Tools for Better Productivity & Time Management | Dr. Adam Grant & Dr. Andrew Huberman
00:00:00.000 | I think it was E.B. White who said, "I rise in the morning torn between the desire to
00:00:07.720 | enjoy the world and the desire to improve the world, and this makes it difficult to
00:00:11.200 | plan the day."
00:00:12.200 | And I feel that every day.
00:00:14.800 | I think, I mean, I even, I felt it this morning.
00:00:17.960 | I was like, "Okay, it's time to leave to come to the Huberman podcast."
00:00:22.560 | I'm like, "Wait, but I didn't hit my minimum sunlight viewing.
00:00:27.240 | What do I do?
00:00:28.600 | Do I show up on time for you or do I meet your criteria?"
00:00:33.440 | The explanation, "I was getting my morning sunlight and therefore I'm X number of minutes
00:00:37.080 | or even hours late," would have been completely fine.
00:00:40.040 | I figured as much.
00:00:41.040 | Yes, absolutely.
00:00:42.040 | That's a built-in acceptable excuse with you.
00:00:44.520 | I think, I mean, I think everybody experiences a version of this, and it's definitely gotten
00:00:49.600 | worse with social media and with smartphones.
00:00:53.320 | I think, so one of the most startling data points for me was Gloria Mark first put this
00:00:58.600 | on my radar.
00:01:00.280 | Before COVID, the average person was checking email 72 times a day.
00:01:05.680 | How do you ever concentrate for more than a couple of minutes if you're self-interrupting
00:01:09.420 | that often?
00:01:10.420 | You can't.
00:01:11.420 | Brigitte Schulte has a great term for this.
00:01:13.780 | She calls it time confetti.
00:01:15.820 | And she says, "We're taking these meaningful blocks of time and we're slicing them up into
00:01:19.600 | these tiny little dots of confetti.
00:01:22.600 | And not only can we not accomplish anything, we're also eroding our own sense of joy."
00:01:29.560 | Because it's really hard to enjoy the 30-second blip of time that you get on a task.
00:01:36.000 | And I think we know a lot more about the existence of these problems than how to solve them.
00:01:40.600 | But one thing we do know is blocking out uninterrupted time is meaningful.
00:01:45.800 | There's a great Leslie Perlow experiment where she takes engineers and she has them – she
00:01:50.840 | sets a quiet time policy.
00:01:52.620 | No interruptions Tuesday, Thursday, Friday before noon.
00:01:56.120 | 65% above average productivity.
00:01:58.600 | Could you repeat the protocol again?
00:02:01.200 | Yeah.
00:02:02.200 | So quiet time, there are a couple of iterations of it, but I think the most effective one
00:02:04.960 | was Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, no meetings, no interruptions, no Slack, no emails before
00:02:10.520 | noon.
00:02:11.920 | And during those periods of no interruptions, one could tend to whatever their primary purpose
00:02:17.220 | is at work.
00:02:18.220 | Yeah.
00:02:19.220 | So for me, it might be podcasting.
00:02:20.220 | Obviously, I don't have my phone in here, never do.
00:02:23.480 | But it doesn't mean no interaction with anyone else.
00:02:26.440 | It just means focusing on the major task.
00:02:28.800 | The task, exactly.
00:02:29.800 | And you come in with a clear sense of priority and purpose.
00:02:32.800 | And I don't think there's anything magical about Tuesday, Thursday, Friday before noon.
00:02:35.920 | It's just the idea of setting a boundary and collectively committing to it that seems
00:02:39.920 | to be important.
00:02:41.880 | And when I think about this, I'd be really curious about your take on chronotypes here.
00:02:48.680 | Because I think one thing I've learned in the last couple of years is that if you're
00:02:52.000 | a morning person, you do your best analytical and creative thinking in the morning.
00:02:56.500 | And so the quiet time block would work very well for me as a morning person.
00:03:00.320 | If you're a night owl, you probably want that block in the late afternoon.
00:03:04.480 | And I was encouraged, there was some evidence during COVID that people have their best meetings
00:03:09.120 | right after lunch.
00:03:10.920 | That they're something like 30% less likely to multitask in an after-lunch meeting.
00:03:15.720 | And I guess, you know, you could probably unpack the food coma, you know, getting re-energized
00:03:23.160 | by other people.
00:03:24.160 | But it's led me to wonder if we should all be protecting the first few hours and the
00:03:28.400 | last few hours of the day for deep work.
00:03:30.680 | And then doing our core meetings and interactions and kind of off-task activities in the middle.
00:03:35.600 | What do you think about that as a sequence?
00:03:37.280 | Yeah, well, I have a lot of questions about this for you.
00:03:39.720 | But I love that sequence.
00:03:41.880 | It certainly fits with my natural rhythms.
00:03:44.800 | I think there's ample evidence to support the fact that provided one is sleeping well
00:03:49.280 | at night and is on a more or less a standard schedule.
00:03:51.520 | When I say standard, I mean going to bed somewhere between, let's say, 9.30 and 11.30 p.m.,
00:03:56.720 | waking up sometime between, let's say, 6 a.m. and 8 a.m., maybe 5.30 to 7.30, something
00:04:04.260 | like that.
00:04:05.260 | That's a highly unusual night out or super early bird.
00:04:10.720 | For people that are following that sort of schedule, the first, let's just say from zero
00:04:15.460 | to eight hours after waking, there tends to be a fairly robust increase in all the catecholamines,
00:04:23.200 | so dopamine, norepinephrine, epinephrine, which generally, okay, generally speaking,
00:04:27.420 | lead to increases in alertness, attention, and focus that are great for analytic work,
00:04:33.960 | for implementation of strategies that you already understand, and you need to churn
00:04:38.080 | through a lot of stuff.
00:04:41.340 | And of course, there's a big increase in the morning, especially if you view morning sunlight,
00:04:45.320 | a healthy increase, I should say, in cortisol.
00:04:47.540 | Cortisol is not bad, folks.
00:04:48.960 | You want cortisol, but you want that peak early in the day.
00:04:50.920 | We know that.
00:04:51.920 | Okay, so for most people, it seems, at least my understanding is that that period of time,
00:04:59.120 | zero to eight hours after waking or so, is best devoted to the "most critical tasks,"
00:05:06.780 | but one of the common problems is that people take that ability to implement a known strategy
00:05:12.320 | and they start battering back all the emails.
00:05:16.160 | Or talking to all, by the way, talking to coworkers is great, and it's often required,
00:05:20.640 | but the question is whether or not it's productive conversation or whether or not it's just conversation.
00:05:25.700 | And we tend to have a lot of energy early in the day, and I'm obsessed with the idea
00:05:28.680 | of neural energy as opposed to just caloric energy.
00:05:31.880 | So there we're talking about neural energy.
00:05:33.380 | And then post-lunch, so really, as we get to sort of nine to 17 hours after waking,
00:05:40.680 | there is a dip in autonomic arousal that during the middle of the day, that postprandial dip,
00:05:44.680 | those are post-lunch sleepiness, that can be partially offset by delaying your morning
00:05:48.960 | caffeine a bit if you have the afternoon crash.
00:05:51.120 | But it's interesting that you know that more productive meetings and less task switching
00:05:55.800 | and distraction occurred in meeting set after lunch, because that makes me think that perhaps
00:06:02.040 | being a little bit less alert is going to lend itself to more focus.
00:06:08.080 | And indeed, that's the sort of optimal state, relaxed but focused, you're not sleepy, but
00:06:14.520 | you also don't have so much intrinsic energy that you're tending to a bunch of things,
00:06:18.640 | because I think a lot of people do feel that way.
00:06:20.720 | I mean, I'm drinking double espresso right now, late morning, and I can sit still, but
00:06:29.720 | I think certain Zoom meetings, how do I say this?
00:06:32.320 | I don't want to offend any of my colleagues.
00:06:33.600 | I mean, they are boring enough.
00:06:35.880 | They are not content rich enough to grab all my attention.
00:06:39.640 | And nowadays, of course, there are multiple screens.
00:06:41.280 | Typically, I've got two phones and a computer, and you have to really spend some work to
00:06:45.240 | flip over those phones while I'm on a Zoom and things like that.
00:06:47.800 | I'm sorry, what were you saying?
00:06:48.800 | That was my mistake.
00:06:49.800 | So it's maybe the reduction in autonomic arousal that supports what you just described, but
00:06:55.400 | I don't know.
00:06:57.000 | My thinking, or my understanding rather, was that creative work and kind of brainstorming
00:07:03.400 | was best accomplished in the late afternoon.
00:07:07.200 | I've noticed when lecturing, I'd be curious what your experience is with in university
00:07:11.680 | lectures when I held courses in the evening, I used to like to hold my courses 5 to 7 PM
00:07:17.640 | or even 7 to 9.30 PM when I was teaching undergraduates, that people were much looser and more relaxed.
00:07:24.480 | And I always thought that that might have something to do with an increase in GABA transmission
00:07:29.460 | that's known to happen in late evening, that people are just kind of more relaxed and less
00:07:34.640 | social anxiety.
00:07:35.640 | They've been around people for much of the day.
00:07:38.520 | I send back more reflections than answers.
00:07:40.560 | I don't have any firm neuroscience explanations for what you described, but there are some
00:07:43.960 | emerging theories about how that might work, and it has this 0 to 9 hours, phase one, 9
00:07:49.400 | to 17 hours, phase two, and then of course, from 17 to 24 hours, I'll call it phase three,
00:07:55.200 | you should be asleep.
00:07:56.200 | Yeah.
00:07:57.200 | Ideally.
00:07:58.200 | Well, I think there's a confound in your teaching experience, which is undergrads often sleep
00:08:03.520 | in until what, noon, or they might be up until 4 AM.
00:08:06.800 | Or at least 10 AM seems to be a typical rise time for the undergrad.
00:08:10.880 | So morning class might be too early for them to be fully awake, but there's some brand
00:08:15.440 | new evidence that at least on creativity at work, I read a series of, I think it was three
00:08:19.920 | studies recently showing that early birds actually did do more creative work in the
00:08:24.240 | morning.
00:08:25.600 | And in part, I think, again, I don't think any neuroscientist has touched the mechanisms
00:08:31.820 | on this yet, but in terms of the psychological processes, early on, there seems to be a benefit
00:08:37.400 | of the energy level, and some of that energy leads to more divergent thinking.
00:08:43.400 | And later, if you're a morning person, you might lose the ability to diverge quite as
00:08:47.440 | much.
00:08:48.440 | And so you end up in a more conventional space of thought.
00:08:51.240 | Does that track at all with your understanding of how it might play out in the brain?
00:08:54.660 | My understanding is it'd be a little bit, it would be individual, but there is something
00:08:58.960 | to these liminal states between sleep and waking.
00:09:01.880 | So maybe we can wrap a convenient bow around what I said and what you just said, which
00:09:07.080 | is that we know that in the transition states into and out of sleep, and it doesn't necessarily
00:09:14.680 | have to be within the first half hour in and out of sleep, that there seems to be more
00:09:20.000 | divergent thinking, or at least activation of neural networks that are not as constrained
00:09:25.320 | as one observes when they're in a sheer task and strategy implementation mode.