Hi Cal, this is Omar Ansari. Hope you're doing well. So I love your book and I've got the whole team reading it and we've even started a book club at work. I was reviewing your first principle and it talked about eudaimonia machines. And you know, the thought occurred to me, these are five rooms and what if we were to transplant these concepts, these five different stages into weekdays?

And the thought occurs to me because at work we've instituted this no meeting Friday approach. So we literally have created this space for folks to have deep work. I'm wondering if we can actually step through the five stages in a chunk like fashion. This is what we need to work with those three 90 minute sessions on Friday and we build Monday through Thursday to that day.

So I was wondering if you have any thoughts around that approach and any ideas. Thank you so much and keep up the good work. Well Omar, first of all, I appreciate the bird sounds in the background. From best I can tell remotely, it seems like a flock of birds was murdering a deer.

Do I have that right? Or maybe it was a flock of birds was repairing a motorcycle. But anyways, you brought the bird sound commitment up to a new level. So I do applaud you for that. All right, so let's talk about the eudaimonia machine. Architect David DeWayne's idea of the eudaimonia machine.

I was actually just talking to David earlier today. He sent me a really cool Emerson quote that I might do something with. Can we move the eudaimonia machine from spatial to temporal? Can we move the rooms of the eudaimonia machine into days of the week? I will say my first instinct here is caution.

If you do, and I'm going to use your example, if you do something like no meeting Friday, these have been tried a lot and they failed a lot. And why do they fail a lot is if you have not fixed the underlying nature of your work to make that possible, it's going to create problems.

And what I mean by that more specifically is if like most organizations, you use the hyperactive hive mind workflow as your primary means of coordination and collaborations that's on the fly, ad hoc, back and forth, haphazard communication. This is how we make things happen. When you then try to put in these bigger constraints, such as, you know, on Friday, we don't do meetings.

On Tuesdays, we don't send emails. It can cause issues because it's actually these impromptu emails and meetings that makes progress in the work and the work slows down and things can't happen and the friction builds up and the heat gets hot and then the constraints go away. So what I recommend is if you're going to do any type of shaping, temporal shaping of how work unfolds, when communication happens, when meetings happen, when emails happen, the rules have to be supported by underlying processes.

You have to have an alternative way for work to happen that's clearly specified that works just fine if no one has meetings on Friday or if no one can send emails on Tuesday. So this is my concern when I hear just a casual idea of like, well, we could take something like the rooms of the Eudaimonia machine and make them in the days because that's putting huge constraints on what is allowed to happen in different days.

And those constraints will fail if you don't rethink from the ground up how work actually happens so that they can fit within those constraints. And that's a big point that I want to put out there in my answer is that the processes for work drive everything else. You cannot solve the problems that are created as a side effect of the hyperactive hive mind by just treating those side effects.

You can't say, man, we get too many emails, so let's put a rule that says let's send less emails. You can't say, man, we're in so many Zoom meetings, let's have a rule that says less Zoom meetings. You're treating the fever without getting to the underlying infection. In this case, the underlying infection is these haphazard back and forth on-demand communication sessions are the only way that you have in your organization to get work done.

So I care more about the underlying processes than the rules you have for how many meetings we can have, email, et cetera. That being said, I do like the general idea of finding different ways of operationalizing the philosophy that is embedded in David DeWayne's eudaimonia machine. The machine is a concrete proposal.

It's also a philosophical proposal. The idea that you could actually think intentionally about how you actually approach the task of creating value with your brain and taking the function of the brain and the human being as an integral part of your thinking about work phase construction. When David talks about having a shower you go through ritualistically before you go into a chamber to really think your deepest thoughts, this is in part a philosophical acceptance of this is a really complicated, interesting, deeply human thing we're asking people to do, and we should maybe give it some ritualistic respect.

So I think more vaguely this is a good idea, that we should have more respect in how we construct our workdays to actually respect how human beings function and what we're asking human beings to do and how the human brains actually operate and what's a good or bad way to work with these brains.

Maybe to add a little bit more of mystery into what we're doing, to add a little bit more of a code of honor into thinking or whatever we want to do. I think this is not a bad idea. But just keep in mind, again, the scale at which these changes have to operate is on the underlying processes for how work gets done.

Jumping on Slack, jumping on email, or sending out Google invites for a Zoom, if this is the primary way that almost all work gets done, you can't have much success making any other changes. So if you start with the processes, you can re-mold your work however you want. You can make your own instantiations of the eudaimonia machine, of radical novelty, of radical effectiveness, whatever you want to do, if you're starting your work from the underlying processes and rebuilding those from scratch to directly support whatever this vision actually is.