How to be a Productivity Ninja | Graham Allcott
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Welcome to the Talks at Google podcast, where great minds meet. I'm Emma, bringing you this episode with productivity expert, Graham Alcott. Talks at Google brings the world's most influential thinkers, creators, makers, and doers all to one place. You can watch every episode at youtube.com slash talks at Google. Are you drowning in information overload?

Do you disappear down a rabbit hole of social media just when you need to focus? If that sounds familiar to you too, Graham Alcott can help. Graham is a productivity expert, the author of five books, and a podcaster.

In this conversation, he talks about how to be a productivity ninja, how to work smarter, manage projects with confidence, and tame your inbox. Originally published in February 2019, here's Graham Alcott, How to Be a Productivity Ninja.

Hello. First thing to say is thank you all for coming. I should probably say that the turnout today perhaps either reflects how amazing my book is or the time of year and the fact that everyone's starting to think about productivity at the start of January. So welcome. For the last...

Just coming up to 10 years, my life has been about obsessing and thinking about the subject of productivity. It started out because I myself had some big holes in my own productivity and I didn't do things particularly well. And I started to really go on a journey of conquering that for myself.

and then starting to falling into teaching other people about what I learned and teaching other people on how they could start to develop their own productivity as well. So I'm going to talk to you about some of the key ideas from my book, How to Be a Productivity Ninja, and hopefully give you a few ideas and spark a few thoughts that you can then take away and use practically to make some changes to the way that you work.

So the first thing I want to talk about is the fact that often there's a bit of a fatigue around this whole subject, apart from obviously at the very start of January. And the reason for that is that I think a lot of people have been familiar with some of the key ideas and techniques of time management. You've probably been on some kind of time management course before. Just by a show of hands, who's been on some kind of time management thing?

and keep your hand up if everything is now fixed and it's all sorted and you're 100% wonderful in the way that you work. So I think for me time management is broken, time management is dead and I think the flip side of that is to start to think much more about the idea of attention management. So rather than thinking about how we manage our time, we think about attention as being the most precious resource that we have and how can we get the best out of those times when we have the best attention.

So I'm going to talk to you about nine things that you can do that really help you to make the best of your attention. Nine different mindsets, nine ways of thinking that will really help you to become a productivity ninja and really help you to move forward in terms of some of those, turning some of those older time management ideas into something a bit more modern and a bit more based in the world that we live in today. So the first one of those is Zen Like Calm.

So often when I'm asked to talk about productivity, one of the questions that I ask back is, when was the time that you were most productive? So just if you think for a few moments about when was the last time that you really felt, yes, I'm really on top of this. This is a moment of key productivity.

Often when people think about that question, one of the answers that comes up a lot is, "When I was on a deadline." So you're on this deadline, you've got this thing to do, it's got to be in at five o'clock, you've got this deadline, and everything else in your life and everything else in your brain seems to fall away. And you get into what psychologists refer to as flow, this kind of state of being totally in the moment,

focused on one thing, you're not thinking about what you're going to have for dinner that evening, you're not thinking about emails, you're just totally you in that zone working on whatever that thing is, whether it's a document, whether it's ideas, whether it's a thing that you're doing as a team, but everybody's just kind of focused or you're just really focused on getting this thing delivered and that becomes the only thing in your world at that point.

Now, for me, the problem with that is that deadlines are really expensive. They cost us in terms of stress. We start to love the people kind of getting out of the way of the camera there. Love it. So a deadline will really, you know, it will cost you a lot in terms of stress. If you're constantly in deadlines and you're constantly using deadlines as the thing that gets you over the line with stuff and you're leaving everything to the last minute and letting the deadline push you forward, then after a while, you're going to burn out.

Whereas really, what is a deadline doing anyway? So what a deadline does is it brings you into the state of zen-like calm. It forces you to say, this is the most important thing. I know that nothing else matters. And my contention is you can get to that place of saying, this is the most important thing, nothing else matters, without a deadline. And what you need to do to get to there is

much clearer thinking in terms of what's on my plate so that you're really much clearer about your priorities. So I'm gonna talk to you a bit about how to get there, but the idea is to spend as much time as possible in this state of zen-like calm, this state of flow, and this state of I'm working on one thing, I really know what I'm doing, I'm really clear and focused on that one thing.

This is how a lot of us do spend a lot of time in work, which is that our brains are just full of different ideas. Does this image look familiar? So we have this whole sense of feeling overloaded and overwhelmed. And we have this sense of there's a hundred things we could be doing. We're not quite sure where to start. David Allen, who wrote the book Getting Things Done, has this lovely line, which is the mind is for having ideas, not for holding them.

So the problem is, if you've got all these different things going on in your head, then it becomes very difficult to get to this state of zen-like time because you're just totally thinking, "Oh, that email, that thing." Your brain is constantly moving from one thing to another, trying to work out where the biggest priority might be in any given moment. It never used to be this complicated. So Peter Drucker talked about this idea of

knowledge work in the information age. So moving from the industrial age into the information age. And what Peter Drucker was very concerned with was defining knowledge work. You all in this room are knowledge workers. And what that means is you add value and you create value out of information. That wasn't always how we worked. So back in the industrial age, you might have had a job that looks something like this. So there's a cake factory, there's a big conveyor belt, and there's cakes coming down the conveyor belt. You've got a big box of cherries, and your job is to put one cherry on each cake.

So you do that nine to five, you put cherries on cakes, nine to five. You have your break at lunchtime, you have a break in the morning, break in the afternoon, you go home at five o'clock. How many people in that job, putting cherries on cakes, nine to five, would be going home of an evening and thinking, "Oh, the cherries today, it just went crazy." Or sat there on a Sunday evening and you're thinking to yourself, "I have no idea how it's going to go next week, it's going to be mental."

So it's very easy in that kind of a job to know exactly what does done look like, what does the end look like, what does success look like. Whereas in knowledge work jobs, it's much more difficult. In knowledge work jobs, it's much more about how we define success, how we define those particular things that make the difference. And maybe your viewpoint is slightly different from your boss's viewpoint, and there's all these competing priorities at the same time.

So really one of the hardest things to really acknowledge and one of the things we've really got to take into account when we're trying to get into this state of zen-like calm is this idea that we're simultaneously the boss and the worker all at the same time. So, by the way, all of you have to put cherries on cakes. That is part of what you do. Those cherries on cakes are the emails that you send, the meetings that you set up, the things that you deliver. You are all putting cherries on cakes.

And the trouble is you're also having to decide what time should the shift start today and how fast should the conveyor belt be going and all these other questions. And having to think strategically about, you know, what's going on in the wider world is that everyone's thinking about healthy eating. So maybe we should take these cherries and make fruit cocktails with them instead. You know, so we're having to make all these intuitive judgments at the same time as delivering on work. So we're simultaneously the boss and the worker all at the same time.

And really getting into that state of zen-like calm, getting into that state of being able to deliver in a really focused way involves doing that boss thinking first, like really getting to grips with and defining what's on my plate so that I can then make the best decisions in that moment and do the best work. So slightly a sort of different energy to follow zen-like calm would be ruthlessness. So almost like the opposite energy from zen-like calm. So the second of my nine characteristics is ruthlessness.

And a lot of people, when I put this slide up, they start to conjure up images of like Gordon Gekko in Wall Street or Leonardo DiCaprio in The Wolf of Wall Street kind of bowling with dwarves and all this kind of stuff. So I'm not talking about stuff that is sort of very unkind or really aggressive. But we have to really think about ruthlessness in terms of how we define tasks, how we define what we're working on, and just our own mindsets around all this stuff.

So the first thing is to be really ruthless with yourself. Really start to really think about how many things do I have on my plate? What are the things that really are going to make the most difference? And what are the really good things that I should be doing that I'm going to say no to?

So, you know, most people are very well able to say no to the stuff that doesn't really matter. It doesn't mean that we don't sometimes spend time doing things that doesn't really matter. But it's, you know, sometimes really the trick is saying no to really good stuff as well. So Warren Buffett has a lovely quote, which is the difference between successful people and very successful people is that very successful people say no to almost everything.

And for me, this sense of being really tight and defined around your role and what you're working on and saying no to stuff that perhaps sounds like a really good idea, learning that art is really, really important. Also just being ruthless with ourselves, so recognizing when we are

in that sense of procrastinating. So, you know, who turns on Facebook or WhatsApp or Instagram on your phone or on your computer like you do? So getting ruthless with how you manage yourself on that. And I'll talk a little bit more about how to manage attention and some of the stuff that we can do on that in a few minutes. But really getting ruthless to put ourselves in that right frame of mind, that right zone for productivity, and really starting to be strict with ourselves sometimes to get the right kind of work done.

And then this one is really key. So I think for me, I mentioned the beginning that time is not your most precious resource. Attention is your most precious resource. So in the book, I talk about these three different modes of attention. So I think we have three modes of attention. The first is proactive attention. This is the two to three hours a day where we have the best energy and the best ability to do our best work. And so when you really start to think about it and track this stuff and just reflect on your own work,

over a period of time, let's say a couple of weeks, you'll start to notice real kind of trends and sort of peaks and troughs in your energy levels. So there's a time when you're sat at your desk and you feel totally able, totally focused, able to do the really most difficult stuff. So that's proactive attention.

On the other end of the scale, who's had a time in your day where perhaps you're sort of looking at the screen, you're scrolling up and down on your email inbox or whatever, and it's like the lights are on but no one's home. It's like four o'clock in the afternoon. And so that's managing time really well. You're in the right place, you're doing the right thing, but actually you don't have the right level of attention to do really sophisticated work at that point. And there's loads of science behind this too, right? So there's loads of science around willpower and willpower is a dwindling resource each day.

So it stands to reason that there will be a point in your day where you have the best energy, that proactive attention, and also a point in the day where you have inactive attention. And the bit in the middle is called active attention. So that's just kind of the bit in the middle where you can do some stuff, but you can't do everything. There's certain things that you can do during that time.

Now the problem is that proactive attention often comes at points in the day where other people want to take our attention away. Other people want to scramble our attention. And so we have to get really ruthless with how we protect that proactive attention. So if you think about it as being two to three hours a day, most of the studies that have been done on this say that that's generally for most people in the morning rather than the afternoon. There are of course exceptions to that.

But that morning time where people tend to have that proactive attention is also the time where it's like, okay, so I'm just going to spend this just warming up for the day or like I'm in someone else's meeting or like something else is going on. And so often there are so many forces that can just take this attention away from us and basically scramble our attention.

So getting ruthless with protecting those times and knowing when those times are key for you. So for example, personally, I have a bit of a policy, which is I don't do meetings in the morning and phone calls in the morning. So my morning is the heads down, proactive attention time, and the afternoon is the more collaborative time.

And that's kind of easy for me to say because I control my own diary. And I get that there are lots of other factors at play there. But even if it's just looking at one or two hours a day and saying, I'm going to ruthlessly try and protect that time, that can make a big, big difference. Because in my experience, certainly most of my best work and what I observe in everyone else that I work with is that that proactive attention, the stuff that you do in those one, two, three hours of the day that really makes a difference,

Like that's the stuff that you'll get judged for. All the other stuff really is kind of filler, you know, all the kind of emails and conversations and everything else. The stuff that really makes you famous in your job, the stuff that really makes an impact tends to happen in those two to three hours a day.

So the third one I'm going to talk about is weapon savvy. So obviously a ninja has to have weapons and tools. It's fun to geek out and have lots of interesting conversations with other productivity geeks about different apps and all this kind of stuff. But really we have to be savvy about how we use tools, how we make the best of all the tools that we have.

So on the little iPad there, you've got like a few different tools. The tool I use most regularly is called Nozbe. Nozbe is basically a to-do list app, a very sophisticated to-do list app.

That really allows me to manipulate the data within my to-do list really well. I can look at it by the project view, project by project, what am I working on? I can look at it by where am I going to be to do certain things. I can categorize stuff. I can put date reminders in, all that sort of thing. So just like slightly more functionality than a lot of the more basic to-do list apps.

Other ones you'll find are things like Todoist, Remember the Milk, really good apps. Most of them have a kind of freemium model as well, so you can get most of what you need from the kind of free version, and then you pay a bit more if you want the kind of subscription version. But one of the things I'd recommend is really thinking about having some kind of app

that you're going to use for your to-do list. And that then synchronizes with your computer, with your phone, with an iPad, whatever you're using across those different devices and platforms, but gives you that ability to really kind of prioritize and think clearly around the work that you're doing. So thinking about

If you're going to use any apps at all, think about what you're going to use for what I call the second brain. So your own brain is not particularly great at holding onto and remembering all that different data. So having a second brain where you put all that stuff

out on the page as it were, like inside the app and you start to see projects and actions and start to be able to kind of move those things around and prioritize those things. And that's really the kind of best use of technology that you can have. There's loads of other really useful apps that I use, but me like getting really honed around a really good second brain kind of app for me makes the biggest difference. I want to just like for a few moments just about email. So who loves their email inbox just by a show of hands?

A couple of hands. So for me, email is one of those things that has just sort of pervaded work over the last few years. I don't need to tell you that you get a lot of emails and the email is annoying. That's kind of a given. So I've, over the last few years, been a big proponent of a thing called Inbox Zero, the idea of getting your inbox down to zero. And I think that's often a misunderstood thing. I think the idea of Inbox Zero

is not that you have your inbox at zero all the time and that like you spend every minute of the day when one email comes in you have to kind of bat it away and like leave it at zero. For me it's more of a mindset that says email is just the medium that we communicate through and it's not actually where most of the best work gets done. So inbox zero is really a way of kind of hacking that problem in order that you can get outside of the inbox as much as possible. The real work for me happens outside of the email inbox.

Even when you're communicating via email, really what's the stuff that's really making a difference? It's the impact of those two people having conversations. And if you had that same conversation face to face, or had that same conversation over the phone, you'd still get the same results. So email is always just the medium. Some people get very bogged down in the idea of email is their job and email is the one thing they need to be doing. And for me, actually, amazing things happen when you start to get outside the email inbox.

Just a very quick overview. There's a whole chapter in the book that talks about how to get your email inbox to zero. My company, Think Productive, runs three-hour workshops. And what I've tried to do is take that three-hour workshop and put it into that chapter of the book. So if you spend about 45 minutes to an hour just kind of reading that chapter with your email in front of you, and then about an hour going through the stuff that it says, your inbox will be at zero. Like we did a

We did some stats over our three-hour workshop, and we found that 96% of people in that three hours left the room with their inbox at zero. So it doesn't take you anywhere near as long as you think.

What it does mean, for the most part people have their email inbox open in front of them, but they're also working on lots of other things at the same time. So for me, when you get really focused around just email, you can actually start to hack some of that stuff away, delete anything that's older than a few days or whatever, and you really start to get to zero very, very quickly.

Next one I want to talk about is a thing called stealth and camouflage. A ninja has to be able to get slightly off the grid at different times. So the main part of this I'm going to talk about is tactical hiding. So you guys are very used to working in a very kind of open plan, open kind of culture. I think there's some really nice benefits to that for sure. It also has some limitations. And one of those limitations-- probably

Probably as you're sat here listening to me, one of the things you're thinking is, "Well, it's all very well for him. He probably works loads of the time on his own. He doesn't have loads of people interrupting him at his desk all the time." And I get this complaint a lot from people saying, "I really want to get my head down. I really want to get into that kind of zen-like calm kind of mode."

But actually, the thing that's really stopping me is someone comes and asks me a question, and then I get loads more emails and loads of other stuff's going on. So really thinking about how we can avoid that. And I often say to people, if you're feeling like you're being interrupted the whole time, make yourself just deliberately less available. For some people, that's going to work from a coffee shop around the corner, finding a little cupboard somewhere where no one's going to find you, whatever that looks like. But just trying to, again, protect those two to three hours of time, proactive attention time.

To really kind of get down get your head down get really kind of focus on things It doesn't have to just be a physical thing as well. So Stealthy camouflage in a more kind of digital sense both outlook and Gmail both have a function of work offline Which I think it's just a criminally underused thing the amount of times I'll say to people do you use work offline and people don't tend to use it but just the idea of that is that you know, you can work on the stuff that's in front of you you can see the emails you can see the calendar whatever it is and

but actually what you don't have is the kind of new notifications coming in and the new emails coming in. So just using that work offline thing, really nice way to just kind of slightly make yourself less available and slightly kind of get into more of a kind of focus mode. This one here is an app called Forest. Who's come across Forest? Got any Forest fans in the few?

Good, good. So, Forest is a really nice little app for focus. So, the idea is that you set a period of time, so let's say it's 20 minutes, half an hour, and you say, "I'm going to really get my head down and focus on this one thing."

Often the thing that gets in the way of that is just what's on my phone, right? Let me pick up my phone and have a look and see what's going on there And so what forest does is it starts to build a tree. So you've got this 20 minutes half an hour It's it's building this tree if during that 20 minutes half an hour You are tempted to pick up your phone and go and look at Twitter or Facebook or whatever the tree dies, right? so

So really kind of small little thing. All it's doing is putting one tiny, tiny little kind of positive reason to not look at your phone in competition with all those kind of other things that are going on in your head. And it's remarkably effective. The other thing about Forest is that as a company, they invest some of their profits in planting real trees. So you can actually get a real gilt.

Right, from like the tree dying. It's a real tree. You have to think about it in that way. But really nice app. There's a whole new chapter, the updated version of the book, has a whole chapter called Stop Messing About on Your Phone. And one of the things that it talks about is basically treating yourself like a kid for those two to three hours of proactive attention. So I have an app on my Android phone. It's called Quality Time.

There's some other iPhone equivalents of it as well. But basically, what quality time does is it allows me to set scheduled breaks. So in that scheduled break, it's like in that two to three hours, these are the things that I can now access on my phone. Everything else on my phone is locked for that time. So this kind of two to three hours of the day, I have no access to Google Chrome, I have no access to Instagram, I have no access to Twitter. All those things are locked down. They are unavailable.

If I want to get them back, then what I have to do is I have to cancel the scheduled break and the clock starts ticking five minutes, four minutes 59, four minutes 58. Usually, as you watch that clock ticking down, it's got to get all the way to zero before you're allowed to turn the thing off. Usually, that's long enough for you to go, "Oh, screw this. I'm not going to sit around for five minutes waiting for the thing." So it just tends to be, again, just a nice piece of psychology that keeps you locked away from those things for those times and just gives you that kind of extra focus.

And obviously the more basic version of that is just using the airplane mode, just using the do not disturb kind of features of the phone, just to keep some of that stuff in a more kind of stealth and camouflage kind of mode.

The same, I think, can be applied to people as well. So actually just having conversations in your team, you know, like what's the time where I really need to get my head down and focus? What are the times when you need to do that? How can we kind of share those responsibilities and make that happen for each other? How can we do that within the team? So just for me, I feel like when I go into organizations, often it's really amazing to me how many of those conversations are just left unsaid.

And it sort of builds up and bubbles up in tension or whatever, but really it never gets put on the table. Like what's the expectation around email? What's the expectation around my attention? Like people don't have those conversations as often as perhaps we need to do that.

Next one I'm going to talk about is unorthodoxy. Just doing things differently, thinking in a very different way, I think that's probably fairly self-evident coming into Google to talk about that. But I go into so many companies where what really happens a lot is that people spend a lot of time looking at their direct competitors.

looking at the direct market that they're in or around and trying to get inspiration from what everybody else in their sector is doing. And I'm a huge fan of just looking way beyond that and just kind of thinking, how would someone else solve this problem? How would someone else do that piece of thinking? How would someone else communicate those kind of ideas? So thinking about it from the point of view of someone very principled like Malala, or how would you explain this problem to a really curious, intelligent six-year-old?

So just thinking about those kind of different ways to approach that same idea or that same piece of thinking and coming up with a solution.

The other thing around unorthodoxy is experimentation. So I'm a big believer that all of us are very stuck in ruts with our own habits and the way that we work. So a couple of years ago, I did this thing. I did 12 extreme productivity experiments, one for each month. And the idea was to just challenge all of my initial assumptions around productivity and the way I worked.

So I did things like, one was called flipping the nine to five. So I worked five till 9:00 AM and then clocked off for the day at 9:00 AM. I did the same five to 9:00 PM. So I had the whole day and then I had my four hours of work. What was incredible about that was, you know, I only had four hours a day and I thought I was like super focused and super productive already, but having this limitation of four hours

really made me think twice about some of the things I was doing. I think constraint is always a really beautiful thing to really get us to a much stronger sense of focus. I still use some of the kind of lessons from that one. I also tried one which was working an hour a day, seven days a week. So literally like one hour burst

but seven days a week just to see how that would feel. Turns out I was really stressed for most of that time. You do need more than an hour a day generally. It depends on what you're doing. I did one which was whenever I feel unclear about a decision or I'm slightly procrastinating about a decision, I made that decision by the throw of dice.

So what that meant is I had to come up with one, I had to come up with basically like two or three or six different like answers to the question. And then, you know, so sometimes, you know, if you're really stuck with something, being forced to come up with six different ways of thinking about it just helps you to open up your brain and kind of think about things in a different way. The other thing about that one was it was really amazing to be able to detach ego from decisions. It's like, well, I didn't decide that, the dice did, you know, it's a really different thing.

But just, I think, you know, I say that because not necessarily expecting you to go back to your bosses and say, I just want to work an hour a day. But I think for me, doing those kind of experiments from extremity is

is a really nice way to then get back to some kind of sense of normality, but with new learning. I think often learning comes from those extreme things. It comes when you're outside of your comfort zone. And I learned so much by doing that. And I think we can do those things really simply in our day-to-day. So just getting off the bus or the tube, like a stop early and just kind of exploring the area for 10 minutes before work just puts your brain in a really different thing. It gets you out of this sense of,

every day starts the same way and every day has this certain rhythm to it. So if you're someone that always gets into the office and the first thing you're doing is on your phone, on your email, try having the first two hours with no phone and no email and just see what that's like.

If you're someone who usually solves a thing by getting up a document on the screen, try and do it with just pen and paper. So sometimes just those really tiny little changes in habitually how we work could just make a huge difference to the way we think about certain things. Next thing I'm going to talk about is agility. So this idea of...

Zen like calm and a lot of the ideas around second brain and having autonomy around our work, they can be really compromised where suddenly there's a big fire that we have to fight. There's some big thing going on and we have to react to that.

So what I'd say around that is, you know, we have to be really aware of where those things might be coming from, but also having a really good starting point. If you're not in, if you don't feel right now like you're in some kind of big firefighting emergency kind of mode, one of the best things you can be doing is really taking stock and like getting clear around what you are working on because you know that some other emergency will come along.

There will be another fire. So like getting to a place where you really know what you're working on and getting real clarity around that stuff makes it much easier to drop those things. It makes it much easier when your boss comes in and says, right, can you work on this for three days? It's like, well, I can drop all that because this is what I was working on before. We all agree that this is the more important thing. So getting that kind of sense of...

sort of clarity and being organized around your work is just the most useful thing at the point where a crisis hits. Because it's the time when you really need to know what you're dropping and being able to do that in a way that kind of feels more, you know, just more comfortable and you're more able to know what you're going to leave behind.

It can often be a sort of point of crisis where we really start to just look at the small things and kind of sweat the small stuff rather than really kind of thinking much bigger. So the other thing is just habitually to really be thinking what could be on the radar, like really thinking about that kind of future, you know, like what might be coming up and anticipating problems before they happen. Usually just the best way to solve problems is to try and nip them in the bud and not let these things become big things. And the other thing about agility is just to dispel

The myth of multitasking-- I was talking about this with somebody just before we started. A lot of the old time management books used to talk about the holy grail is multitasking, like do two things at the same time and then you'll be more productive. Actually, all the science points to the fact that it's really hard for your brain to do two thinking tasks at the same time. So multitasking really doesn't exist in that way. And in the kind of stuff we're doing, we need to focus much more on the idea of monotasking, like doing one thing at a time, doing one thing with focus.

That can be as applicable to the desk space in front of you. So not having five different bits of paper that relate to five different projects when you're trying to focus on one, just like putting those things in a drawer or to one side. Same with your desktop. Like who's got hundreds of different open windows on your computer and like hundreds of different, you know, like unfiled things that kind of get in the way. So really kind of getting that focus around monotasking, not multitasking, really, really helps.

A couple more before we finish. Mindfulness.

So when I first wrote the book about five years ago, I was really struggling to find the time and the space to do that because I had a business to run and all the rest of it. So like it was this thing that kept coming up every week I looked at my to-do list. It was like write book. I was like, oh, I'm not really, that's not really happening. What do I need to do? So what I did was something quite extreme. I booked a plane ticket to Sri Lanka. I found a beach hut that had no Wi-Fi, no phone signal. I was totally kind of off the grid and I went away to Sri Lanka and I wrote the book.

And I didn't really have very many conversations while I was there with different people because I was just kind of on my own. But I did meet a Buddhist monk at the bus stop. And basically, the Buddhist monk asked me to come to the monastery and taught me meditation. And it was a really beautiful thing. Meditation wasn't supposed to be one of the characteristics in the book.

But I was there and I was writing the book and suddenly I was having this experience around meditation. It's like, this has to be in the book. This has to be a thing. And I thought it was risky at that point to put meditation and mindfulness in the book. And I was going to go into my corporate clients and they were going to be like, this is all a bit hippie woo woo. What's going on?

And what's happened in the last few years is that the opposite has become true, which is that mindfulness has become such a saturation thing. And you get all these really annoying things on Twitter that say, the one thing you need to do is be a better leader. Meditate for five minutes a day. Oh, well, if only it was that easy. Great. So I think meditation is an amazing tool. It's not for everybody. And I think there are lots of different ways in my mind that we can get to a place of mindfulness. Really, for me, mindfulness is kind of noticing your thoughts.

noticing the things that you might be stressed about in that moment and starting to really understand where your brain might be going in certain things. So you can get that just through walking. Lots and lots and lots of different ways that you can start to really understand your brain. And for me, the benefit of that is...

thinking about this idea of the lizard brain. So the lizard brain is the amygdala. It's the part of your brain that gives you this fight or flight response. And often the things that become really tricky for us to do or we start to procrastinate over or we're scared about

because the lizard brain is having some big response to it. So for example, when I put a book out into the world, my lizard brain is kind of saying to me, don't do this. And the reason for that is that books are going to be judged, right? People are going to write Amazon reviews about them. And people are going to make judgments about what you do. And that's a scary thing. It's the same reason if you're going to stand up and give a presentation in front of

a bunch of your colleagues, or even worse, a bunch of your bosses, it's like, I'm going to be judged here. This becomes a scary thing. So recognizing that that lizard brain is often going to try and sabotage it. It's going to try and get in the way. It's going to try and give you a period of procrastination rather than a period of really useful work. So when we start to recognize that that's lizard brain thinking, we can start to override it and do something differently. And for me, mindfulness is one of the best ways that we can start to get into that kind of place.

I think also mindfulness is just a really useful thing to help us just take a step back and realize how far we've come. So this is always quite a good point in the year, I think, where people start to kind of take stock of where they were last year and what they want to do this year. So just kind of taking that step back sometimes and kind of thinking how far we have come, what we have achieved. A really nice productivity tip that doesn't feel like one is, you know, once a week or on a kind of regular basis, write a have done list.

So as well as your to-do list, write a have-done list. It's a really nice empowering thing. Also just kind of overrides that lizard brain thinking of like, oh, I'm not capable. I feel guilty that I've not achieved this. You know, just gives you that kind of sense of momentum, which again fuels the next kind of round of productivity. Preparedness. One of the things I talk about in the book is

an idea called the weekly checklist. So this is a thing that you do once a week where you just kind of take a step back from all of the work that you're doing and you prioritize just really clear thinking. And sometimes one of the things I come across quite a lot in businesses is people feel like they don't have the time for clear thinking. It just feels like a luxury. It feels like something that I'll do when everything dies down or when everything changes.

Henry Ford has this amazing quote, which is thinking is the hardest work there is, which is the probable reason so few engage in it. And I really love that quote because I think for me, you know, when we're in a knowledge work job, our job is to add value and create value out of information. The way we think and really quality thinking is the biggest asset that we have. Our brains are our biggest tool. So taking some time to step back and really look at your projects, look at your second brain, make sure all that kind of stuff feels fresh.

I think sometimes to-do lists kind of fall apart and apps fall apart because we lose trust in what the data is within those apps. So we start to look at what's in the app and we start to go, oh, I know there's more stuff in my head, so I don't quite trust the app as being the full record of everything that I've got.

And then we lose trust in it, we stop using it, and it kind of changes. So really having that weekly checklist, having that regular time where your only job really is to interact with those lists and really get clear on what's on your plate is a really nice way of keeping those things fresh and ultimately gives you more focus. But there is a cost to that, which is a little bit of maintenance time. So just coming back and using those checklists to really make those good decisions happen.

The other thing about preparedness is the idea of our biggest tool being our brain is basically sleep. And this slide is just to indicate that sleep is a good thing, and it's really good to get enough sleep.

When you think about your tool, your biggest tool being your brain, getting good sleep and also a whole lot of other stuff. You know, hydration is a really important thing and stuff that we kind of know. I've just actually just finished writing a book called Work Fuel, which is all about nutrition and how to eat to have better energy. Looking at the things on your plates, Google, as you're doing a good job.

It's good. But I think it's just one of those really underrated things. I really couldn't find any books out there that looked at nutrition and productivity and kind of married those two things in a really specific way. So I've been working with a nutritionist called Colette Hennigan, who was my nutritionist for a couple of years, to really put that into practice. So that comes out in March.

And I think, you know, for me, all of those things that help us to fuel our brain, whether it be nutrition, whether it be sleep, whether it be hydration, exercise, you know, mindfulness to extent can do the same thing. But just all those things are really important to give us as much of that energy and proactive attention as possible.

And finally, just to say that a ninja is a human but not a superhero. So when you do a lot of the stuff that's in the book, when you really start to have a really good second brain, a really good load of apps and tools that you're using, when you've really got the best kind of productivity setup that you have, people will look at you across the office and they'll say, oh, this person just feels like a superhero. They're doing all this amazing stuff. You'll start to be really valued because of that.

And often people will start to go, how do they do it? Have they got some kind of special superpower? And really, none of us have superpowers. We're all just humans, but with good tools and good ways of thinking and all that stuff. And I think that's a really useful thing to come back and remind ourselves of regularly, just this idea of being human, not superhero. Because what that does mean is that we have limitations.

It does mean that we need to acknowledge that humanness sometimes and not work ourselves too hard too often because ultimately we're going to risk burnout by doing that. And we also need to kind of recognize that humans do need that time to kind of refresh the mojo a little bit and kind of come back to who we are outside of work and be a human being, not just a human doing. So for me, that's a really important thing.

part of the whole productivity ninja philosophy really is this idea of human not superhero. I think productivity is one of those topics that it would be really boring if you could just systematize everything and everything could just be done by robots and then it's all kind of done. There's no challenge in that for me. I think the interesting part of productivity for me is that we all come to this with all those kind of weird thoughts that we have in our brain. So I've done

with my podcast, I have a podcast called Beyond Busy. I've done about 100 interviews now with often very high achieving people. And people often sort of say to me, like, what's the having done all that work and done these really long in depth conversations with high achieving people, like what's the kind of commonality? What are the things that these people have in common? And I say, well, the only thing I can find that all these people have in common is that humans are weird.

Humans are weird. And we all come at all of our work with a lot of, you know, kind of mental baggage, if you like. We have a lot of thoughts in our head that

derail us, try and stop what we're doing, try and get in the way of what we're doing. And actually by coming back and reconnecting with the humanness, I think that's where we start to recognize some of those things, overcome some of those things. And also, you know, by doing that, we start to realize that productivity is a really amazing thing. Like humans are amazing. Like we do so much amazing stuff. And despite all those limitations, despite all those things, we can just do amazing work.

Thanks for listening. You can watch this episode and tons of other great content at youtube.com slash talks at Google. Talk soon.