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Hey friends, welcome back to Deep Dive, the podcast where it's my immense pleasure to sit down with entrepreneurs, creators, authors, and other inspiring people, and we find out how they got to where they are, and the strategies and tools we can learn from them to help build a life that we love. Now this episode is a little bit different because we're going over seven unconventional truths that will help you level up your productivity, and these are taken from a diverse range of episodes that I've done with various people who are specialists in productivity, authors, and academics, and entrepreneurs.

And I hope that by listening to these seven different tips, there might be at least one thing that you can take away as an experiment to try and apply to your own life. So without further ado, here we are. I think of productivity as a phase. It's a phase in someone's life. There is a phase in your life, or it could recur, so there could be different phases, where you have to think about productivity. And then there's other phases where you think about creativity. I really see productivity and creativity as two sides to the same coin.

And where I learned about this was from my dad. My dad is one of the most creative people I've ever met, wildly imaginative creative.

But how does that creativity make it out into the world is productivity. So he has these very systematic approaches and routines and rules that he uses from, you know, the time of day that he paints from this time to this time, to how long he's going to spend on each stage of a painting, to the way that he takes notes. And so I see this kind of like pendulum, productivity, creativity, productivity, creativity. And if you go too far on either end of the spectrum, you start hitting diminishing returns and you start to get stuck, right?

Right. Like like on both sides, you can get so fixated on productivity. Your work starts to become formulaic. It starts to become very boring. And it's time to kind of go to the other end of the spectrum, creativity. But then you can go too far in creativity. That's when you get too precious.

You get to, oh, no, that's my art. It has to be this certain way. And, you know, you talk to someone six months later. What are you doing? Oh, I'm working on my one painting for the last six months. That also doesn't work. You're not, you're getting stuck. You're getting sort of locked up in your own preciousness. And so I really see them as this kind of alternating back and forth pendulum. Nice. Yeah, I had a bit of thought as you were saying that. And I think I've never really thought of the two as being separate, I guess, because

Given that a bunch of videos I make happen to be vaguely themed around productivity, when people ask me, oh, what is productivity to you? I kind of take a step back. I broaden it out. And I say, oh, productivity is just using your time intentionally. Yeah. Which then makes it a more gentle definition that you can apply to your personal life, to your work life. And who doesn't want to use their time more intentionally? Yeah. But there's something about the word productivity that feels a bit more like, ugh.

It feels very worky and very much like I'm generating economic output for my employer and this is a bad thing. Any thoughts on that? Yeah, a couple of things. So productivity is like efficiency. Efficiency is sort of a synonym, right? What is efficiency? Again, if you go back to manufacturing, it's simply minimizing waste. That's how I think of it, which is one of the most important things in life. Like when people say productivity doesn't matter, I go, does it not matter that you not waste your time?

Does it not matter that you waste your attention? Does it not matter that you waste your ideas? Does it not matter that you waste your potential? Isn't that almost what life is about? And it's easy to lose sight of that if you think of efficiency, but I really just think about it as minimizing waste. And then the other thing I was going to say, oh, think about other uses of the word productivity, a productive conversation.

Would you say a productive conversation is anti-human or is not benevolent or is kind of removing the humanity? No. The most intimate conversation with my wife, I still want to be productive. That doesn't mean it's not a good conversation. Or alternatively, think of a productive ecosystem.

productive ecosystem. The forest is a productive ecosystem, not because we went in and clear cut everything and built a parking lot, but because there is value being created, right? And you could say economic value, but I just think of

There's plants being grown. There's animals that are surviving. There's evolution that's happening. There's families, animals and humans that are being raised from the sustenance of the forest. So I kind of like to use the word productivity because it confronts people. That's what I like. I want people to be confronted because the same thing that has you kind of be triggered by productivity is

If you follow that thread, you're going to get to an incorrect assumption, a limiting belief, a blind spot that is going to limit you in life and in your career. Oh, that is beautiful. I can feel my kind of mindset changing about that because I've also been like, yeah, I agree. Productivity is a bit of a dirty word. Let's not use that word. Let's call it intentionality or something like that. But I like how you're just like, yep, productivity is.

One of the lines that I was listening to the audiobook and you said, sometimes productivity can be self-care. And I was like, oh, that's interesting. What's going on with that? So I think that's one of the main triggers for the book was actually the fact that people would be like, oh, self-care, relax. And I'd be like, actually, sometimes self-care is meeting that deadline that you're currently not on track to meet, but actually respecting your future self and your goals is getting

getting the fuck up and doing the work that you need to do for that. And like, we cannot market self-care as always like doing nothing. Sometimes self-care is working harder because you're currently not working in line with what you want to make happen. And I think that again, the internet hates that because it's like,

It doesn't fit into this idea of like wellbeing versus productivity. It's the actual understanding of the fact that both are one and the other, like self-care isn't always running a bath. If you're running a bath and you're about to miss three deadlines and that's your paycheck for the week, self-care is not running a bath. I refuse to believe that self-care is running a bath. So that was...

A lot of the stuff in the book is around how to action actual self-care and like how to know at what point something will be self-care versus self-sabotage or any of these things to create a life that revolves around, you know, your boundaries and where you need to be more productive and where you probably need to stop being so harsh on yourself.

What are your two different types of doing nothing? Yeah. Because I thought that was a super interesting distinction. And I had one of those over the weekend. It was a Saturday. No one else in the house. I was like, I'm going to make all this book progress. And I made zero book progress. Just browsed YouTube all day. And I was listening to the audiobook last night. I was like, oh, if I had this terminology of like, fuck it, nothing, I would have called it. I would have just like written the day off. But I didn't. And so I felt guilty for the whole day. So I think that's really, really important. And I think that when we're taught so much how to work,

And we're not taught that well how to take time and know when we're probably a little bit burnt out and all of these different things that actually if we took rest, we would be much better tomorrow. The idea of planned nothing and fuck it nothing are the fact that actually I believe wholeheartedly in time management. I believe that time management is stress management. For some people, you're gonna be very like type A and it's gonna be like, of course you're time managing. Like, of course, at the beginning of your week, you know what your whole week looks like and all of this. Other people are gonna be like,

"No, I won't know till the day." I do believe though that if you want to fit a certain amount of things in, you have to be good at time management and you have to do your 10,000 hours and make yourself good at time management.

You don't have to want to, fine. But do, I think that it's really important to also give a bit of tough love and be like, if you want to do X, Y, and Z, you have to plan. It's not going to happen without you planning it. So whether that's starting to go to the gym, whether that's starting a new side hustle or a new hobby or any of those things, if you're not planning those things in, in the same way as if you don't plan in the gym or, you know, if you don't put your doctor's appointment in your diary, it's not going to happen.

So the idea of like plan nothing and fuck it nothing is when you're looking at your week plan and you're doing all your day plan and you're doing your plan for yourself, I think it's really important to have enough planned nothing in there. And I don't think we do that because planning nothing again seems quite oxymoronic. It doesn't make sense.

But knowing your boundaries and getting to know how you're most productive and how you're happiest is really, really important. And that all comes then into your time management. So for me, for example, I know that from a Monday to Thursday, so weekdays, I'm probably going to want to do something two nights and do nothing two nights. And that's my limit usually. So like this week, I've had something every single night.

And I hate it. I feel dead. I've started every day feeling like an absolute zombie. I don't have any thinking time. I don't have time to stare at the ceiling. Like I don't, you know, I'm not able to kind of process things in the same way. And so I get anxious about things and I get stressed and I don't feel like I'm my best self. The way we mitigate that is by understanding those boundaries. And for me, usually...

If I look at next week, for example, and I've got something in on Wednesday and Thursday and someone says, are you free on Tuesday? I'm not. I'm actually not free on Tuesday. It might look, if you look to my diary, like I'm free, but I'm not. These are my non-negotiables. And this is how I manage myself to be able to be my best self for my goals, whether those are personal life, whether those are work. Fuck it, nothing is understanding that we can plan as much as we want. We can...

operate by those rules we can you know I can know that I'm going out Wednesday and Thursday next week for dinner and I can know that I'm doing Tuesday Monday and Tuesday in and then whatever the weekend I've got it all planned and I can get to Wednesday and I can be like I actually I actually

either don't want to or I can't or I'm feeling really burnt out or my mental health isn't there or any of those things and understanding that we can plan for absolutely everything and we can't plan for the fact that we're human and so fuck it nothing is essentially being able to be like fuck it not doing that and I think important distinction again is like you get a real dopamine hit when you think you had to do something and then you don't have to do something so you have a plan with some someone and then you you cancel that plan you get that dopamine hit

but then also you can get into the habit of doing that because you think you need that. And actually what you needed was to push yourself out there and go out to dinner and have a good laugh with someone you haven't caught up within a while. But it feels like a chore when you're at the end of that day and you're like, that's the last thing I want to do. So I think understanding as well, the boundaries of fuck it, nothing too are really important. But I do think that if we don't have fuck it, nothing, say your Saturday night where you were going to make a huge amount of progress with the book,

and you decide not to, what you really needed in that time was fuck it, nothing. You needed to be like, fuck it, I'm doing absolutely nothing.

Instead, you probably sat on the sofa being like, I'm meant to be doing something and then felt probably you probably didn't get the benefit of doing nothing and you didn't get the benefit of doing work. And so I think understanding our human limits and our boundaries and being able to just say, I'm not going to do that. And I know I'm not going to do that. And I'm OK with not doing that is one of the most important things you can do for your productivity and your time management and your self-care. What is slow productivity?

Totally. So, yeah. So if we don't have, here's the issue with knowledge work in general,

the issue we've been grappling with in the last 20 minutes, like what does productivity even mean? Right. And so then it just becomes this weird catch all or boogeyman. So I have this thought of like, why don't we actually positively come out and come up with a definition that we like a definition that's human, a definition that, that melds well with our human instincts and the way our brain is actually wired, that's centered around producing meaningful and valuable things, but in a way that's very sustainable in a way that's very satisfying. So, so instead of just pushing back against the,

the boogeyman productivity, like let's put in place an alternative. And the alternative I've been working on is called slow productivity. And like the slow food movement or these other movements, I've gone back and pulled from these sort of existing cultures of knowledge workers that have been around for centuries, in some cases, millennia, that had the privilege and space to kind of figure out what's the best way to work with your mind.

you know, what works, what doesn't and figuring out, can we have a widely applicable definition of productivity comes out of it. And so slow productivity has three principles to it. Do fewer things, working at a natural pace, obsessing over quality. Those three things, approaching knowledge work with those three principles realigns the efforts with our humanity, the way we're wired. I can give you a neuroscience argument for it. I can give you a psychological argument for it. I can give you a philosophical argument for those three things. On all three of those levels,

Orienting knowledge work around that is meaningful, satisfying. You can produce things of great value. It can be very productive for companies and it can be very satisfying for individuals. So I'm sort of putting together my pitch of what target of productivity should people who make a living using their brains, what should they be going for beyond just get after it, have your to-dos organized? I don't know. What's the philosophical argument?

Well, there's like, we can go back to Aristotle if we need to, right? There's this, what is the teleology of human existence? Well, what's the one thing we have that other creatures don't is we have these brains that can sit and think and create things. And there's an argument towards the,

the production of things of value and meaning and sort of giving things the time they require, craftsmanship, that there's a real philosophical foundation to the human value that's extracted from actually like doing things of value of impact with your mind. And a lot of that gets sapped away when you're just

answering emails all day or just hustling to get after it. You could go all the way back to neuro. I mean, this is the thing I'm working on now is I've gone back heavily to do a deep into the mainly social anthropological research to do a deep history of work for 300,000 years. What was work for humans? Because that's a long enough time span that our brain doesn't

evolved, right? To match this definition of work. And, you know, surprise, surprise, when you go back and look through this deep literature, you see not doing too many things. Sees a variation in pace and intensity. A lot of your time being the application of hard-won skills. Like that's exactly what comes up. That's what we did for 300,000 years. So there's also this almost like psychology, anthropological, even neuroscientific argument for

not being overloaded, varying your intensity in various ways and spending more of your time like applying hard one skills, like what we expect work to be. Do you have you stumbled across any kind of Dunbar number for number of active projects that one should have at a given time? Like when you say fewer things, I mean, how few are we talking?

Well, yeah. I mean, I, so there, there's two different timescales. I mean, at the scale of like what you're working on right now, it's one, right? So like in the, what, what we cannot do, what our brain cannot do is concurrently during like the afternoon, go back and forth between three different things.

Just the way our planning motivation loop works, like we have one thing in our working memory, we build this internal model that pulls episodic memories out of the hippocampus. We use that to try to predict what we should do next. That system cannot handle more than one thing. So we cannot be thinking about making decisions on or making progress on more than one thing at a time. And I don't mean like literally at the time, like over a...

A couple hours, even like work on one thing till you're done, move on to the other thing. Our brain cannot go back and forth. It's why email, like going back and forth between your email just crushes us psychologically. You know, a recent podcast episode, I talked about task freeze where you see like 15 things you need to do and you just stop.

It's because you literally, the planning motivational center of your brain can't make plans for 15 things at the same time. It neurologically can't do that. So your motivation system just freezes up, right? So at a time, one thing, in terms of like ongoing projects, I'm a big believer in like pull-based methodology, where there's like two or three things you're working on. When something finishes, you can pull something else in.

And I actually think this is how companies should organize work. Software developers already do this, but I think we should do this more broadly in knowledge work where, yeah, there's a lot of work the company needs to do. Don't just distribute that to everyone's plate and everyone has 20 things that they have to kind of figure out what to do with.

They should just be working on a couple things and they can pull in new things once it's ready. And the problem, why I think this is important and why I think it's killer to have a lot of things on your plate, even if you're not working on them at the exact same time, is there's something called an overhead tax that every project that you have committed to generates. It's an overhead of administrative work that you have to do, even if you're not actively working on the project. It's emails you have to send.

meetings, planning meetings, standing meetings you have to have, and just cognitive load of knowing it's there. So that builds up.

So if you have 15 projects on your plate, you're paying overhead tax on 15 projects and that tax takes up your time. And before you know it, most of your time and mental energy is going to the maintenance of the ongoing projects and almost nothing gets done. And then you fall farther behind and then more projects build up and the tax gets worse. I call it the overhead spiral. It's a terrible state to be in. So there's a real cost to having too many things on your plate, even if you're very careful about

This morning, I'm just working on this. And then in the afternoon, I'm just working on that. And on Tuesdays, I work on this. Once you get past a certain level, it's a problem. And I think, again, it's something companies get wrong. They just say, let's distribute the task informally to everyone. We'll have everything live on people's individual plates and they can just figure out what to work on and whatnot. And the overhead tax kills them. A much better system is this all sits in a holding tank.

And when I'm ready for the next thing, I pull it in. But until it leaves that holding tank, I'm paying no overhead tax on it. It's not actually in my view. So I honestly think like three active projects at a time is best. And obviously when you're working on something, you're only working on that one thing. Yeah, this is actually something like as of last week, we have now started doing in our team. And it's...

I'm so surprised it's taken so long to get to this because we were in that model of, oh, there's all these things we could do. Let's just like distribute them. But now we're like, oh, actually, let's do the thing that software people do and actually make a, I mean, we have like a bucket list of, we would love to,

Have my website contain book summaries of every book I've ever read. We'd love to think about a Patreon. We'd love to think about making our own keyboard. We'd love to think about making our own bag. We'd love to think about this enormous list of things, but not right now. Like for the next six weeks, we're just focusing on these things. Good. And then six weeks later, we can reassess the bucket list and see, okay, whether we actually want to put things onto it. And that model has...

basically is like within half an hour freed up a lot of cognitive overload from people being like, oh, actually, this is not a priority right now. So therefore, I'm not going to think about it until our next six week sprint planning or whatever that looks like. Yep. Yep. That's 100% right, by the way. That's what everyone should be doing. I have a chapter about this in the new book I wrote a couple of weeks ago. Everyone should be doing that. But mainly only software people do. And it's such a it's such a it's such a

Such an unnecessary, unforced source of stress and overhead. I mean, just like this is what I think happened, by the way, with the Zoom apocalypse. So I don't know if you heard this from your listeners. I definitely was getting this feedback that during 2021, when everyone we were everyone's remote knowledge workers were remote. People got to these sort of absurd states where like all they were doing was Zoom remote.

They're like, wait, there's no work left. Like it became absurd. It was like a Kafka play or something like this, like some sort of like meta commentary on the absurdity of work and bureaucracy or something like that. But what this was, I think, was like a really clear example of the overhead tax system.

It's spiraling out of control because when people went remote, it increased the amount of tasks on their plate by like 20% all of a sudden, because you had to figure out how to run whatever you do remote. So it generated new work, right? To figure out how do we make the transition and switching over to video processing.

is there's efficiencies that that's lost so there's a lot of efficiencies in person where where i can grab you at the end of a meeting be like well hold on like what are we doing about this client coming tomorrow we go back and forth for three minutes and figure it out when i can't do that anymore we're left saying like we should have a zoom meeting yeah the talk about the client but what's the smallest interval on your calendar 30 minutes and so now five minutes becomes 30 minutes so i think the the

The zoom apocalypse that happened in like the summer of 2020 was making the phenomenon of overhead tax unavoidably visible. Like it's like,

Look, we, we, we up these things by about 20% and soon all time went away for working. All time went away for working. And it showed how, how perilous, like how, how much we, we, we push that tax up almost to the limit. Like before the pandemic, we must've already been spending so much of our time just talking about work because when it got 20% worse, we couldn't ignore it anymore because people were writing me and saying, I don't know when to go to the bathroom.

Because it's back to back to back to back to back for seven hours of, you know, Zoom. Like it got so absurd that people were like, okay, obviously this can't be right. But we were like right below that for years and years. So I think it's a huge phenomenon and we really should spend more time thinking about it. Yeah.

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One of the things that really resonated with me was the way you described the rocks analogy. I wonder if you can talk a little bit about that. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Talking of stereotypical bad time management. I mean, okay.

I feel like a caveat, one or two people have explained to me since the book came out ways in which it's possible to interpret this parable that are not so ridiculous. But in case anyone doesn't know about it, in various different versions, but it's like the teacher or somebody brings in a jar of...

Should I go through this whole thing or is it so well known that this is a waste of valuable digital push? I think it's worth going through. I'm not sure it's that... It's well known to people like you and me. Okay, just very quickly, and you decide whether to use it or not. A teacher brings a glass jar into a classroom with some large rocks, some pebbles and some sand, and challenges the students to fit all of this into the glass jar. And then the students, because they're apparently really dumb...

Start putting the sand in first and the pebbles in first, then they find the big rocks won't fit. So the teacher says, no, no, no, let me show you how to do it. And he says, so you put the big rocks in first, then you can fit the pebbles and then pour the sand in and it all fits. And the idea is if the big rocks are your major priorities in life, you've got to make time for those and you can make time for those. And if you do make time for those, then everything else you can fit in around the edges. But if you don't put those first, you'll never get around to them at all.

And I don't think that's a completely meritless point. I just want to say that right now so that, you know, the estate of Stephen Covey doesn't come under... Excuse me. Like Susie for libel or slander. But...

The experiment is plainly rigged, right? It's set up, the professor, the teacher has only brought as many big rocks in as he knows can ultimately with the right configuration be made to fit. And I think that extending this metaphor, the problem most of us have with time management these days, the main one, it's not necessarily that we're bad at prioritizing. It's just that there are too many big rocks to fit in the jar. In other words, there are too many things that totally legitimately have a claim on your time.

too many people in your life, business opportunities, demands from the boss, whatever you're setting it, whatever your situation is, there are just too many things that legitimately you could use your time on than you have the time and stamina available for. So the nature of the hard choice involved is different. It's not just like, how am I going to organize my day? It's like, why am I doing this?

what am I going to neglect? And what important things am I going to neglect? Because I'm definitely going to be neglecting some important things. Yeah, as I was listening to the book, it really gave me a lot of reassurance because...

again as a productivity guru i feel like i should have my life in order and you know when the whatsapp messages pile up to like you know 100 plus i'm like oh my god relationships are the most important thing in life i'm letting people down by not replying to them and then i spend hours replying to all the people and then responding to whatsapp messages generates more whatsapp messages similarly to responding to emails just generates more emails yeah um

And, you know, at the same time, I care about the work stuff. I care about like, I don't know, some sort of impact. I care about spending time with my family. And it's like in the past, part of me was just like, you know what? I just really suck at keeping in touch with friends and that's okay. And then another part of me was like, no, that shouldn't be okay. Like, you know, I should use my productivity powers to like actually focus on this thing that's important, like keeping in touch with friends. How do you, I guess, knowing that, for example, there are too many rocks to fit in the jar. How does one go about solving this problem? Well, I think so. There's sort of,

I think the most important point there is that like in a certain sense, you can't. And that's the really important point. And this is not a despairing message. I think it's a really empowering and sort of thrilling message in a way. But like if the challenge and like I show it like vibe with what you're saying there about

feeling that there must be a solution and that all these things really matter. They do really matter. You don't need to persuade yourself that actually some of them don't matter just to get really sort of existential about it. I think there is some kind of urge motivating that and it's almost universal to want to find a cheat code for life or find a sort of, you know, a caveat in the contracts of being, of being human and,

And to get on top of everything or in command of your time in a way, in a certain way that is just not actually available to us as finite creatures. Because we have this fundamental mismatch between our capacity to think of infinite possibilities and feel infinite obligations and our finite material, you know, short lives and limited time.

So this is like the vague part. And we can totally talk about like more specific and practical things. But I think there's something really powerful in just seeing, oh, this isn't a problem to be solved. This is just the way things are. At the end of life, there will be lots and lots of things you didn't get around to doing that work.

totally were legit that there would have been good things to do but that was because you were doing other thing hopefully things that were that were good things to do and you can sort of relax into the discomfort of that a little bit you can sort of you can feel the anxiety or anyway it leads to anxiety in me that comes from thinking like well you mean i'm never going to get to this point in my life where i have no problems or feel no no it's like no you're not that and that would be ridiculous and you wouldn't want to get there actually but it's a separate discussion

You can sort of factor in like price into your to your approach to life that there are going to be good relationships that you don't nurture interesting opportunities that you don't pursue great books that you don't get to read. It's like once that's if something like that is completely a given it stops being stressful. We don't beat ourselves up for not being able to like jump a mile in the air because nobody expects that in the first place of human beings.

and it should be the same for this kind of stuff and once you sort of let this whole fantastical edifice crash to the ground and you're just standing in the rubble you can be like okay now

I've got this many hours today. What would be the most meaningful, exciting, high impact things to do? And it's like, it's, it's hard. And I don't want to imply that I've like totally solved this, this, this issue either. But like, I think that is the way forward. What sort of tools were you using to stay productive before it coalesced into the method? Everything. I was like a hopeless early adopter. It's like a new app. I'd be on it immediately. And yeah,

Sometimes it helped me here or sometimes it helped me there, but it's, I don't know. I mean, you name it, I probably used the app, I used the system, I used all of it. And what's funny is that I learned so much more after I started sharing like Bujo work, right? People are like, oh, have you heard of David Allen? I'm like, no, I hadn't. I probably should have at some point, but like all these great thinkers in the space and I'm like, okay, what do they say about this stuff? And

it's been really exciting for me because I'm as much of a student of all this stuff as I am a teacher. And so, yeah, I continue to use stuff all the time. I love this stuff. It's fun. It's like, okay, how do I make more

How do I make better use of my time? And so what were the dots that connected for you to result in that? Oh, this is the pen and paper based method that I have found the most helpful. Having tried these like thousand different things. Okay. So there are a couple of things there. One is...

It's not done, which is the fun part, right? Like here are the, here's the minimum viable product. That's kind of what I share with people. Like you're the fewest amount of tools I found to be successful over the longest period of time. Try them on for size and see if they work for you.

I think that I never intended on sharing this. So maybe we can approach it from that angle. What happened was that people always saw me sitting down with a notebook, especially as somebody that's a digital native and working in digital design. People are like, you always have a notebook. What are you doing in there? I'm like, well, thinking. That's what I'm doing. I'm trying to figure out stuff, drawing, whatever. It's a canvas.

And then people would be like, well, so how would you deal with this problem? Or how would you deal with this problem? Or how would you organize this? And I would show them like one piece of the methodology or at that time, just what I was doing. And I found over and over again that no matter what their background was, it would be useful, especially for people who only did things online. And I was like, huh, maybe I should share some of this stuff. And that's kind of what ended up

incentivizing me to coalesce everything to share it. And so I stripped everything out, but the most helpful tools that had the things that had worked over the longest period of time. And a lot of that's just about writing down your thoughts. That's the core of it. Like in bullet journal, you write down three things, the things you have to do, the things that you experience and the things you don't want to forget.

And then you come back to those things in regular intervals. That's the greatly diminished version of bullet journaling. It's writing things down and reading what you wrote and trying to connect the dots over time. So those three things were writing down what you have to do. Tasks, events, and notes. Tasks, events, and notes. Okay. Yeah, I guess that's kind of what mine looks like as well. Because so I guess...

You must get this a lot, but I first, I mean, I'd heard of the method like years ago on some random productivity blog or something. I always thought, oh, interesting. Like, I'll file that in for later to try at some point.

And then my friend Matt D'Avella did a video recently where he tried bullet journaling. I was like, oh, okay, interesting. Like it's not too artsy-fartsy like I sort of imagined it would be. And then I started watching a few other videos about it. I was like, oh, this actually is really helpful. Like I need a way to look at my year for the whole year because I think like the problem with Google Calendar is that like it's –

forces you to think very zoomed in and if you try and zoom out like suddenly you can't see anything at all because now it's just little dots on a thing and oh this this like future log thing seems great oh like month at a glance yeah i'd love that that'd be really helpful just being able to see my calendar at glance and figure out like you know where where do i have blocks in my calendar where i should probably take some time off and go on holiday or something and

oh, you know, this daily thing of like actually figuring out what your most important task is for the day or what tasks you have to do. I was sort of doing a version of that. And so we released our own like stationary line, which where it's like every day is a page and it asks you three things you're grateful for. It asks you what's your most important task and the sort of the might to do list, things that you might want to do with like a little brain dump area. And I was like, oh, I'm already kind of using this sort of most important task method. Let's try this bullet journal thing.

And then I came across the book and I listened to the book on Audible. And I think that might have been a mistake because it was like hard to imagine what was going on when just listening to it on Audible. And so I think that that's one of the tricky things about this, because I guess it's, it is somewhat visual, but I guess like with, with that caveat in mind, so like what,

What are the core principles, I guess, of the method? And obviously people will put links to the book, which I recommend not getting on Audible because then you can see what's going on when you get it on Kindle or in real life. It really helps to see what's being talked about for sure. Okay.

Tasks, events, notes. Tasks, events, and notes. So I'm trying to think of a way to have a non-visual version of describing this. I think the best way to think about it is writing down your thoughts in a really distilled way. So a lot of people know how powerful journaling can be, right? They hear about...

all the mental health benefits that it can have. And I very much encourage long form journaling, but it takes a lot of time, right? And a lot of people see it only as an emotional thing, right? It's like I journal when I'm confused or when I'm sad or when I'm angry, and that can be helpful. And then you have bullet lists, which essentially are for very specific things. This is what I have to buy. You know, these are my goals. These are all these things. So bullet journaling kind of combines the best of both worlds.

where it helps you organize your thoughts as bulleted lists. That's one component. There's two parts of the bullet journal method, the system and the practice. The system is how you organize information. And then the practice is more about what you do with what you write down. I like to say that, you know, writing things down is only the beginning.

So you write down the things that you experience. So your events, the things that you don't want to forget, which are your notes, and then your tasks, things that are actionable, right? Okay. Sorry, please. Go ahead. And each one of those has a different icon in front of it. So as you're writing things down, you're also categorizing your thoughts in real time.

And the only way to make that sustainable is figuring out a way to write down less, right? You're really trying to focus on what really matters. And that is part of the practice, right? You're listening to somebody and you're like, it focuses, it helps you become an active listener, right? It's like, what about this is the takeaway specifically? So you're starting to think about what's being said in a very different way because like hearing and listening are two very different things. So it's like, what about this is important, right?

And then using your own words to capture it and that process as well, like using your own words helps you retain it better and helps you make it more personal, all these things. And you're doing this throughout the day. So information that's coming from the outside being filtered through your brain and then being added to your bullet journal. So that's like a big part of it, capturing things.

You record. So the bullet journal method works in a cycle, which is record, reflect, refine, and respond. And those are like the four steps. So you record by writing things down. Then you reflect on the things that you wrote down and try to come up with insights and different takeaways. And then you take action accordingly, right? That's essentially what you're trying to do. The bullet journal creates both

framework for you to organize your information but also how to think about your information and then make all that insight actionable that's the big part like what do you do with what you learn there's a great story that you tell in your new book some days today about I think you had a lunch with someone and they were a few minutes late like seven minutes late or something I wonder if you can you can tell that story because that's one that's really really stuck with me

So I always am willing to give fledgling writers 30 minutes of my time if they will meet me in the place that I happen to be. And I was in McDonald's that day, which is actually one of my favorite places to meet writers at some. I like the sort of tearing away of all of what people see as writing, which is, you know, I need to be at a coffee shop with smooth jazz and a cappuccino. I like to put them at a plastic table with a lot of noise and

and Diet Coke. So she met me at the McDonald's and she was late. And so when she sat down, I said, tell me what you're doing. And she started describing this book. And it sounded interesting. I was like, this sounds like a good project, but I just waited for my moment. And then eventually I said, as I always say to writers, I say, so how much have you written? And so often, almost always the answer is, oh, well, I haven't started writing anything yet.

And I, then I said to her, I said, well, you were seven minutes late today. And she said, I'm sorry. You know, she, I'm so sorry. I'm like, no, no, no. My point was not that you were seven minutes late and I was upset. My point was I used the seven minutes that you were late to,

to write some sentences. You know, I turned my computer. I said, this is what I wrote in the seven minutes that you were late, right? She was a person who believed she could only write in a two-hour block, that her ideal writing time was like 10 to 12, you know, that she needed to be in a certain place and a certain mind frame, which is so often every creative person's belief that they only work under certain circumstances, ideally. So I reminded her that during World War I,

There were men in trenches wearing gas masks, artillery exploding over their heads, and they were scribbling in little books, in journals, hoping that if they survived this battle and the many battles that were to come, someday they might publish something. So thank goodness that the writers of the 1910s did not require Starbucks smooth jazz and two-hour quiet blocks of time for them to get their work done, because that's just not a reality, especially if you actually want to make a thing.

If you want to do something like a vegetable garden in your backyard or write a book or create a YouTube channel, if you actually want to do it, you should want to be doing it whenever it's possible. So I tell all of the creative people of the world, 10 minutes is precious to you. It doesn't mean in 10 minutes I can write a chapter, but you know,

In 10 minutes, I can reread the last three paragraphs I wrote earlier today and see if they're okay and clean them up a little bit. Or I can write five good new sentences. So it's just the idea that people, they just assume they need these ideal situations in order to create something lovely. Whereas Van Gogh,

was like mentally unstable and unmedicated and produced some of the greatest work in the world, you know, but had he been living in 2022, people might've said, well,

let's get control of some of your mental illness first. Let's experiment with some medication before we get you painting, right? Like it's always this idea that everything has to be right before we launch. And that's not true. We should just launch. We launch now. We're not the space program. We're not putting people into orbit where we have to be careful. We just have to take steps forward. And as is the case with most people, she really wasn't invested in writing. She was invested in the idea of having written or in the

idea that I can quit my job and write from 10 to 12 every day and then have lunch with my friends. And that is the writer's life, which is, as you well know, not the writer's life. Nice. Yeah, I think back to that bit of your book whenever I feel like, oh, you know, I should probably do some book stuff right now, but...

I've only got 23 minutes until this thing that I have to do and like, oh, you know, I could go down, I could get a coffee, get a biscuit, just like lounge around a bit. I can't get anything done in 23 minutes. I need hours and hours, you know, with my flat whites in my hand, like my Lord of the Rings and my background music to get into the zone.

But I love the way you put that of like, in the seven minutes, I wrote some sentences. I'm just thinking that I should just have that approach. Because when I was working as a doctor...

and trying to do the YouTube thing on the side, I would use those seven minutes blocks of time here and there to write stuff for videos. Like if I'd be on the toilet, instead of scrolling Twitter on my phone, I'd be on Notion typing out some stuff for a video. Or if I'm waiting eight minutes for a patient's blood results to arrive and there's no one else in the waiting room and there's nothing for me to do, it's like, great, let's open up Notion on the Windows computers in front of me and just like type out a few notes for a video.

And so many people in my academy ask like, oh, but like, I've got a job. Like, how do you do YouTube alongside the job?

I'm always like, look, man, like there are very few jobs where you don't have small, small amounts of time here and there where you know what you normally waste scrolling on your phone, where if you wanted to, and if you really cared about this thing, I'm not saying you have to, but if you did, you could potentially spend that time opening up Apple notes and just drafting a few bullet points for, for your next video. And I think I've got that approach to YouTube, but I really don't have the approach to the book because for the book I've committed, I've talked myself into believing the bullshit that like, I need to, I need to have four hours and like the appropriate coffee cup and all that crap.

Yeah. Well, I wrote my fifth novel, almost all of it in faculty meetings while teaching. Now, admittedly, it's a book of lists. It's a novel written by an obsessive list maker. So the book is told or the story is told through list after list after list after list. But I wrote almost all of those lists.

in those moments of a faculty meeting when something was being said that was irrelevant to me, which was an enormous number of minutes in those faculty meetings. Or I always arrive five minutes early and I use those five minutes. And as things are wrapping up or we have a raffle at the end of it because that's going to make us happy, I'd just be writing lists. And the beauty of that was I didn't even need to write on a computer. I could have a Post-it note that I'm writing a list on and that can later be transferred into the computer. I wrote a whole book during meetings

And, you know, I always remind people a book is probably about 5,000 sentences. So like incrementalism, right? Pile up 5,000 sentences and you have a book. I can't guarantee that's going to be a good book. That depends on you and your effort and skill and experience. But it's 5,000 sentences. And if I write seven sentences here, I am a lot closer to 5,000 than I was a minute ago. I really believe that that seven sentence sentence

step forward is a significant one, especially because I know I'll do that 23 times today. I'll take 23 moments in my day to write somewhere between one and 50 sentences. And if I just keep doing that, you know, that is why I have a pile of books, you know, it's, and you know, I'm a school teacher, you know, I am a wedding DJ. I have a consulting business. I'm launching another business.

I do. I'm a minister. I officiate weddings. I'm a substitute minister at churches, even though I really don't have a lot of faith in God. I do all these things. And people, the reason I wrote my book was because people would ask me, how do you do all that you do? And I would always say, well, if you give me 12 hours, I'll sit down with you and I'll go through your whole life and I'll help you out. And no one wants to do that. So the book was the answer to that question. But yeah, same thing with writing is with everything else, people get very precious things.

Over how a creative person works or how creativity works, whether that creativity is writing a book, painting a painting or figuring out how are you going to lay out your vegetable garden or my son, right? He's a fish. He's taken up fishing this summer. He loves it. He's obsessed with fishing. And, you know, he had his tackle box and he bought all this gear. And I said, all right, when are you going to set it up? And he said, right now. And I said, well, you got to go to bed in 10 minutes. And he goes,

I can get some of it done in 10 minutes, dad. And I was like, damn, he is right. Like I was going to tell him, don't start setting up your tackle box now. Wait for the morning. But he was like, no, I'll get some of it done. I got 10 minutes before you're going to make me brush my teeth. That's exactly the attitude you have to have.

I've been obsessed with productivity for quite a while. I found that when I was at when I was at university going through medical school and trying to build my first business on the side, I realized that I had to find ways to become more productive and ways to work harder and work smarter and learn how to study efficiently and stuff so that I could have the time to do the things that I wanted to do.

But then, and so that worked throughout university. But then when I started working full time as a doctor, that was like a step up in terms of like, oh, you know, I didn't think I had free time at university. Now I really don't have free time. Because like at university, even medical school,

going into the hospital is kind of optional. You wake up in the morning and you're like, I don't know if I feel like going in today. Or yeah, I'll go in for a few hours. I'll leave at lunchtime and then do my own like self-study. When you have a job that, you know, that's just, that's unfeasible. Like you have to show up. And so all of a sudden, like 10 to 12 hours of every single day were just being blocked up by work. And I was trying to grow the YouTube channel on the side. And I had lots of periods of where I felt pretty overwhelmed and pretty stressed by the demands of work plus the demands of the YouTube channel.

And so that was when I was like, okay, I need to change my approach to productivity. That's where this idea of sort of feeling good, like positive emotions and stuff landed. Because I didn't really want to be in a position where every day felt like a grind because I was in that mode for a while. I was like, okay, what if...

being productive and like doing the things I wanted to do didn't have to come at the expense of my like physical and mental health. What if I actually could feel good while also being productive? And then I went on this whole like research rabbit hole and found that actually feeling good is one of the keys to productivity. And actually the more positive emotion we feel in our work, the more productive we become, but also the more energy we have to give to the other important things in our life. And so to me, feel good productivity became this sort of like holistic philosophy that

That I, you know, I use every day when I whenever I'm doing something and it feels bad or I feel blocked or I feel like kind of the negative emotions getting in the way. I remember I sort of remind myself that, OK, no, there are ways to make any situation feel better and the way ways to experience the positive emotion and everything. And it just means that I can float through life. It means I can go through life.

feeling better about the work that I'm doing while also being pretty, pretty effective at the work. And it's interesting, I guess, because you have both types of experience. So, you know, when you were working as a doctor in hospital, where when you're dealing with people who are really unwell or really highly stressful situations, it must be really hard to find the

the pleasure in that kind of work in comparison to you know a youtube life and and where you can kind of choose your hours a bit more or do things that you're interested in so were they quite different challenges yeah so this is the thing so when i first started started working i found it very like stressful and sort of these high high stress situations and most of the doctors around me also had that approach where it was like there was this sense of like uh kind of

and stress in the air. But not everyone was like that. And I had a few seniors who I really looked up to who were just like, they were really good doctors, but they were also happy. They were like, had a smile on their face. They would crack jokes. And it kind of helped me realize that actually there is another way. Like,

Approaching work as if it was really stressful was actually a choice that I was making. And so I did also make a concerted effort in my day job to enjoy the day-to-day a little bit more and kind of modeling the doctors that I'd seen who would have smiles on their face and stuff. It sounds weird, but approaching it with more lightness and ease, almost as if I was playing a game, kind of. Hmm.

And it's not playing a game in the sense of, you know, people's lives are at stake. But there was a line from Grey's Anatomy that I often thought about, which is when Derek Shepard, the neurosurgeon, when he starts his operation, he says, he puts the music on and he says to his team, it's a beautiful day to save lives. Let's have some fun.

And obviously, you know, that's a fictional drama. But there's something about that, that even when you're doing neurosurgery, even when it's just like life and death is in the balance, it can still be a beautiful day to save lives. You can still have fun along the way. And so much of that, I found, is a choice that we make ourselves rather than a thing that's foisted upon us by the environment. Yeah. And I guess with any job, however difficult or kind of emotionally taxing it is, there's always something to...

be grateful for or something to find in it that we feel thankful for or find even the slightest pleasure in? Yeah, I guess. Yeah. I think, I think gratitude is a, is a really major part of this. Um, the other one is, uh, you know, this is the first chapter of the book is the idea of approach, approaching work in the spirit of play where yes, even, even when the thing is really stressful, you can still choose to approach it in the spirit of play. Um,

And, you know, there's so many stories of Nobel Prize winners who found, you know, the key to their productivity and the key to their creativity was kind of treating it with a little less seriousness and heaviness that we tend to approach work with, even when it's heavy and serious, like working in medicine or being a therapist and things.

just choosing to approach it with a little bit more lightness and ease yeah so I tried to kind of I tried to do that when I was in the day job and especially now running this business and having a team and stuff again a lot of people I know a lot of business I know is a lot of business owners I know are pretty stressed because of the demands of running a business and managing payroll and having all these people dependent on you but at the same time it's it's a bit of a game approaching it in the spirit of play yeah yeah

The idea that joy is the most kind of important factor when it comes to being productive, is that at the core of this whole thing? So it's sort of, that's where you start? Yeah, sort of. So the scientific basis for this is a theory called the broaden and build theory. So there's this researcher in the early 2000 called Barbara Fredrickson who kind of coined this theory to basically explain the fact that when we experience positive emotions,

it boosts our performance in almost everything. It boosts our creativity and it lowers our stress. And, you know, her theory very loosely is like, if you imagine back in caveman days, because we're still operating with caveman brains back in the caveman days, if, if life is good, if you're feeling positive emotions, it means that you're not in danger of being eaten by a lion. The group is surviving. Life is good. And so you're more open to exploring and you go out into your environment and you forage for new stuff. And you see if you see if you can make some new alliances and,

Whereas when you experience negative emotion, like fear or stress or anxiety, it's like, oh, my life's in danger. A lion could be around the corner and your entire being contracts and you go tunnel vision for survival. And when you're in that survival mode, it's a very high stress state because the body is literally kind of trying to survive. Whereas when you're in that kind of broaden stage, it's like it broadens your repertoire of things that you can do. And it builds like resources, like alliances and like creativity and things like that.

And so that was like a thing that I came across in my research where I felt that that was really the key. And so if we can experience positive emotions, joy in our work, it just has all of these benefits. It generates more energy for us. And often for a lot of us, time isn't necessarily the limiting factor. Energy is the limiting factor. But, you know, when you when you experience joy and positivity in your work, you end up with boundless energy and you as a side effect, you become more productive in your work.

But then outside of work, you also have way more energy to give to the other important things in your life. Yeah. And it's interesting because there's sort of literature around that idea, but in young children. So sort of that, you know, if you have a young toddler, for example, and they are in a kind of threat mode and they'll feel anxious and they'll go to their mother to feel safe. And then once they, you know, they get that reassurance and they feel safe or they...

you receive a positive emotion or experience a positive emotion from an interaction with that mother, they'll then go out and take more risks and dive into whatever the situation is and play with other children. All they needed was to feel safe and to have a sort of positive emotion and then they're ready to go out again and experience. So does it sort of help with risk-taking and trying new things or creativity is all kind of linked up? Yeah, absolutely. No, I think that's a great example with the kids.

I wish I thought to put that in the book because that's absolutely perfect. Can we edit? Can we edit?

We'll do some edits to the book. No, it's like, yeah, there's just so much evidence. So there was a, the first study that really tested this, I think it was from like the 1980s. There's this thing called, I think it's called the matchbox puzzle. What's to that effect? Where you give, you know, they get people in a lab and they give them like a matchbox and a candle and like some like thumbtacks. Those are things that you, pins, put stuff in the wall. Yeah.

And, you know, the challenge is find a way to get the candle, to light the candle, but without any wax dripping onto the floor or something to that effect.

And this is like a classic test of creativity because people who are more creative in that moment will discover the solution where people who are less creative won't. And they found that if you prime people with positive emotions, like giving them a Malteser or something just before they do the thing, they're like way more likely to solve the puzzle through creativity. Amazing. And so it was that study that was in, I think in the 1980s, that sort of helped spawn this wave of research into how even for adults, positive emotions do make us more creative. And increasingly in the world that we live in,

where most people watching or listening to this are probably knowledge workers or students of some sort productivity is actually more about being creative and thinking broader than it is about just like efficiently cranking out more and more widgets so i can eat chocolate all the way through when writing absolutely yeah that's the one that's gonna help me with our creativity absolutely yeah more the more we feel good the more productive we are that's a great piece of research