

01:11:34.340 | And basically, we'll probably just be stressed out.

01:11:36.900 | I mean, or you could be OK.

01:11:37.860 | Like maybe you just whatever become kind of misanthropic.

01:11:40.420 | And and resentful and people don't want to deal with it.

01:11:44.100 | And you kind of find a way to make it work.

01:11:45.540 | But it's all just you're drifting towards some sort of steady state.

01:11:48.660 | That's probably going to be a non-optimal equilibrium.

01:11:51.300 | But when you know everything that's going on,

01:11:53.140 | you can stand back and say this, this and this is the problem.

01:11:56.100 | And if I move this, I can't do those.

01:11:58.900 | I got to take this off my plate.

01:12:00.180 | And no, no, no. Of course, no.

01:12:01.540 | Of course, no. Of course, no. Yes, I'll do this.

01:12:03.060 | Here's I mean, it just makes all the difference.

01:12:05.060 | You can do so much if you have a good productivity system

01:12:07.540 | and you can't do almost anything without it.

01:12:09.380 | I mean, you're just left with like I'm burnt out or,

01:12:12.900 | you know, quitting the workforce and hoping that people subscribe to my sub stack.

01:12:18.020 | There's got to be something in between those two.

01:12:19.620 | All right. Let's keep rolling.

01:12:22.180 | What do we have next?

01:12:22.820 | All right. Next question's from Rito, 23 year old from India.

01:12:27.300 | I have too many interests in my life.

01:12:29.540 | I have so many choices.

01:12:30.740 | It's crippling and I end up doing nothing.

01:12:32.660 | My question is, how do I learn to prioritize?

01:12:36.180 | So, Rito, I included this question because it helps show

01:12:39.860 | that the productivity perspective is also relevant to your life outside of work.

01:12:45.060 | It's also relevant to your leisure life.

01:12:47.940 | So haphazard busyness can cripple you like it's happening here

01:12:52.820 | in your leisure life in the same way that it can in your professional life.

01:12:56.020 | Especially like Rito, you're young, you're 23 years old.

01:12:58.420 | You have all this time and all this potential.

01:13:00.820 | And there's so many different things you can do that you bounce

01:13:03.140 | from one thing to another and nothing's making progress.

01:13:05.940 | Your brain will eventually stop trying to generate motivation.

01:13:10.420 | I've written about this before, Rito.

01:13:12.900 | What's really happening here, if you want my opinion,

01:13:15.060 | is that our brain is very good at evaluating potential plans.

01:13:19.860 | Is this objective worth it?

01:13:21.380 | And do I have reason to believe this plan is going to work?

01:13:24.260 | Our brain asks and answers those two questions all the time.

01:13:28.420 | We're very good at that.

01:13:29.620 | This is something that is bred into our Paleolithic path.

01:13:32.900 | Those mechanisms, when it doesn't trust you really know what you're doing,

01:13:36.660 | when it doesn't trust that there's a plan here that makes sense,

01:13:39.140 | that's going to lead to some sort of mastery or a highly fulfilling outcome.

01:13:43.700 | It says, nope.

01:13:44.740 | And what does it feel like when your plan evaluation apparatus

01:13:49.140 | in your brain says, no, it feels like procrastination?

01:13:51.300 | You can't summon motivation because there is a system in our brain

01:13:55.780 | that generates the feelings of motivation towards action.

01:13:58.340 | It has to believe what you're doing.

01:14:00.020 | So if your leisure life is crippled with or ridden with haphazard busyness,

01:14:05.220 | it's like, I'm not going to just start this whatever,

01:14:08.340 | buy a video camera to become the next Martin Scorsese,

01:14:11.620 | because you don't know what you're doing here.

01:14:12.580 | There's no plan here.

01:14:13.220 | This is one of like 15 different things you have.

01:14:15.220 | That is why you have this feeling of I can't do anything.

01:14:17.540 | I feel crippled.

01:14:18.260 | It's because it's too haphazard.

01:14:19.540 | It's too busy.

01:14:20.180 | So you can bring a productivity framework into your leisure life

01:14:23.460 | to get your arms around this, to start to be selective,

01:14:27.300 | to start to be intentional about what you spend your time on.

01:14:30.180 | And in doing so, you're going to end up in a much better place.

01:14:33.780 | So let me give you a particular suggestion here, Rito, just to plant a seed.

01:14:37.380 | So one way you might structure more intentionally your life outside of work

01:14:42.900 | would be a four part focus.

01:14:45.540 | I've talked about this before.

01:14:46.580 | Three routines and one project in one time.

01:14:50.260 | So the three routines that just figure out how to have going in the background

01:14:53.700 | would probably be some sort of fitness health routine.

01:14:56.820 | Uh, this is eating and exercise.

01:14:59.220 | This is foundational.

01:15:00.340 | Let's get that going.

01:15:01.460 | Background, some sort of reading routine.

01:15:05.220 | I'm reading on a regular basis.

01:15:06.740 | I'm moving away from just distraction.

01:15:08.420 | My mind is learning how to actually remain focused on complex thoughts.

01:15:13.860 | You're going to develop as a human being.

01:15:15.540 | You're going to develop as a, as a thinker.

01:15:17.380 | Uh, we did a podcast episode a few weeks ago on how to become a reader.

01:15:22.180 | It was called the joys of the reading life.

01:15:24.180 | It's probably like two 38.

01:15:26.820 | Yeah.

01:15:27.140 | Yeah.

01:15:27.460 | Episode two 38.

01:15:28.500 | So go back and watch that.

01:15:29.940 | Your third routine I would say to put in place foundationally is some sort of community routine.

01:15:33.540 | These things you do on a regular basis that keep you connected and serving your friends,

01:15:38.180 | your family, other people in the communities that you're involved with.

01:15:40.900 | Get background routines for those three things going.

01:15:44.420 | That's just foundational.

01:15:45.540 | You can tweak those, but you should always on a regular basis.

01:15:47.780 | Those things are just woven into the fabric of your life.

01:15:50.100 | Okay.

01:15:50.340 | And then one major project.

01:15:53.860 | And then do that major project until you get to a great milestone that you can swap in

01:15:56.740 | another major project.

01:15:57.700 | So just one major project at a time, spend six months on it, spend a year on it.

01:16:02.820 | I don't really care.

01:16:03.700 | You're young.

01:16:04.180 | You're 23.

01:16:05.300 | You have more time than you think.

01:16:06.980 | So this is just one particular suggestions of how you might establish a more intentional

01:16:11.620 | approach to your leisure life, but, but having routines for the things that are foundational

01:16:16.020 | to a life well live and then pursuing one thing at a time until a good point, giving

01:16:21.620 | that your full attention.

01:16:23.140 | That for example, works really well.

01:16:24.660 | And it's the type of thing that you're not going to get to until you get more intentional

01:16:29.220 | about your time.

01:16:29.860 | All right.

01:16:32.260 | We're making progress here.

01:16:33.060 | What do we got next, Jesse?

01:16:34.020 | I like this question.

01:16:35.620 | Next question is from Jonas, a 32 year old research analyst.

01:16:40.340 | I'm trying to decide whether a ditch postpone a side hustle idea in order not to overwhelm

01:16:45.060 | myself versus adopting a slow part productivity mindset and see how progress compounds over

01:16:52.100 | time.

01:16:53.140 | So Jonas, what you need is extreme clarity, and this is where the productivity perspective

01:16:57.060 | is going to help you.

01:16:57.860 | You have to get your arms around the job that's making you feel busy right now.

01:17:04.180 | Capture, configure, control, see where you can get that.

01:17:07.460 | You reduce the stress, take control of your time, begin with the configure step to be

01:17:12.580 | more aggressive about workload management.

01:17:15.060 | See where you can get that line in a place that's allowing you to do what you need to

01:17:18.020 | do without feeling overwhelmed.

01:17:19.380 | And then step back and say, where would the side hustle fit?

01:17:24.340 | And answer that question honestly.

01:17:26.820 | And now, Jonas, knowing what I know about you, because in your elaboration, you talked

01:17:31.220 | a little bit more about your busyness and you have a lot of going, a lot of things going

01:17:34.100 | on with your family and young kids.

01:17:35.380 | When you step back, you might say, there is not time for me to execute a reasonable plan

01:17:41.860 | for the side hustle.

01:17:42.740 | And you know what?

01:17:43.220 | That's fine.

01:17:43.860 | Don't do the side hustle.

01:17:44.820 | But you're going to get that answer with clarity.

01:17:47.300 | Or after you capture, configure, control, you might really tame your job.

01:17:50.900 | And so you know what, I could work on this two days a week, three hours in the morning.

01:17:55.140 | It's my remote work days.

01:17:56.340 | Nothing really gets going until noon or whatever.

01:18:00.020 | And this would allow me and here's my plan.

01:18:02.740 | And I could actually make pretty good progress on this.

01:18:04.740 | And then you might find like, OK, now I see exactly where I'm going to work on this.

01:18:07.620 | And I'm looking at exactly where I'm going to work on this.

01:18:09.300 | And this is enough time.

01:18:10.180 | And this is worth it enough to me.

01:18:12.020 | Let's do it.

01:18:12.660 | But you cannot get to these answers with confidence unless you really know what's

01:18:16.340 | going on with your current work obligations.

01:18:19.220 | And so that's what I want you to do.

01:18:20.420 | Pull out, capture, configure, control until you are a master of your job.

01:18:26.980 | Then work through what are the reasonable scenarios for me to make progress on the

01:18:31.540 | side hustle and evaluate those.

01:18:33.460 | Will it work?

01:18:34.100 | And is it worth it?

01:18:36.180 | Is where the achievement the side hustle would generate?

01:18:40.100 | Is it worth it for what I would have to do?

01:18:42.180 | And be very honest with you, answer it.

01:18:43.700 | And especially at this stage of life, you have young kids at home.

01:18:46.260 | It's completely fine for your answer there.

01:18:47.940 | Just be no, it's not worth it.

01:18:50.340 | I've controlled my job.

01:18:51.380 | I like having this flexibility.

01:18:52.820 | I want to just use this to do more things in my family or a hobby.

01:18:57.060 | I think that's a completely reasonable solution as well.

01:18:59.300 | But you don't get those options until you know what's going on.

01:19:01.780 | You're just haphazardly busy.

01:19:03.060 | Good luck.

01:19:03.540 | You're just going to start doing the side hustle that in a way that you don't have

01:19:07.140 | time for that's going to cause stress.

01:19:08.580 | And you're going to let it peter out.

01:19:10.100 | So, again, the productivity perspective here says once you have control, you get

01:19:12.820 | autonomy, autonomy gives you options.

01:19:14.980 | I actually thought when I first read the question, I thought that he had already

01:19:18.980 | started the side hustle and was working on it for a while.

01:19:22.020 | And then--

01:19:22.820 | You know, it's a little hard to tell.

01:19:23.940 | I read the longer one.

01:19:25.940 | He talked a lot about the various things that he was worried about, like his

01:19:30.500 | busyness.

01:19:30.980 | And there definitely was a sense of haphazard busyness.

01:19:33.620 | Yeah, but it was a little unclear if he had started and he was feeling

01:19:37.060 | overwhelmed by it already.

01:19:38.180 | Or if he was pretty sure that if I just started this, I'd feel overwhelmed.

01:19:41.860 | I mean, the slow productivity approach, it can work with a side hustle, but you

01:19:46.820 | really got to evaluate it.

01:19:47.780 | Right.

01:19:47.940 | So you could say, like, at some point it's too slow.

01:19:50.180 | If it's I'm going to work once a month, I'm going to have an hour session like

01:19:52.900 | that's too slow.

01:19:53.700 | Yeah.

01:19:54.260 | I mean, to me, slow productivity also involves obsessing over quality.

01:19:58.660 | It also involves the reduction of things.

01:20:00.980 | You can give more attention to something.

01:20:02.660 | It's not just about you can fit another thing into your schedule, because if you

01:20:06.820 | stretch it out long enough, you can find little pockets of time to make progress.

01:20:10.180 | I mean, slow productivity is it's a lot of it's about simplification.

01:20:13.300 | So it can take more of your attention.

01:20:16.900 | Yeah.

01:20:17.300 | Obsession over quality so that you can really come at it again and again.

01:20:21.940 | I think just trying to spread something out.

01:20:23.780 | So you touch it here and there.

01:20:25.460 | It's not really a slow, productive approach.

01:20:27.060 | I think it's just a fragmented approach.

01:20:29.300 | Yeah, yeah.

01:20:30.660 | All right.

01:20:31.620 | Let's try to fit in one more question here.

01:20:33.540 | All right.

01:20:34.340 | Next question is from Andrew, 51 year old biology professor.

01:20:38.500 | I'm a professor because research production is not a shared goal.

01:20:42.340 | I have difficulty getting my colleagues to think creatively about system changes,

01:20:46.260 | even if we might benefit from it all.

01:20:47.940 | It's always easier to do what is easiest in the immediate moment.

01:20:51.620 | Other folks productivity be damned.

01:20:53.620 | What should I do?

01:20:54.500 | Well, I included this question in part just because I like professor questions,

01:20:58.180 | but it's another good example for us to apply the productivity perspective.

01:21:04.500 | So what Andrew's talking about is the type of collaboration systems I detail and motivate

01:21:09.700 | in my book, A World Without Email, where I talk about in the knowledge work context.

01:21:14.500 | There's many informal collaboration styles that are built mainly around haphazard back

01:21:20.820 | and forth messaging that are actually really unproductive for everyone involved in the long

01:21:25.220 | term, even though in the moment, it's easier just to shoot off a quick email than it is

01:21:29.940 | to actually implement some sort of collaboration system, like whatever.

01:21:33.460 | There's a shared document where the thoughts go.

01:21:35.380 | And on Monday night, I review that.

01:21:37.620 | And then I put the notes using track changes.

01:21:39.940 | And you have till Wednesday, close a business to react to them.

01:21:42.260 | And then we have a standing meeting on Thursday morning.

01:21:44.660 | Those type of systems get you away from constant back and forth messaging, but they're a little

01:21:49.220 | bit more work in the moment.

01:21:50.500 | Andrew is saying, I can't get fellow professors to do this because we're not all working

01:21:55.060 | towards the shared same goal.

01:21:56.500 | It's not everyone in my department is working on getting this new product out.

01:22:00.340 | We're each working on our own thing.

01:22:02.340 | And so we're not that interested in being collectively focused on improving how we collaborate.

01:22:09.380 | So, Andrew, my productivity perspective here is you have to shift the scope that you're

01:22:16.980 | thinking about productivity.

01:22:18.100 | If you are a professor at a research institution, you need to think about yourself as a standalone

01:22:27.460 | business and the other professors in your department and other professors that you interact

01:22:32.100 | with and other departments, you know, the HR department, the whatever, like other, whatever

01:22:38.340 | you would call them, groups within university, like their own businesses with which you have

01:22:41.780 | various professional relationships.

01:22:43.940 | You're Ford and you work with Firestone tires.

01:22:49.460 | They're two separate businesses, but you know, you guys have a contract and a relationship

01:22:54.020 | to get the tires for your car manufacturing plant, but you're not the same company.

01:22:57.940 | So you have to think of yourself almost as like a standalone silo.

01:23:01.060 | So when you're thinking about systems internally is where you're really trying to get a handle

01:23:05.060 | on what is my work?

01:23:06.980 | What do I work on?

01:23:07.780 | What are my quotas?

01:23:08.660 | What do I not do?

01:23:09.620 | When do I get this work done?

01:23:10.820 | How much time do I have available?

01:23:12.340 | How do I want to use this time?

01:23:13.700 | And you're keeping track of all that and have all your complex systems.

01:23:16.740 | Then when you're interacting with the rest of the world, it's well, you have sort of

01:23:19.620 | interfaces with interacting with these other standalone entities.

01:23:23.620 | And I don't know, they're bothering you with emails.

01:23:26.260 | You could just do what you need to do with that.

01:23:28.420 | Just process centric emailing might work there where you never formally develop a new

01:23:32.980 | collaboration system with someone else.

01:23:35.940 | You just sort of tell them in your response.

01:23:37.460 | Yeah, great.

01:23:38.500 | We should think about this.

01:23:39.380 | Put any thoughts you have in this Google doc that I started.

01:23:43.540 | I will review it if I have any questions because you're a professor.

01:23:47.860 | I know you have clearly posted office hours.

01:23:50.740 | I will actually just come to your office hours next week and we'll talk about it.

01:23:55.140 | You just sort of put a process into the communication and there it is.

01:23:58.820 | You're not calling it a process.

01:24:00.020 | You're not negotiating about it.

01:24:01.060 | You're just saying it.

01:24:02.180 | Certain types of work like this is very disruptive.

01:24:05.460 | This person just constantly wants to email things.

01:24:08.500 | OK, I'm not doing that.

01:24:10.100 | I'm not going to work on that person.

01:24:11.860 | I'm going to leave that committee.

01:24:12.740 | You have all this autonomy.

01:24:13.700 | This is like a company saying we're going to get out of selling etsels because there's

01:24:17.540 | not a lot of profit there.

01:24:18.420 | We're going to focus more on, you know, selling Ford focuses or whatever.

01:24:23.060 | You think of yourself like a standalone business that interfaces with other organizations and

01:24:28.020 | you do your best to keep those interfaces as non-disruptive as possible.

01:24:31.860 | So you need to be more ruthless, Andrew.

01:24:34.420 | That's, I guess, what I would say.

01:24:35.540 | Your department is not your team members.

01:24:39.620 | They're your colleagues.

01:24:40.740 | You're collegial to them.

01:24:41.700 | You enjoy them.

01:24:42.260 | But you're all your own standalone entities trying to figure out how to exist in the same

01:24:48.660 | academic sphere while still accomplishing your internal objectives.

01:24:52.580 | So I don't know, maybe it maybe I'm being a little bit Darwinian there, but I think

01:24:58.020 | it's the best academia really is.

01:24:59.620 | It's entrepreneurial.

01:25:00.980 | Yeah, you're trying to produce original research.

01:25:03.620 | That's the whole game.

01:25:04.740 | If you don't, you get fired.

01:25:05.700 | That's the whole game.

01:25:06.420 | And you work with other people.

01:25:08.340 | There's other things you have to do and service you have to do.

01:25:10.180 | But but it's just like Ford has these other things they have to do.

01:25:13.540 | But ultimately, if they're not selling cars, they're out of business.

01:25:16.100 | You kind of have to keep that in mind.

01:25:18.420 | Hey, if you like this video, I think you'll really like this one as well.

Work Less, Achieve More! - 5 Habits To End Laziness, Phone Scrolling & Boredom | Cal Newport

Chapters