Core Idea: Slow Productivity

00:00:05.000 | The core idea I want to talk about today is the following question.

00:00:11.000 | Is slow productivity the solution to burnout?

00:00:17.000 | So slow productivity is an emerging topic of thought we've been talking about more and more frequently,

00:00:23.000 | and I want to get into it with this core idea.

00:00:27.000 | All right, let's give some background to where the concept of slow productivity came from, what motivated it.

00:00:34.000 | We are in a moment right now in which there is a popular and visible pushback against the general notion of productivity.

00:00:45.000 | And by productivity, I mean just the general drive to try to get more things done.

00:00:51.000 | Now, I think the coronavirus pandemic helped amplify this, but this movement predates the coronavirus pandemic.

00:00:57.000 | If we're going to use books as a rough proxy for cultural thinking on this topic,

00:01:02.000 | we can really look to 2019, February of 2019, when Ginny O'Dell published How to Do Nothing.

00:01:09.000 | This book probably helped spark more than anything else this modern moment of anti-productivity thinking.

00:01:16.000 | It was a popular book, a New York Times bestseller. Barack Obama selected it as one of his best books of the year.

00:01:22.000 | It opened the floodgates to multiple other books along these same lines.

00:01:28.000 | So we got Celeste Headley's Do Nothing that came out soon after.

00:01:32.000 | I actually interviewed Celeste for a New Yorker piece this fall. I got a little bit deeper into this.

00:01:37.000 | We also got Devin Price had a book called Laziness Does Not Exist. I blurbed that book. It was a good book.

00:01:44.000 | Helen Ann Peterson had Can't Even, the book-length treatment of her viral BuzzFeed article about millennial burnout.

00:01:54.000 | More recently, we have Oliver Berkman had 4,000 Weeks, which I blurbed that book as well. It was fantastic.

00:01:59.000 | That book's really been killing it. So there's been this long string of books since 2019 that are all basically making the same point.

00:02:05.000 | We're burnt out. We're doing too much. We're tired of doing too much.

00:02:10.000 | I saw this anti-productivity movement even among you, my listeners and readers, in 2020.

00:02:16.000 | I wrote an essay for my newsletter about this asking, "Is the term productivity over? Do we need something new?"

00:02:24.000 | And it led to a really heated discussion and two subsequent follow-up posts.

00:02:29.000 | We had a lot of back-and-forth discussion on this in the spring of 2020 that made it clear that there are a lot of you out there that are just exhausted.

00:02:37.000 | Exhausted with activity and work, your life outside of work, and need something more than just falling back on, "How do I get more done?"

00:02:47.000 | All right, so that is the modern anti-productivity movement. Here's the issue.

00:02:53.000 | The question left unanswered in a lot of this work is, "What should we do about it?"

00:03:01.000 | We all agree, these books are doing well, because we all feel exhausted, but the question is, "What should we do about it?"

00:03:09.000 | And my opinion here is that we haven't had a lot of fully featured answers.

00:03:14.000 | The typical response that we will get to what we should do about it is basically just do less and be okay about that.

00:03:22.000 | Which is perfectly fine advice, but is not in itself, I think, a fully-fledged solution to this issue of burnout.

00:03:29.000 | Now, we get this advice from many different angles. Some of those books I talked about before come at this from an economic materialist standpoint.

00:03:36.000 | They say, "Well, you're doing a lot of things because, essentially, you're being exploited by the capitalist superstructure."

00:03:41.000 | And so it's an act of political resistance to not do something. Do nothing as an act of political resistance.

00:03:48.000 | Some of these books are more cultural. Just we have a culture of overproduction.

00:03:53.000 | Maybe it goes back to the Protestant work ethic or whatever.

00:03:58.000 | And we just need to defy that culture. It's an arbitrary culture. We should just do less things.

00:04:03.000 | Nothing wrong with that advice. I just don't think it's enough by itself to actually cure what ails us, because we do like to do things.

00:04:11.000 | There's nothing that makes us more consistently miserable as a species than actually doing nothing for any extended period of time.

00:04:19.000 | It makes us very uncomfortable. It makes us feel non-efficacious. It makes us feel rootless and bored and anxious.

00:04:25.000 | We like to do things. The problem is not activity. The problem is too much activity.

00:04:29.000 | So we need a more sophisticated solution than simply saying, "It's okay to not do as many things. Just do less."

00:04:38.000 | That maybe is a step in the right direction, but we need to take many steps more.

00:04:43.000 | This is what brings me to my recent thinking on this emerging concept of slow productivity.

00:04:49.000 | Slow productivity is meant as a response to this question of what should we do in the face of being exhausted by all that we have to do.

00:04:58.000 | So to look into this topic of slow productivity, I started by trying to understand what was productivity for our ancient ancestors?

00:05:09.000 | In other words, as human beings, what is natural when it comes to activity?

00:05:15.000 | It is a basic question, but we need an answer to this question of what is natural if we're going to try to get back to something that's more attuned to the human condition.

00:05:23.000 | So I went back and did some work trying to understand the rhythms of activity of our Paleolithic ancestors.

00:05:30.000 | We obviously don't have direct observations about this, but I ended up talking to a quantitative anthropologist from Oxford University

00:05:37.000 | who is one of the world's experts at studying extant hunter-gatherer tribes in the Philippines and using robust methods to try to measure what their activity levels are like

00:05:48.000 | and very carefully try to make some extrapolations from this to our hunter-gatherer past.

00:05:53.000 | That's an extrapolation you have to do carefully, but he's sensitive and careful about that.

00:05:57.000 | And here's basically what you see. Our best guess at what activity was like for the bulk of our species' existence is you would be doing skilled and important work basically every day,

00:06:11.000 | mainly focused on food acquisition and preparation as well as child-rearing, but you would be, you know, in these extant tribes they studied, if you were gathering herbs,

00:06:24.000 | we had a huge expert understanding of the various plants and their various uses. It's very expert work.

00:06:29.000 | If you're hunting, hunting was a very skilled activity when you don't have very sophisticated weapons like rifles, right?

00:06:36.000 | So you're doing skilled but important work at a natural pace.

00:06:40.000 | This is definitely what they found in their work on these tribes is there's lots of breaks.

00:06:45.000 | You might be spending all day on a hunt, but there's going to be a two-hour part in the middle of the day where you're just resting

00:06:52.000 | and maybe you take a, there's a nap over here.

00:06:54.000 | There's a natural pace with ups and downs of intensity and never too many things at the same time.

00:06:59.000 | There's no notion of I have 18 things I'm trying to get done as a Paleolithic hunter-gatherer and I'm trying to go through this list.

00:07:08.000 | It's like we're doing this today and then that, right? That's basically what we did throughout most of our history.

00:07:13.000 | Now compare that to where we are today.

00:07:17.000 | Where we are today, and let's focus mainly on the world of work just to keep this more precise.

00:07:23.000 | Where we are today is maintaining list of things that we need to do, obligations and commitments,

00:07:31.000 | some of them explicit, some of them implicit, that are massive.

00:07:35.000 | Massive list of obligations and commitments.

00:07:39.000 | In the world of work, these just come flying at us through emails.

00:07:42.000 | They come flying at us through quick requests during Zoom meetings.

00:07:45.000 | "Hey Cal, can you take care of this?" or "Can you jump on this?"

00:07:48.000 | Flying at us in informal conversations in the hallway where a boss grabs you and says,

00:07:53.000 | "Look into this. Can you get this done for me?"

00:07:56.000 | And we have these very large list of things that are on our plate.

00:08:00.000 | I call this state chronic overload because we have more things on our plate than we can easily imagine how we're going to get them done.

00:08:06.000 | And this is a state that is persistent.

00:08:08.000 | We constantly have this overloaded list of things that we have to do.

00:08:13.000 | This causes three problems, three problems that were not faced by our Paleolithic ancestors.

00:08:18.000 | One is just the simple short-circuiting of the center of our brain that is dedicated to making long-term plans for goal completion.

00:08:27.000 | Humans have a center in their brain that does this very well.

00:08:30.000 | Even our close primate relatives do not have anything that's quite as powerful as our ability to plan and go after goals.

00:08:36.000 | This is tapped into our motivational systems.

00:08:39.000 | We feel good when we make a plan. We feel even better when we execute the plan.

00:08:43.000 | We feel bad if we don't.

00:08:45.000 | This system gets completely overloaded when you have 700 unread messages in your inbox

00:08:51.000 | and 75 different projects, tasks, and ongoing commitments that you're trying to juggle.

00:08:57.000 | It is too many things for that part of your brain to imagine how it's going to accomplish,

00:09:01.000 | and it short-circuits that planning center of our brain.

00:09:05.000 | That makes us anxious. That makes us miserable.

00:09:08.000 | Again, our Paleolithic ancestors never had 700 unread emails, each of which representing a commitment

00:09:13.000 | that we can't wrap our mind around how we're ever going to satisfy all these commitments.

00:09:17.000 | Two, when you have way more things on your plate than you can easily imagine handling,

00:09:22.000 | you suffer from what I think is one of the more insidious tortures of modern office work,

00:09:27.000 | which is the overhead spiral.

00:09:30.000 | So if you give me something to do, here's a project.

00:09:33.000 | I want you to work with these two people and get it done.

00:09:37.000 | There is a fixed amount of overhead that comes with this project because we have to kind of coordinate.

00:09:44.000 | So there's going to be, I don't know, some notion of number of meetings we have to do

00:09:48.000 | to talk things through and make a plan.

00:09:50.000 | There'll be some non-trivial number of emails we have to send back and forth

00:09:53.000 | to get questions answered or to move the project forward.

00:09:57.000 | In isolation, that's all fine. If I'm working on something, yeah,

00:10:00.000 | let's meet about it once a week and send some emails in between. That's fine.

00:10:03.000 | That's just the overhead cost of working with people to accomplish something. No problem.

00:10:07.000 | The issue is what if we have 25 of these ongoing at the same time?

00:10:11.000 | Each of them has the same fixed amount of overhead.

00:10:14.000 | Each one needs that weekly meeting. Each one needs a couple dozen emails sent each week.

00:10:18.000 | And it adds and adds and adds until your schedule becomes overloaded with this fixed overhead.

00:10:27.000 | And now you are spending almost all of your time talking about the work you need to do

00:10:32.000 | with no time left to actually execute the work.

00:10:37.000 | Again, I think this is the knowledge worker equivalent of Chinese water torture.

00:10:41.000 | It is maddening. It is deranging.

00:10:45.000 | We saw this really clearly amplified during the first half year of the coronavirus pandemic

00:10:50.000 | where office workers had to suddenly work remote.

00:10:54.000 | Shifting operations remote meant that there was a lot of new work that got generated, right?

00:10:58.000 | Because we have to figure out how do we do our work if we're remote.

00:11:02.000 | So suddenly everyone's obligation list got bigger.

00:11:05.000 | Each of these things brought with it a meeting and some emails.

00:11:08.000 | What happened? I heard report after report from knowledge workers saying,

00:11:12.000 | "I am spending eight straight hours per day in Zoom."

00:11:17.000 | I would get complaints from people that said, "My biggest issue is I don't know when to use the bathroom during the day.

00:11:24.000 | I'm on Zoom that often, in Zoom, doing email while in Zoom the entire day."

00:11:30.000 | This is a parody of work life where all you're doing is talking about work.

00:11:34.000 | Not just I have too many meetings. All you were doing was meetings.

00:11:37.000 | That's overhead spiral personified right there.

00:11:41.000 | So again, you have too many things on your plate that you've committed to.

00:11:43.000 | The overhead itself takes over your whole schedule.

00:11:46.000 | And finally, the last issue with chronic overload is it's relentless in its pace.

00:11:51.000 | There is never any time where you get to relax.

00:11:54.000 | There's never any time you get to downshift.

00:11:57.000 | Remember, our Paleolithic ancestors, if they're doing an all-day hunt,

00:12:01.000 | might have hours in there where they're just sitting around.

00:12:04.000 | It's the heat of the day. Let's sit in the shade of a tree and just like nap and chat.

00:12:09.000 | Or we hunted the last two days. It's kind of rainy today, not great conditions.

00:12:12.000 | We're not going to hunt today at all.

00:12:15.000 | In a system of modern work with chronic overload where you always have way more on your plate

00:12:19.000 | than you ever can get around the handling, there is a constant pressure on execution.

00:12:25.000 | Because there's always things that need to get it done and you're always behind.

00:12:28.000 | So every day you fill it, relentless.

00:12:31.000 | Work every minute you have available.

00:12:33.000 | Probably have to do some evenings, probably have to do some weekends as well

00:12:36.000 | to get around the overhead spirals.

00:12:39.000 | We're not wired for this relentless pace of work where you never have any relief.

00:12:43.000 | And it's pegged at this 10 on the scale of 1 to 10 of how hard you're working day after day after day after day.

00:12:51.000 | This, I think, is the more detailed sociophysiological explanation

00:12:58.000 | for what all of those anti-productivity books were commenting on.

00:13:01.000 | This is why we're so miserable.

00:13:03.000 | Chronic overload creates those three problems.

00:13:05.000 | Those three problems alienate us from the rhythms of work for which we're wired as people.

00:13:10.000 | And that is why we're not happy.

00:13:12.000 | That is then what we need to solve.

00:13:15.000 | How do we get rid of chronic overload?

00:13:17.000 | How do we get rid of those issues that come from chronic overload?

00:13:22.000 | Just saying I'm going to do less isn't going to cut it.

00:13:25.000 | Hey, boss, I've decided I don't want to be a part of the exploitative capitalist engine,

00:13:32.000 | so I'm not going to work today.

00:13:34.000 | Good luck. Not going to solve it.

00:13:36.000 | We need a more detailed, sophisticated solution here.

00:13:40.000 | It's not going to work to say, hey, client,

00:13:43.000 | I do not want to be a stooge in a Protestant work ethic culture established during the pre-colonial period

00:13:52.000 | in the early days of migration to the United States, so I'm not going to answer your email.

00:13:58.000 | That's not a solution.

00:13:59.000 | We need something more sophisticated.

00:14:01.000 | All right, slow productivity is that answer.

00:14:04.000 | Slow productivity is that answer.

00:14:06.000 | Let me give you three quick ideas for what slow productivity might mean.

00:14:10.000 | Three elements to it.

00:14:11.000 | This is going to evolve, but let's try to get something pinned down here.

00:14:14.000 | So to me, there's three big things I care about with a slow productivity philosophy.

00:14:19.000 | Doing fewer things.

00:14:21.000 | Doing those things at a natural pace.

00:14:25.000 | Obsessing over the quality of the things you do.

00:14:29.000 | That definition of productivity,

00:14:31.000 | productivity that prioritizes those three things, I think can get us back towards the rhythms of work for which we are wired,

00:14:40.000 | while also fulfilling us, doing interesting work, letting our companies grow.

00:14:46.000 | Helping our team succeed, getting promotions still, getting the autonomy that comes from getting good at things that are rare and valuable,

00:14:53.000 | that is compatible with that.

00:14:55.000 | So let me just touch on those three things real quickly.

00:14:58.000 | Do fewer things.

00:15:00.000 | I think your workload in an ideal world would be below that level of chronic overload.

00:15:05.000 | You have few enough things that you are committed to doing on your plate that you are not suffering from the short-circuiting of your planning circuit,

00:15:11.000 | you're not suffering from overhead spirals,

00:15:13.000 | and you do not feel like you have no option but to have a relentless pace where you're feeling every minute of your day.

00:15:19.000 | We need to do many fewer things.

00:15:21.000 | And if you work for yourself, if you're a freelancer, run your own company,

00:15:25.000 | aggressively titrate how many things you take on at the same time.

00:15:29.000 | You are not a computer processor where you want your pipeline of instructions to execute to be full,

00:15:36.000 | so you never miss a particular tick.

00:15:38.000 | You're a human.

00:15:39.000 | You're not wired to do that.

00:15:41.000 | We need to do many fewer things.

00:15:43.000 | What if you work for someone else?

00:15:45.000 | Well, I think we need to completely rethink how work is assigned in the workplace.

00:15:49.000 | This should be transparent.

00:15:51.000 | How much work is this person doing?

00:15:53.000 | What's on their plate?

00:15:55.000 | So that we can all see it.

00:15:57.000 | We can have very clear understandings of what is reasonable.

00:16:01.000 | And if I see, you know, Jesse has a fair number of things on his plate, I can't put something else on it.

00:16:07.000 | It's on me to figure out.

00:16:09.000 | Something pops up, it needs to get done at some point, I can't just say, "Jesse, handle this."

00:16:12.000 | I have to figure out where does this go until someone has room for it.

00:16:18.000 | It can't just go on their plate.

00:16:20.000 | The answer here is probably going to be external systems.

00:16:24.000 | Things that need to get done go into external systems where they bring with them the information they need to be accomplished and have clear statuses and priorities.

00:16:30.000 | And then individuals pull work out of the system as new slots open.

00:16:36.000 | This might sound like it's a pain.

00:16:38.000 | I don't care if it's a pain.

00:16:40.000 | It's what we're wired to do.

00:16:41.000 | Keep my load reasonable.

00:16:44.000 | And I'll pull in new stuff when I'm done with what's on my plate.

00:16:46.000 | Don't just give it all to me and say, "Figure it out."

00:16:48.000 | You're going to short-circuit my brain.

00:16:49.000 | You're going to make me miserable.

00:16:51.000 | All right, second piece of slow productivity, work at a natural pace.

00:16:56.000 | We cannot just peg our efforts at a 10 for 8 to 9 hours a day, day after day, week after week, week after week.

00:17:04.000 | This is not natural for humans.

00:17:06.000 | We need seasonality in our work, first of all.

00:17:10.000 | Seasonality meaning hard times balanced by easier times.

00:17:13.000 | And I think we should have this at all scales.

00:17:18.000 | So this week, some days are harder than others.

00:17:21.000 | I'm going to pull back on Friday and come into the weekend maybe a little bit more relaxed, but Monday I'm pegging it.

00:17:28.000 | We should have certain months, perhaps, that are more intense than others.

00:17:34.000 | This is an intense month.

00:17:35.000 | We're kind of getting after it.

00:17:37.000 | But you know what?

00:17:38.000 | In June, things really get quiet around here, and I'm pulling back, and I'm going to have very light days, right?

00:17:42.000 | So seasonality at different levels, maybe even seasons like professors do.

00:17:47.000 | Winter, I'm getting after it.

00:17:49.000 | Summer, I'm pulled back far.

00:17:51.000 | Rest, recovery, up, down, up, down at all scales.

00:17:54.000 | I think we absolutely need this.

00:17:56.000 | The other thing we have to do to get a more natural pace to our work is adjust the time scale at which we care about accomplishment.

00:18:03.000 | Instead of caring about how much do I get done on the scale of days and weeks, you say, "I worry about what I get done on the scale of months and years."

00:18:13.000 | Completely changes your relationship to the current moment.

00:18:16.000 | If you're going to produce a good number of very high-quality things over the next three years, it really changes how you feel about Tuesday.

00:18:24.000 | Now it's not so important that every minute of Tuesday you're getting after it.

00:18:28.000 | In fact, you might say, "I need to take a couple weeks off here so that I can really have a high-quality push for the weeks that follow."

00:18:33.000 | It completely changes your relationship to work when you say, "I don't care about how many things I check off a list this week.

00:18:39.000 | What I care about is what is on my CV that I produced over the last five years."

00:18:43.000 | That's much more compatible with seasonality ups and downs.

00:18:46.000 | The final point here, the final part of slow productivity I mentioned was obsess about quality.

00:18:51.000 | If you're going to do less, you need to pair that with doing what you do better.

00:18:57.000 | This will make the work more fulfilling because you're building and applying craft.

00:19:02.000 | Remember our example of our Paleolithic ancestors, skilled, important activity.

00:19:07.000 | We get motivation for that.

00:19:09.000 | We don't get motivation for adjusting the fonts in a PowerPoint deck, for fundraising for some company idea we probably shouldn't be doing in the first place just because we're bored.

00:19:21.000 | But crafting the computer program that's going to run and do something really cool, and you can see it producing the book, the brilliant new marketing campaign.

00:19:30.000 | We want to focus on doing a smaller number of things, but doing those things much better is going to feel more fulfilling.

00:19:35.000 | It is also what is going to give you both the ability and the courage to say no to other things.

00:19:41.000 | When your main metric becomes how do I do what I do better, now it's easy to say I'm not going to do this middling thing.

00:19:50.000 | I'm not going to do this distraction.

00:19:52.000 | I'm not going to jump on this call.

00:19:54.000 | I'm not going to learn this new plug-in that maybe will bring me some new email subscribers for my news list because that's not going to help me get better at what I'm trying to do.

00:20:02.000 | It is much, much easier to be minimalist in your scheduling when you're focused relentlessly on a small number of things getting better and better at it.

00:20:09.000 | It also earns you the right to be more autonomous.

00:20:13.000 | The better you get at what you do best, the more leeway you have to say I'm not coming onto that committee.

00:20:21.000 | I am not going to do this client contract.

00:20:25.000 | It barely overlaps.

00:20:27.000 | What I like to do is going to be incredibly time consuming.

00:20:30.000 | I'm not going to have to do 25 social media posts a day in some quixotic quest to build up an influencer audience.

00:20:37.000 | It gives you the autonomy you need to take control over what you spend your time on and what you don't.

00:20:44.000 | So that is my answer.

00:20:46.000 | That is my answer to the anti-productivity movement.

00:20:49.000 | Yes, we are overloaded.

00:20:50.000 | It's a problem.

00:20:51.000 | Why?

00:20:52.000 | Because of chronic overload.

00:20:54.000 | It causes all these issues that alienates us from our human wiring.

00:20:57.000 | What's the solution?

00:20:58.000 | Not to discard productivity and say do less and let's celebrate that, but to get more specific and say let's redefine productivity.

00:21:09.000 | We'll call it slow productivity and we're going to build this very intentionally from the ground up to get our work lives back aligned with our ancient wiring.

00:21:20.000 | Do fewer things.

00:21:22.000 | Do this work at a natural pace.

00:21:24.000 | Obsess over quality.

00:21:26.000 | That I believe is the proper response to our current rightly pointed out as problematic state of overload.

00:21:34.000 | That is how we take back control of activity in our life and keep it fulfilling, keep it meaningful, keep options open,

00:21:42.000 | but also get away from all of the issues we're currently facing in our world of chronic overload.

00:21:50.000 | All right.

00:21:52.000 | So that's what I have on slow productivity.

00:21:54.000 | This is a new thought, guys, so I'm sure it's going to evolve.

00:21:58.000 | Jesse, you've heard me talk about this a few times now.

00:22:01.000 | Yeah, I heard you.

00:22:02.000 | I listened to you talk about it on the Ferris interview yesterday.

00:22:06.000 | That's right.

00:22:07.000 | Yeah.

00:22:08.000 | So the day before the day before this came out or a couple days before my interview with Tim Ferris came out and slow productivity was one of the topics that we got into.

00:22:16.000 | I've also written about slow productivity in for the New Yorker.

00:22:20.000 | So my my last of my office space columns for them, which came out in early January, was on slow productivity.

00:22:26.000 | And I may or may not be working on a book proposal on the topics.

00:22:30.000 | You might be wondering why I'm talking about it.

00:22:33.000 | I mean, ironically, for a book on slow productivity, it can't come out fast.

00:22:38.000 | I think that's the problem.

00:22:39.000 | I was like, guys, I stayed up every night for two months and got this book done by just relentlessly working as fast as possible.

00:22:47.000 | I think that's not going to work.

00:22:51.000 | Yeah, you talked about this in the past, too, in previous podcast episodes where you said you were going to kind of walk us through the process of writing the book and stuff.

00:22:59.000 | So I'm looking forward to that.

00:23:01.000 | It's actually already started.

00:23:03.000 | Yeah.

00:23:04.000 | So maybe there's some breaking news here.

00:23:05.000 | In past podcast episodes, we were talking about a book I'm working on a proposal on for the deep life.

00:23:12.000 | This would be a second book.

00:23:14.000 | So I might be I'm working on potentially the deep life and slow productivity in some order might be the next two books.

00:23:21.000 | All right.

00:23:22.000 | None of that is inked.

00:23:23.000 | You know, none of that's actually written down or signed or none of it's official.

00:23:27.000 | But that's what I'm currently thinking is those might be the next two books I write.

00:23:31.000 | And that's what you did before the last two books.

00:23:33.000 | Right.

00:23:33.000 | You worked on simultaneously.

00:23:34.000 | Yeah, I like doing that because I want to just work.

00:23:37.000 | I want to think deeply and write.

00:23:39.000 | And so I sold digital minimalism in a world without email.

00:23:43.000 | I sold those at the same time.

00:23:45.000 | And then that allowed me to just not worry about selling books for four or five years.

00:23:49.000 | I could just write.

00:23:50.000 | And when I was done with one book, I knew what I was working on.

00:23:53.000 | I mean, I'm going to put my head down and write type of guy.

00:23:55.000 | That makes me happy.

00:23:56.000 | Having to go out and talk about the books, you know, OK, that's harder for me.

00:24:00.000 | I like the part where it's just me, me and the idea.

00:24:04.000 | I guess me and the idea and Jesse and tens of thousands of podcast listeners.

00:24:08.000 | But that's it.

00:24:09.000 | Just our small circle talking about these things.

00:24:13.000 | So I like that.

00:24:14.000 | I like to sell multiple books at a time if I can.

00:24:15.000 | I don't want to spend.

00:24:16.000 | It's a pain to sell books, man.

00:24:18.000 | And it's stressful and it's complicated.

00:24:21.000 | And there's a ton of fiddling overhead on it, too.

00:24:25.000 | I mean, these proposals are 50 pages long.

00:24:29.000 | It just takes a long time to write.

00:24:30.000 | But it's not fun writing.

00:24:31.000 | It's not, oh, I'm writing about ideas.

00:24:34.000 | It's, you know, you're writing about your marketing plan and stuff like that.

00:24:37.000 | So I try not to do it more than I need to.

00:24:40.000 | One thing you mentioned in the Ferris interview was he asked, he started off with your relationship or your Steve Martin.

00:24:46.000 | He was asking about him and you were talking about his autobiography.

00:24:50.000 | I listened to the auto audio book recently.

00:24:52.000 | And at the end, he was he had the quote where he was in, I think it was in the jerk when he was like leaving the house.

00:24:59.000 | I was like, I just need this and I need this one thing.

00:25:01.000 | And he needed all those things.

00:25:02.000 | It kind of reminds me of what you just said.

00:25:04.000 | I just had this and then just this and a little bit of that and then just this.

00:25:08.000 | And yeah, good book.

00:25:10.000 | Born Standing Up.

00:25:11.000 | Yeah, I recommend it.

00:25:12.000 | [Music]

Core Idea: Slow Productivity

Chapters