All right. Let's do some habit tune-ups, Jesse. Sounds good. So for those who don't know, a habit tune-up is a segment in which I take a piece of advice for my advice, Canon and walk you through it. So today I want to talk about what I sometimes call multi-scale seasonality.

So I've been reading a lot recently about what I sometimes think of as natural productivity, and what I mean by that is the way as human beings, we are wired to work so clearly through most of our history before culture could rapidly intercede with what our day-to-day lives were like, we had time for our brains and bodies to evolve for whatever it was we had to do to survive day to day.

And I'm really interested in what that is because it gives us some, I'm approaching this with care, but it gives us some notion of what our natural inclinations for work actually are. So actually, as we finished recording this, Jesse, the, my research assistant, Caleb's coming over. He's bringing a big stack of research he's been doing on my behalf on this topic.

So a couple hours from now, I'm about to really increase my knowledge of how, how did we think about work in the paleolithic? So one of the things though, that seems to be clear from the work I've done so far is that our minds are not used to this idea of being pegged at all out work relentlessly day after day, week after week, month after month, our natural sense of productivity is way more rhythmic on different scales.

There's intense periods and recharge periods. There's up and down periods. There's a variability to what work means. We get frazzled. We get this chronic background hum of anxiety when it's every single day. Wall to wall, email, zoom, email, zoom, email, zoom, Slack, Slack, Slack, email, email, email, quick break, dinner, go to sleep, repeat again and again.

And again, we can handle intense situations. We're not meant to live in that all of the time. So one of the things I have been recommending, one of the things I've been experimenting with is what I call multi-scale seasonality, which is about inducing more breaks into your working life at different scales to give yourself some freedom from the sense of I'm always on.

Now at the scale of a year, most people will take vacation. So that's good. One or two weeks, maybe twice a year, people will take off work and that's good. But what I want to recommend with multi-scale seasonality is that we replicate this at shorter timeframes. So if possible, I would say take one day off every two months or so.

So if you, if you're in a job where you build up like a federal government job, where you build up a bunch of personal days and vacation days, use one once every two months, take that day off and don't work, do something kind of over the top that signals to yourself that this is a self-care relaxation type of day.

Next, again, if possible in your job, take one half day off every two weeks or so. Now this I would recommend if you're in a knowledge work job, just doing unofficially. Let you follow my advice. You're on top of things. You're organized, your time block planning, your multi-scale planning, you get your stuff done.

You can set things up so that on Friday, you're really clocking out of work at one 30 instead of going all the way to five, you can figure out how to basically do that if you're working from home, you can literally go somewhere else. If you're working in an office, you can kind of informally shut down.

And kind of be relaxed and working something else and then leave the office early, a little bit earlier than normal. So you can do this a little bit unofficially. That's like a half day where I'm going to see a movie. I'm going to, you know, catch a day game at the baseball stadium.

Do that every, every two weeks or so. Look, if you're an organized person, this will have zero impact on how much you produce. But it is really good for your psychology. It's not that this adds up to a ton of time off, but psychologically, it adds up to regular breaks from what's going on.

You're never too far away from a half day that you're taking off out of the normal where you normally be working. You're never more than a month or so away from taking a full day off and doing something else. You're never six months away from taking two weeks off for a vacation.

So having breaks on multiple scales serves a really useful psychological trick and it gets your brain into a mode of we worked and we're off and it can really help short circuit that background hum of anxiety that happens if you feel like you're constantly pegged. Now in the big picture, I think multi-scale seasonality can be way more aggressive than that.

I have a lot of thoughts about that. I think work should be way more varied than that. We'll get to that whole chapter. My new book's going to be about that, but for now, this is a simple thing that you can do right away that will make a big difference to your psychology.

So do you practice that? Yeah, I practice. Well, I practice more extreme versions, but, but I, but again, I have a very flexible job, I have seasons that are different than other seasons. I'm in writing mode for three months now. Like that's a big change. Uh, yeah, I do weeks off and not weeks off days off on a very regular basis.

I'll do that. Protect days way out in advance. Um, makes a big difference. But you still write six days a week. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, when I'm talking about days off, it's usually from Georgetown stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Writing's on a different type of scale. I'm working on a book for the six months and then the next six months I'm doing nothing.

So like writing goes back and forth on that scale. Uh, but I'm coming to it. This is the working at a natural pace piece of slow productivity. This is what this is starting to get to is work should not necessarily be. I'm just pegged seven, you know, eight, nine hours a day with a few extra checks after it, just, there's always stuff piled up, always stuff I'm working on anytime.

You know, I barely get away if I am, it's an issue. We're not wired for that. (upbeat music) (music)