Toxic Productivity: The Truth About Getting Ahead In Life & Escaping Overload

00:00:00.000 | So that's what today's episode is going to be an interview. I did on the Jordan Jordan Harbinger

00:00:06.080 | did of me on his show, the Jordan Harbinger show, that interview. So it'll be instead of me talking

00:00:11.520 | to someone else about them, it'll be someone else talking to me about me. I thought that'd be a fun

00:00:16.880 | change of pace. So that's what we're doing for this show. And then of course, next week, we will

00:00:21.840 | be back with our sort of regularly scheduled content. So anyways, I'm always a fan of what

00:00:27.840 | Jordan does on his show. And I think you will be too. After you hear this episode. Hope you enjoy

00:00:33.440 | the interview. Well, thanks for coming back on the show, man, you are one of my favorite people

00:00:44.480 | to talk to when it comes to this type of stuff. And actually, frankly, not to torpedo my own

00:00:49.520 | compliment here, but I have to say you're actually one of the only people that I will talk to when it

00:00:53.680 | comes to this stuff about productivity, and and the like, because I think largely over the past

00:01:00.640 | few years, I have also become increasingly anti productivity. And some of that culminated with

00:01:07.040 | COVID. Although it could be 2020 hindsight, I was during COVID, I was like, fat, not a shape,

00:01:12.480 | stressed, working till 8pm. Every day. I was always on the red line. And I remember just

00:01:19.680 | playing with my two at the time two year old son and I couldn't get up off the floor because I was

00:01:23.840 | too fat and stiff from sitting in my chair. And I was like, this is this is not good. And I looked

00:01:29.040 | at like, what do I have to show for it? I didn't even have zero inbox. I wish I could say I did.

00:01:33.440 | But I didn't write I just had like, my Twitter feed was all answered or something. It was just

00:01:38.240 | like, very ungratifying. And I think you're you sort of captured that in this latest book is like

00:01:45.360 | people are fed up with doing more. Yeah, I mean, I think people aren't anti productivity really so

00:01:51.840 | much as they're anti overload. Right? Like this idea of I have too much to do, which doesn't just

00:01:57.840 | mean I'm really busy, because I have a lot of things to do. But it also means that the administrative

00:02:02.080 | overhead that comes with each of these tasks is now starting to pile up to the point where I'm

00:02:06.080 | barely actually making progress on any work, like the state of overload is uniquely deranging.

00:02:11.600 | And I think the pandemic put a lot of knowledge workers into that mode. And they personify that

00:02:17.040 | frustration by saying, well, you know, screw you productivity, right? Because I mean, you think

00:02:21.920 | about loosely, what is productivity? I don't know, like trying to do more, like trying to produce

00:02:25.200 | more, and more is the absolute less thing I need. So I mean, I think the pandemic, a lot of people

00:02:30.800 | had your same experience, which is overload got to a place where it's side effects became

00:02:36.960 | intolerable. Something has to change. The hard part was figuring out what, but I think most people

00:02:42.880 | agreed something had to change. Yeah, for me, I started with the physical, because a friend of

00:02:47.360 | mine ran a personal training company, he was like, you need a trainer. And I was like, Oh, I'm not

00:02:52.000 | going to say no to that. Because that's, that's just fact at this point, if I can't get up off

00:02:55.840 | the floor from playing Legos. So that started things, but then it was like, well, I'm feeling

00:03:01.040 | good and playing with my kid more. So maybe I will put some tasks aside. And I sort of almost

00:03:05.120 | accidentally discovered some of this where I was like, you know, now that I actually feel good,

00:03:09.920 | I don't want to spend any more time, I don't want to spend time going in the opposite direction by

00:03:14.960 | like, trying to do more busy work. And I think I'm not like you said, I'm not the only one.

00:03:19.680 | There's this growing anti productivity sentiment during the pandemic. But aside from other people

00:03:25.600 | going through it in the pandemic, at the same time, it seems like there's more happening with

00:03:31.200 | this because people are actually taking action. They're not just feeling it. They're starting to

00:03:35.120 | go to hell with this, right? That we heard of quiet quitting. It's kind of related to this.

00:03:39.760 | Oh, I know it. Yes. Yeah. I wrote a New Yorker piece about this a couple years ago that got some

00:03:43.600 | attention. So yeah, I'm pretty familiar with it. What can you tell us what that is? For those of

00:03:47.920 | us who probably don't even have never heard of this? Well, the way I see it now is quiet quitting

00:03:53.440 | was actually one of several waves of reform disruption within knowledge work that happened

00:03:59.840 | because of the pandemic. So the quiet quitting wave, this was largely Gen Z, though it did extend

00:04:05.840 | beyond there, sparked by TikTok. So it got sparked by TikTok and then spread through other social

00:04:11.040 | media. The idea was to do the bare minimum at work. So I'm not officially quitting. I'm keeping

00:04:16.800 | my job, but I'm not going to do almost anything beyond the bare minimum. And it's usually the

00:04:23.360 | sentiment was expressed in a sort of antagonistic employer employee relationship. Like I am about

00:04:28.960 | more than my labor. I'm going to stop going above and beyond. I'm just going to work the bare

00:04:34.480 | minimum. It spread really fast because of social media virality. It also kind of got squashed

00:04:40.480 | pretty fast because there were some pretty obvious, I would say, reactions to quiet quitting

00:04:45.840 | that were less than positive. But I say more generally, this was a piece I wrote a few months

00:04:51.120 | ago. This was one of multiple waves of similar disruptive sentiment that swept through different

00:04:57.440 | age groups within knowledge work after the pandemic arrived. I understand the desire to do

00:05:03.520 | something like that, but it's actually really good if you're the type of person who can put the work

00:05:08.800 | in because if all your if all your colleagues are quiet quitting and you're like, I'll take the lead

00:05:12.240 | on that project, that's that ends up working out for you. It's almost like there's this funny tweet

00:05:18.400 | I saw or whatever it was the other day. And it was like, I'm just saying that if I was a billionaire,

00:05:22.560 | I'd tell all my competitors would be competitors that the secret that the secret is getting up at

00:05:27.200 | 430 in the morning. Have you seen this? It's like, like all these, but yeah, I get up at 230 in the

00:05:31.760 | morning and I do a three mile swim. And it's like, when do you when does this guy sleep? When does

00:05:35.840 | he actually get work done? And I guess this comedian was just like, you know, we all know

00:05:40.240 | that that's not true, but it's really great. You're just torturing all the people who are on your

00:05:44.800 | coattails to far away from ever accomplishing anything. Yeah, I always imagine, you know,

00:05:51.840 | Jocko Willink, sleeping in the 10am every morning with his his auto scheduled. Yeah, that would be

00:05:58.400 | funny to find out. Yeah, yeah. Right. Going on benders every night, right? It's the benders

00:06:03.200 | aftermath and it's the weights with the chalk and the sweat and it's like, you check the metadata,

00:06:08.640 | the photo and it's like 8pm the night before. It'd be funny though, because if most knowledge

00:06:13.680 | workers were to do Jocko aftermath photos, like what would we have? It would be like

00:06:19.440 | our keyboard sort of askew or like inbox, like smoking a little bit. Right. I just slam through

00:06:26.960 | 500 slack messages in the last in the last seven minutes. But I mean, look, zooming out on it,

00:06:34.320 | zooming out on it. Like, why did we have these various waves of disruption? It was quiet quitting,

00:06:38.080 | but it wasn't just quiet quitting. We also had before that the Great Resignation, which was

00:06:43.120 | later 2020, and in the 2021, which was across all economic sectors, but had a strong subcomponent

00:06:50.080 | about knowledge workers. So basically, older knowledge workers who could left work, right?

00:06:55.520 | Like, okay, I'm going to go to part time and go to no time, I'm going to retire early. So we had

00:06:59.520 | that big go through that big sweep go through. And we had the remote work wars happened as well,

00:07:05.120 | like a lot of unrest about a lot of energy and what exactly the schedule was going to be working

00:07:10.560 | from home or from the office, or we have to go back to the office. My argument is all three of

00:07:14.720 | those are symptoms of the same underlying disease, which was people had become increasingly

00:07:20.240 | frustrated with overload and knowledge work, a problem that started in the early 2000s,

00:07:25.520 | it got worse and worse, and they got pushed over the edge in the pandemic.

00:07:28.480 | And in some sense, those were understandable, but misplaced reactions to this more fundamental issue,

00:07:34.640 | which was knowledge worked the way we were running it, especially the way we're

00:07:38.560 | thinking about productivity, knowledge work, it just broke. And so then everything went haywire.

00:07:43.040 | And we start getting all these different reform movements and people spreading virality and

00:07:47.760 | complaining and quitting all these different things all happened in response to the same problem.

00:07:51.680 | What I thought was interesting was it wasn't just the United States or West, North America,

00:07:56.000 | whatever. I see this in China, and you hear you read about it in China, I think they call it

00:08:01.840 | something like laying down. And it was basically it's a little bit different because it has to do

00:08:06.320 | with the Well, actually, it's probably quite similar to what Gen Z is doing, which is,

00:08:10.160 | all right, I'm never going to be able to afford a house, I'm never going to be able to get a job

00:08:13.680 | that pays anything close to what I need to survive, like my parents did based on, you know,

00:08:18.560 | inflation or whatever, because wage growth is completely stagnated. And so I'm just not really

00:08:24.640 | going to do anything. And so there are these people in China that were like, never, I'm never

00:08:28.320 | gonna, I'm not going to get a job at all, I'm just going to lay flat, it's called lay flat.

00:08:31.760 | And it really was a lot of the same sort of causes as we have here, I'm sure there's more to it. But

00:08:37.920 | it was like, yeah, I'm just I'm never going to be living even the same way as because in China,

00:08:42.320 | of course, they had this massive mobility from like, your grandparents were like turnip farmers.

00:08:48.000 | Hey, it's Cal, I wanted to interrupt briefly to say that if you're enjoying this video,

00:08:52.880 | then you need to check out my new book, slow productivity, the lost art of accomplishment

00:08:58.880 | without burnout. This is like the Bible for most of the ideas we talk about here in these videos,

00:09:06.240 | you can get a free excerpt at calnewport.com/slow. I know you're going to like it,

00:09:13.360 | check it out. Now let's get back to the video.

00:09:15.360 | - Your parents worked in a factory or something like that, and then bought a flat in Beijing.

00:09:21.280 | And now you're like, you grew up in this totally modernized environment. It's like,

00:09:24.640 | where's my mobility? No, you're gonna maybe stay right here, but probably go down a notch.

00:09:30.640 | - Right. And you're like, I'm already here. I mean, I'm already living in my parents flat. So

00:09:34.880 | why do I need my own? Yeah, I'm not leaving the turnip farm.

00:09:37.760 | - Right. Yeah. Yeah. Like, or that, yeah, the flat in Beijing, like, okay,

00:09:41.200 | I'm never really going to be able to afford my own one of these things. So why should I work

00:09:44.560 | 90 hours a week just to not be able to marry anyone because there's no girls because the

00:09:48.800 | one-child policy. It's like, no thanks. Your new principles of slow productivity are simple,

00:09:57.040 | but not simplistic, right? So one, do fewer things. Okay. I think a lot of people don't

00:10:01.440 | switch the podcast off just yet, right? Two, work at a natural pace. This is a hard one for me,

00:10:08.400 | and we'll get into why, probably because nobody really knows what that means. Three, though,

00:10:12.800 | was my favorite, of course, which is obsess over quality. And I wish more people would say that,

00:10:16.480 | and I wish more people especially would do that. So backing up the truck a tiny bit,

00:10:21.440 | what does productivity mean in the first place? Can we get to like a core definition of that?

00:10:25.360 | So we have a starting block. - Well, let's start with the

00:10:28.240 | broken definition. - Okay.

00:10:29.600 | - So my argument is the implicit definition that arose once the knowledge sector became

00:10:35.360 | a major sector, which is in the 20th century. The implicit definition was visible activity

00:10:42.720 | is a useful proxy for productive effort. So pseudo productivity, which substituted activity

00:10:49.520 | as like a heuristic, seeing you doing things is better than seeing you not doing things,

00:10:55.600 | that became the dominant mode for thinking about productivity and knowledge work,

00:10:59.360 | which is very different than the way we were thinking about these ideas in the industrial

00:11:04.560 | sector, the agriculture sector. I think this is important is that in the industrial sector,

00:11:08.400 | it was quantitative and clear, right? It's Model Ts produced per labor hour invested.

00:11:14.080 | Agriculture is very clear, bushels of corn per acre of land that we're cultivating, right? You

00:11:19.680 | had these numbers and these ratios, you had clearly defined production systems, and you

00:11:25.200 | could tweak that system and see what the number did. And like, oh, when we changed it this way,

00:11:29.360 | we produce more Model Ts, that's a better way to build Model Ts. Now, a lot of the issues with,

00:11:34.880 | I think, people's complaints with productivity and knowledge work is that they implicitly

00:11:39.440 | shift that mental model from industrial manufacturing, agriculture to knowledge

00:11:44.240 | work where we don't actually use it. We don't actually use ratios and knowledge work because

00:11:48.720 | there is no clear thing we produce. Different people work on different things. We work on lots

00:11:52.480 | of different things at the same time. There's also no clear production systems to tweak.

00:11:56.960 | Productivity is personal. It's up to you how you organize and manage your work. So that doesn't

00:12:01.120 | really work in knowledge work, but we pretend like that's what we're still doing. So it's why,

00:12:06.160 | when you see like a magazine writer, you know, in 2020, writing about productivity and knowledge

00:12:12.000 | work, they'll be bringing up Frederick Winslow Taylor, right? The famous scientific management

00:12:17.200 | guru with a stopwatch that was trying to make people's motions more efficient. We actually

00:12:21.280 | don't do that in knowledge work because there is no well-defined process to make more efficient.

00:12:25.440 | There is no movement to look at and say, how do we do this faster? There is no number we're trying

00:12:30.400 | to improve that we can sort of relentlessly drive people to do. So what we're doing instead

00:12:35.840 | is pseudoproductivity. Like visible activity is better than none. So let's all come to an office,

00:12:40.160 | look busy. You know, the boss is here. They can see you there. If we need to get ahead,

00:12:45.120 | let's work longer hours, show up early, stay late. And that's what we were using.

00:12:49.840 | My argument is that when it mixed with the front office IT revolution starting in the 2000s,

00:12:55.760 | so we have networks and mobile computing, that's when that definition really began to fall apart

00:13:01.040 | because email, chat, laptops, smartphones, this made it possible in a very fine-grained way to

00:13:08.480 | demonstrate activity at all times at a very small level of granularity. And that's when the wheels

00:13:14.480 | fell off the bus. So now it's constant messaging back and forth, constant meetings. It's where work

00:13:19.600 | took this turn towards the fully clearly nonproductive performative. And that's what

00:13:24.640 | things became deranging. So that's where we are. Pseudoproductivity was fine for about 50 years,

00:13:29.840 | doesn't play nice with email, does not play nice with smartphones, does not play nice with Slack.

00:13:34.720 | So work became intolerable in the 2000s. So we need a new definition. And so my definition of

00:13:41.120 | slow productivity is an approach that focuses instead on the actual long-term production of

00:13:45.040 | stuff that has value. The big stuff that matters. Are you producing good stuff at a reasonable rate

00:13:51.920 | over a long period of time? - Yeah, the busy work over the... So rushing through meaningless tasks

00:13:58.080 | instead of sitting down to do deep work, I suppose, as per one of your previous works.

00:14:02.800 | Is toxic the right word or is that just an overused word? It seems quite toxic, right? It

00:14:08.560 | seems quite like a bad path to be going down. Because when I worked in Wall Street, this is

00:14:13.200 | like 2006. So we had email, of course, we had BlackBerrys, but we had Outlook or whatever.

00:14:20.240 | It was, am I in my office? Are you shooting emails back and forth that include a partner

00:14:25.120 | so they kind of know that you're there? Am I on the phone, on a conference call, in a room with

00:14:30.240 | other people? Basically, is that billable hour ticker thing that you fill out at the end of every

00:14:35.760 | day or every project, is that thing... Are there blocks dropping in that thing or are you doing

00:14:43.200 | something that can't be measured? So with a lawyer, it was a little bit easier because you're

00:14:46.960 | measuring billable hours, but you still then would be like, "Oh, I went to the bathroom and I thought

00:14:52.720 | about this and I even talked about this while I was there, so I'm going to bill that." I mean,

00:14:55.920 | there were literal times where we'd come back chuckling because we're like, "I just billed

00:14:58.800 | that piss." It was like 60 bucks. It's ridiculous, but it was really what we were doing.

00:15:04.640 | And yeah, man, this must be so much worse now. All we had then was email and we had an electronic

00:15:11.200 | tracker that we filled out billable hours by the client. Now there's email, but there's also

00:15:16.080 | texting and there's also Slack and there's also phone calls and there's meetings, but some of

00:15:19.840 | them are virtual and they're on Zoom. Some of them are in person and some of them are... There's just

00:15:24.640 | all kinds of infinitely new ways to do nothing, really. And at least when you're a lawyer,

00:15:30.800 | you say, "We're billing for this." Right, at least you get paid.

00:15:34.400 | Yeah, there's a direct connection. I charge while I was in the bathroom, I'm going to make money by

00:15:38.080 | it. In most other jobs, the problem is you're taking that lawyer style freneticism not only

00:15:43.920 | without getting paid, but it's also directly getting in the way of the work you need to do.

00:15:49.840 | So you're like, "In the moment, staying on top of my email and Slack and meetings is

00:15:54.480 | pseudoproductivity purified and it's going to make me seem like I'm being productive,

00:15:58.240 | but I still have to write the report at some point that I prom... I still actually have to

00:16:02.800 | do the work. So I'm going to have to wake up early or do it at night." And so it's uniquely

00:16:08.000 | deranging, right? Because it's not only are you constantly in this activity, but the activity is

00:16:13.040 | preventing you from doing the actual projects that need to be done as well. So you're having

00:16:17.520 | to work even longer hours. So that's what makes it hard. If at least you said, "I'm getting paid

00:16:21.920 | for every email I send." You're like, "This is hard, but I'm racking up the dollars." But instead,

00:16:27.920 | you're having to send emails all day knowing that this is directly going to make your life worse,

00:16:33.440 | not better. And that's really difficult, I think. We had FaceTime, which was like make sure that

00:16:39.040 | you're in the office when the boss walks by. But the reason you had that, not only so that everybody

00:16:43.440 | knew you were there like punching in late, but it's because there were people there doing real

00:16:47.760 | work at late hours. But then reading your book, I was like, "Oh yeah, why are they there at 8 p.m.

00:16:54.160 | on a Sunday?" Well, because during the week, they can't get shit done because they're getting calls

00:17:00.640 | and emails. And someone's like, "Lorna, can I pull you into this real quick? We're waiting for a fax

00:17:04.880 | from Deutsche Bank." Okay, and I have to sit in the room while y'all wait for the fax because

00:17:09.520 | then we can bill the client for my hourly rate in addition to the other 20 associates who are

00:17:14.080 | sitting here. And it's like the untold thing, the untold sort of grift was, "Yeah, if there's 30 of

00:17:20.320 | us waiting for the fax, we bill like thousands of dollars per hour. But if you're over here doing

00:17:24.880 | something else for another client that could be done later, then you can't bill for that and bill

00:17:30.800 | for this." So it's like they would rather have you sit, and this is probably not unique to lawyers,

00:17:36.080 | there's probably a brand of this for every profession. They would rather have you sit in

00:17:39.600 | the meeting doing nothing and then come in on the weekend and do the other thing for the other

00:17:43.600 | client than just stay in your office and do the thing for the other client and not go to that

00:17:48.240 | meeting that you weren't needed at at all because then you can bill for those two things separately.

00:17:52.240 | Does that make sense? There's some version of that for every profession though, for sure.

00:17:55.760 | Yeah, but it's just much worse, right? Because I mean, the other thing, I was talking to a friend

00:18:00.720 | recently who was telling me about his friend who's in Wall Street, I forget exactly what type of

00:18:09.120 | banking, they might be a hedge fund, I'm not exactly sure. But anyways, she was telling him

00:18:14.560 | about how some of her younger employees were like, "Why didn't you answer my email?" or whatever.

00:18:20.800 | And like, "Oh, I was going for a walk or I was with a friend or whatever." And her answer was,

00:18:26.720 | "Look, if you want to do those type of things, get a different job. We're compensating you here.

00:18:32.000 | It's hard, but we're compensating you for what's hard." And I hear the same thing from lawyers,

00:18:35.920 | like young lawyers, is they're often given the message, "Yeah, this is really long, annoying

00:18:40.720 | hours, but you can't say we're not compensating you for that. So if you want less money,

00:18:44.800 | go get another job and you'll have more flexibility." The problem is we've taken

00:18:48.400 | that Wall Street elite law firm also mentality and we're taking the worst of that without the,

00:18:54.800 | "Well, at least you're being compensated." - That's a good point.

00:18:57.200 | - That's the problem with it is that if you're just working, you're a university professor,

00:19:01.680 | you're just in the marketing department, you're a development director at a nonprofit,

00:19:07.040 | it feels more like Wall Street felt, like law firms felt. I'm jumping around doing all this

00:19:12.080 | work, but without the real reason behind it, other than this pseudo productivity mindset,

00:19:17.360 | which is not, and this is where I differ from some of the anti-productivity movement,

00:19:20.960 | is that it's not that the, at least in my analysis, it's not that the pseudo productivity mindset

00:19:26.720 | is easily translatable or reduced to some sort of zero-sum relationship,

00:19:32.240 | some sort of antagonistic relationship between management and labor.

00:19:35.840 | It's more arbitrary and cultural than that, right? So the pseudo productivity mindset,

00:19:41.120 | let's stay busy all the time and demonstrate activity. It's not a particularly good way

00:19:46.960 | of producing valuable output, right? It's not making your company more profitable, right?

00:19:52.720 | And so it's not that, okay, it's zero-sum. It's good for the company, but bad for the employee,

00:19:57.840 | and we're butting heads against it. No, it's more of a cultural idea that emerged without

00:20:04.400 | consensus that was explicit. It's just like what we fell into once knowledge work emerged.

00:20:10.560 | And then like the water getting hot slowly with the frog in the pot doesn't realize that he's

00:20:16.560 | being cooked. That's what happened when the IT revolution came and began to make this increasingly

00:20:22.080 | intolerable. It happened a little bit every year. And I get into this. You can watch it get worse

00:20:26.800 | and worse, but a little bit every year. And then we looked up at some point, and we're like, man,

00:20:30.800 | this is really on email a lot. We're really in a lot of meetings. I'm not getting a lot of work

00:20:34.400 | done. It happened gradually. It's not being imposed by one group on the other for some

00:20:40.080 | sort of zero-sum purpose. And that makes it sort of uniquely difficult, that it's not helping

00:20:45.680 | anybody, and yet we're all stuck in it. - Yeah, we are all stuck. It's funny you should mention

00:20:50.000 | that we're all stuck in it because, look, if you're being pulled into meetings that you don't

00:20:54.400 | need to be in, that sounds like a bad office environment if you're doing that. But I work alone

00:20:58.960 | in my underwear half the time. I'm still engaging in pseudo-productivity on a regular basis. Sure,

00:21:04.960 | no one's like, hey, Jordan, can I pull you into this meeting? No, you can't. It's not on my

00:21:08.720 | calendar. That doesn't happen anymore. But I'm still making sure that I don't have any DMs on

00:21:15.120 | this social media thing that come from, or making sure my inbox is cleared and I'm doing a terrible

00:21:19.520 | job because there's so much stuff in there right now 'cause I just got back from Japan. But it's

00:21:23.760 | really, pseudo-productivity is still present even if you're not in a company with a boss. We're

00:21:29.440 | just now doing it to ourselves. And some of that might be my Wall Street programming, like that's

00:21:34.480 | what a job is, just doing a bunch of meaningless crap all the time. But I think if everyone is

00:21:39.040 | doing this and not everybody worked at a white-shoe firm on Wall Street, then this is almost like,

00:21:44.640 | it's something in the water. - It is in the water now. Yeah,

00:21:47.280 | because it's all we knew, right? I mean, knowledge work is a thing, is widespread thing,

00:21:51.920 | is pretty new. This is like the 1950s and '60s. The term knowledge work is coined in 1959 because

00:21:56.960 | it wasn't a big enough sector of work, the sector where you use your mind to add value to information.

00:22:02.160 | It just wasn't a big enough thing to even label until the mid-20th century. So all we've known

00:22:07.200 | is pseudo-productivity. So it is in the proverbial water. So if you're an entrepreneur, if you're a

00:22:11.600 | freelancer, if you're a solopreneur, you don't have a lot of other options to even think about.

00:22:16.240 | You're like, this is what work is. And if I'm not, in some sense, people who work for themselves

00:22:22.400 | can be the worst practitioners, like the most intense practitioners of pseudo-productivity,

00:22:27.360 | because you also have fear and guilt driving you. Like, I need this to work, and I'm willing to do

00:22:32.800 | what it takes to be successful. Like the mortgage payment depends on it. And if the only lever you

00:22:36.880 | know to pull is pseudo-productivity, you're answering those emails, man. You're jumping

00:22:40.560 | on those calls. You're leaving no stone unturned. And it's why I say at the end of the book,

00:22:45.120 | slow productivity is a alternative definition to pseudo-productivity.

00:22:50.080 | But probably the larger project here is to have alternative definitions writ large.

00:22:55.920 | And there could be many of them. But just to get people thinking, what is my definition of

00:22:59.920 | productivity? What are its principles? How do I pursue it? Like to have a menu that's not just,

00:23:05.600 | you should be jumping off and on calls about funnel marketing or whatever. Like,

00:23:09.680 | have options that are not just pseudo-productivity. And I think that's as important of a consequence

00:23:14.720 | of what I'm trying to do as even the details of my particular pitch, is break people out of this

00:23:20.320 | mold, teach the fish what water is. Hey, pseudo-productivity is not destiny. And in fact,

00:23:25.040 | it's a pretty terrible way to organize cognitive labor. Like, let's start thinking of alternatives.

00:23:29.520 | - I like your slow productivity concept, which is essentially, and I'm paraphrasing as usual,

00:23:34.720 | reorienting your work so that it's a source of fulfillment instead of overwhelm. And the lawyer

00:23:41.840 | example might be a little tricky, just because you're measured on billable hours. So there is

00:23:46.080 | a way to sort of measure your productivity. But I know you mentioned in the book also,

00:23:49.680 | doctors with crazy patient schedules might have trouble implementing some of this stuff. There's

00:23:54.240 | still plenty that I think they can do. I would imagine if you really sat a group of doctors down,

00:23:59.200 | you could say, what's taking up a bunch of your time? And there's going to be all kinds of crap

00:24:03.600 | that they could outsource or have somebody else do, or that they're doing to themselves, because

00:24:08.080 | that's how they got through medical school. So they're used to doing all the extraneous crap.

00:24:12.240 | I'm curious what the pandemic did to speed things up. We kind of talked a little bit about these

00:24:18.240 | Zoom calls, I think are one of the gross examples of this. I know people that love these things.

00:24:26.480 | I don't. I go outside and walk and refuse to use my camera. And I remember during the pandemic,

00:24:34.080 | it was like Zoom coffee chat with friends. And I just remember being like, I love you guys,

00:24:38.640 | but this is the last thing I want to do with any free time is be on Zoom even more. It was like,

00:24:44.400 | I ended up trading Zoom calls with friends and family in Australia or whatever, people that I

00:24:48.000 | love, in order to do Zoom calls for work or talking with other entrepreneurs in the podcast

00:24:52.960 | space in a hangout. Like, oh, this is the worst. A lot of like drinking by yourself,

00:24:57.520 | but with a camera in front of you. Right. Yeah. Like, have a glass of wine in my kitchen.

00:25:03.680 | And then the time zone's all weird, right? Everyone's in New York and it's like 7 p.m.

00:25:07.360 | and they're like, yeah. And you're like, it's four. This just feels weird and wrong. And I have

00:25:11.920 | so much stuff I got to do after this. And I just want to take a nap. Yeah. All right. So here's

00:25:16.080 | what I think happened in the pandemic. There's two things that made it worse. So one has to do

00:25:20.480 | with workload. So one of the big ideas is we're very, we're bad at managing our workloads and

00:25:26.480 | we should care about it. Right. Because the issue is everything that's on our plate brings with it

00:25:31.600 | administrative overhead. Right. So like everything I say yes to, that generates emails, that generates

00:25:36.880 | meetings. I have to support this thing I've agreed to do. So as you say yes to more and more things,

00:25:42.240 | more of your time has to be servicing the administrative overload of all the things

00:25:47.120 | on your plate. Less time is there to actually make progress on the tasks themselves and everything

00:25:52.080 | begins to slow down. So workload really matters. And the way that most people implicitly manage

00:25:57.600 | their workload is with stress because there is no, in most knowledge work circumstances,

00:26:03.120 | no transparent way of saying how much are you working on and how much should you be working on

00:26:07.120 | and how do we manage how much you're working on? We don't do that. Right. In knowledge work,

00:26:10.800 | we're like, ah, it's up to the individual, you know, like that's up to you. It's none of our

00:26:14.880 | business. So what people do is stress. They say, I keep saying yes because there's a social capital

00:26:20.320 | cost to saying no. I keep saying yes until I feel sufficiently overloaded by my workload

00:26:26.960 | that that psychological distress gives me cover to say no. It's worse now. That feeling of overload

00:26:34.000 | is now worse than the feeling of saying no to another person. And therefore, I can now start

00:26:40.480 | saying no. The problem with that heuristic is it keeps us like right at the red line.

00:26:44.640 | Like it keeps our workload exactly at the point where I can barely handle this. Right. So we

00:26:51.120 | always have like 20% too much work to do. So what happened with the pandemic for knowledge workers?

00:26:55.760 | Overnight, you got like a bonus 20% worth of tasks, right? Because we have to shift our operations to

00:27:01.840 | run remotely. Like it generated a bunch of tasks overnight. So we have a lot of knowledge workers

00:27:06.080 | at the red line. And then like overnight, hey, let's add 20% more tasks we can't avoid. It pushed

00:27:11.840 | people over. I think that was one. Two is more simple. We do in person a lot of quick ad hoc

00:27:19.600 | interaction. I grab you after another meeting, like Jordan, what's going on with, you know,

00:27:24.640 | client X and we can just like figure it out in a minute, have a quick back and forth and figure it

00:27:28.400 | out when we weren't in person anymore. And I was like, OK, Jordan, we need to talk about client X.

00:27:33.440 | We would say, well, let's just set up a Zoom meeting. Here's my Calendly. Here's my Calendly.

00:27:38.320 | 30-minute blocks. And I'm like, I have a 230.

00:27:41.440 | That's the problem. It's 30-minute blocks. So we also began expanding a bunch of two-minute

00:27:46.960 | conversations into 30-minute conversations. Right. And also keep in mind, those two-minute

00:27:52.000 | conversations were well placed. Right. It wasn't just I would just run and burst through your door

00:27:57.120 | no matter what you were doing. Like, talk to me about this now. It'd be like, wait till I saw you

00:28:01.520 | in between things or you're getting coffee. There's time you were. Yeah. So it was time that

00:28:05.840 | was otherwise unspoken for. Right. So then that created the Zoom apocalypses where we had meeting

00:28:13.280 | after meeting after meeting because we were expanding a lot of the ad hoc into 30-minute plus

00:28:18.400 | blocks on our calendar. So those two things, we were at the red line and we got pushed over by

00:28:22.880 | 20 percent. And then we had like a big increase in meetings. The best number I saw was from a

00:28:28.480 | Microsoft annual work survey. They found a 252 percent increase in these type of meetings from

00:28:35.040 | 2020 to right now. And by the way, that number's not going back down. It like came up. Oh, shoot.

00:28:39.280 | I was going to say, but it reset a little, right? No. Oh, man. Because we went to hybrid work.

00:28:44.000 | And so it got bad. Right. So, of course, that pushed people over the edge. But it was the

00:28:49.760 | underlying reason why we were set up for that to push us over the edge is in a pseudo productivity

00:28:55.680 | regime, you're like, hey, activity is all that matters. You don't think about things like

00:28:59.280 | workload. You don't think about things like when do I work and how much should I work and what's

00:29:04.640 | the what's the optimal load of things to work on and how should I spread things out? It's like,

00:29:08.800 | I just do activity. And like it kind of worked and it was stressful, but it kind of worked.

00:29:12.640 | And then we shook things up with the pandemic and it was like eight hours of Zoom. It's you're

00:29:17.760 | working at four in the morning on writing stuff so that you can clock in for an entire day of doing

00:29:23.280 | virtual meetings. Like it just it pushed a bad situation towards the absurd. And I think that

00:29:28.800 | was just that was too much for a lot of people. You know, it's funny. This reminds me there's

00:29:32.800 | a company, a very popular company in Silicon Valley that I probably shouldn't name just

00:29:37.520 | because of what I'm about to say. There was a my friend worked there in sales and he's this

00:29:44.480 | alarm went off when I was in his office and I was like, oh, he's like, oh, it's just a meeting.

00:29:48.000 | And I was like, oh, OK, well, I get up to, like, walk out because I'm thinking you got to go to a

00:29:51.920 | meeting. He goes, oh, I don't have to go to that. I was like, are you sure? Like just because of me,

00:29:57.200 | because I can come back, we could grab lunch later. He's like, no, no, I'm in sales. We don't

00:30:01.280 | have to do any of the meetings. I was like, you don't have to go to meetings at all. And he's

00:30:05.200 | like, no. And the CEO name, like, you know, household Silicon Valley tech CEO says that

00:30:12.080 | anybody in sales, we just don't have to go to the meetings. And it's funny because so and so came in

00:30:16.640 | here was like, I want to see you at this meeting and did it. And I was like, nope. And he went to

00:30:20.240 | the boss's boss's boss. And the guy was like, he doesn't have to go. He's in sales. And I thought

00:30:24.160 | that was so telling. Right. They have all these meetings. You have to go and you've got to go to

00:30:27.920 | this and you've got to go to that. Oh, wait, you're one of the people who actually makes money for

00:30:30.800 | this company. Do not come to this meeting. You need to be doing your thing. We need the money

00:30:35.040 | for the company. And I thought that was so telling, like these meetings are so important unless,

00:30:39.360 | of course, you get paid by outside parties, in which case this is completely not a thing you

00:30:44.240 | need to do. And it's like so it's really not that important if you don't need the salespeople there

00:30:49.040 | because they're the ones that generate revenue, then you probably don't need the other 80 people

00:30:53.760 | that got invited out of the hundred that are just showing up because their calendar

00:30:57.920 | outlook thing went off and they don't want to say no to the big the big guy upstairs.

00:31:02.400 | I want to take a brief break from my conversation with Jordan Harbinger to talk about one of the

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00:35:25.840 | Now let's get back to my conversation with Jordan Harbinger.

00:35:29.600 | Yeah. I mean, I think that exactly highlights the issue of so much knowledge work is because,

00:35:33.680 | again, if we're not in sales, we don't have this number we can point to of like,

00:35:38.400 | this is what I'm generating. And when we started doing this, that number went down.

00:35:42.160 | Most of us don't have this. That's what allows these really suboptimal, weird cultural implicit

00:35:48.720 | consensus type of behavioral patterns to emerge. And I think it's exactly what you're saying is

00:35:53.200 | incredibly telling. You find a knowledge worker where there's a clear indicator of their output,

00:35:58.480 | and you begin to see like what actually makes sense. Oh, these meetings mean you sell less.

00:36:02.640 | That's what you do that's important. So you shouldn't have to do those meetings. We'll

00:36:05.520 | figure it out. We see the same thing with programmers, right? Like Silicon Valley

00:36:10.160 | figured this out at some point. Writing computer code is very industrial. I mean,

00:36:14.320 | it's a knowledge work thing, but it's industrial. You're building a product.

00:36:17.360 | A product, yeah.

00:36:18.240 | And they realize like, okay, our main thing, our main piece of machinery that builds this product

00:36:22.720 | is human brains. And it's really hard. It has to think and write computer code. And so they

00:36:27.040 | figured that out a long time ago. Also, leave the programmers alone. We're using a sprint

00:36:32.160 | methodology. Like in the morning, we will check in, what are you working on? And only one thing,

00:36:36.880 | only work on one thing. What is it? What do you need from us? Good. We'll check in tomorrow.

00:36:42.000 | And you just put your head down and code because it turns out like that's how you produce really

00:36:46.000 | good computer code. And if you start making the programmers go to a bunch of meetings and

00:36:50.320 | be on unrelated Slack all day, the thing doesn't ship.

00:36:54.240 | And what kind of art do we want in the break room? What? Do you want this to work or not?

00:36:59.760 | Most knowledge work, it's not so clear because you're doing seven things. And it's a different

00:37:03.520 | seven things than what you were doing. And some of them are non-promotable activities and some

00:37:07.200 | are core activities. And so it's just anything can arise. It's the obfuscation of process and

00:37:14.640 | knowledge work allows for all sorts of weird sort of pathological behavioral patterns to emerge.

00:37:22.000 | And so I think that's a great example where the rubber clearly hits the road. Another example,

00:37:27.120 | where else do we see this? Literary novelists, people who write novels that are award caliber,

00:37:33.120 | they famously disappear. And the entire work culture surrounding the publishing industry says,

00:37:39.360 | yes, novelists in between their books, we leave them alone. They should not be doing podcasts.

00:37:45.040 | They don't need to do social media. We don't want them doing anything but thinking and writing

00:37:50.480 | because you know what? If your book is great, it's going to sell like 5 million copies and

00:37:55.840 | everyone's going to talk about it. It's going to be Oprah's going to recommend it. And that's what

00:37:59.280 | we need. That's our product. So just don't do anything else except for try to write a great

00:38:03.360 | book. And so novelists famously disappear. And then they come back when they're done with their

00:38:07.520 | novels. When the rubber hits the road and it's clear, the way we work looks nothing like most

00:38:13.120 | knowledge workers work. But the thing is, is most knowledge workers actually have, if you really

00:38:16.960 | pull back the layers, this is the two things you do that creates the most value for our company.

00:38:20.640 | And if you did those things better, it would be really useful for our company. We are preventing

00:38:24.800 | you from doing those things better, but because there's not, here's where we landed on the

00:38:28.960 | bestseller list, or here's how long, how good the code is, or here's how many sale dollars you

00:38:32.800 | brought in, because it's not directly observable. We prevent people from still doing like the core

00:38:37.840 | things that that's their most valuable contribution. - I love this message. And I love if

00:38:43.840 | there's something you said in the book that was, you kind of touched on it earlier in the show,

00:38:47.600 | how we manage our workload is problematic because we're always on the edge of that burnout.

00:38:51.280 | And one of the reasons being, the discomfort of saying no to something new has to be greater than

00:38:57.600 | the distress we cause the other party by saying no to something new. So basically, like, you have

00:39:03.680 | to, we have to be so tormented by saying, by our workload, that it's actually, the only answer we

00:39:12.000 | could possibly give is no, and that washes away all the guilt we feel by saying no to something,

00:39:17.200 | even if it's totally unreasonable, not related to our core task. And I think that sort of speaks to

00:39:23.200 | why the idea of doing fewer things sounds a bit scary, because to some people, it sounds like

00:39:28.160 | accomplish fewer things, and it's not really that, is it? - No, it's not that at all. I mean,

00:39:32.560 | it helps people sometimes when I append it to say, do fewer things at once, right? Because

00:39:38.960 | really what we're trying to do here with that advice is reduce all that administrative overhead,

00:39:44.640 | right? So like, we can use hypothetical numbers, but you know, imagine everything I say yes to

00:39:49.280 | brings with it a certain number of emails and meetings that I just have to do to support the

00:39:54.000 | thing, to talk to people about it, have meetings about it, right? So if I have two things versus

00:39:59.520 | four things on my plate, that's going to have the number of emails and meetings on it. But those

00:40:04.880 | emails and meetings clog the day, they clog the schedule, they make you have to shift your

00:40:09.200 | context back and forth, they reduce your ability to think clearly, they fragment your schedule,

00:40:13.600 | so you have less longer periods of time to work. So the amount of total productive work per day

00:40:18.480 | has gone down. So when I have four things on my plate, the average productive effort

00:40:24.320 | towards finishing things per day is much smaller than when I had two. So when I have two things on

00:40:30.320 | my plate, I actually finish them faster. And not only do I finish them faster, but I finish them

00:40:33.520 | at a higher level of quality, and I'm happier because it's not this whole deranged, you know,

00:40:37.440 | I have no time to actually do the work. And hey, what can I do when I finish those two things?

00:40:41.360 | I can bring two new things onto my plate. And so now, how long did it take me to do those four

00:40:46.000 | things? Probably not nearly as long in the scenario where you did two at a time and then the other two

00:40:52.080 | versus when you just said yes to all four at the same time. So doing fewer things not only makes

00:40:58.160 | work much more sustainable, you become better at working, right? Like if you can just bootstrap

00:41:03.760 | into this, it's not going to be long before your star is on the rise. Like Jordan is shipping,

00:41:09.200 | look at this, like good stuff. Like he did this and this and this and this, and it all looks great.

00:41:14.160 | But your secret was like, yeah, because I only did one of these things at a time,

00:41:17.920 | you know, and it led me to actually do the work. - It's funny, a lot of other podcasters or people

00:41:23.440 | in the media space will be like, how do you produce three episodes a week? It's so much,

00:41:27.200 | they're different. You read the book for every guest that comes on the show.

00:41:30.560 | And the answer is, yeah, but I'm not doing other stuff, right? I don't have like a product thing.

00:41:36.880 | I'm not also on the speaking circuit and writing a book. And you know, I've got two kids. How do

00:41:41.680 | you manage all this? I just read the book and I do the interview. I don't have 17 other irons

00:41:46.640 | in the fire. The problem is I get FOMO, right? I see other people, I'm like, oh, Cal's got a new

00:41:50.720 | book. I should probably write a book. But you have to focus on this stuff because you're right,

00:41:56.800 | it gives you that psychological space to innovate and focus on quality, which we'll get to in a

00:42:01.120 | minute. And you know, I used to not really be a believer. I was like, I can switch context,

00:42:05.760 | no problem. But I really can't. And maybe I'm just getting old now, Cal, I don't know.

00:42:10.880 | But going from, I'm going to do a bunch of email to I'm going to sit down and read and take notes

00:42:15.760 | to then going, I'm going to do a live show or whatever, like a recording. It doesn't work.

00:42:21.680 | And I don't know, did it never work and I didn't notice it? Or am I just too, am I getting slower

00:42:27.440 | jumping between like performance mode podcast than reading than email? I don't know. I don't

00:42:31.760 | know the answer. No human in the history of the human species has been able to do that.

00:42:35.680 | When you're younger, you have a little better, you have a bigger pain tolerance, right?

00:42:40.240 | This is just neurochemistry. Like it takes time for the human brain to change its target of

00:42:46.880 | attention from one thing to another, because inside your brain, you have to start inhibiting

00:42:51.440 | certain neural networks and you have to begin exciting other networks. It takes a while.

00:42:55.600 | It's the clearest way to measure. This is just think about when you sit down

00:42:59.760 | to do something that's very hard, like write something right or read something difficult.

00:43:04.000 | You know, there's that like 10 to 15 minute period where you're like, this is really hard.

00:43:08.000 | I really don't like this and I'm not making much progress. And then you feel like you're

00:43:12.240 | sort of getting into the flow of it. Well, it took 10 or 15 minutes for your brain

00:43:17.120 | to load up all the right programs. And so when it starts feeling easier is because your brain

00:43:21.840 | has now fully switched its attention frame to what you're working on. So if you're switching

00:43:27.040 | back and forth between things, you never allow yourself to ever settle on an attention frame.

00:43:31.440 | I mean, it's why checking email and answering emails is actually one of the most cognitively

00:43:36.720 | distressing things we do as humans right now, because it's taxing our brain in a way that it

00:43:43.440 | absolutely can't do because every email in that inbox is associated with its own attention frame,

00:43:49.360 | its own cognitive frame. And they're often, by the way, highly salient. It involves other

00:43:53.440 | people we know who need things from us. Potentially they're upset or there's like

00:43:57.440 | our relationships on the line. And one email after another means we're switching from one

00:44:02.160 | frame to another, to another, never giving our brain anywhere near enough time to actually switch

00:44:08.880 | the cognitive context over. So we're trying to wrestle with these things without the right things

00:44:12.640 | loaded in our brain. It's mismatch. We get that cognitive grading. It's exhausting, right?

00:44:18.400 | I mean, there's a hack out there for email that I like that speaks to this. And it seems weird

00:44:24.800 | at first until you understand attention frames. But the hack is you go through your inbox and you

00:44:29.360 | take all of the emails related to the same thing. And then you sort of move them into their own

00:44:33.920 | folder and then you deal with all of those. And then you go in and get all the other emails of

00:44:37.440 | a different type. And then you move those into a folder and deal with those. If you try this,

00:44:41.200 | you'll realize like, oh, this is much easier. It's because you're giving your brain time

00:44:45.920 | to shift its cognitive frame. And then it's easier to do. So I don't think we realize the cost.

00:44:53.120 | And I honestly think like jumping to an email inbox, back to work, on the Slack, back to work,

00:44:57.280 | on the social media, back to work. For a cognitive worker, it is the equivalent of an athlete,

00:45:02.560 | like someone who depends on their body for a living. That's, let's say, taking tequila shots

00:45:07.200 | in between matches, right? Like that same effect that has on our ability to run really fast and

00:45:14.800 | like throw balls accurately. We're doing the same thing to our brain, but no one realizes it. You

00:45:19.200 | know, like, of course we're miserable. - Yeah, it's funny. You're right. And I never thought

00:45:23.680 | about this, but I do the email triage where I'm like, okay, this is important. And when I have

00:45:27.600 | space, I'm going to hit this. Let's like start or whatever. But then there's people who are just

00:45:31.040 | like, hey, I just found your show and I really like it. Or, you know, hey, I've been listening

00:45:34.080 | for five years and I have a question about that. That goes into a separate folder. And I've noticed

00:45:38.320 | that when I go through that separate folder, I can do like a hundred emails in two hours.

00:45:43.600 | But when I'm in my inbox where I'm doing triage or in the starred ones where it's important,

00:45:47.840 | I can do like 20 emails per hour. So maybe, what does that end up being like 40 to 60, 80 emails

00:45:56.160 | in the same amount of time I could do a hundreds in the other folder. And it's because, yeah,

00:46:00.960 | there's one, when I'm cruising on one lane, I can really do that stuff fast. But you're right,

00:46:06.560 | if I'm switching lanes and you don't think about it as switching lanes, because you're like, it's

00:46:09.360 | just email. It's like, now you're thinking about your schedule. And then this next one, you're

00:46:12.880 | thinking about, do I want this person on the show? And then in this next one, you're thinking about,

00:46:15.920 | can I join this conference? And then this other one's like, we want you to do a keynote. You're

00:46:20.000 | like, oh, is my keynote a fit? It's a completely different game and it takes like five times as

00:46:24.000 | long. - It's productivity poison, right? I mean, we just tell ourselves this story that I'm just

00:46:30.880 | answering messages, but it is torture. And when you think about it, you realize that, like,

00:46:36.080 | it's the thing that exhausts us most is a diverse inbox of a bunch of different stuff. Yeah. Which,

00:46:42.000 | by the way, this is why if you're doing fewer things, everything gets better because you have

00:46:46.960 | less things generating email and meetings. So the emails you have, there's less context represented

00:46:52.480 | here. You now have the space to work on one thing for a while. I mean, it makes all of the

00:46:57.920 | difference. It's a light switch difference in both what you're producing, but in just the

00:47:03.360 | subjective wellbeing you experience while working. Like getting fewer things on your plate at once

00:47:09.760 | is like the biggest positive change you could make in your knowledge work life.

00:47:13.760 | - Thanks for watching on YouTube. Remember, you can also enjoy The Jordan Harbinger Show

00:47:19.680 | on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Our podcast feed is a

00:47:24.960 | treasure trove of insights from intellectuals, authors, spies, artists, athletes, pioneers,

00:47:30.000 | engineers, former mafia bosses, and business leaders, all sharing their secrets to success.

00:47:35.200 | For more information, click the link in the description. Now, back to the show.

00:47:39.760 | - At some point, people are going, right now people are thinking, okay, great. How do I say

00:47:46.400 | no to work, though? Go back to what you guys are saying about telling my boss, no, I don't want to

00:47:49.680 | do this. That, I think, is, well, it's like the trick, right? What do we do? And I love this

00:47:57.200 | tactic, if I can call it that, in the book, where most of us, we just say something like, oh, I'm

00:48:01.440 | really busy, I can't. But instead of that, we say, well, okay, I can't start on this project for

00:48:07.520 | about six weeks, then I've got four other projects competing for that slot, so tell me why this needs

00:48:13.680 | to happen during that. And I know if I asked you to do something and you told me that, I'd just be

00:48:18.880 | like, never mind. And I think that's kind of the idea, right? - Yeah. I mean, so this is like,

00:48:23.520 | most of that chapter is on how do you get away with this. Because if you have control of your

00:48:29.120 | own schedule, and let's be clear, if you're an entrepreneur or a solopreneur or whatever,

00:48:32.640 | it's not that this is trivial, right? Even after you get over the psychology of doing fewer things,

00:48:37.440 | it's not that it's trivial, but there's like one key trick if you're an entrepreneur,

00:48:41.200 | which is you can't reduce what you're working on each day if you don't reduce the number of

00:48:46.560 | projects you're working on, and you can't reduce the number of projects you're working on unless

00:48:50.000 | you reduce the number of missions you're pursuing in your job. So start from the top down. Like,

00:48:54.320 | simplify at the highest level what you're trying to do, then you'll have less projects you're

00:48:58.400 | working on, and then, so that's the key trick for there. But if you work for someone else,

00:49:02.560 | most of the ideas that I give are based on making workload transparent. Like,

00:49:08.480 | just like you were saying, like, the biggest thing that helps support pseudoproductivity

00:49:13.040 | is that no one talks about their workload. It's all informal. And so everyone sees everyone else

00:49:18.320 | as a vessel to make their life easier by executing work that they need done. And when they just see

00:49:23.920 | you as a black box work-executing vessel, it's like, this would be great if you could do this,

00:49:28.320 | and it's annoying to me if you can't. What you need to do instead is break that

00:49:32.000 | mental model by making your workload transparent. And there's a bunch of ways to do this,

00:49:36.240 | but, like, the simple way – here's, like, the vanilla way of doing this that's actually really

00:49:39.680 | effective – is that you keep track of what's on your plate, and you divide it between actively

00:49:45.680 | working on and queued up for me to work on, right? So you make a distinction of the things you've

00:49:50.720 | said yes to, actively working on, queued up to work on, and here's the order it's coming.

00:49:56.080 | And you let other people into this context. And so someone comes up and says,

00:50:01.040 | "Hey, can you do this for me?" One way or the other – you can word it however you want to

00:50:05.680 | word it – but one way or the other, you're basically saying, "Yeah, sure. Here's my workload

00:50:10.960 | tracker. Just throw it on there at the end of the queue of things that I'm waiting to work on,

00:50:17.680 | and, like, let me know, like, what I need to do it or that I should call you when the time comes."

00:50:22.240 | Now they have to confront two things. One, "Oh, he's not actively working on this yet. It's at

00:50:27.200 | the back of this queue, and until it gets up here, he's not actively working on it, so no emails,

00:50:30.800 | no meetings until he's actively working on it." Two, they get a realistic picture of your workflow,

00:50:34.880 | and they realize, "Oh, OK, he's saying yes, but all of these things have to get done first,

00:50:40.720 | so it might be a while." So either I'm going to say, "You know what? It's not that important,"

00:50:45.040 | or my expectation is going to be recalibrated, or if I'm your boss, I say, "No, no, this has

00:50:49.440 | to be done now." You're able to bring them into the workload process, be like, "Great, I'm with

00:50:54.080 | you. Help me choose what to move out. I'll swap this in for something up there. You let me know

00:50:58.720 | which one is lowest priority." They're now involved in that as well, right? And they now have to

00:51:03.840 | explicitly – and I'm saying this in a way that sounds somewhat confrontational. The book talks

00:51:08.400 | about how to do this, you know, without just being like, "Hey, boss, use my spreadsheet." But

00:51:12.960 | essentially, this is the mindset that completely changes people's relationship with work assignments.

00:51:18.240 | - Man, I love it, because instead of no, it's no, and here's a bunch of great reasons why, or yes,

00:51:24.480 | but here's also why. I can imagine someone being like, "Hey, get on that such-and-such report."

00:51:30.240 | You're like, "Great, all right, it's going to fit in here May 3rd," and it's like March 25th,

00:51:35.360 | and they're like, "Whoa, what are you talking about?" "OK, if you want me to do it now,

00:51:39.040 | that's fine, but then you and I have to tell this other partner that I can't actually work

00:51:44.240 | on his thing because I'm doing your TPS reports," and it's like, "Ew, let's not stir that can of

00:51:50.080 | worms up." - Let's not stir that.

00:51:50.960 | - Yeah, maybe I'll give it to the other guy who's just sitting there with his thumb in his nose.

00:51:55.120 | - Well, and then so, like, here's another way of doing it that's less, you know,

00:51:58.800 | concrete, right? Like, another thing I talk about doing is to implement the same idea,

00:52:03.600 | is when someone asks you to do something, you find a time on your calendar for it and schedule it.

00:52:09.840 | Great, this is going to take 15 hours, I got to find 15 hours, and I'm going to protect it,

00:52:13.440 | right? It gives you a time management advantage, right, because now, like, you don't have to

00:52:17.280 | schedule stuff once you've already scheduled it, but it gives you a realistic confrontation

00:52:21.600 | with your schedule. So now you're looking for 15 hours to schedule something. You got to find 15

00:52:26.480 | hours, and it might be a month until you can find those 15 hours, but if you're clear, like, "Hey,

00:52:33.120 | I'm really careful about managing my time, and I schedule every project on my plate,

00:52:38.000 | I schedule when I'm going to do it, and this is when I could find the next 15 hours clear,"

00:52:42.800 | you're accomplishing the same sort of idea as the to-do list, and it's more unimpeachable than you

00:52:49.120 | would imagine, because part of what happens is you get a reputation for being careful about your

00:52:54.480 | time. You don't get a reputation for being difficult. You get a reputation for being

00:52:58.640 | careful about your time. That earns you trust. So, like, "Well, you know what? But this guy over

00:53:03.280 | here, he's always, like, haphazard in doing stuff," or, "I don't trust that he's really

00:53:07.600 | busy. I think he's just disorganized. Hey, I'm going to—you just get this done." But you're

00:53:11.280 | the guy who's like, "Yeah, no, no, no, no. Look, I manage everything on my calendar, and I always

00:53:15.840 | deliver when I say I'm going to deliver. I know what's on my plate, and when I say I'll do this

00:53:20.240 | on this day, you get it." You've just earned yourself a lot of trust. And then they're like,

00:53:25.360 | "Oh, okay, so I guess you're too busy for this," because, again, it's helpful for people if you

00:53:30.320 | say yes, but they're not thinking that much about you. What they're thinking about is, "I want to

00:53:33.840 | get this thing off my plate. Hey, Jordan, can you do this? Well, blah, blah, blah. Okay, whatever.

00:53:37.760 | Hey, can you—they're just going to move on to someone else." They're not sitting there stewing.

00:53:41.120 | >> Right.

00:53:41.760 | >> And as I tell people also, you already say no to things, right? You don't just happen to have

00:53:47.200 | the perfect number of things being thrown at you that exactly fills your schedule. You're saying

00:53:52.240 | no to things. That's why your schedule is exactly full. This just means you're probably saying no

00:53:56.960 | to more things, but no one keeps track of that ratio. There is no break room where the CEO and

00:54:02.320 | the CFO are in there, and they have your name up on the wall, and they have the number of times

00:54:06.400 | you've said yes or no, and they're plotting it and being like, "You know what? This ratio has

00:54:10.240 | changed in the last couple of months. I don't like this at all." No, you're like a black box.

00:54:13.920 | Sometimes you say yes, sometimes you say no. They're talking to a lot of people,

00:54:16.800 | and that's another reality is reducing your commitments by like 25 percent.

00:54:21.280 | No one even notices that. It's still like you say yes, you say no. I don't know the exact ratio.

00:54:26.480 | It doesn't feel different enough for them to notice, but for you, that could be the whole

00:54:30.800 | ballgame, a completely different experience at work. >> You know, I'm not recommending anybody

00:54:36.080 | do this, but it reminds me again when I was on Wall Street. These corporations are so dysfunctional.

00:54:40.800 | It's kind of funny. There was a young lady who only wanted to do a very specific type of work,

00:54:47.040 | and they would give her things that were not that, and she would go, "Oh, no. I really am only doing

00:54:52.480 | this," and they would go, "Okay," and I asked her, "So what are you doing if you don't have

00:54:57.600 | enough of that kind of work?" She's like, "Oh, I just read." I'm like, "Read what?" She's like,

00:55:01.280 | "Books," and she was always reading, and I'm not talking about like law books. I'm talking about

00:55:05.520 | like novels. She just, you know, caught up on whatever, Harry Potter or whatever, and I'm like,

00:55:10.800 | "You're going to get fired." She's like, "Oh, well," and during her performance review, they

00:55:14.880 | were like, "You billed like 20 hours this quarter. Everyone else billed you like 400 or whatever it

00:55:19.840 | was," and she's like, "Yeah, I just wasn't getting enough tax work or something," and instead of

00:55:24.160 | being like, "You're fired," to their credit slash or whatever, this company, this law firm was like,

00:55:30.000 | "We really need to make sure that you get more of this type of work," and I was blown away,

00:55:33.440 | because I thought, "You are going to get kicked out of there so hard. You better bring a parachute

00:55:38.160 | to work. They're going to throw you out the window," and they didn't. They tried to accommodate this,

00:55:43.040 | and that blew me away, and of course, at that point, I was like, "I got to try some version

00:55:47.760 | of that that won't get me fired," and sure enough, you can say no to certain kinds of work.

00:55:53.440 | Now, if there's something everyone needs to work on, you don't say no to that, right? You're a

00:55:56.960 | team player getting it done, but if people are just dumping crap off on you, it never occurred

00:56:01.840 | to me that you could be like, "Oh, you know what? No, I'm not going to take part in that," and there

00:56:06.880 | was a lot of sort of like shit rolls downhill at these corporations, and some people were just like,

00:56:11.920 | "Nope, not doing it," and they totally got away with that, which is actually shocking, and to your

00:56:19.360 | earlier point, I know that there's a lot of ad hoc that goes around, like the overload that goes

00:56:26.480 | around work, and I know, I'm pretty sure, I'm not the only person who would get an email and is like,

00:56:31.840 | "I really don't want to deal with this today. I'm hungry. Let me ask a question about something

00:56:38.960 | logistical and ping pong this off a few more people so that I just, I'll look at it tomorrow

00:56:43.280 | when those replies come in," or I'll like boomerang this for a week after asking a question about

00:56:47.760 | something that I could have asked at the meeting. I think we probably all do that stuff, and it

00:56:52.240 | makes everyone's problem worse, and we do it because we're overloaded, right? If I had the

00:56:56.560 | space to deal with it, I'd be like, "Yes, I would love to do this. Let me get started on that.

00:57:00.160 | Where's the plan? Let me get together," but since I don't, since I'm already on the red line,

00:57:03.680 | I just make more busy work for other people because it's like a temporary, it's like I can

00:57:09.520 | come up for air by doing that and then dive back into the sea of crap that I've got to deal with.

00:57:14.880 | Yeah, I call it obligation hot potato. It's like this is on my plate right now,

00:57:19.200 | so that's a source of stress. If I send an email about this to you, no matter how nonsensical or

00:57:24.160 | unproductive or ambiguous, it's not on my plate in the moment, and I get a little bit of relief,

00:57:29.840 | and so you get the like thoughts, you know, like question mark. I mean, that's just because it

00:57:34.320 | gets you off your plate. I saw this, for example, in response to something I suggested in Deep Work,

00:57:40.960 | my book from 2016, where I had a very common sense suggestion about email. It was called

00:57:46.800 | process-oriented email, but I was like, "Look, if we're being very rational about this, you know,

00:57:50.960 | if you sit and think before you write an email about some sort of project or request, if you

00:57:55.680 | really think through what really needs to happen here and you spell it out, 'All right, here's what

00:58:01.520 | we need to do. We need to reach this decision. Here's the steps that are required. Let me spell

00:58:05.600 | out how we should do this. Let me lay out the process. Like, I'm going to suggest these times,

00:58:10.240 | and I'm going to put them in this document, and you take a look on them, and everyone takes a

00:58:14.000 | look on them, and by Wednesday, everyone marks which ones that work. I'm going to check in on

00:58:18.160 | that document Thursday morning. I'll pick the time that works in the middle." And like, if you laid

00:58:23.040 | out the process of like how the work was going to unfold in your original email, you can prevent

00:58:28.880 | needing to have another 25 back and forth messages, each of which requires a bunch of inbox

00:58:33.280 | checks. It's much better. There was this question, like, "So why aren't people doing this?" And

00:58:37.520 | they're like, "I just, I don't have nearly enough breathing room or space. That would take like 10

00:58:41.840 | minutes to write that email message. I can't do that. I have to just thought, you know, like,

00:58:45.920 | get that off of my, like, well, are you available that day?" You know, "Oh, it's off my plate,"

00:58:49.840 | right? It's another consequence of overload. But I liked your example about the law firm,

00:58:55.520 | because this is actually, in Wall Street, like, this is a real thing. I was getting real numbers

00:58:59.680 | for this here in D.C. My lawyer friends told me about this. It is a thing in these big elite law

00:59:05.360 | firms in D.C. where you can leave the partner track and say, "I'm going to be a specialist,"

00:59:11.760 | right? Like, "I just do like this type of compliance with this law. Anyone who's working

00:59:16.720 | on a case that has this, I can come work on just that thing," right? And it's considered inside

00:59:22.640 | the firms to be non-prestigious because you leave the partner track, right? Like, partners, you have

00:59:26.960 | to do all the crap, right? But I got the numbers from people. And I was like, "Well, if you can

00:59:30.880 | become a managing partner at one of these firms with bonus, it's like a $1 million to $1.2 million

00:59:36.800 | a year annual compensation package, your life is like hell. But it's like a $1 million to $1.2

00:59:42.400 | million." And they're like, "Yeah, but these specialists, they don't get a profit cut.

00:59:46.240 | Honestly, they, like, top out at, like, $600,000." I knew you were going to say that. And I was like,

00:59:50.640 | "That's amazing," right? It's amazing. Yeah. You're like— You work one-third of the hours.

00:59:54.480 | One-third of the hour. It's a huge salary, and it can be made more reasonable. But it's even better

01:00:00.080 | than that. In a lot of knowledge work firms, you can make yourself one of these non-partner track

01:00:04.240 | specialists without having to trade off the money. The trade-off you have to make often to do this,

01:00:09.120 | where you say, "This is what I'm doing," the trade-off you have to make is accountability,

01:00:14.080 | right? That's how— There's risk in it. But in a lot of firms, non-law firms, which is, like,

01:00:18.400 | normal type of knowledge work firms, you can say, "I'm going to specialize on this. Measure me.

01:00:23.920 | Like, this is what I do. And if I'm not, like, bringing the rain, like, hold me accountable for

01:00:29.360 | it." But you can trade accountability for accessibility, right? Because most people,

01:00:33.680 | the trade-off is, "I have to be emailing all the time. I'm in pseudo productivity,

01:00:37.040 | but it's low risk." It's like, I can very consistently look productive. All I have to

01:00:41.360 | do is be willing to send emails all day and jump on Zoom meetings, and it's all obfuscated. I have

01:00:45.600 | a lot of flexibility. I don't even have to really be doing a lot of work, right? I just have to be

01:00:49.520 | really busy and kind of stressed out. If you trade that for accountability, people will leave you

01:00:54.880 | alone. But you have to deliver. Like, typically, it means, like, "I'm just going to do this. And

01:01:00.000 | this stuff I do is going to be great. And if it's not, like, this is not going to work out,

01:01:03.280 | you might have to fire me." But if it does work out, the flip side is I don't do 17 different

01:01:08.800 | things. I don't do— There's nothing to do Zoom meetings. We'll check in once a week. Leave me

01:01:12.480 | alone. - Yeah, that's— Man, it's incredible. That's— I did not know that that was an option

01:01:17.920 | at any law firm. That's a really good career track. That's a really— On Wall Street,

01:01:23.920 | it's more like partner track, or they pigeon you into this one sort of, like, council area,

01:01:28.960 | and you stay there until you jump back in or you leave, right? It's kind of like,

01:01:34.160 | "You're not going to make partners, so you should go work at Visa and have a lifestyle change."

01:01:38.480 | - You know who's innovating, and I think it's relevant, who's innovating the law firm space

01:01:41.840 | now is there's an increasing number of— There tend to be more boutique firms run by women.

01:01:46.240 | And the women seem to be much more willing than the men, which is obviously stereotyping here,

01:01:52.240 | but they seem much more willing than men to experiment with different models, revenue models,

01:01:57.440 | right? And so you have these women-run law firms that are emerging where they say, "Our model is

01:02:01.600 | not our maximization," right? It's not, like— Theoretically speaking, which is how most big

01:02:06.880 | law firms run, theoretically speaking, what is the maximum number of dollars that this number

01:02:11.520 | of people can generate using their brains? And they're instead thinking, like, "All right,

01:02:15.360 | here's our job. We want to, like, get paid well and, like, get good compensation and have reasonable

01:02:21.040 | hours. We're really smart, so why don't we find a way to use our smarts to, like, make a good

01:02:26.880 | salary and do, like, really interesting high-level work but not try to maximize the money we make?"

01:02:32.640 | And it turns out, like, law could be a fantastic job if you're doing a third of the hours. It's

01:02:38.720 | fascinating, interesting work. And because a lot of people are realizing, like, a third of the money,

01:02:42.720 | well, fine. Okay, so it's not $1.2 million. It's, like, $350,000, $400,000. But, you know,

01:02:48.880 | so what? If we start as, like, that's a giant salary if you're not comparing yourself to other

01:02:52.960 | people, if you don't have to belong to the Chevy Chase Golf Club, if you can do this remote. A lot

01:02:57.120 | of these companies are remote first. Like, I live in Asheville, North Carolina now. Why do I care

01:03:01.920 | if, you know, like, $400,000? I'm a king. You know, I've got the nicest house on the block.

01:03:06.880 | Why do I care? You know, this is great, and I'm working 30 hours a week. That innovation is great,

01:03:11.280 | but pseudoproductivity doesn't support it because pseudoproductivity says activity is what matters.

01:03:15.360 | Doing less activity is bad, and that's just it. - Man, I'll never forget one of my professors who

01:03:19.840 | was a managing partner at a Chicago law firm. He was also, like, he commuted to Michigan,

01:03:25.040 | which is quite a drive, and he would teach this class on law firms and legal careers. And he was

01:03:29.760 | an interesting guy, you know, a typical sort of high-level law partner. He's like, "Yeah,

01:03:34.560 | I belong to a golf club in Ireland. It's $40,000 a year. I've been there once in four years." And

01:03:39.760 | you're like, "What the heck? That's an expensive round of golf." But somebody had asked him

01:03:45.600 | something like, "Are there part-time options at law firms?" And he goes, "No, not really. Unless

01:03:51.040 | you're a woman and you're pregnant at that particular moment, not really. And even then,

01:03:55.200 | not really." And we were like, "Why?" And he goes, "How many of you would work half as much for half

01:04:01.440 | the money?" And, like, everyone in the whole class is like, "Yeah!" And he's like, "That's why." And

01:04:05.360 | we're like, "But isn't that kind of okay?" And he's like, "Well, benefits and stuff, and it adds

01:04:12.640 | up." And it's like, "But can't we sort of account for that? What if I buy my own health care? Can

01:04:18.080 | then I work only 45 or 60 or whatever it was hours a week? Can we not figure this out?" And he just

01:04:26.000 | was like, "Hell no." But this was 80, 100-hour work territory, these kinds of firms.

01:04:32.080 | Well, you know who is experimenting this better is entrepreneurs. Now, when entrepreneurs

01:04:36.160 | fall into the slow productivity mindset. So now it's just you negotiating with your own psychology.

01:04:41.440 | They're innovating with a lot of these ideas. And I really push — and I talk about this a

01:04:46.000 | bunch in the book — is, like, if you're an entrepreneur, you can experiment massively,

01:04:51.200 | right? Like, here's an example. It's an entrepreneur. It's a solo shop. She, like,

01:04:57.200 | does coaching, and then she has maybe four or five sort of part-time virtual-type people,

01:05:02.880 | right? So it's like that scale of a shop. And she figured out at some point, she's like,

01:05:07.040 | "Here's what I'm going to do. I take two months off in the summer." And she's like, "Okay,

01:05:11.360 | it's not too hard to work out. You have to be a little bit careful with your contracts,

01:05:14.800 | but it's not too hard." And she lost about, if you do the math, like 20% income, revenue.

01:05:20.560 | - Okay. - Right? She's like,

01:05:21.600 | "That's a super fair trade. This is great. Like, 20% less revenue, and, like, July and August,

01:05:27.040 | I can take completely off. Yeah, I'll take that trade. Like, the numbers are arbitrary. Who cares

01:05:32.800 | 20%? Like, I'll do that, you know, I'll do that all day," right? I have a writer friend who does

01:05:37.920 | that. Takes three months off. I do this with — I'm not an entrepreneur, but kind of am,

01:05:42.000 | right? I'm a professor. - Yeah, you kind of are. Yeah.

01:05:43.600 | - Yeah. So I realized at some point — people don't realize that if you're at a research

01:05:47.600 | institution as a professor, the school pays your salary for 10 months. And the two months over the

01:05:52.960 | summer, they don't pay your salary. And so, like, what most people do is their research grants,

01:05:58.400 | they ask in their research grant budgets for what's called summer salary. And that's where

01:06:02.240 | you fill in those last two months as it's coming out of your grants, right? And that's just what

01:06:06.800 | people do. And in fact, the push I had was — when I first started was, "Well, if you — you can get

01:06:13.280 | three months, technically speaking, if you have three different research grants, you can take a

01:06:17.920 | month of summer salary from each and actually get paid three months' worth of salary in two months.

01:06:22.720 | And that's what you want to try to do." But the thing is, that means you're doing all this work.

01:06:26.800 | And I figured out at some point, I said, "Well, what if I just didn't do that?" Like, I just

01:06:31.120 | didn't ask for summer salary and grants, and I just didn't work on academic stuff in the summer,

01:06:36.160 | and I just sort of disappeared and went to do England and, like, wrote books or whatever.

01:06:40.320 | And it turns out, "Oh, yeah, it's 20% less money, but yeah, you can do that."

01:06:45.440 | Except for your books are bestsellers, and you're probably massively in demand

01:06:48.720 | on whatever speaking circuit and stuff. So I think you've maybe figured out how to plug the gap, Cal.

01:06:54.000 | Yeah, but it was an awareness of, like, "Oh, that's an option." Like, "Oh, that's just a

01:06:58.320 | trade. It's 20% less money, but you get the summer off." And there's a lot of professors

01:07:02.480 | who make that same trade who don't also write books and do whatever. What they do is they

01:07:06.960 | just adjust their spending. Like, "Let's just pretend my salary is 20% less. This is so worth

01:07:12.880 | it. I can take the whole summer." So a lot of professors who don't do research will teach

01:07:16.960 | summer classes to try to fill in their salary. And those are really hard because you do, like,

01:07:20.880 | a semester's class in two weeks. It's, like, five-hour days. Yeah. And I know a lot of professors

01:07:25.760 | who are like, "Well, what if I just spent 20% less and took the summer off?" And they're like,

01:07:29.680 | "That is so much better. That is so much worth it." So anyways, there's a lot of innovation.

01:07:34.240 | I know people that do seasons on, seasons off, too. It's like, "I work really hard and then I

01:07:40.240 | take a season off and work another season." Like, they go back and forth. There's a lot more

01:07:44.080 | innovation and models once you break out of pseudoproductivity. And if you work for yourself,

01:07:48.080 | everything is on the table, right? You're just playing with these, like, income-spending ratios.

01:07:52.880 | You have so much flexibility on your table.

01:07:55.600 | There's some stuff I want to say in the show close about working at a natural pace,

01:07:59.840 | but in the interest of time, I think we can kind of blow past it a little bit because

01:08:03.440 | you're touching on some of it right now, right? Like, you're making that longer-term kind of

01:08:08.800 | vision of what you want your life to look like. And working in seasons, I love this idea.

01:08:13.120 | Our mutual friend, Jenny Blake, does this. And she's funny because whenever I look at her phone,

01:08:19.360 | she always has, like, 74 unread text messages and my skin starts to itch. I'm like, "Oh, gosh."

01:08:25.120 | I wonder what you think of that as somebody who's like, "Hey, email's overrated." I'm like, "Yeah,

01:08:29.280 | but do you have 74 unread text messages? That just makes me have some sort of weird anxiety."

01:08:35.120 | Well, I mean, I don't think—I'm not a big—I'm bad at text messaging, let's put it that way.

01:08:39.600 | Not really. You get back to me, like, right away.

01:08:41.920 | I feel like.

01:08:42.640 | You got lucky. Trust me, trust me, people know. It's like, if I have my phone around that I'm

01:08:49.200 | just doing a minute—like, I'll answer a text message, but if I'm in, like, a three-hour

01:08:52.560 | recording—like, I don't know what text messages are arriving right now. And I'll just declare—I

01:08:56.000 | declare text message bankruptcy basically after any extended period of doing something away from

01:09:00.720 | my phone. I'm just like, I can't—there's seven different things going on here, all with long

01:09:05.200 | threads. I mean, people just have learned that about me, right? Is, okay, you know, sometimes

01:09:10.320 | he's around and he'll answer. If he doesn't, he's probably, like, writing a recording and may not

01:09:14.560 | see this at all. And so I'm not gonna expect it. People rewire pretty quickly, I suppose.

01:09:19.360 | And Jenny, by the way, just took, like, one of her podcasts off the—her calendar, you know,

01:09:23.440 | off of her plate as well, which is, like—she's in my book. I talk about her in the book.

01:09:27.520 | That's low productivity, right? It's like, do I really need to do this? I mean, it's fine,

01:09:32.640 | but what about the time I would get—okay, let me take this off my plate. Yeah,

01:09:35.760 | I love that way of thinking. It's like another quick break from my conversation with Jordan.

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01:13:25.920 | let's get back to my conversation with Jordan. She's great at taking a few months off or whatever

01:13:31.040 | and just being like, this is my sacred time in Hawaii. Sorry. Or she'll like call friends like

01:13:36.400 | we're, you know, she's a friend of mine. I'm not asking her to do any work. So it's like, you know,

01:13:39.760 | hey, let's chat and catch up. But she she's what are you working on? Nothing. My tan, you know,

01:13:45.440 | great, good for you. But for me, it's like, oh, gosh, can can you do that? So she's been really

01:13:50.240 | good at sort of, I guess, an inspiration in many ways, you might say, because she's really good at

01:13:55.520 | not doing that stuff. And I won't say doing nothing because she gets a lot of stuff done.

01:13:59.360 | But she's also one of the I had a problem many years ago where I separated from one business

01:14:05.280 | into another. And she's like, you need a she didn't call it a cool down period. But it was

01:14:10.080 | basically what you talk about, which is like a cool down. She's like, go to Hawaii for two months

01:14:15.680 | and just don't do anything. And that was too scary. I didn't take her advice. I kind of

01:14:20.160 | probably should have let me get your opinion on that. Because I I had an interesting argument

01:14:25.200 | about this with with Ryan holiday. So I want to get your opinion, right? What do you think

01:14:29.360 | would happen if you're with Amazon, right? That in terms of I'm not No, no, I'm on podcast one.

01:14:35.120 | It's funny. I almost went to Amazon. That's okay. So let's say I talked about it. Let's say next

01:14:38.480 | time you negotiate your contract with podcast one, like what if you said, yeah, I podcast 10 months a

01:14:44.240 | year, right? And then like two months, I don't. So and it's like you go to like Hawaii or do

01:14:49.840 | whatever. So I brought this up on on Ryan show, because I'm really thinking about this is, you

01:14:55.440 | know, telling my my ad agency, I'm independent, but my ad agency books about a year in advance

01:14:59.840 | worth of my ads, right? And I was like, yeah, I'm thinking of telling them, let's book, you know,

01:15:04.960 | 45 weeks, or whatever, 46 weeks. And I'm just going to take when I'm gone in the summer,

01:15:10.400 | like not worrying about like podcast or whatever, because I was doing the same sort of math,

01:15:13.840 | right? I was like, yeah, it's less money. But like, does it matter? Like, for me, I'm not,

01:15:18.320 | I'm not the pen, you know, it's all kind of funny money to me. Anyways, it changes each year. I'm

01:15:22.480 | like, whatever, why not? That would be great not to have to record. Ryan was very worried about

01:15:26.320 | this. Right. And this was in public. So I'm not talking about school. He's like, I don't know

01:15:31.600 | about this. I'm worried about this, because you're going to lose your audience. And people are not

01:15:35.440 | going to become used to listening to you anymore. And there's like a whole momentum thing. So okay,

01:15:38.880 | you be the arbiter here, because I'm going to try to convince you to do the same if I do it.

01:15:42.880 | Is that is that really scary? Or is it we're just telling ourselves the story? Yeah, I'm just

01:15:48.560 | nervous about not doing the work. With podcasts, though, tons of them go in seasons, right? Now,

01:15:55.680 | it used to not be the case. Tons of podcasts go in seasons. Now it'll be like 12 episodes or 24

01:16:00.720 | episodes of this TV goes in seasons, right, but they have to advertise the next season. What I

01:16:05.680 | what I would do if I were you in this particular situation is in certain apps, like Apple podcast

01:16:11.040 | will stop downloading, it'll be like, hey, this show hasn't been updated. Do you still want to

01:16:14.640 | listen and people have to kind of like re opt in. What you could do is take episodes like this one

01:16:19.120 | that I'm doing with you. And you could be like, alright, that was that was half decent. Why don't

01:16:22.720 | I save that? And I'll do that. I'll air that during my summer break. And I'll do it. I'll

01:16:28.240 | air the one I got did with Ryan during my summer break. And we'll I'll run two of those that are

01:16:32.960 | already done. You did like no work other than being the work you're doing right now sitting

01:16:36.400 | here suffering through this conversation with me. But you're doing no work to produce,

01:16:40.640 | write and edit the thing really, your team can get it done ahead of time. And then you have

01:16:44.720 | something to put in your feed. But it's not doesn't require you to then sit down and produce it. I

01:16:50.160 | mean, you could, of course, and you've already thought of this, you could also record episodes

01:16:53.840 | in advance, right? That's the other solution. And then you don't have to do any work during that

01:16:57.680 | time, right? That's sort of the ideal, but that requires you to do all the prep and all the

01:17:01.840 | production for those episodes. Yeah, so it could be a sort of a pseudo hiatus, right? It's like,

01:17:07.600 | yeah, in the summer season. It's it's like reruns, right? And then like the new stuff starts again.

01:17:13.920 | And that's like enough to like keep you active in the podcast freeds and Apple doesn't unsubscribe

01:17:18.480 | you and people like, oh, this is a good one or button your downloads go down. In fact,

01:17:22.240 | you could even not sell ads on those or use programmatic advertising. Yeah, 100% man. Yeah.

01:17:29.200 | You know, for me, I record ahead and I go on vacation. And nobody cares slash even notices

01:17:36.080 | for you. If you don't want to do that. Take take your take your rich role in your Ryan and your

01:17:40.880 | Jordan interview and throw them in every three weeks and people will be like, wow, those are

01:17:44.480 | really cool. I've never heard that side of Cal before. They're not going to be like, this guy's

01:17:48.720 | not doing any work unsubscribe. You know, they're gonna see you in hell, Newport. Right? Exactly.

01:17:54.640 | Yeah. No one cares. There. I've put episodes where somebody interviews me and people are like,

01:17:59.200 | wow, I've never heard you interviewed before. That was my favorite episode of for the last year. And

01:18:03.680 | instead of it. Meanwhile, I put that in and I'm like, Oh, man, how many emails am I going to get

01:18:07.440 | that are like, are you okay? Are you sick? Why are you being lazy? Zero, zero of them came in.

01:18:13.520 | I love it. Good. Yeah, I wouldn't worry too much about that. But yeah, two months with nothing,

01:18:18.160 | nothing. It's like, Oh, is he dead? You don't want to do that to your fan base.

01:18:21.760 | There's so much in the book. And again, I'm going to cover a lot of this in the show,

01:18:25.200 | in the show clothes. But there's a lot in the book about rituals and creativity of well known

01:18:29.280 | people, creatives finding certain places to do their work. Like I'm no Ian Fleming with a beach

01:18:34.640 | house in Aruba, or whatever it was. But I, I have certain places where I will sit down and answer

01:18:43.280 | certain kinds of like, I call it fan mail, which sounds so self important. Now that I say it out

01:18:48.160 | loud on your show, our on our show here, because we're doing a crossover. But it's like, it's fun

01:18:54.160 | to have a coffee and do that. And like, when that coffee is done, I'm kind of like, done with this

01:18:58.800 | particular project that I find helps me do certain kinds of work. If I'm reading, I like to go out

01:19:05.360 | and walk, it keeps the rest of my body busy gets rid of that anxious stuff. There's just so much in

01:19:11.200 | your book that is very practical. I don't want people to think that the whole book is like,

01:19:14.800 | two guys complaining about how there are too many meetings, because that's not,

01:19:18.080 | that's not what you wrote about. Yeah, I mean, there's the there's the reduce part. And then

01:19:22.800 | there's the amplify part. Yeah, how do you produce better stuff, which is which is the glue

01:19:28.160 | for everything else, right? So this, this third principle obsess over quality. It's the glue for

01:19:33.920 | the other two, right? If you don't do that, if you don't care about like, how do I like really begin

01:19:39.200 | to care more about what I do best and like, push myself to do it better. If you don't do that,

01:19:42.880 | you only just try to reduce workload. And you only try to work at a natural pace, that's probably not

01:19:47.200 | going to work. Right? Because it keeps you in this mindset of just like, I don't know, I don't like

01:19:51.120 | work, I want to do less of it. It's not very sustainable psychologically. But when you obsess

01:19:54.800 | over the quality of what you do, those ideas become inevitable and natural. It's like, yeah,

01:19:59.600 | I'm trying to do this thing better. Busyness is incompatible with me doing this better. So of

01:20:04.480 | course, I want to try to simplify things. And then that's why the flywheel starts getting pretty

01:20:08.960 | quick. As you start doing things that are valuable, better, you gain more autonomy and control over

01:20:14.080 | your workload, and it gets even easier to simplify it. And then that flywheel gets going. And that

01:20:18.800 | powers that really is what powers a substantial and sustainable shift to slow productivity,

01:20:24.800 | obsessing over quality. And that's where the rituals matter. Isolating what's important matters,

01:20:29.360 | working on your taste, caring about what you do. That's what ultimately is going to break you out

01:20:34.080 | of pseudoproductivity's grip and fuel you as you try to travel to a brand new configuration of work.

01:20:40.640 | - Did you think about calling the book pseudoproductivity?

01:20:43.280 | - Yes, but- - But I didn't like that, right?

01:20:47.040 | - Well, the school of thought is you want to name this positive selling proposition, right? Like,

01:20:52.080 | what's the- - That makes sense.

01:20:53.040 | - The worst, it did very well, but the worst performing, I'm still a New York Times bestseller,

01:20:58.320 | but the worst performing book of my last three or four was A World Without Email,

01:21:03.840 | because I was focusing on the negative, right? The title, deep work, deep work's the positive

01:21:07.920 | thing to do. Digital minimalism is the positive thing you want to do. Be so good they can't ignore

01:21:12.640 | you. True story about so good they can't ignore you, by the way, when I pitched that to my

01:21:17.280 | publisher, the title was Don't Follow Your Passion. And the publisher said, I will never publish a

01:21:24.320 | book with that title, and we left. I was at Random House, but we left and went to Hachette. But after

01:21:29.120 | we left, we swapped the name from Don't Follow Your Passion to Be So Good They Can't Ignore You,

01:21:35.040 | to the positive. And then the book went to auction, and a lot of people wanted to buy it.

01:21:39.280 | So yeah, focusing on the positive vision of where you want to get is better than pointing to the

01:21:46.240 | negative thing that you're trying to escape. - That makes a hell of a lot of sense. Yeah,

01:21:49.760 | 'cause I noticed you keep using that phrase, and it's a great one, and I'm like, it's so catchy,

01:21:53.120 | but you're right, it is kind of like, no one wants to buy a book on pseudo-productivity. I

01:21:57.520 | would not buy that book either, now that you mention it. So they were probably onto something

01:22:01.040 | there. I love that you transitioned to obsessing over quality, because quality demands that you

01:22:07.680 | slow down in the first place, right? You can't do, I could do the show seven days a week if I

01:22:12.800 | didn't need to read your book to prep, I didn't need to watch other interviews that you've done

01:22:16.800 | to find out some of the stuff you're really passionate about talking about. I don't think

01:22:20.800 | the show would be nearly as good if I did seven a week, because at that point, you're kind of like,

01:22:24.640 | you know, to use the PC term, pooping 'em out, kind of, right? Like, back in the TV days,

01:22:31.360 | when people cared about those talk shows that were on TV, I, RIP Larry King, but one of the

01:22:36.640 | things I asked him was like, how do you prepare for interviews, in part because it doesn't seem

01:22:40.960 | like he does a whole lot of that, and he said, yeah, I just use my natural curiosity, I often

01:22:47.040 | don't even know who's gonna be in studio that day, sometimes I read a printout of their bio in the

01:22:52.560 | car on the way to studio, and I thought, that worked for you, for a long time, because there

01:22:58.880 | was one other show on at the same time as yours, and they watched that, or they watched you, and

01:23:05.120 | that was kind of like, you threw your hands up in the air and it wasn't your problem, and that's a

01:23:09.360 | level of production that you can't get away with anymore, there's too much competition, if I'm just

01:23:14.400 | talking to you and I'm like, tell me what your book is, I haven't even looked at it, another

01:23:18.240 | podcaster who's like, I don't know, read the back in chapter one, is gonna crush me, and they should.

01:23:24.400 | - Yeah, I mean, I think that's absolutely right, right? If you wanna actually do something good,

01:23:29.120 | you can't be busy, and this goes back to why, like, why do literary novelists do the fewest

01:23:36.080 | things as compared to every other type of author, because they're the most obsessed with the quality

01:23:40.000 | of what they do, because their whole professional career resides on their book being award caliber.

01:23:46.400 | Like, if you're Jonathan Franzen, like, I can't just write a book, and be like, yeah,

01:23:50.400 | it's kind of interesting, it's like, this book had better be great, because that's my whole

01:23:54.400 | selling proposition, is that, like, I write great books, and so they're like, of course I can't do

01:23:58.640 | other stuff. Dave Eggers, very famously, goes to, like, a rental house with no internet, works on

01:24:04.240 | a laptop with no internet, and he just disappears and writes his novel, because the novels have to

01:24:08.080 | be good, and they obsess over, so, like, you see this, Chris Nolan, let's look at movies, right,

01:24:12.720 | Chris Nolan just won an Oscar, best director, best movie, all the, seven Oscars, but Chris Nolan

01:24:17.600 | doesn't even own a smartphone, right? He's like, I'm trying to win the best picture award, I can't

01:24:23.360 | do email, I can't, I don't wanna hear your pitch, and I don't wanna, 'cause people get this wrong,

01:24:28.160 | they get mad at me when I say that, they're like, well, but he has other people who take calls for

01:24:32.000 | him, and it's like, no, that's not the point. The point is, there's a lot of stuff that if you're a

01:24:36.720 | director, you could have your hands in, a lot of calls you could take because you wanna take 'em,

01:24:41.520 | let's strategize, let's, yeah, hey, let's do Dark Knight, The Ride at Universal Studios,

01:24:45.680 | and what are we doing over here? And what he's saying by saying, I don't wanna have a smartphone

01:24:49.600 | is, I just wanna work on the movie, because that's the difference between winning the Academy Award

01:24:54.640 | and making a billion dollars, and, like, oh, that was okay, right? So, like, the more, the more

01:24:58.960 | people move up that hierarchy of, like, the quality unambiguously matters, the less busy

01:25:03.280 | they become, but that same effect happens, like, with your solo entrepreneurship endeavor, with

01:25:08.320 | your podcast, with your job within a company, where you say, I'm gonna start specializing on

01:25:13.520 | this, and I wanna do this really well, I'm in sales, I can't do my job if I have to be on

01:25:17.920 | meetings all day, that becomes so clear and intolerable once you really focus on, I wanna do

01:25:22.080 | this thing well, that you find the courage and motivation to be like, we gotta completely

01:25:25.920 | reconfigure this, I'm not doing this, I'm not doing that, hold me accountable if you need to,

01:25:30.160 | maybe, whatever you need to do, it becomes an imperative that if you're not obsessing about

01:25:34.960 | quality, it just becomes a, wouldn't it be nice if I had less to do type of thing, which is not

01:25:38.960 | nearly as compelling. - It's not, and you write this in the book, you say something along the

01:25:43.440 | lines of, the market doesn't care about your desire to slow down, so, and you have to give

01:25:48.800 | something in return, so if you're not obsessing over quality, it's like, oh, I wanna do less

01:25:55.200 | stuff, I'm just too busy to focus, people are going, okay, but your work is, eh, it's all right,

01:26:00.800 | what do you mean you wanna do, cool, you wanna get a different job, to your earlier example,

01:26:05.280 | get a different job, but if you're suddenly, at my law firm, one of the highest paid guys,

01:26:10.720 | he was never in the office, and I was like, how did that happen, how come you don't, do you just

01:26:15.200 | work from home, and he's like, kinda, I mean, but that's not the point, he was bringing in business,

01:26:19.920 | so nobody was like, you know, you didn't hit your 2,000 billable hour requirement, they were like,

01:26:24.720 | here's a bonus check for $500,000, because you brought in Citibank, and the way he did that,

01:26:30.800 | was, he did, basically, no crappy little work, he was never in meetings, he didn't even show up to

01:26:36.160 | the office, and I was like, what are you doing, and he's like, ah, well, I'm limping because I

01:26:41.200 | have a jujitsu injury, because I was rolling with, I don't know, some junior partner over at Deutsche

01:26:47.120 | Bank, and then he was like, ah, but I've got this 30 mile cycling thing tomorrow with, I'm guessing

01:26:53.600 | another potential client, and so this guy was like, on cruises, at dinners, jujitsu, golf, biking,

01:26:59.520 | his biggest concern was resting his knee and hip, because he was pushing 40 or whatever years old,

01:27:06.960 | not, am I gonna hit my billable hourly requirement, so he had to basically satiate the market by

01:27:12.160 | doing work that was of a different or higher quality than everyone else, and so, go ahead.

01:27:19.200 | I was just gonna say, people underestimate themselves, they don't realize that employers

01:27:24.400 | are desperate for good people. They imagine their employers basically are mustache twirling,

01:27:30.560 | and they're like, I kind of employ people, but I wish I could just fire them, no, they're desperate

01:27:35.840 | for good people that do stuff well. If you do something well that's valuable, that's the lottery,

01:27:42.080 | right, they struck oil, you have so much leverage you don't even know, right, they're like, I do not

01:27:47.840 | wanna lose this person, they're a rainmaker, they're bringing in business, they bring in the

01:27:52.720 | development dollars, no one organizes events better, whatever it is you do really well,

01:27:56.640 | that is the most valuable thing if you're a manager or an employer, is someone who does

01:28:01.520 | something well, right, they're not looking for an excuse to fire you, they're terrified you're

01:28:07.360 | gonna leave. Once you start doing something well, you have all of this leverage, but it gets lost

01:28:12.560 | in the fog of pseudoproductivity, you're like, I don't know, isn't it bad if I say no, so I'm with

01:28:16.400 | you on that so much. - Man, I always love the message, do less but get better work done, and

01:28:22.240 | you bring that every time, and so, yeah, if you'll excuse me, I've got 600 emails in my inbox to

01:28:27.280 | ignore while I go out to lunch with my wife, but thank you so much for coming on the show, man,

01:28:31.440 | always appreciate it, and like I said, for people who are like, but wait, I have a lot more in the

01:28:35.520 | show closed, you talk about studying unrelated fields, which I really liked, no meeting Mondays,

01:28:41.120 | I've actually kind of got the opposite, meeting Mondays, if you want me on a day that's not

01:28:44.880 | Monday, better be damn important, and unless it's like this show, which is of course a different

01:28:49.360 | kind of work, there's a lot in your book as well on setting work boundaries, project timelines,

01:28:54.880 | long-term vision, types of workflows, so this is by no means an exhaustive interview of everything

01:29:01.200 | that's in the book, and I just, I always like to highlight that so people aren't like, don't need

01:29:04.880 | to buy that, already heard the podcast. - Yeah, well, Jordan, you're always one of my favorite

01:29:08.800 | conversations when I have something out, so I was excited, looking forward to a chance to chat

01:29:13.680 | about this one with you, I knew, we've known each other for a while, so I was like, yeah,

01:29:16.960 | this is on Jordan's wavelength, but it's been a lot of fun talking to you about it.

01:29:20.160 | - All right, so there we go, that was my conversation with Jordan Harbinger,

01:29:25.360 | I'll say, Jesse, it was a great conversation, on the scale of famous people he's had on the show,

01:29:33.200 | I don't think I've cracked the top five, I think he's had like LeBron James on the show,

01:29:40.160 | I think he's had some very famous people on this show, so I'm just sort of happy to be included,

01:29:44.880 | I've known Jordan for a long time, I think from my early days, probably a decade or more.

01:29:49.840 | - Didn't you deny being on Tom Brady's roast though, you're pretty famous.

01:29:53.920 | - Was I on, yeah, Tom Brady's roast, did you watch it?

01:29:58.160 | - It's on my list. - Okay.

01:29:59.840 | - Mad Dog was talking a lot about it. - Yeah, yeah, okay, so when we do, yeah,

01:30:06.000 | next roast, Jordan Harbinger's show could have better roast guest on it probably than my show,

01:30:11.280 | my roast, if we had like a Cal Newport roast, it would be like me, Laura Vanderkam, Dave Epstein,

01:30:16.800 | and Brad Stolberg, like that's my crew on this show, he would have like LeBron James and Richard

01:30:22.320 | Branson or whatever, anyways, that was a fun conversation, so hopefully you enjoyed me being

01:30:26.320 | on the other side of the proverbial microphone there for a little bit. Okay, so by the time

01:30:32.640 | you're hearing this, I should be on my way back from England, so I will see you next week for

01:30:36.640 | a normal episode, I hope you like that, and until then, as always, stay deep.

Toxic Productivity: The Truth About Getting Ahead In Life & Escaping Overload | Cal Newport

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