- Next question's from Marie from New York City. I work in leadership development for a large healthcare institution. I think your ideas on work processes are potentially game-changing for many of the leaders I work with, but I'm struggling with how to share it with them. - This is difficult.

It is difficult. I have done some of these events before. I have worked with C-suite types. I've worked with boards of directors. I've worked with the executive cores of Fortune 50 companies. It's not always my favorite thing because the corporate world is complicated. It's more complicated than I understand, is often more complicated than my ideas fully appreciate because in addition to just producing work, there's all of these other constraints, these social and political constraints of, you know, this division traditionally has had this power and they gave it up and this executive VP, and it is a really complicated, it is a complicated world, but I will say what seems to help, Marie, more so than particular examples, more so than particular tactics, which might seem at first what you need.

Can I be more specific? Can you give me more specifics? You don't really wanna be specific when talking with leaders because leaders will hear specifics. Oh, I use office hours plus shared documents plus whatever, docket clearing meetings. You give specifics and what they hear is where is there a problem with this?

Where is there a potential danger with this? Where might this ruffle someone's feathers or get me in trouble? It is always easier not to do something new. Something new introduces the possibility of problems. So I always say with leaders, we're very aware if I don't wanna do something that's gonna create new problems, you wanna get the core principles.

And I think the core principles you wanna get to when you're talking to a leader is to push them away from a cybernetic definition of productivity, get them away from what IT system can we buy that's gonna generate more analytic insights from our data and ensure that we get data sharing at a higher velocity of information accessibility, get them away from that.

They love that world because there's vendors and you spend money and they have slick slideshows and you feel like you're doing something. You gotta say that doesn't really matter. Yeah, you can speed stuff up, have more information, great, but this is who cares. What matters is the brain. The human brain can only focus on one thing at a time and needs relatively long refactoring periods to switch from one target to another.

This is what we should care about. We have a bunch of human brains, we wanna think about things and produce value. They need time to do it. They need the ability to do things one at a time. And once we realize that, I would say, we then realize that context shifts are like productivity poison.

That's the thing we're trying to minimize. We don't need IT systems that makes the velocity of information transfer higher or the depth of analytical insights sharper. We need less context shifts. You want these leaders to be going through their day after talking to you mentally in their mind, keeping a counter of, well, how many times do I have to switch my attention to something else and back to something else?

You want them to slowly become sort of disgusted with the reality that they discover. My God, every time I'm doing this, I can feel it now. I can almost feel the cerebral sludge that's building up as I keep switching back and forth. I can see my concentration fading. I can see my energy dissipating.

And then they start to think, okay, so when we think about productivity, what we think about is minimizing doses of this poison. Even if this slows us down, even if it introduces friction, even if that executive VP over there that has bad blood with me is gonna get mad about it, even if it is a pain in the moment, now I realize this is what we have to do is stop the context shift.

So we have to rethink everything. How do we allocate work? How do we talk about work? How do we collaborate? What are our processes for moving information around? We are ready to go through the pain of building an attention-centric productivity environment, a workplace that actually respects how the human brain functions.

And then they can come up with the very specific things that make sense for their work, for their tools, for the people they work with. Then they can figure that out. So anyways, Murray, that's what I've increasingly come to realize. Forget examples and get the principles. Because if they're a leader at a big company or a large healthcare institution, they're smart.

They're very smart. They notice the issues. They know what's not working. They can understand deep principles. They can generate tactics out of it. So anyways, I've been big about that recently. The weeds are too messy in corporate America. It's why I don't go around and try to consult for companies and say, "Let me help you rebuild "your communication protocols," or something like this, because the weeds are so thick and bespoke, and every company has their own very specific issues, and it's very difficult for an outsider to move through.

And an outsider can only do so much anyways. You need the people right there that are stuck in these weeds to recognize that a better plant needs to grow there. You need them to realize what the problem is, and then they can generate the solutions. They know more about their company than I do.

They know more about their group than a leadership development executive does. So the best thing we can do is teach them what the issue is, and then let them actually come up with problems. - That was a good analogy with a plant. - Plants and weeds, yeah. You know, I could do that, Jesse.

I could be. This is my problem, is I'll write about all the stuff I write about since 2015, basically. Everything I write about, in some ways, about technology intersecting with different parts of our life. So technology intersecting with work, of course, is a big thing. All this productivity talk is about work in an age of digital distraction and high-velocity cybernetic productivity notions.

It's all about technology intersecting work. Digital minimalism is about technology intersecting our personal lives. This is what I care about, right? But the issue is I'll deal with a particular topic, and I'll think about it deeply and produce some big ideas, and then I move on. But the problem is the ideas are still out there.

So, you know, Deep Work had a bunch of ideas that I thought were very important. But then I went on and wrote a bunch of other books, and yet there's a lot of people who are saying, "Well, can't you just come and help us do Deep Work?" That's the issue.

It's not my instinct of, let me just stick with a topic and really keep pushing it and promoting it. I like the idea. I want to understand. I get the pleasure out of understanding something new. And by the time people are catching on with something, a lot of times I've moved on to sort of the next topic I'm trying to understand.

So this is why I don't travel the world, you know, running workshops. This would probably be pretty lucrative, actually, but running workshops about, you know, how to make your team deeper, building processes. I don't know, just actually, we could probably make a lot of money. Maybe you and I should just fly around the world and have people cancel their Slack accounts and do office hours and market clearing meetings.

We could wear suits. - Well, then you wouldn't be able to read books in the woods like you're doing right now. So that wouldn't be as fun. - That's the problem. Yeah, that's the problem. Yeah, well, here's what we'll do, like in "Good Will Hunting," when Ben Affleck went to the meeting with the NSA instead of Matt Damon, I'm gonna send you, and you're gonna give like very bombastic speeches on my behalf that like involve, for whatever reason, like a lot of sort of onstage flexing and weightlifting.

I don't know why. I just think this would be great. Just to mystify people, just to have you run out and be like, focus is like- - The correct form to deadlift is this. - Exactly. Now, I don't know why I would want you having doing deadlifts. I just have this vision of you in like gym pants and like a muscle shirt.

Like, okay, deep work is like lifting heavy weights. Every rep. - I can't even lift that heavy weights. - No, I know. And it's not like this is something you do. I just thought it'd be funny. I'm just thinking like what the opposite would be. And then to flip it around, then you should have me take over some of your coaching, sports coaching responsibilities.

And then I would just be terrible at that. I'd be like, well, the lacrosse ball, we have to think about it like an idea that is evolving through a network of competing ideas. And then so is it really, are you catching the ball or is it an idea that we're formulating?

And so that's what we'll do. - Ah, I'm actually going to an event right after this. This is why I'm wearing a nicer shirt is right after we get off the air here, I'm going over to the Rockefeller Center, which is the School of Public Policy and Social Sciences here at Dartmouth.

And I'm doing a fireside chat. We're gonna go, I'm gonna sit in a chair and be interviewed by another professor in theory for an audience. We'll see, but-- - That's cool. You had the fireside chats in your courses back in the day. I took those before I even knew you.

- Didn't, I know exactly what you're talking about. Scott and I, Scott Young and I had fireside chats. Was this in-- - You can hear the fire crackling in the background. - Yeah, so the VAT put in the fire crackling sound? - Yeah. - That's great, I love it, I love it.

Yeah, yeah, we did these fireside chats. So this would have been for, was it Life of Focus? - I think it was Focus, yeah. - Yeah, yeah, so we did these fireside chats where we would talk about what had happened in that week of the course. And then, yeah, shout out to VAT, Scott's longtime producer, I think added fire sounds.

I'm actually talking to Scott, I think tomorrow, so. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)