what to do on the very first day on your journey from disorganized to organized. So it's the day one steps I want to focus on today. My plan is I have five steps to go through. The first four steps are highly technical. What to do in the first four to six hours on the quest to become.

A more organized person, the fifth step will then give you the maintenance activities to do for the 30 days to follow to make sure that everything you do this first day actually sticks. So this is not about having the most advanced ongoing system, but instead taking the biggest possible steps on the very first day.

Before we get into those details, though, let's start by briefly discussing the psychological obstacle that we have to get past before we can hope to succeed in this quest to become more organized. Here is what I think the main problem is that people have is a misperception about the reality of their workload.

So I'm actually, again, with great trepidation, going to draw a picture here for those who are watching instead of just listening. I want to draw a picture about how most people think about their work day. This is just sort of implicitly in their mind. So we have here a very happy stick figure.

And he's sitting, I don't know, he's sitting at his desk. And there we go. You know, he's sitting here at his computer, expertly drawn. So let's draw a little computer here. Perfect perspective. All right. So there he is, happy at his computer. Because in the in the world of the way most people just sort of imagine their work is, what's going on?

Well, there's maybe a couple phone messages to return. I have three little phone messages over here. And there's, you know, two projects. Somebody choose one of these projects to make progress on. And there's like a few phone messages that you might want to return. And in fact, our happy person here, I'm going to give them a notebook.

And in this notebook, they, with colored pencils, kind of have this like nice little plan for the day. Work on project A, and then return these calls, and go for a nice walk, and then take lunch. Like this is sort of the implicit assumption people have about what their work life is like.

I have some stuff I'm working on, some things I have to get back to people. All right, what's the reality? Well, I'm going to draw a picture of what I imagine, this is what I think the reality is for most people. So what I have here is our same person, now very unhappy, running as fast as he or she can, because there is a giant cloud of an overwhelming quantity of projects, and requests, and tasks, and things that people need from them.

And it's chasing him or her. I'm going to say, or, you know, let's do, for whatever reason, it's shooting lightning bolts at this person. Huge cloud chasing after the running person, there's lightning bolts. For some reason, things are on fire, because I don't know, that's kind of what it feels like.

So there's just flames everywhere. This is the reality, all right? What people think, oh, I use my colored pencil, so that I can differentiate my phone call from when I work with a nice cup of tea on project A. Reality, running from fire, as there's this giant swarm chases after you, firing lightning bolts at you.

All right, why is it important that we have this misconception? It's because when you think, it works not so bad, two things happen. One, you don't think you really need to do much to get more organized. Like work is not that hard. I just need to, you know, maybe draw out a to-do list in a nice format, be a little bit careful, or just buy, like I bought this nice, this nice looking, you know, Japanese paper planner online, and just, we'll write it.

It's gonna make our lives a little easier. You don't see the urgency of actually taking major action. The second issue that's generated by this misconception is that if you do begin wandering towards some more systematic organization, it's you open the door to this reality, and my God, it's so terrible, that you just slam that door shut and say, let's just pretend that doesn't exist, denial.

I don't wanna confront the reality of how much stuff is going on. Here's the thing though, and this is the first step of the five steps I wanna talk about today. The very first step on your very first day of becoming organized is preparing yourself to face this reality.

So it is a psychological preparation step. There is a term of art that I used to use in the early days of this show, and that was called facing the productivity dragon. And the idea behind facing the productivity dragon is that you confront the reality of everything that is on your plate, even if it is terrifying and overwhelming and shooting lightning bolts at you and lighting the world around you on fire.

It is better to confront the reality than to pretend it doesn't exist. So step one is to prepare to face this productivity dragon. Now, this is not a new idea. If we go back to the sort of OG of digital age productivity, that is David Allen, he wrote about what was involved in trying to get your arms around for the first time, the step of getting started on being organized.

He wrote very clearly in his 2001 classic, Getting Things Done, how much is involved in taking that first step from chaos towards calm. I'm gonna read you from chapter five of his book here. Here's a short excerpt. Just gathering a few more things than you currently have will probably create positive feelings for you.

But if you can hang in there and really do the whole collection process 100%, it will change your experience dramatically and give you an important new reference point for being on top of your work. When I coach a client through this process, the collection phase usually takes between one and six hours, though it did once take all of 20 hours with one person.

All right, so what Allen is teaching us here is this very first step of confronting the productivity dragon takes time. It takes hours, 'cause there is more in there than you probably want to admit. So the concrete advice that comes out of this first step is that you need to put aside a full day for this day, right?

When I say, what do you do the first day of becoming more organized? I don't mean here's something you can do for 30 minutes in the morning and then you'll be more organized. You actually are gonna need a full day to do this right. So you could take, put aside a day that was otherwise quiet or put aside a weekend day or a vacation day if you need to.

We have plenty of those coming up. But you need to prepare yourself that you're gonna need something like a full day to actually make the transition I'm gonna talk about right now from chaos to calm. All right, step two, let's get technical. You need to set up your first storage system.

The place that is going to gather and make sense of all of these things that you actually have to do. Now, if you go back and read David Allen, one of the things you're gonna notice is that he relies a lot on a embodied physicality in the obligations in people's lives.

So he sort of imagines that many of the obligations in people's lives have a physical embodiment. There's a receipt that has to be submitted. There's a phone slip for a call that has to be returned. There's a printed report that was given to you that you have to do your revisions on.

And so his process of collection from getting things done is all about having these physical inboxes, literal boxes. And you're going around your space and collecting these artifacts and putting them into these inboxes. You're building piles of your stuff. And for the small number of things that don't actually exist in the real world, he says you write down a pointer to it and put that piece of paper in the physical box.

So it's a very physical process. I'm gonna suggest something different. I think that the difference between the late '90s and early 2000s when Allen was putting together this methodology and now in the 2020s is that the vast majority of professional obligations in your life as a knowledge worker are digital.

Very few of them are embodied. Maybe you printed something, but the thing you printed has a digital counterpart for which it began. Most stuff is actually implicitly in an email somewhere. It's a request that was in a Slack. It's an appointment that's lurking on your digital calendar for which work has to be done.

So to try to translate now that the vast majority of our obligations are digital, to try to somehow translate those into the physical world to gather them back into the digital would be inefficient. So our storage systems, we're gonna start digital and we're gonna remain digital, all right? So no physical inboxes.

What is gonna be the digital system in which we're going to store everything? It's gonna require three things, a collection of lists, the ability to rapidly add, update, or move items between these lists, and the ability to efficiently append information such as links or notes or texts copied out of emails to individual items on these lists.

These are the three capabilities we're gonna need in our storage system. This clearly is gonna have to be digital. You're not gonna be able to get all of those features in a purely analog system, the quickly moving things with back and forth, appending information to things. So we're gonna need a digital system here that can satisfy those three things.

I'm gonna give you three options here from simple to most complex. The simplest way to implement a system that has those three properties would just be with word processing or text files. So just imagine you have a text file. You can just have a bold header for each of the lists that we're gonna define and then just write below it, separated by white space, different items of the list.

If you want to append information to an item in this particular implementation, you can just put a bullet point or a collection of bullet points under the item and just copy and paste whatever information you need. It doesn't have to be neat. So you could just get going with Microsoft Word or Google Docs.

Any number of online task programs let you do this easily as well. A favorite of mine is WorkFlowy. All it is is list that you can indent. Press Enter, you get another item, press Tab, it indents over. What's nice about this is you can hide indentations. So if you have a bunch of things, extra information or a task, you can click Assign to have it all collapse and then you can just open it again when you want that information.

So for our three properties, text files will be fine. Next more complicated solution for implementing this system is gonna be something like Trello. This is what I use. It's just very well set up for what we're talking about here. Each list can be a column on a Trello board.

Each item can be a card on a Trello board. Extra information can be appended to the back of the cards and the cards are easy to move back and forth between different columns. The more advanced solution would be to build something more custom, perhaps using a task view database system like Notion.

I would not start here for your very first day of becoming organized unless you're already a pro at one of these systems and it's as easy for you to put together as it is for someone else to set up WorkFlowy. This is the type of thing you can think about down the line.

Once we've made this initial leap from chaos to control, chaos to calm, down the line, you might think about if you're more tech oriented, building a more advanced system, but I wouldn't start there. Okay, so we now know what a system, broadly speaking, needs these lists that you can update and move stuff between and append information.

We know what tech tools you can use to actually store these lists. What are the actual lists we need in our initial system? I'm gonna suggest six for your starter system. Again, whether this is in Docs, Trello, or Notion. Ready, Backburner, Waiting, To Discuss, Clarify, and Scheduled. So in fact, I'll even write these on the screen so we can be on the same page.

I'm gonna talk a little bit about each of these. I always try to type on here, Jesse, but it always just creates, makes the world just fall apart. By the way, see that issue with the trying to type on here? That's why I had to stop using this in my classroom.

When you're in projection or screen sharing mode in Notability, the text does, the typing doesn't work very well. All right, I can just write though. I got beautiful handwriting. All right, so what are these things? Ready was number one. What we mean by ready is going to be, think of it as like ready for action.

These are things, items that need to be worked on as soon as we can get to them. I typically think about something under a ready list as something that I want to try to complete in the given week. Different people do that slightly different ways. Next, we had Backburner.

These are things that they need to get done. You've committed to them, but you're not working on them right now. So we have them on the Backburner. So we're not gonna forget about them. We have a place and here it is on this list. If we get more information about this thing that we've committed to, but it's not coming up yet, we have a place to put that information.

Someone emails us more details about the workshop we've agreed to set up, and we're not really working on that yet. We can copy that text from the email and put it on the back of this Trello card or an indentation under this item. So that's what's going on the Backburner.

Waiting, this is critical. I think this is the most important type of list that people do not typically keep. This is things that you are waiting to hear back about. All right, so this is I'm working on this workshop. I sent an email to the administrator about trying to get a room reservation.

I am waiting to hear back from that person about whether or not we can get that room. That item can be now under the waiting list. So it's waiting as in waiting to hear back. Other critical lists that most people don't use in their systems but is very efficient is to discuss.

So it's where you keep track of things where I'm going to be meeting with this person or team at some point in the near future. What do I want to discuss with them at that next meeting? Now you have two options here. You can just have one list to discuss and every item on it, the very first thing in the title of the item in bold is to discuss with Jesse.

So like you can just, you can clarify for each item who is this for? So it's for people or teams you meet with on a regular basis. And the idea here is if you have things you need more information on, instead of just throwing an email into the ether, you can kind of collect lists of, okay, next time I talk to Jesse, I have four things on here to go through.

If there's people you have a lot of things to discuss things with and you talk to them on a regular basis, they can get their own to discuss lists. You might have multiple to discuss lists with team, with boss, with department chair. That's fine as well. Clarify, these are placeholders.

All right, I have this obligation, something I'm supposed to do something about this. I don't yet know what that means. In other words, like I don't know what I should do right now to make progress on this thing. I just know I'm committed to it. I need to think through or learn more about what this actually means.

You know, I said, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll handle the secret Santa in the office this week or this month. And I don't really know what that means. Like, I don't know how that works or what I need to do, but I just committed to it. I don't wanna forget it.

It can go to the clarify list. That means this is an obligation that is pending more clarification on what it actually is gonna require us to do. So we have a place for it. And then scheduled. So if there's a non-simple task that is scheduled on your calendar. So it's a task that requires some explanation or maybe has some information that gets appended to it.

Here's what people emailed me. Here's the list of steps I need to do on this. I'm supposed to file this report. I put aside time to do this on Friday morning, but here's the step. Someone told me about how to do this or how to submit it. This gives you a place for that item to live in your system.

So all that information can live somewhere. So a item under scheduled is also on your calendar somewhere. But the item on your list can hold all the extra information you need. Not everything on your calendar needs to be under the scheduled item. You don't need appointments for the most part under there.

You don't need small things under there. You know, pickup, whatever, someone from the train station. You know, you probably don't need an item there. But if it's complex, there's information you need to remember about it. Then it can live there under the scheduled item. All right, so you have six lists.

And that's your initial collection system. So we've set up six lists in some sort of digital system. All right, step three. Here's the facing the productivity drag and part made real. Dump everything on your mind, in your inbox, in the world. Everything that you are obligated to do gets on these lists.

All right, so what does this mean? Everything you can think of. So just start, like, what can I think of that I'm supposed to be working on or I should be doing? Maybe I told someone I would do it or I've just been thinking to myself, this is something I should make progress on.

I should update the website. Get everything you can out of your head. Get it onto an item in these lists. Go through your inbox and process every single email. Get the inbox empty. This doesn't mean reply to every email. This doesn't mean take care of every email. You're translating these emails into task items that go into your system.

So for this initial collection phase, you wanna clear everything out of your inbox. And it might mean you might have things showing up on your list. It's just, like, reply to send Jesse the information he requested about skeleton manufacturing, right? Like, just whatever it is, you're just translating emails into items on this list.

But you are denying your email inbox to be a secondary task management system at this point. You're putting all your faith into this collection system. Look through your calendar. There are complicated things on there, reminders that should be translated into tasks that are on this list. Then go back and think some more about what else am I forgetting?

What else is just in my head? Let me give you a couple advanced tips for going through this collection process. Number one, it does help sometimes to use a working memory.txt file as an intermediary in this process. So just have a plain, unformatted text file on your computer. As you're going through one of these categories, you can just dump things into that text file and then go from that text file into your system.

It helps, right? It feels like this is an extra step, but it actually helps, especially if you're cleaning out an inbox. 'Cause you can type really quickly into a text file and you don't have to be organized or really think it through, like reply to Jesse about this, send back dates to so-and-so.

You can just type really fast and just fill in this text file really fast. I call it working memory.txt because this text file is like an extension of your working memory. Our brain can hold five or six things at a time. With a working memory.txt file, you can have 20 or 30 things.

It's like you're extending your working memory. And then you go from that text file into your system. It takes a little bit more time to put things into your system. You have to choose the list. You have to create the card or do the font formatting if you're using something like Microsoft Word.

More importantly, as you go from this very fast to fill in plain text file to your system, you see things to consolidate or to simplify. Eh, actually I don't really need to respond to these people. Or now that I look at this, I have eight different emails on here from Jesse about merchandising Jesse Skeleton.

I could just combine this into one item on my list, which is, you know, set up intervention to talk to Jesse about his obsession with Jesse Skeleton, right? So you actually get some on-the-fly organization and consolidation simplification as you go to this extended working memory and then into your system.

Advanced tip number two, when you're going through this initial dumping of everything in your life into this system, lean heavily into the clarify list. Don't try to work everything out during this process. There's too many things. Don't try for everything you come up with, like, well, what's going on with this project?

Well, let me follow up with so-and-so about this. And let me go, let me look at this a little bit. When might I be able to do this? You don't have the time or energy to actually clarify all of the ambiguous obligations that are on your plate. Right now, we're just trying to get everything into our system.

So at first, your clarify list might be really long. You just don't want to forget it. So you just have, you know, workshop plan. It's like, God, I don't even know what that means, but I'm not forgetting it. Let me just throw it in the clarify list for now.

We'll deal with this in the next step. So don't worry about that. The key rule to maintain as you're initially populating your list in your system, and this is the rule that you should maintain going forward, is that every obligation gets one item in the system. It can move between lists.

It cannot exist on multiple lists. You do not have, okay, under ready, workshop, you know, next steps for this workshop project. And then if that generates an email to an administrator, you don't keep that item under the ready list and add a new item to the waiting to hear back list.

You move that full item over to the ready, waiting to hear back from list and just update the status up top. I'm waiting to hear back from so-and-so about this. All of the information about a given obligation lives in the system, but it moves around to what is the status of this obligation right now.

So think about these lists as the statuses of various obligations. If you are actually building a notion-based system to keep track of this stuff, this would be a lot more explicit because these are database entries that can have a single status. It's here, then it's there, then it's here.

So everything just lives in one place. All right, this will take a while, one to three hours probably. So we've really spent a lot of our day here getting everything into this list. But now symbolically when you're done, everything is captured. Your inbox is empty. There's nothing in your head.

There's nothing just sitting there on your calendar. You don't know what it means. It's all in this one place, this collection of lists, this system of yours. That brings us to step four to do your initial configuring. Moving forward, configuration of your list, of your system is something you're gonna do on a semi-regular basis.

We'll get to that soon. But we're gonna do our very first configuration step during this very first day that you're making your leap from chaos to calm. This is a big thing that was always missing from David Allen's methodology, but I think is really important. This is where you make sense of all of the things in your system and you clarify and optimize, remove redundancies.

It's where you sit and move and work around and make more sense of this huge mess of stuff that's on your plate. So this means a few things. One, start going through your clarifying, the items under the clarify list and try to clarify as many as you can. The stuff that's not particularly urgent, you can skip for now.

But the things you think like, I need to do something about this. Now you can clarify it. So you don't want to clarify as you're filling in your list and doing your dumping everything in your life because that's too much friction. But now that you've done that, now we can focus just on moving through this clarify list and say, what are the things that really I should be making progress on and start doing the clarification.

Now this might mean you discard it. I don't really need to do this. Or it might mean you're sending a clarification email. This is often the case with stuff that ends up on clarifying when you go through a configuration step. Often the reaction is, I got to write to someone to say, what the hell does this mean?

Like, how do I set up the Secret Santa? You did it last year. Can you tell me about it? That's fine. So those things just get moved over to the waiting to hear back from list. Other things, it might be obvious. Now that I think about it, what I need to do is set up a meeting with my team and we need to make a plan.

So either I can send that doodle pool now to do that or move this over to the ready list and change the actual description of the item to set up meeting with team to discuss this project and all the information about it is attached to this card. This is what I mean by clarify.

So it's moving things off of that clarify list to where they should go. This is also a good time to triage. Go through and triage the back burner. Do I really need to do this? I was excited about this, but I'm thinking now I don't need to do that, right?

So you can kind of go through like what's on the back burner. Let me triage things out of this. What do I really want to stick with? This is where you might send some sorry triage messages. Hey, you know, sorry. I know I said before like I could help you with this, but actually I think my schedule is too crowded.

That creates like seven seconds of annoyance on the recipient's end, but for the sender of that email, it can create seven hours of freedom. So those are very powerful. Whenever I get those type of messages from someone, not right before something is due or after it's due. Hey, I didn't do this.

I can't really get to this, but like three weeks in advance. Hey, you know how I said we should record this thing. Honestly, like I don't, I was misreading my schedule. This is probably not the right time for it. I know that someone who has their act together. That's someone who's looking and configuring their whole schedule and seeing what makes sense and what doesn't.

You'll actually earn respect if in advance, you're stepping back from things. Now, if you wait until it's due and just don't do it and then step back, that's a different thing. Then you look out of control. Another part of configuring is adding things to calendars that need to be on calendars.

Okay, this is pretty urgent. Let me find time for this and get that on my calendar. If there's information associated with this task, I'll move this over to scheduled. If it's a one-time thing like set up doc dentist appointment and I get it on my calendar, then, you know, I just delete the item from my list.

I don't need it there. It's also a good time. And this is an advanced tip to look for batching opportunities. Like this, this, this, and this. All of these things I could really make progress on if I talk to Jesse about them. So what I really want to do is take all of these five things and put them all on the back of my Trello card for the item of set up meeting with Jesse to discuss many things.

And you kind of have these things below. And then I send the email to Jesse saying, "Let's do this meeting." And that whole card gets moved to waiting to hear back from. Or I'm like, "Oh, we meet every week when we record our podcasts. Let me batch a bunch of these things and put it under the to discuss list, Jesse's to discuss list, right?" So it's in this configuring step you get all these great batching opportunities.

Let's wait to do this here. Let's do all these things at the same time. Let's, I'm going into work on Friday. And so like, let's put aside a big group of time and we're going to like squash through 20 things that need to get done. This is really productivity ninja stuff when you begin to do these batching opportunities, something that really doesn't happen when you're just reactive and chaotic.

"Oh my God, what do I need to do next? My inbox is on fire. Oh my God, this thing is due." You're never going to see those types of opportunities. All right, so at this point, you have your system fully set up. We're about four or five hours into your first day of trying to be more organized and you have everything in a intelligently designed digital system in these six optimal lists.

And you've done your initial configuring. So stuff that's important has been clarified. You've batched stuff, you've removed stuff, you've moved things where it needs to go. Some things are on the calendar. So you kind of have your arms around what's on your plate. The fifth and final step is how do we then make the use of this system stick?

If you stop trusting this system, it will fall apart. If you find yourself unwilling, for example, to move something out of your inbox and onto an item in these lists, that means you don't trust yourself for this system. It means you say, "I know I'll check my inbox." 'Cause I get yelled at if I don't.

I don't trust myself to look at this system. So let me just keep this in here. If you're writing notes to yourself, you're not trusting your system. So how do we actually get you into the habit now of actually making this system part of your workflow? Well, I'm going to suggest two things you do daily and one thing you do weekly for the next four weeks after this very first day of getting organized.

So the first daily thing, review this system every morning when you look at your calendar. Use it to help make your plan for the day. I won't even get into now how you're making your plan for the day. This is more advanced stuff. But however you make your plan for the day, and again, the brightly colored pencils on your fancy planner, or you're just jotting stuff down on a text file, I don't care for now.

I look at my system every day before I make this plan. I see what's on that ready list. I remind myself who am I waiting to hear back from. I remind myself on the to-discuss list. Hey, do I have a meeting coming up today that I need to discuss things on a to-discuss list?

We're talking five minutes, but you see it all. You see the mess of stuff and clarify that you haven't got to. You see the big back burner. You see everything. Number two, at the end of every day, when you're finishing the shutting down your work, you have to go back and review the system again.

Here, the goal is to make sure that anything that is floating gets nailed down back into the system. Oh yeah, you know, I said in this meeting I would do this. Let me make sure that's written down in my system. This thing came in, this request in a Slack.

Let me get that into my system. You're closing the loops, making sure that there's nothing just in your head. Should you at this point empty everything in your inbox into your system like we did on the day one? It's probably not practical because it just is too time consuming.

You might not always have that time. So let's put that aside for now. But otherwise, anything else that's loose or urgent, you want it in your system. You look at your system, make sure there's no obvious changes or updates to do. Typically, if the day moves fast, there's updates you need to make to your system you haven't gotten around to.

Oh, I sent that email about this. I need to move that over to waiting to hear back. Or I heard back from this thing, so I need to move this back from waiting to hear back. To over here and then copying what I heard about it. So just do that final cleanup.

So your system, everything is back in it and the system is up to date. Do that every day, first four weeks. The weekly thing I want you to do for the first four weeks is return to that step four configure step at the beginning of each week for the next four weeks.

Do it Monday morning, you can do it Sunday. Some people do it at the end of day Friday, so they can go into their weekend less stressed. I don't care when you do it, but go back and do something like that configure step, which remember meant you're going through the clarify items and trying to like, okay, which ones can I actually make progress on?

You're triaging, you're batching, you're moving things, your calendar are off. This is like a 30 minute process of just getting the system fully up to speed. Critically, when you do that configure process, this is a time to return to your inbox and empty it. That's why it's good to do on the weekend or before the week really gets going.

The stuff that's piled up to my inbox that I didn't really have time during the days or my daily reviews to get to, I wanna get that back down to zero and everything back into my system. So it's a more thorough configuring than what you're doing at the end of each day.

So the book has four myths of attention span. So four things that we think is true about attention, but are not. That's what Jason's asking about. So let's go through these one by one. And then I'll tell you whether or not I agree or not that this is a myth.

All right, glorious first myth. We should always strive to be focused and should feel guilty if we can't or can't be. Yeah, I completely agree with that that's a myth. To strive to always be focused is absurd. It's like talking to someone who wants to get stronger or an athlete and be like, you should strive to always have your muscles like in a state of load-bearing strain.

That's crazy, right? There's only so much load-bearing strain you can do like modern bodybuilding orthodoxy says, really you wanna have eight to 10 sets per week per muscle group, right? Like otherwise it's overload. So just because you need to know how to put hard strain on your muscle and do it on a regular basis to get stronger, it is obviously a reducto ad absurdum to then say, therefore it is good to always have your muscles under strain.

Same thing with attention, focus is important. You need the focus to produce things of true value using your brain, but to then extrapolate from that to say you should always be in a state of focus is absurd because that's impossible. So I agree, that's definitely a myth. All right, Gloria, second myth.

Mindless activity that we do on our computers and phones is wasteful of our time. No, I agree here as well. I'm gonna draw from my book "Digital Minimalism" to tell you what I believe. So the whole premise of that book, like why did I write that book? Not because I believe there is some intrinsic evil in particular activities, but because my readers and listeners were reporting to me, I am spending more time on these activities than I know is useful or healthy.

This is when distractions become a problem. When you know they are keeping you away from things that are more important, that they are lowering the quality of your life. That's when you say this is a problem. And that was the problem people began feeling around 2016, 2017. This tipping point where more and more people who bought their iPhone in 2010 because they saw the Steve Jobs speech about having your iPod and your phone combined, like that's awesome, woke up seven years later and said, "I checked this 150 times a day.

"I'm not paying attention to my kids. "I'm not socializing anymore. "I feel strung out and anxious. "I'm not doing the activities that used to matter." That's the problem. So there's nothing intrinsic, "This is evil to look at it." It's, "I can't help but look at this "when I'm trying to do bath time with my kids." That's when it becomes a problem.

Good analogy here would be something like alcohol. Right, same thing. It's not, "Hey, you should never touch alcohol. "That's bad." But what's the cliche about it? When does it become a problem? When it's messing up your life. And I think that's what happened for a lot of people with their relationship with their phones.

So yes, you wanna measure technology from your values. "Is it helping or preventing me "from doing the things I care about?" So it's perfectly fine to have perfectly distracting, low-quality things in your life, as long as it's not having a footprint that keeps you away from things that you value.

Problem is for a lot of people, they do. And then the real problem becomes when we look at kids, because they can't help it. I'm yet to find a 13-year-old who you give unrestricted access to the internet with on their phone, and they're like, "I'm gonna use this a little bit.

"I wanna go outside and play." Nah, if you're a kid, that thing is gonna brain worm in there. So we gotta, there we have to have some more protection. All right, but so far I'm on track here with Gloria. All right, myth number three. "The inability to focus on our devices "are due primarily to notifications "and our lack of discipline." That's an interesting one.

I agree with the notifications piece. That's like 2003 thinking. Notifications are the problem. I get the notification that I have a new email, and that's the problem. And if I just turn off my notifications, I'll be fine. No, that's crazy. We come back to these things again and again, not because we were notified, but because what they're offering us, whether we were notified or not.

And it is a complicated picture. When it comes to work, you can turn off your email notifications, but you're still gonna check that inbox once every six minutes. Why? Because of the hyperactive hive mind mode of collaboration. This is the core of my book, "A World Without Email." We work out so much of our collaboration through asynchronous back and forth messaging.

These conversations required many back and forth messages. They're timely. So now I have to keep checking my inbox so that I can see your most recent message and bounce it back to you so you can bounce it back to me and I can bounce it back to you and get an answer before lunchtime.

So we check our work email all the time in this example, not because of notifications, but because we have a collaboration method that requires us to constantly check this work email because that's how we keep these asynchronous conversations going. On our phones, it's more complicated. I don't go back to Twitter compulsively if I have a problem with Twitter because of a notification, but because of what it gives me.

It presses these emotional buttons. There's an addictive design element to it. I don't need a notification to grab a cigarette if I'm addicted to smoking. It's already wormed its way into my rhythms of the day. So yeah, notifications have nothing to do with it. Discipline is complicated. Often directly speaking, it's not discipline.

I can't just fix my email problem by being disciplined. I'm not going to check my email. The whole structure of my work requires me to do it. So I have to put in place an alternative structure collaboration that does not require email. A little bit harder when it comes to your phone and in some ways a little bit easier.

Yes, I agree, just white knuckling it. I don't want to look at these digital cigarettes is hard because they're helping you paper over voids in your life. They're giving you emotional stimulation. They're scratching deeply human urges you have in a very superficial way, but you need to scratch those urges.

And it's easier to be seeing something on social media or like pornography than it is to actually fulfill those human urges with like real relationships with real people. But there is a discipline aspect to that as well, but it's just indirect. It's the disciplined construction of a more intentional cultivated deep life that begins to make the superficial pleasures of the attention economy superficial and optional.

It's that disciplined effort to actually build into your life what really matters to get a taste for it that makes the digitized junk food no longer appealing. So ultimately discipline will be involved, especially with the non-work digital life, but it's not the obvious discipline of just avert my eyes and grip my knuckles.

It's a more indirectly subtle relentlessly applied discipline to build a life where you don't just avoid those things, but you find them increasingly intolerable. So look at that like I 80% agree. Number four, fourth myth flow is the ideal state. We should strive for when using our technologies. Yeah, I agree flow state be wary.

It's overrated. We have this argument a lot flow state feels great and there are certain times in work where flow state feels great for example, but also there's a lot of important work activities that are not a flow state. It's pulling teeth. Why because you're straining your brain to do something that is past your comfortable ability, which is critical if you want to get better produce your best work flow state requires that you get you fall into a zone which requires that you're like right in this sweet spot of like I have to focus but I can do this pretty well.

For the guitar player flow state is when you're playing a hard song you can play. Well, it's great. You get lost in it. Your fingers are doing it deliberate practice is when you were learning that song in the first place and you couldn't play it fast enough and that feels like the opposite of flow you feel every second when you're trying to with your full concentration do something you cannot yet do comfortably so flow states great, but it's not the be all end all goal when it comes to Technologies Gloria's right be very wary, especially addictive video games want you to get into a flow state because you look up seven hours later and you've been focusing on that thing all day long.

They want to just pull you from one experience to another. There's no more purified example of a flow state than the tick-tock interface swipe swipe swipe swipe, you know, just here's something here's something that's not good. That was really good. This one wasn't but if I swipe some more I should get some more they get you lost in this flow state.

So there you go. They've just gathered three hours of data on you. So Gloria's right in technology use flow states, not the goal in work in general flow states are great, but they're not the only thing that's good. So I think we sometimes we probably sometimes put too much popular emphasis on them.

And by the way, my Haley checks hit me high would agree with this right? I mean he he studied these very specifically the context of psychology. He wasn't saying you should be in a flow state all the time. He said there's a very observable thing. It's important and we can measure it and we should understand it but people took it and said flow states all that matters.

So some wisdom in those. So thank you who asked this question Jason good question was a chance to go over Gloria's four myths and I recommend that book attention span. If you read my book world without email. I have a whole long section on Gloria mark. I talked about her her whole story.

I've interviewed her on multiple occasions really one of the top thinkers on attention and distraction. So definitely check out that book if you're a fan of what we talked about here. I work in data analysis and I'm regularly bored in my day-to-day tasks at the same time. My side hustle has gotten to the point where I can spend the whole day and deep work without distraction.

What should I do in the intern to maintain my deep work muscle while also getting through the day? Just if you've gotten used to this type of question, we get the I call it the leading the witness question, right where it's like, well, my work is bad and it's really boring and it's stupid and but this other thing is really great and it's awesome and I could do it all day long and I gives me meaning in life.

What should I do? It's a leading leading the question. Yeah. So I want you to be careful here. This is Maggie. I want you to be wary of grasses greener syndrome. So when you're just sort of going through your professional life with what in my book so good they can't ignore you.

I call the passion mindset, which is what is this job offering me? You're very susceptible to the grasses greener syndrome, which is like I don't love like what I'm doing day-to-day right now. Maybe there's something where I would love what I'm doing day-to-day more and when you start messing around with side hustles, this gets even more dangerous because it is easy to create a quote-unquote side hustle that just like lets you do the thing you think is fun in the moment, right?

Because when you don't have to depend on that side hustle for all of your income when you don't have to you know, depend on that side hustle to actually create an impact in the world or support people. You can just make it whatever you want and then you tell yourself the story that like there's jobs like this out here.

I could just be doing this really fun thing. But over here on this other world in this non, you know data analysis there's you know, I have to fill out memos and it's not always like that. My boss is kind of annoying and it's not always interesting what I'm doing.

But in my side hustle, I'm writing a novel and it's like fun. I'm just writing all day. But the issue is that side hustle could just be you cosplaying some sort of imaginary ideal of what work could be. It's a dangerous thing to have pulling you. So how do we get out of this situation?

It's not just we say we'll just grin and bear whatever your job is because maybe your job isn't in its current state what it should be. The way you get out of this situation is lifestyle centric career planning. I have an ideal vision of where I want my life to be and here's my sort of target in the next few years all the aspects of my life where I live what I do what my days are like my engagement with community and the rest of the world.

All these things are really clear and as part of this you then look back and say how does I use my working life to get me closer there then what you were doing in your working life is part of a intentional plan to get you closer to a more idealized version of your lifestyle that is much more effective than just the passion mindset of do I like what I'm doing?

Is there another thing I could be doing that I would like more maybe I should just be a novelist because this is fun. Like Cal I bought my hipster keyboard and it clickety clacks and and I'm drinking coffee and clickety clacky Brad Stolberg, by the way, Jesse called my new keyboard a hipster keyboard.

All right. Yeah, he's like us you got one of those hipster keyboard does he seem a lot in coffee shops? I don't know. I don't know. He lives in Asheville. I've is probably a lot of hipsters there, right? So I understand but yeah, so he calls it a hipster keyboard which it is.

So you like this is fun. I clickety clack and wear a beret and a pipe in Starbucks, which is exactly what I do. I'm just like ha ha ha right, right, right. Anyway, this is fun and data. Now. This is the other stuff is kind, you know, it's annoying right?

You're just going to get drawn into that. But if you're like no, no, this data analysis job. Is part of like the money it generates what I'm doing now, but where I want to shift my position here eventually as I get to this level, I'm going to shift this to a consultant because I've saved this much money and then it's going to be six months on six months off which is going to allow us like you have this plan worked out that the work you're doing now and what you're working towards with your work is part of a plan that connects to deeply with what resonates that's where you want to be not just analyzing this your day-to-day activity something you enjoy or not and then inventing you know, this ideal job cosplay like well, I'm comparing it to that.

You know, couldn't be that it's equivalent of like you're looking at your romantic partner and then you're watching. A Ryan Reynolds movie and you're like Ryan Reynolds seems kind of better. I mean, he's funny. He's like pretty good shape, you know, he's like the handyman in this small town in this Christmas movie that like I didn't realize would teach me the meaning of Christmas and then you know, you look over at your romantic partner like I don't know.

I mean, maybe he's probably Ryan Reynolds. It's kind of the same thing when you're, you know, cosplaying on your hipster keyboard like this is more fun than you know, my job that's sending my kids to private school. So I think working backwards and I know I'm a broken record on this but Lifestyle Center career planning gives you focus on what you're doing and why which is what you need to keep moving your motivational system needs an understanding of what you're doing and how it leads to something important so that your episodic future thinking can see something that really resonates.

That's what it needs. It doesn't need to enjoy every minute of what you're doing. That's the wrong metric the athlete who really wants to be the best in their field does not enjoy all the time they spend in the weight room, but they're motivated to do it because it's part of their vision of being number one.

So that would be my advice there. Be careful. A grass is greener syndrome. All right. What's our next question? Jesse is the moment of truth to it's just slow productivity corner. Yeah, let's get some theme music. All right. What is our slow productivity corner question of the day? Jesse that came from Kieran.

Thank you. Kieran. I'm a slow thinker, but at times my employee wants complicated answers quickly. I struggle at times to gather my thoughts into concise answers to appease management. How should I compensate? Well, I'm going to give you a couple ideas here. One of them will be concrete and one of them is going to be a little bit more psychological.

Let me start with the concrete lean into your slowness here. By cultivating this could be like a a quirky idiosyncratic trait of yours. You get that email. Hey Dante, what about like whatever you say? Interesting question. Let me give this a let me give this a thought. I'll get back to you after lunch.

You have a specific time that then gives you enough time to sit down and say, okay, let me take a break. We take a beat. And let me think through like what do I really want to say here and let me gather some points here and actually make this pretty thoughtful and then send it back by the time.

I said it was going to send it back. So then people think like well Dante. Yeah, he's very thoughtful guy. Like he never responds right off the cuff in the meetings. He says, let me get back to you and then he does and he gets back to us in the time.

He says and it's always really thoughtful stuff. And now you're leaning into the slowness instead of losing opportunities. Like I like Dante doesn't he gives us doesn't get back to us or it's it's it's incomplete. They're like this is just the way this guy operates. That's actually kind of cool.

He's careful so we can kind of trust him on careful stuff. And here's the bonus Dante. They will maybe start leaving you out of this sort of knucklehead like back and forth hyperactive hive mind. Like let's just like go back and forth 70 emails right now and try to like get some answer.

You don't really want to be a part of that. Anyways, like I'm slower. So no, I can't do the less than 70 emails next 30 minutes, but I can really help think what's really going to be best for this client to do this. You really have to deliver though really do think through and be deliberate.

Here's my psychological answer. So that's like what you could do positively. There could be a negative aspect here as well. There could be some combination of perfectionism and imposter syndrome self-confidence issues going on here. Right? So the other thing that might be happening is you just worried about shooting off a response because you worry I'm insufficient.

Like this might not be smart. This might not make sense. If I send off this response too quick and I really haven't thought about it. The boss is going to be like, aha, I knew it. You're not smart. You're an imposter pack up and get out of here. And so you're crippled by this idea of you know, I just do I really belong here?

Can you know, are people going to think I'm dumb? It's sort of like a perfectionism imposter syndrome. That's also very common in these sort of work scenarios and there you have to just basically this is psychological you have to harness your sort of inner American white maleness of just I will be very confident like, yeah, I know about this there, you know, and just be like it'll work out.

You got to have to kind of get that mindset a little bit. It's going to feel artificial at first. That's sort of like, yeah, of course do this course, you know, then high-five people because that's what American white males do. I suppose we high-five each other. Yeah, they type on hipster keyboard.

It's like, let me just knock this out on my hipster keyboard. Give it up just round of high-fives. Everyone in the room is just high-fiving. So you got some that's just mindset people. Here's the thing. People are not scouring over your responses. They're not looking at him in detail.

There's not a committee. That's like, okay, here comes Dante. Let's put it up project it projected on the board for some reason. They have it on a 1980 style plastic film on the overhead projector and they're all staring at it and thinking about it. And then finally like someone in a tweed jacket shakes their head and says now this is not good.

This is not good at all. And then the other guy is like, so we're going to murder him like else do it and they all just run out of the room to come get you. That's not what happens when you send a quick email. It's mainly just people who are really busy and overwhelmed and just try to throw things.

I didn't answer this because I have so many things going on. I'm super stressed it. They don't really care. If you read most people's emails in the hyperactive hive mind situation, they often sound like you have you know, a caveman who's dealing with a brain injury responding, you know, like it's like a meme client meeting bad 4 p.m.

Question mark emoji, right? Like it's people are just throwing junk around. So the psychological answer is like you got a little easier on yourself. Just be like, yeah, it's fine. They're not people just the conversation needs to move forward. So you have some combination of these two options. Don't be so worried about people scrutinizing your responses or and this could be complimentary lean into being a slow thinker.

I'll use my thing. I take my time, but then I give you good responses. I like this this second this ladder response just because I think it might free you from a lot of the back and forth hyperactive nonsense and in a way that's not costing you we don't involve Dante and like a lot some of the back and forth nonsense because not because he's not reliable but because he's a slower more careful thinker.

So you probably won't respond to this right away. And in fact the fact that you are you will respond this right away makes me think why aren't you more like Dante? So it's like a positive way to actually get away from some knucklehead stuff. Hey, if you like this video, I think you'll really like this one as well.