#764 - Cal Newport - The Delicate Art Of Mastering Work-Life Balance
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Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My yesterday is cow. Newport is a computer science professor, a Georgetown university of productivity expert and an author. If you've ever felt that you are not as productive as you could be, you are not alone. But what if the goal isn't to be more productive, but to let go of the goals that aren't serving you? What if the power of saying no to more things is the most important skill you can develop?

Expect to learn what our current problem with productivity is, why su du productivity is a catastrophe, the advantages to what cold calls slow productivity, how to Better organize your communication, the best strategies for implementing a productivity cheatle, how to stop saying yes all the time and much more. This episode is brought you by net sweet. What does the future hold for business? Ask nine experts and you'll get ten answers.

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I was saying i'm really impressed with what you ve done with your podger. Oh yeah, thank you. Really cool, you know, for a one stop shop for understanding productivity and where it's at and the history of hearing you trying use some .

example of the creatures period of how a email got introduced in. As IT always does.

talk to me about what the problem is with our current definition of productivity.

Well, it's a bad one, right? And I think that's what's going on, is that in knowledge work, what happened is that I went back and dug up this history, right, to try to understand, you get the knowledge work as a major sector begins to emerge roughly mid twenty's century when IT emerges.

There's this question of, okay, how are we going to measure the productivity of people? And in other words, how are we going to actually manage people? This is a harder question, you would think, right? Because before the knowledge sector roses, a major thing, what did you have is the major thing of the economy, the industrial sector.

But in there can be productivity in the industrial sector is quantitative. Its model is produced per labor hour input, right? You had a number you could measure, you could change the way you did IT, right? Let's move from the craft method to the assembly line and see that number grow up and say, this is Better.

You got acknowledge work now that works anymore, right? Exam working on seven different things. It's different than what you're working on.

How i'm doing the work is kind of up to me and my own private sort of organization system. So there's no clear thing that we can improve or mess around with. So we don't have a good old fashion definition of productivity.

So what do we do in that space? We said, well, will just use visible activity as a proxy for useful effort. So if I see you doing stuff that's Better than you not doing stuff, and if we need to do Better, let's do more stuff.

I get there earlier. Let's work later. I call that super productivity. That's implicitly been what has been driving knowledge wok activity for at least seven years.

You asked your readers or listeners, I think, to try and define productivity. This is a community of people that have come together to watch a show specifically on productivity. And they failed to come up with a good sentences for what they meant by the thing they're interested in.

Now they could do IT just what most people did when I asked them. They basically just summarize with their job less so like what is productivity and like, well, it's you know, doing my dev ops responsibility, ie as well. They just paid back what their job was and say, I guess that's productivity.

So that's that's the the issue is suit or it's it's unnamed. So we don't actually recognize or admit this is what we're doing, which is just activities Better than non activity. Uh, we can't fix IT because we don't know there is something to fix.

But you know my big argument is that super productivity went after rails once we had computers and networks and emails and laptop. And work could follow you anywhere, and you could demonstrate activity anywhere you were at any time. You see this in the productivity literature. We talk about productivity completely different in the nineties. Then we do in the early two.

you didn't you track productivity advice from the fifties through until the modern day or so, like an archaic logic of of productivity advice. So take me through what what we being told about how to be more productive in the fifties up to today. Yeah.

I I wrote this for the new yorker recently, and this was all for my own short, because I geek out on this stuff. So I have a historical collection of sort of protectively. Yeah, so you see, see a big change when we get to two thousands, but starting the fifty, the thousand, nine hundred and fifteen, very first book.

So is the very first book of what we would think of is modern time management. And it's called the management of time right? Came in one thousand fifty is good title.

I was you go to the title, right? But it's not at all what you would expect. It's almost entirely psychological, right? So knowledge work as a was new, these large organizations in which you are sitting at desks, a lot of this was new.

So most of the management of time is actually just grappling psychologically with this new reality. It's how do you even what's the mindset to even have to deal with the world in which you're no longer turning a ranch on an assembly line. That is all this stuff coming at you. Thousand nine hundred and sixty defended a book, the effective executive right Peter .

drako still read today.

fantastic book, right? Peter drunker, by the way, coined the term knowledge work. So he was really a key figure.

And understanding knowledge work, why is different? That book is all spaces, optimism, right? It's all like, okay, we can optimize. We can optimize hell out of this. It's okay.

Executives, you need to keep a log of like what you're doing every minute of the day, and we're going to go back and we're going to study this log. We're going to find the inefficiencies and we're going to remove those. And you're going to figure out like the optimal set of acts as very space age, you know, he's going to throw a lot of engineering at work.

You're going to make IT optimal. The seventies, everything is depressed, right? The american economy in the seventies is its deflation is its jy mi Carter in the great malays, right?

Uh, so everyone is in a bad mood. And so the the seventy's book I have is just A B C. Through this is or alphabetical. And for every letter, he just has some things relevant to the office that start without letter. And then they give you a couple of paragraph s like b brief cases and else what you should look for in your brief cases. A alcohol because they .

bro anti well.

it's clear from that intro that they were drinking a lot at work when you see the advice yeah he was like, you know, I don't know, maybe I not have that third .

Martini .

at lunch that was the advice that like W A waste basket, waste waste basket.

right? Like the art of building waste baskets and where they should .

be position to like. So anyway, there no, there was no ambition in the seven.

So just like just just right, how do how do you keep procedure procedure? Yeah, then you get to the eighties and nineties now it's Stephen covey, right? So eighties and nineties right now we're thinking wall street, right? We're thinking the american consumer boom, the economy starts booming, right? And so now you get, uh, seven habits of highly effective people that in the eighty's, first things first in the nineties, these are all about work is self actualization, right? And so coffee is like, here's what we're going to do.

It's incredibly optimistic. You're gna figure out what matters to you in life and all your different roles. You're going to write those down and were going to we're going to optimize everything you do in the day, all aim towards like actualizing your biggest goals in life, right?

When we're going to figure out these complicated systems for selecting and track in your time, all aimed that like accomplishing your deepest ambitions and not just in work, but like at home and and like your religious communities. Covey was a religious morman icc. Then we get to the two thousand and and this where the shift happens. So the the big book of the early two thousand is David Allen getting things done.

Show is leg exactly?

Know if you go back and you read getting things done. This is not an ambitious, optimistic book like his goal in this book. It's like, how can we basically find some moments of the peace among this untainted onslaught? The whole thing is like we can't.

It's very nalini almost right? There's this huge incoming on slot. And what we're going to do is keep this on slot from colonize in our mind and making us stress.

So everything's is going to get to reduced the next actions and then with mind, like water. So I profile Allen for the new york is so like he comes from a background in zin and karaite, so he really likes mine. Like water. You're going to execute these actions, uh, without even having to to give me mindless about this this execute execute contacts of I execute. So IT was about just trying to find peace among an on slot that's really different.

He's a very peaceful .

man and a peek guy is no hi is nice .

that seems like IT works for him okay .

to yeah but so now this is a big change, alright, because what happened between the nineties and two thousands is going to be the front office I T. revolution. Computers is going to be email later going to be smart phones is going to be slack.

So we get this huge uptake in the amount of work people felt like they had to be doing all the time. And that's when we get this change in tone. Now when we get to the twenty tens, all of the books are on the other side of IT, right where we are being essentially overwhelmed by this work.

How do we survive until the big sellers are like essentialism? My book deeps work, you have a killers. One thing like these are all books about trying to combat overload. So he gets a big shift from nineties into the two thousand, two thousand and tens. Everything becomes about work is overwhelming us.

It's too much where burning out Allen is like, how do we just basically disconnect from the stress of this all and just execute like we're clinking widget, me and socialism and know kellers, but we're trying to like, okay, how do we fight back about this? Focus still matters. Don't get overwhelmed.

This almost like a rear guard action, you know, trying to protect the rear as, uh, the advancing army is rounding you like all this is going. So it's a huge shift. And I think that's because super productivity was fine like that. You could talk about a alcohol and waste baskets and self actualization until you get computers and emails and laptops and smart phones and then IT began to overwhelm. So it's it's a nine day shift in tone once you get to .

about two thousand. Why is suda productivity so sticky? What's caused that to be so prevalent?

Simple IT was a right IT was like, I don't know what are we going to do here um simulating like a manager in the one thousand nine hundred and fifteen what are we going to here? I don't know uh if I see you working, at least I know you're not not working and so I was simple, right? So anything else is more difficult so we just went with what was simple the other thing that so it's it's not so as less that sticky is simple.

But the other thing that happened is that same Peter darker who wrote the effect of executive, he really hammed writing in the sixties all the way up until the late nineties. He was really hammering a try to explain his a management theory or to try to explain knowledge work. He was really hammering autonomy.

He said. Productivity is not something for us to discuss. The manager shouldn't be discussing IT.

It's not our business. It's now personal. Individuals will figure out on their own how they want to manage their business.

Knowledge work is not something more like in a factory. We care about how the work is done. This is up to the individual.

So productivity is not a topic of discussion. So Peter druck er really pushed this idea in knowledge work. We don't talk about productivity. So in lack of discussion, the simplest things gonna ck, and the simplest thing was if I see you working, that's good. Why arent you answering details? You must maybe it's a defensive approach to IT if I don't hear from you or see you, how do I know you're .

not slack enough so that I guess, organisationally, how productivity has become. Detected by the people that are typically above you and also by your um peers as well in your colleagues you work with. Ah but this is a merging like we are on task masters with regards to this.

So you like where we're building out our own suda productivity desire and wiping ourselves with this. What's the reason? Is IT just that this was the only measure of business, therefore, we took that and turned IT into our own internal state? Or is there something else going on when the individual is working for themselves?

Well, yes, so so what happens within the non working for yourself context if super productivity rains, right? So people are going to measure your activity is how you prove that you're valuable. Then all of your own work on being organized or productive is all gonna aimed at.

How am I more visibly active? How do I do more? How do I be seen more? This just makes into the culture eventually. So yeah, now I start my own company and a free answer.

Er my own thing going on is the only definition of productivity I know right, is the the this activity and everything that we've been seen since the the early two thousand and is is all in a world in which this is what really matters. Seeing work is what matters. Activities what matters. Slack is away.

You can always show that you're involved and always internalized IT, right? So even though there's a lot of flexibility if you run your own business, they actually are probably the worst to be the worst defenders of super productivity mindsets because they feel more pressure like I have to be productive, yes, like it's all on me. And if all that we know is suitor productivity, then that's what you're going to do.

But when you are both the person who decides which tasks to work on and also the person who works on the tasks, yeah, you end up with this very bizarre, like Harry Carry emulating sort of situation where you work, never finishes this sort of a productivity poetry scenario where IT just permeates everything that you do. And yeah, how would you how do you frame or what do you think about most people's relationship with productivity? Like how do you think that they conceive of that?

Well, it's shifting a lot, right? Because what seems to be happening is a super cube around IT begins to become increasingly unbearable in the two thousands. Um what we then get starting maybe five or six years ago is an emergent anti productivity movement, right? Because again, this is coming out of a place to make sense.

People are increasingly burned out. It's also come on the tAilings of the first decade, the two thousands. There is a whole technology ctia ity revolution. This was the whole what they've called a productivity pron revolution. This is some lead speak, but basically he was this, there is this moment in the early two thousands where people were really optimistic about this idea, that productivity implemented by smart software was itself. He was gonna onna revolutionize work.

IT was like, if we get the right system, remember David Allen, I kind of introduce this idea of being more systematic and a engineering in your system that, plus the right software was going to bring us to this utopia where work was like efforts like, do this now, do that now, you're going to be crank in widget and the software was going to do IT interviewed some of the people who worked on these these electronic gtd systems back in the day. Um so there's this big optimism that kind of faded by the end of the two thousands. Now even more burn out them before we begin to get entire productivity, right?

So this begins to emerge. It's it's picking up some steam. Two thousand and eight, two thousand and nineteen, right? These are in some of the first big books on this emerge. And then the pandemic really accelerate that. So by the time i'm actually know writing the the new book, there's a really big and productivity movements.

So so we now have an emerging and tagish relationship with the concept of productivity, which what I really is, tagish relationship with super productivity because the demands of that are dinging, right? I mean, especially win. Now you're at home.

You're working remotely. The work never ends at every moment. You have to be internally arguing with yourself, should I work or do this other thing I could be working.

Now you're in this constant internal battle. There's no boundaries and any more betwen work and non work. So like that was the defining relationship with productivity of the last five years, I would say. Is this antti productivity movement and .

where we now we still in the throes of that? Or is there something new coming up?

Well, i'm trying to put something new in the slow productivity in my mind is A A IT starts from the same places of the anticancer vy IT goes somewhere different because the problem of the anti productivity movement is there. They're starting from the right place, which is we're out out from this.

But their their response is typically, uh and I work right so then the answer they often come to is um work itself is tainted and typically they will bring more of like more like left wing labor politics so mean like a more of mark this frame right this is this is an inevitability of the exploitative nature of late stage capitalism Operations. And they wanted to go that far. They'll be like, don't try so hard, right?

Do nothing.

The art of doing now, how to do nothing. These are titles of of a really good selling books. Quite quitting was sort of a you think it's like an anti productivity move IT. So IT IT recasts IT sort of request what's going on away from our definition of productivity doesn't work well to like.

Let's put this back into more like an early twenty century labor politics context of, no, its exploitive managers trying to trying to exploit labor from you and hour in a year, some fight. And the way we i'm going to fight back and do less work is more than life than work. So that was largely the the answer that is not really catch on in part because a lot of people that were um preaching workless, we're like working really hard .

this beliefs yeah .

i'm subtribes in my sub stack. I'm writing every day about why you couldn't work hard and i'm work hard on with and also people, uh they don't hate work, right? Like a lot of people, especially entrepreneur S, I want to do this. Well.

I will be killed by IT.

I don't be killed by IT. yeah. So that that became the central question for my book was, okay. So here's the question, how do we produce stuff that's good like that we're proud of and support the family um without burning out and without having more take over more more of your life like that's the real question, right? The question is not how do we deconstruct capitalism like that's not the right response to the burnout crisis, right as the capitalists ally sell their box on this uh, the right question is this, how do we produce stuff and be proud and ambitious about what we're doing, but also not for now.

I did an annual review, and I ve used the same process every year after a while now, and I read IT this year, and I tried to ask myself more kind of introspective R. C. Questions, suffer.

What would eighty old me look back on? And wih that I did more and less of, yeah um what do I think is productive but isn't and what isn't productive but I think is really that's a really great question to ask so things that are productive, I don't realize that they are yeah, I were going for coffee with people who are just coming through town for a short amount of time, right dinner with friends at playing pick ball and going for walks are those with some stuff that I think is productive but isn't yeah being on calls, answering email, spending time in slack, sitting at my desk and i'm not working. That's a big one.

I'm just like if i'm here and I met the seat and the computer is that will happen. So yeah just talking about that's not that's productive. And the final question that I asked myself, like just notes and IT was the most interesting part of the review process was just notes at the bottom and I was stuff that came up that didn't fit into any of the questions are categories that I created for myself, is fleeting thoughts.

And this one was, and this is the main question for this year, is so funny. This is the topic of your new book. Is IT possible to be world class and have fun? Yeah, that the main question that i'm asking myself.

many of the most road class creative minds in history to have a lot of fun .

is the answers.

Yes, yes. And this is why is something some people complain about, but I think it's actually a feature of my approach approaching this topic. As I said, i'm going to go back and find world class creators come, traditional knowledge work for scientists and philosophers, artistic ec throughout history.

And I want to see how they worked. And then the complaint is, well, wait a second. I can't work the same way as gallo. That's like a completely different time in place.

I was like, the goal is not to try to replicate the workday of galley, but what we can look at, his galley had a lot of flexibility and how he worked. So with all that flexibility, what did he drift towards? So what? They have a lot of space.

Mary currie had a lot of space, georgio chive had a lot of space to figure out how they want in the works. They were running these natural experiments to see what is the absolute best way to create value with your mind. Then once we isolated those principles, okay, we can adapt them to b modern jobs.

But this is the principles that matter. So if you study these great traditional knowledge ers about history, none of them, we're busy. The idea business being somehow connected with great production is not inevitable, especially for not talking about running a complicated business, but just creating high value things with your brain. You don't find a lot of happiness until you get much more towards to the moderna.

What was the typical day of some of these favourite famous people from history? black?

That question, when that makes sense to them, right? So it's a very a modern notion that we have uniform workdays. And so we need to have like a tip. Here's, here's what I do during work days, and I work five days a week and I worked this many weeks, this many weeks a year.

They were way more variable about winning how they were working right so be like okay um this two months on working really hard on something and then I went away and traveled for four months. I did nothing right? There is no typical workday.

They had a lot more variation, right? So George okey for the painter, right? What kick started her productivity as an artist is, you know, SHE began dating stiglitz and he had. Land in the atran dex is like OK you got to come up.

We're going to go up there in the summers and SHE figured out this rythm if they go up there in the late summer to the fall, SHE has the shack by the lake. And that's where SHE SHE has inspiration. She's do her nature penis, and then SHE brings, and she's there for months.

And then he brings them back to manhattan, and then he finishes them and exhibits them and does the stuff. And then they go back to up to the other action. SHE gets her creative input.

There was like no typical day for George jo key for there's a typical year and he has different seasons. She's doing things open the book on johnnic fee and like, okay, for five days. IT opens on five days of john refused life in the late sixties, lying on his back on a picnic table because he was trying to find his way into a new york peace.

And he was a completely couldn't figured out right, like of all this research, how I can start this piece. And as someone who's written my share of new yorker piece, as I can tell you, this is like an impossible problem. Like, how do I get into this article five days is lying on his back just to try to figure out how I going to make sense of this stuff. Like what's a typical day for joy c fee like that you could look if you zoom in on that day, you would say he did nothing.

He's lazy, you know and on another day he would be you know, up in his office next to a swiss massage parlor in princeton, where he has this really kind of a centric way that he would cut up all his notes and ziogoon and put him on these board, and he might be there for hours, and another day he might just be doing nothing or doing research, right? So didn't have typical days. So this idea that there's a work day, how do you structure your work day? We invented that in for knowledge work in the one thousand thousand nine hundred and fifties. And IT was an idea we brought from factories because that our factory ran yet shifts. And so it's not even the right question for creative work.

Every time that I read, whether it's a digital minimalism or deep or any of your books out in some of rine stuff as well, is this IT almost feels like a nervous system reregulation. It's like a reminder of a slower time. It's a reminder of a different time.

And so much of the stuff that we take the granted about the rythm of modern life, about the ferocity and the last city that we go through these things with, we realize just a creation, maybe not even a creation, maybe a malignant bogor, a by product or a side effect. Some weird extension of the thing that no one really designed is the second, third, fourth order effect of some shit that happened fifty years ago. And then reading stuff like that, reading about how much I zc new, new instant love to walk. Yeah, I felt that was in one of your books at some point, like the power of walking and how important that is. And you think, god, I I came up with this idea. The productivity poetry is is one of those where all of the things that you do, even the things that you're supposed to do for pleasure, you do because you once saw an under human documentary that said fifteen minutes of walking improves your doping ogc response by whatever, whatever that there's nothing that isn't done in service of productivity, even the things that things to be supposed to be for leisure yeah and then yeah to me and maybe to a lot of people listening IT sounds like hearing gallo or or georgio cafe in a ranking of a former and then dick about and then coming back and do a little bit work IT sounds bohemian IT sounds new age IT sounds happy yeah, because our framing is only within the last, we only know the last hundred years of work. We only know that before that I was just people hooing the the ground right was just agrarian ship .

and change darsn't ally by the seasons, right? Like you talk about, like the german rural ual, because then nothing to do right is a page and ritual. They're like we're going to bomb fires for a month because like what are we're going to do?

There's no it's the winner. There's no crops to whatever. And then in the fall, they like, they are really busy. So the agrarian lifetime was up and down.

I went back and look really deeply into a four hundred hundred gathered life, which is the two hundred and seventy thousand and the first hundred and seven thousand years, or species. Nature dictated everything, right? I mean, I was today, we're on this hunt the other day, rain.

We did nothing in the middle this hunt, but it's hot in the mild days. So we just stop for a while. The only time in human history, like the first time we really had just worked hard all day long, was when mills and factories were invented.

And IT was so unbearable, IT was so terrible, to try to take humans who are used to all of this variation and autonomy in the approach to work. They say, you have to work all day long as hard as you can. We had to invent labour unions.

We had to invent regulatory frameworks. We had to put all of these huge AAAAA dies in place just to make that type of incredibly unnatural work tolerable. But the knowledge work emerges, like, so how we are going to organize our workday guys like us, what the factory guys are doing, we rap that like the least natural. And in terms of our human wiring choice that we had, because I was simple and IT, was what we were used to and IT was what was big right now. And really, well, I just do that yet.

One of the principles of slow productivity is work at a natural pace. Yeah, what is that for humans?

Well, there's there's two parts to IT. So for humans is what we just talked about, a variations and intensity. And it's not just on one time scale, but basically all time scales, right? So so when I went back and looked at how humans work before for within a day, you're going to have some periods of more intense than others in a week, some days will be more intense than others uh, when you're looking at a season, you know uh some seasons might be more intense than others.

The fall harvest way more intense than the winter um even at a bigger time scale, you might have busiest periods and less busier periods. I'm writing a book for two years and then for the next year um going more fellow rights of variations that much more natural than the other principle that came out of that and this was just from directly studying the great traditional knowledge workers of time past. They take much more time so we try to go too fast.

And a lot of these thinkers who were very productive in the sense of they produced, you know, new scientific work that changed the way we understood the universe. They worked very slowly like their notion of how long should I take on this project was way slower than what we do today. So we're always trying to charge ahead right away.

What's the quickest way I can get this done? They took their time right. They're happy to take their time. Even contemporary traditional knowledge workers do this.

Link ma Manda was on the examples I gave his first play before hamilton in the heights was a big hit, right? Eight, tony. He spent seventeen years working on that play, not protestant.

He didn't put IT aside for eight years. He just was working slowly on IT for eight year, kept going back to IT. They were doing reading to real actors.

Then you will go away and do some other stuff and think about IT and and try to get something Better. They come back and do another reading here, or just this like slow process. But that's like pretty typical with traditional knowledge workers.

We think in the super productivity culture is like not fast as possible. I will do a play. I'm gonna go away for weekend and grand. This thing out like this rock and roll. That's not the way people use to do things.

What are the industries of job types for whom this changing of th Epace d oesn't w ork q uite s o w ell? Because there maybe people listening who say, well, that's all well in. But if your goal is to create over the next however many years, a really great play, but that's not the world that I live in, that's not the profession that I have access to, right? So the whole .

goal is then how do we take these principles the greater of knowledge workers, uh, excavate. And then how do we apply to just Normal knowledge jobs? right? So all the advice for knowledge work jobs. But basically, if you work on a computer screen for a living, if you send the bunch of emails, you're probably in knowledge worker.

So what does that look like to start, adapt in these ideas to a regular jobbery, a bosses, or this or that? Well, now what becomes a little bit more subbed, but you get the same effect. So now, when a boss ask you, hey, can you put together this report instead of you saying, sure, i'll have you done in the new, new plug in the most optimistic possible estimate? Now we do like you fall in love with the idea of getting IT done that fast.

You instead take that estimate and you double IT like, yeah, you don't see one months, you say two months, you're giving yourself more time to work on IT. And then what about like the seasonality? If you're treatment ur, you can just start actually wiring this into a your actual work rythm, right?

Like I talk about entrepreneur in the book, SHE takes two months off in the summer. SHE just works that out at the way her contracts in the clients, and she's just not around in that summer is about twenty percent less revenue. You'll happily take that hit.

You will be able to take two months off in the summer. So she's getting, you know, variation. We talk about people who work in jobs so they can do that.

Now they start doing the suddenly, right? okay. So here's what I do. I don't really schedule meetings on mondays.

I don't tell people i'm doing this like when they say, hey, when you available, I give them lots of times. You don't happen to have any on mondays now. We have like a slower start.

And I know in december because we're not going to lose the last week anyways for Christmas. I'm kind of careful. I don't tell anyone about this. I'm pretty careful to have projects set up to finish before that and start after IT, but nothing is really do into IT. And I am turning down that intense dial for those three weeks, and it's not long enough for my boss to really notice.

But for me, it's a big deal knowing that I can wine down that we that month and wind down versus another months, right? So people can start implementing these principles, but like more subtitle ously. So we see them really flashing done in these historical stories. But then when we jumped to implement them in practice, it's like more subtle, but it's the same principles you're taking longer. You have variations and intensity on different times that starts to add up, starts to make a difference.

Yes, your first insight around do fewer things, which is essentially impossible for people to do because you look at the calendar and there's rooming IT and you feel the gap dbs should be filled, should be doing things. And I think a lot of people feel like do fewer things is accomplish fewer things. Yeah, that's the conflation.

Yeah and they are wrong. Yeah because if I add two words that becomes clear and do fewer things at once, right? Because here's what I think is going on.

And this is like the case of making the book, is that when you agree to something, the big problem is when you agree to IT, that is, gonna bring with the administration of overhead. So whether i'm ready to work on this thing or not, now the team needs to hey, house ago and there's emails i'm going have to answer. There's meetings going onto the calendar, right?

Like we're got to check in on this house is doing, I call IT overhead tax everything you say yes to be generous overhead tax. So the problem is when you say yes to a lot of things, you're not just trying to keep keeping my q really false. I always have something to do.

That's not just what's happening. You're generating a lot more overhead tax. So the more things you've said yes to, the more things are generated administrative overhead, which means the more meetings go your calendar and the more emails that are coming that you have to answer, right? So where do those meetings from? They're filling up your calendar.

They are not just random, right? It's not just, hey s just one do a meeting, you know? No no, it's related the things you agree to do. So the more things you agreed to do, the more of your time is devoted to the administrate of overhead, of the things you need to do, which means you have less time of be able to actually accomplish the things. And to make IT worse, this a mystery of overhead, does not cover less until.

like one nice, big, bad IT to action into, what's the quote from deepwater I must have shed in a million times of you shot, shot is your day to fragments so small that you get nothing meaningful.

One, yeah. shares. I like scheduled. The fragment is so small, like insufficient for concentration, nothing is done.

Yes, yes, think about that all the time.

Well, but think what happens now that this is why I think people are so burn double, because really is arranging. Think about this. So you say yes to too many things.

Now your schedule is like completely for not doing the things but jumping on calls and answering people's emails about the things right ah. Now you don't have time to really get them done. So what happens? You fall behind. So new things come in. So now the things you have to do get longer and you fall even farther behind and then eventually you get to a place where most of your time is now taken up, uh, just dealing with talking about work and nothing gets done.

You feel like you're making no progress to start getting up at for or working in the evenings, you know and now you're completely frustrated because you said i'm on zoom all day long now i'm working instead of being at my kid's baseball game like what was the point of the day and this is what's making knowledge work is cry uncle. So when I say do fewer things that wants not at all about accomplishing fewer things, because if you can save most of your schedule from all this administration of overhead, what happens? Starched, executed.

So now the rate at which you're finishing things and finishing them at really high quality levels, that skyrockets, right? So doing fewer things at once will make you actually accomplish many more things. It's not the only reason to do IT.

The main reason to do IT is because it's entirely dragon to have your whole schedule be taken up by misery of overhead. I mean, just makes life bearable not to be overloaded, but you have this bonus, you also can start producing, right? So if you can just boot strap, have a lot of ideas how to do this, but if you can just boot strap in the doing fewer things, get over that initial fear. You're gona pretty quickly earn your ability to keep doing fewer things because you're gonna out shipping everyone .

else in your organization. Yeah the zoom apocalypse that everybody went through when the overhead of having meetings and this, I guess, pain for management of coordination, you know if you can see what someone's doing when they are in the house, because they are no longer in the office. God, I mean, that s anxiety inducing isn't IT.

So why don't we start looking at slack dashboards and activity time and then know a response to this? You know, the anti productivity movement was that law was in france that brought IT in where boss can't message the work is after five P. M. I think they tried.

Yes, interesting. Yeah, but topic for the podcast.

Well, that is interesting.

But in france of labor and that represent knowledge workers in a way that we don't in the us. But the problem with that, I wrote about this sum at the time, is, you know, again, it's like putting, uh, the little bit of a bandage on the wound.

We got to stopped the things that are creating the big won like in other words, this is the issue with almost any response that is just focusing on um this is reduced the time you can work because have a four day work week and have a five day work week extra. The problem these ideas is, if you don't also fix the overload problem, you're not getting to the core issue, right? The core issue is I have too many things on my plate at the same time.

yeah. So this is why people went insane during the pandemic and anti productivity took off because that overhead got out of control, because a everyone got like twenty percent new task saw at once when they shifted remote, right? And then be the corporation took twenty five percent longer, because things we could have just done in the hallway get a zoom meeting, but I can't drag a zoom meeting. I don't zoom.

There is no two .

minute zoom meeting age. Did you got that thing sort? It's going to be a half hour because I can't drag IT smaller.

So we had the footprint of overheads, got worse the cover, he got worse inflation, and we got zoom pocalypse where and this is my readers, we're writing me and saying, my main problem right now, and you may twenty twenty, is a window. I go to the bathroom because I have eight hours of zoom without any gap anywhere in IT. And then at this point is just absurdities, right, like that third play or something.

What's that? I did the red queen effect.

Yeah running faster and faster to stay .

in the same place. correct? This is the podcast. And it's been interesting, I guess, that you've been in the art you've been involved is on the guest side in an art seeing IT from episode two hundred ds year in one of the first ones and then will be like three hundred than six hundreds.

And now and Operationally, it's so complex behind the scenes, you know, to coordinate something of this size. And increasingly, I find myself doing more and more of being an Operator is supposed to being a creator or a visionary or a research or or just a ola. It's all coordination all the time. So much coordination and you don't like it's the thing from Michael gobs, the e mh.

Revisited, that lady that starts a Bakery and then soon enough, you can't remember what it's like to bake a cake yeah all that she's doing is unzip meetings, organizing factories to stop where's the week coming from? And if we what's the machine that we're gonna have to grow the flower and stuff like that. So yeah, i'm very much living a um and and I can remember when the Operation was simply because the business was simpler and because the the actual production itself as simple.

And i'm observing even within my own life, this trajectory go from simplicity, purity to much more success than and and very, very grateful. And it's amazing to do all of this stuff. But there are all of these side effects that come along with IT that build that build things out.

And there are a million opportunities as a million things to say yes to. There's million things to say no to that you would have begged to have the opportunity to say yes to only two years ago. Yeah so you're permanently we adJusting the sensitivity on what constitutes to hell yeah yeah.

Like that's the one thing that I would serve as hell are no rule, which is fantastic. The problem is that you, eg, yes, yeah. What you would have begged for yesterday is something you now need to learn to say no to today. Yeah.

yeah. I mean, I think the guy has all figured out we all to, just not our heads to fairs. I was on a shown feber and you know, he just like head set like that had said I was what's going on with this day me and he's like, if I if I do video, well, if I built a studio, then I have to stay where the studio is, then I have to have people run the studio and um I wanted travel and I have this headset. The only this thing, this is a pretty good microphone. I could just be anywhere where in the world, so maybe fairs for the whole game.

And is the guy that did IT, uh.

but there is there a deeper thing in there though, right? Which is like, that is sensual tension when with slow productivity, when things start going well, like this is partially why I wrote this book, is because things are going well for me, right? You know, like this is not a book that would have been relevant to me as a twenty three year old that MIT you doing, you know, the recall, computer science.

But now it's like things are hitting well, like I can my my books get read and i'm a tenured professor and there's opportunities and know of a podcast. Other things are going on now. And IT is that same fear? okay. So how do I keep in Christal, zed, the principles of just slowly producing stuff that matters even with different stuff going on and it's let actually need to be pretty be careful or thoughtful thinking about the different aspects like what I do and what I don't do, like when I started a podcast and pandemic.

I was really worried about the footprint because the footprint can get big, which is fine for you know um like to hear one show like this but this was something I was doing in addition to be in a professor addition, the writing so I made a rule said half day a week, that's what you get, pot casket half day week. And I want to grow or add something or whatever I want to do. I got to figure out a way to do that such that the podcast doesn't leave a half day a week.

So I got to have to hire. Yeah, it's what happened. So IT developed slowly, eventually higher.

The producer to touch the computer for me, because that saves a lot of time, right? Okay, I have to touching any computers. And we have on the master OK.

So he talks to all of them. So now I can just show up and do the show. Now I have more time to think about, you know, what am I going to say or what are we going to do? We want the video.

How are you going to make this fit within a half a day a week? Well, I took a long time. We have to find the right person to set something up. IT was super turn key, like we have the studio set up for, like it's all just installed and my producer can just to turn on these lights that in these cameras are always in the same place yeah with these big sea stands that I never move, that the cameras are locked locked into everything like that. So okay, great isn't everything has been very uh, slowly.

But IT also means though, which is impacts like if I want to have a lot of guest prouty win going to work with a half a week rule because Young guess can do IT when they can do IT and it's not going to fit. And so i'm not doing that right, like it's so it's made some had some impact yeah what are you can I can do but IT allows me but IT slow IT is growing and slow perfectibility so that the show is growing. And like actually this does pretty well generates more money than like my professor said, if this is interest like a starting to get interesting, it's probably going slower than maybe I could, but it's a slow productivity play. You know, this is important, but I want to take my time with this and not let IT meta tii ze.

I think James clear put in a news latter recently, over the short term or results determined by your intensity, and over the long term, your results to determine by your consistency and IT is a trade off. Now there is a trade off between the two, the harder work, the quickly burn out, and there is a thresh hold above which, you know, that's not to say that's a Linda relationship. You know if you're doing the bare minimum, doing double the bare minimum is probably not going to make damage difference to your consistency over a long period of time. But if you're running at seventh gear at seven thousand R P M, trying to shift that to a little bit faster is something that's really going to hurt.

Look at famous novels st like they figure this out, right? novels. St, you have very long careers. They figured out no more than if you're a genre, one book a year and if you're literary, like one book every two or three years, maybe even every four years, do very little outside of the riding like a whole industry understands this like we don't need to hear from john graham until like he has A A book coming out.

But IT allows them to produce large literature over their lifetime, right? So like we could all take a lessons from that. You don't see jang guion being like, I really get after I could probably get three books done.

You I could do the whole James patterson thing like I got three books year that I could get a team, write other books. We could this, I, dr. And land and going to work. Now it's like I, if I do all that, i'm in last five years.

Have you seen Brandon sAnderson's output? Yes, yes. I mean, so this I think it's in the r flash fantasy sub date. And if you have a look at that, the number of words that that guy writes per a is terrifying.

But I worry about him me too, because he's add in other things he started adding he's he's building out more of .

a company much, well, well and yes.

exactly merch and fulfilling their own their their own printer. Now they do show in his books, they print themselves as opposed to going through like a standard publisher. And he has a big team now and like his whole thing, like everyone, his famous and writing circles for exactly this, like he just sits and rights and he generates like a lot of words like that.

I think it's maybe three hundred thousand words.

Yeah, yeah, it's crazy, crazy. I mean, you saw his video, his whole surprise video thing in the pending. Like, I have a surprise for you. I wrote five extra books and i'm .

gonna selling directly.

Yes, the thing he did, what I do admire because it's crazy, but I love IT. It's a deport thing. So he lives in like a Normal cold sac in utah, right?

So it's just like a cold dsc houses. Um he bought a lot next to his was empty, right? What he did was instead of building like a cool workspace there, he ducked down and built an underground layer, right?

So he built a whole Victorian gothic c underground layer where there's, you know, old fish talks with weird things, and he writes in there, there's a full screening room, movie theater in there, the podcast in there, whole things decorated like a tiburtine movie, built a underground right, twenty ten foot ceilings that they dug, I, I, photos of all this, they covered to back over. And then they put like a garage on top of IT. And he has a secret interest, tute from his house.

So he goes under. The suburban house is like secret entrance in his age. And IT takes him into this like massive underground layer is awesome. It's a preposterous. But hey, what if you're writing fantasy novel though at his level like .

what that's one of your lessons, which is that the space you in habit when you're trying to do your productivity can influence the way that you feel yes.

And productivity idea, right, is that like, okay, the environment matters because you're trying to produce the best possible stuff and not just trying to be as busy as possible. Yeah, so environment matter. So sAnderson built that whole underground layer because IT inspires him to write you fantastic y well, in much in the same way the dan Brown who wrote the deventer code has a similar kind of corky house.

He built a new hampshire would like secret passage, ways and code. He pulled down the statue head because he, right, sort of conspiratorial john, a thrillers. So like, why not put ourselves into that that mindset? Other people did other things.

So like one example, a copa france for copa, he brings where of his production offices are old tonic edits, because he likes this connection to building. I am building something that you know, i'm bringing together part and he used to soda and do all the stuff as a kids. He like brings them wherever he's going.

But it's not just uh, the positive, which is ha stuff in your space is inspiring ing. It's also get away from the stuff is distracting, right? And this is the problem, for example, of just working out of your home office.

This is right there in your home. Next, everything else is that you're exposed to all of these highly silent distractions that have nothing to do with what you're doing. But when you see them, we're gonna glow.

All these neural networks are gonna start to be activated. Ah there's a laundry basket. I got the under when the laundry and what going.

This is very difficult. So I also tell these stories of people. These are mainly writers to who go through like great length to get away from the distractions.

And my favor was Peter banchi. He wrote jaws because he lived right down the street from where I grew up when he was riding jaws. So I know his house. I could see IT for minds, a beautiful house. And when he wrote jaws, he didn't write IT in that house, but in a back room at a furness repair shop that was on the other side of town.

And with the fact tokers, the new yorker talked to windy benching about this Peter stead, they talked to windy and he was, I O, yeah they were like hammering in their man. I was like loud metal hammer. That's where he went to right jaws because he he's trying to get away from the distractions like the distraction of loud hammering, whatever.

That's not something that he has a lot of associations with he can associate, right? That's no big deal. But the laundry basket, you know that now you're gone for the next twenty .

minutes thinking about IT. Did you ever hear the story about Victor hugo being locked in the room by his own servant? No, so this this is um a guy he wanted to write six pages per day writer and he paid his servant every single night to come in during the middle the night, pull the bed sets off him, just slide the bed heat off him.

And then there was a quill and the naked part in six as of paper. Yeah, they were left on the table next to him. And then he would lock the bedroom door from the outside, and he wouldn't unlock the door until victimize. A slid six piece of paper, double sided, written under the door.

I like that that people.

by the way, extremity, the right ers, have had to go through in order to be able to overcome the writing hump.

My Angela would do this. SHE would go to, typically like cheaper hotels. Take all the artworks, the wall he wanted to be White box, and he would write on the bed so he would just like, prop up on one ARM with a legal pad.

And like that, nothing to do. You're in a completely distraction. Stand back at this beautiful property outside harbor.

He would get his robot and go out into the middle of harbor and right on a little hand desk, David mca lived in mark is vinyard beautiful house with his barry. He wrote in basically the garden should. So he had a great home office.

Like where he would do is like corresponds whatever he went his books on a typewriter in the garden shed that was pretty absorbs in the back art and like a shed. But yeah, they would do anything to kind IT. Let's get away from distractions.

Let's like locker self. Some place where it's it's hard to leave. There's nothing here that's distracting.

Let's get some more. I don't have the keys.

I don't have that. Yeah, mark twin, when he hear this off building that he would go and out building, he would work out. And so his wife had this like horn SHE would blow to try to get his attention.

It's time they come back for this because he was so far away, right? He was like, the heart, wow, I have an off. You know, I have in my house have a very nice library, but I also rent office space like a three minute walk away. IT seems like a different place to go to podcast studios there also, it's a place to go, right?

What is a more accessible solution for someone who doesn't want to dig twenty feet to meet the house in you .

to everyone more? And I pro .

underground ized, this is the revolution that we really need.

podcast.

Yers, I aw, that cool?

yeah. Like small office, you go down the stairs.

you could pull the statue of the tiny oil and open.

It's just killer on the ground. Yeah, yeah. You can also like a murder. E or guest down there is the problem with IT.

Imagine if IT was a podcast run by serial killer, and each guess that .

was just the last .

day on the planet.

IT would be briefly make murder .

need to read. Yeah.

you got any way you got, yes. Okay, we'll say you're not you're not going to build IT on the ground law, right? I'm a big fan. For example, what I call work from your home, which is only to build an underground layer, but also if you don't work in an office, find a space to work in.

Its not your house like that is a worthy investment and that might just mean leasing is like low cost office space nearby that might be worth IT, right? And don't think of that as an expense. Think of IT as you are going to be able to be your mental health comments.

We are going to able to produce much more, or taking an out building in your backyard and make IT in the something that you can work in. I mean, I think this idea of going out of your way to find places to work, this, not just your home, is the right idea. Don't think about IT in terms of, at my home is free, and this is not free.

Now think about more. Is my home is this terrible place to work that I really wish I didn't have to work there? Oh, this is, I only have to pay this much to avoid that.

H that's great. You know you're paying to solve a problem and then be careful about uh, your environment. But the ritual s can be not just uh, but can also be functional, right? So so IT IT might not just be, here's what's in my space to inspire me.

IT can be, here's what I do as a ritual before I work to inspire me. So I could be, I walk the same row, like to this coffee shop. I get this coffee as I walk with that coffee back.

That's when i'm beginning to frame up on about the work on. And then when I sit down up to those sessions, it's like hard work time and that's how I mentally separate from email time. And you like I do this, for example, there is a particular walk i'll do about fifteen minutes transition walk.

okay? I am. I'm switching. I often switch locations, but also I want to switch my mindset into i'm ready now. Not answering emails or doing something like .

this is the reason why training at home during the pandemic was so difficult. But there is something ritual, alisa, about you get in the car and and you drive to the gym and you say hello to are you playing your music, you say hello to the reception, is you back? There's something about that, right? Okay, this is gym time. And in some ways, there's a bit of a costly signaling thing going on, which is driven all the way to the gym. I'm not not gonna now yeah every fifteen minutes to get to the gym, whether if you go, I walked into the garage like a thing yeah so um what about going back to to do few of things thing for the unite people? Pleased es among us, us yeah how can we get Better at learning to say no to things both philosophically, emotionally and then tactically as well?

Yeah transparency about your workload, right? I think this is the the number one issue that, when solved, makes workload management Better is getting transparent with other people. This is what's on my plate.

Instead of keeping at this office stated thing, no one knows what anyone else is doing, and we just sort of throw tasks at each other. And like sometimes they come back and sometimes they are accept IT. And we just imagine why that is be more transparent.

So many of the tactics in the book are all under that category for underdoing. Fewer things that are all into this category of making your work more transparent. So here's a really direct way of doing that.

For example, this is like sort of on the nose, but people are actually doing this. And now, now I say, like, this is not a thought experiment, but really do this. Imagine, have a shared document at the top. IT says, okay, here's what i'm actively working on right now and you should have like three things into there. Like i'm working on these three things below IT like big dividing line.

I here's the order q of things that like are lined up for me to work on next and in the order in which they are going to like a pop into here as I finish things right now, imagine someone's like a crist. Can you do whatever now? So just feel like no or yes you can be like, yeah, just go add IT to the q right? This I keep track out, very careful about my work.

Add IT over there after any information I need to know to do IT, you know, either put that in there or put a note there that I should like call you want to get closer. And now they have to confront the reality of your workload, right? Which means either they're going to say are never mind, like I kind of you get this done, you have like fifteen things waiting to happen and you know I would take too long or their expectations are reasonable.

Like, okay, uh, I see you're not starting to work on this tomorrow and I can start bother you. In fact, I can keep checking in on this document and seeing this thing Martine's way up to win its active. So i'm going to generate no overhead tax until are working on IT.

Yeah course I can understanding meetings or emails until it's one of your three things you're working on. So you either get much more realistic calibration of like wind and you're going to get work back. You like I don't bother about IT now if there are boss is, say, no, no, I need to get this done now now you can put back to them, great. Tell me which one to move and I let them know that you said that, like. And so now there's people have to actually be involved.

What about the emotion that you feel of this sort of default? Yes, no, you don't want to appear lazy. Is almost this sort of self flag lation that I certainly have with my productivity where I like, I should be able to take on more.

I shouldn't be as inefficient or whatever Melody I think I have that's causing me to not get a million things down in a day. And I need to get half a million things done in a day. What about dealing with that? You know, guilt, almost like productivity guilt.

yeah. So never give a yes or no in the room helps with that, right? So once you have some sort of system now, you're kind of tracking and what am I working on now? What am I waiting to work on? How do you want to do that? Your answer can always be a, yeah, that sounds great.

That sounds really important, like that sounds like the type of thing I could really do next time I get a chance, let me just go. You know, i'm very careful about i've always like work management systems. I track my time very careful. Let me just run IT through that and see like what i'm dealing with and then i'll go back to and so you're not going to yes or no in the room.

And now the next day, you're like later that day, you can actually go through and look at and come back and and either you say this is important and figure out when you're going to work on IT and give a good estimate or be like, I know you know what I took a look and um really I don't have a lot. I'm looking at my time. I track my time very carefully.

Be like a couple months before I had enough cycle. So this is not going to work. I'm not made to fit.

This is now yeah that specifically the the wordings ge yeah of delivering this to people. Have you found any Better or worse ways to actually communicate? This is a thing that I don't think I can get done. Yeah well.

there's two things here. The first is just you have to be super clear with the know when you give IT. So when you give the no IT has to be, you know hammer into the tablets, the moses is holding clear, right? Like I can do this and then you can put whatever. Then you soft in the softening should be around the very clear. Now when you actually give IT, do not leave any wildlife room for, like maybe I can do.

I can do this right now.

right now because you know, their whole goal in life is to get this thing, taking care of this on their list. So you give them there's they're not going to a lot of people just hope that the other person who gave them the task in the first place is going to do the no for them.

I will take that.

Yeah yeah, you're right. Or i'm looking at your school. Yeah this you do sound busy.

No, don't bother. I'll take IT on the like. great. So when you are available in a half weeks, great uh expect two and a half weeks that might be color I can do this um and then you can be nice around IT but don't let the nicless make the no but the the thing I mentioned before that the second piece that could be useful signal that you're very careful about your time this earns you a huge amount of lives, right? Because a lot of no resistance, right resistance that someone saying no comes from the fact where I don't really trust that you have your act together um I just I .

don't ark this overwhelm .

or is this lazy you lazy is so you you know just your entitled that gets all these might do your work but if you have the reputation of like you like a calm new erd, right like you, you have your stuff together so if you're signaling that, yeah, let me let me just run this through my system because I actually track like everything I work on and I find the time and advancing and work on.

Let me run into the system and let you know, like when we can fit this in and then you come back and say, I can't fit in now they're dealing with Chris has his act together on this. So he's probably not lying. He probably doesn't have enough time for this and is also the Christian has is act together and it's the technical nose like the no based on on a very technical system can actually raise you a steam in the eyes of the people who you're saying no to like this guy.

Okay, no. Second, maybe we this is someone we should keep their eyes on like they really seem to have their act together. So having some sort of system were on managing my own workload.

Here's what i'm working on. Here's what's active. Here's what's not active. That division is critical. You cannot treat everything on your plate is all active IT wants IT has to be this is active. This i'm waiting on like that's how you get rid of that overhead tax problem and then you need to communicate other people. I'm really careful about this.

So to recap the nose for people blazes be transparent about your time yeah to help people buy in and understand what's going on yeah say no yes when you mean no and related IT back to your time management and availability in the fact that you're careful with your usage of time yes and they .

make us all easier don't yes or no in the room. So in the moment where all of the social pressure is on, you have your set answer, which is not yes or no, but is a sounds great. Let me next time I get a chance to run this through my system and see, like when I might be able to get this done.

is that to give you a little bit of emotional buffer .

so that you're not as, yes, I like Chris, you do this. You don't, you can, you do not want to say no there. Yes, I can see in an email for hours later, you got the current very good.

I think I heard a story is the Daniel conomo maybe it's either Daniel conomo or warrant buffett that say something longer lines. If I never say yes, I know on the phone yeah.

i've heard this before, some kind of stealing this. I don't know who I was, but I heard this before.

Yes, I just there is a particular I I don't know. I am seeing people pleasing everywhere at the moment and i'm very hesitant about, like my shiny news psychological pattern toy being used to be like this is great tweet I saw the other day that said, i've just learned about the availability bias. And I have to say out of all of them, I think it's my favorite .

one yeah .

i'm very hesitant about about like patent matching this to everything. But I I can't imagine the mindset of a person who doesn't feel that compulsion doesn't feel that sort of desired while I I waiting the phone, the person and and yet IT seems to be giving yourself a little bit of psychological distance. You know that mindfulness gap is curry Allen calls IT yeah to just go.

Okay, let asset in the cold, harsh light of day. Can I do this? Yes, probably not.

And I don't think, you know, when I think about this stuff that I say yes to additional calls, many of which I said in the ub, the way here, yes to i'm looking at my day. I like that's nice and free. So good if we got a kind time for monday looks great.

Giving yourself as much psychological distance as possible just helps you to look like I probably can't do this. I don't really even need to look at my schedule because if it's something that optional and IT doesn't find me up and it's not Mandatory, can IT? No, it's obviously I know yeah but you .

the is well.

it's obviously a no press .

speak to be on the .

call later day.

but that doesn't goes along with that would also be temp lazed in quote. So it's another way. So how do you deal with things where you're going say yes to sum, but you can say yes to everything so you could quote, IT, right? yeah.

I love to take calls with like whatever new people or whatever. But I only do three a month. So I already hit my three this month. I can do IT this month.

Like quotas are a way to keep you doing things or IT doesn't you don't want I noted to every single time, but if you say yes every single time, you get overwhelmed and ten plates would probably be great for you. So i've been messing around with these two. For certain types of really common things, you have to have a whole completed process in place so that IT doesn't have to just be the interaction.

So like if you if you write adam grant to blur a book, he's got this great. So you want me to book a book document and like IT walks through like so IT here's how IT works like a camplin er most box but you should send that to me and and here's how many I get and so in the end I blur R A few and so if you don't hear from me and that means IT wasn't and he is the whole thing out. So now, because I get this request a lot as a rider, now when someone is like OK, can you blurr my book? And it's often like someone you can know now you can just send in the thing you've templated IT, right?

So even have we've started using this on the website for a few things um like dark links on your website, you secret you are roles a cow, you put your com slash testimonial or whatever and you just said you are have a little luck. I think this a type of legitimacy you are really gives IT as well that is quite and he's got to here for this means that he must happen.

Know for a yeah I can't you for dog comes like blue request or something. Now it's like, really, do you have this issue with like unsolicited guest? Is this like more people can understand in this world, you know that the host in their team is is pulling in guest or you get a lot so .

I get an awful lot of requests to come on the show. One of the problems and this is ah I guess the unique chAllenge of going from total cottage industry solo influencer to niche microwave to whatever version of of platform are right now. Like hypership slightly larger fame I built up along though you have my email and like fucking David Allen has my email and and band holiday has my email. Mark .

manson has perona .

years, did my phone number. I am maybe shouldn't say this, but I don't care. My phone number was on every flying for a club night that we ran for years, years and years. I haven't been.

You don't start something off most of the time with these systems and processes of, and one day this is going to reach half a billion people a year and like going to be all of these. We actually you just do the thing just in sort of scrappy can do exactly which is cool. And I like the fact that we did that, but yeah, I am reaping the world wind of this Frankenstein's monster that we built for up until a year ago.

We got our first like additional member of staff one year ago. One one year ago was me and video guy dean still the same thing. And then we got another guy and he was like, what's your systems for, like communicating and stuff? And we have a facebook messenger chat.

So what do you mean as I go to me? yeah. And dean and a facebook .

messenger chat.

we just go back and forth and we do. And because you can reply and facebook maintains the quality of media, he said, that's insane to do that. That an absolutely the insane as I get.

But we've released six hundred podcasts and a thousand clips through a facebook messenger chat. And then we can move to server to slack and you get promise like but slight problem. But that moves revolutionary for us because it's segmented things into different channels and we could find things much more easily.

And it's got a record is a history of everything we've ever spoken about organized by topic. But um yeah it's it's a really interesting time. I'm really thinking and awful lot about the Operations of the show exit fan myself becoming increasingly distracted by being an Operated, not being created, not spending time reading, not doing that stuff because it's .

just this huge he must be the stage right now is that transition becomes you become the head of a organization. I am not just like someone who's doing a podcast people are talking to no.

yeah, it's it's, it's very quickly become i'm now C O O chief brand, the the leader host, header researcher, guest curator, all of these things. And yeah, we've got right now, we've got an exact after I finish, we ve got to our meeting with an an executive consult who had literally just needed to be like, I need a navy seal kind of guy to come in and kick the door down and just say, right, this isn't a problem for you.

This is something i'm going to take off your plate. I'm gonna real. G everything. Because if you look at the org structure of modern wisdom, it's a fifteen legged octopus with one head because .

and you hire .

people to do, yes, I picked me everything together and then didn't vertically pull anything now. And especially because it's also recent, it's also recent and so new.

So solving problems with you come and .

solve this problems, but the problem is still always on me. So yeah, we are not to get into the weeds too much, I suppose, about internal marginals of what's going on with the show. And also, there's a part of me that's like hesitant about being too open about this on the internet because in party feels like a humble break, which IT isn't if you saw the mess and like the nightmare that I have to wake up with an email, it's not a flex.

But the other thing being that the whole point of the podcast is for me is for me to just express my curiosity and to speak to people that i'm interested in about, stuff i'm interested in and all of this sort of complexity feels a little contrived and cynical and it's like, hey, and this is just supposed to be you chatting with people you're interested. Why does there need to be fifteen people behind you? It's like, well, because as the number of incoming emails and sponsors and all of this other stuff needs to happen and the reason has to happen because the show gets to a size where I can't take IT on anymore.

Yeah but yeah, in inbound email, a lot of that I have found, get research, keeping on top. Your last book was a world without email, which I dream of. Uh, it's a very .

interesting .

chAllenge. I'm really hoping i'm gonna look back at sort of this period. As, uh, Operationally, organisationally, psychologically, emotionally, a very formative learning experience so I had to let go of the kind of boy Operator I was before and grow up to be a real kind of.

yeah, isn't this fun that you can kind of do this for a living like i'm just chatting with people and it's and at some point IT changes till there's a media company you put on A T V show. T V shows have steps.

yes. yeah. And they and they need to. So obsessing of equality. We were talking about this before. It's something that I ve really lead into as much as I can with the show, you know, this hyper fixation that we've had on the quality of the AV stuff yeah, the way that we shoot, the way that I try to construct a the the guest lineup as well. To give this really sort of lovely museum art gallery .

curator make .

different. I had, I had a democratic presidential candidate on a couple of weeks ago, is the founder of belva of auto talented galette. And he's of a cool dude.

Yes, I am like, i'm interested in this guy so i'm going to speak to a democratic presidential candidate yeah, just because it's interesting, I think, well, that's all. I look back on this such websites, I think that's great. And the doctor, Robert glover, no one is a nice gather.

So this subsection sion of equality is important, but I think a lot of people when when that gets ripped out of them, the fear of a doing fewer things is, well, business. This is a reliable route toward success. And the obsession of equality plays into their fear of perfectionism paralysis.

yeah. So I mean, I think they have a backwards business is never around to success like some successful people are busiest than they probably should be. But the real less success is producing stuff is valuable and and calls don't produce things that are valuable and emails don't produce things that are valuable.

And jumping back in four check, they don't produce things that are valuable. That requires doing something really, really well. And IT turns out the world like incredibly competitive. So it's tenens harder.

Then you imagine when you get started, right, that you have to produce stuff that is at a very high level if you want to begin gaining autonomy over your life and career and impact in this that so I think people get their backwards, so then say, yeah, but i'm afraid so you business I think it's it's reliable and that you'll succeed at IT. I think what's appealing with business is it's a goal that you will succeed at. I want to be busy.

You will succeed that, that is not a hard goal to succeed that it's it's not easy because you have to be busy, but you know you can succeed at IT. Just keep take calls, do this, do whatever you need to do. Uh, people worry much more about now I want to produce something that is unambiguously really good.

And if that means could be bad, right? Like there's there's fear there. So there then people fear about perfection ism.

And essentially, like my short answer to that, like that, that's the whole chAllenge. This is like the whole chAllenge of doing stuff that matters. I gotto make this good. I'm going to have to battle perfectionism. Like that is the drag. And i'm saying shorts, like, that's just part of this chAllenge is like saying to relief pitcher in baseball, um you're gonna nervous like relief pitcher in baseball, they come out in these like super important moments of the game and IT all rides on like this one person so in the ball and i've heard them talk about this before, they say, oh, the hope part of this job is how do you do stuff when physiologically you feel incredibly anxious, right?

Like like it's absurd that your goal would be, I don't want to be anxious like, no, you're gonna to deal with the anxiety, right? You know other type of performers do you have this as well? Anxiety is a big part of what you do.

What you do is high stakes. You're hosting the Oscars, okay? That's you're going to be anxious because it's very high stakes. Um you ideal with that. This is the same thing that can produce things that are really good.

You're you're going to struggle perfectionism and we have ideas how to get passed IT and there's best practices here, but that's IT. That's a chAllenge. You're trying to get Better.

You you want to do as good as you can without waiting too long and holding onto IT. You're gona walk this tight rope and you might fall to decide sometimes yeah, that's IT. That's the whole game, right?

You can be nervous when you pitch. That's the whole game. So I tell people, business is not going to make you, uh, not going to make you successful.

How do people deal with perfectionism?

So, you know, there a couple of things to do, but the example I gave in the book was the beetles, right? Because when the beetles decided to stop tour in is like a big deal. I had a terrible tour late sixties, and everything went wrong.

And he was declare, like on their way to the very last stop, which was a canal stick park. And sam cisco, like this, is that we hate tour. We don't want to do this anymore. So they went to the studio after this for the first time.

They did not have to produce an album that they could replicate on stage that just opened up like every possible option, right? This kind of indoors box, like when you when your recording music has had been done up until that point that you were gonna go play on stage, you only had so many options, we'll have a guitar in the basis and we are only so many cards we can do and yes, so didn't happen so was completely open ended, right? Ah and so there is this fear and they're like we're going to make this Better.

We can spend way more time and we've ever spent on now before we want to be great, but we also want to get IT out. So one of things they did and actually we could probably give credit to, uh, their manager and not them but one of things he did as as soon as they had a single that was releasable, he released IT. So we put stake in the ground. Oh, there's there's a single out oh, were expecting an .

album now kind of a .

clock three years, right? So they spend much more time on this alone they ever had before, but they didn't spend incredible amount of time on of the album. Argee peppers and IT stayed longer at number one than anything we've ever done before.

Like that's the tight rope you're working on. So what they did there is something that other people can do. You put stake in the ground is what lima, Mandy, seven years working on the play in the high.

Like, oh, that seems like professional m land. But what they did was he was working with these two allum night of swaths r that had theatrical company in manhattan. They would schedule are right.

Three months from now, we're going to bring an actors to read the latest version of the script. So like you had a do something like I had to be Better, that people were going to come and read this. The people who are kind of invested, you want to see this is Better.

So you had to do something to make a Better. But I also wasn't. Oh god, I could do this tonight.

So they kept scheduling. Well, here's the next thing we're going to do. Here's the next thing.

He had time to think about IT, time to marinate and mature creatively. But he always had a stake in the ground. This was pulling them forward.

So it's like you want to make the thing you're doing a as well as you can, as good as you can, but also put time pressure on yourself and put some constraints OK. I want this to be good. I really want this to be good. But I also got to ship IT. And if that's the best possible thing, the next one will .

be Better justified to the busy addict. Why they should obsessive equality.

Well, if you can give you two things. I mean, so if you care about slow productivity, um it's going to make slowing est suddenly be natural. People who obsess over quality grow anti bodies to business is they begin like the complaints you you were having about the administration of overhead of your show is because you're obsessive quality.

What you're doing it's in the contrast of that, that the the business becomes frustrated if you didn't care about the quality. What you are doing like it's a job. It's fine.

I do these things all day, right? So that makes sonerell comes more natural. Want to care about quality. Then as you actually do Better, because you have set about quality, you gain more control, more autonomy, more leverage to enforce more sloan. As you can start taking stuff off your plate, you can afford to hire people to do things.

Or like fairies case, because his show, so the og show that so like powerful, he can just say, I can just wear a headset and record from where we aim in the world and you know it's just me in my right and man and whatever right. So then you gain more leverage to to keep the stuff occupant. So it's really the glue that makes sloan as possible.

And if you don't care about sonus, then I think the right argument is nothing great didn't require an obsession over doing quality. Greatness is not accidental. No one accidentally produced surgeon peppers or breaks a record in a sport, right? That is an obsession with, I want to do this Better, meticulous to cus.

Uh, getting the evidence is another big thing finding the evidence of what actually matters. So another part of growing up in terms of, like, professional lives is realizing at some point, here's this thing I want to do. Well, I can't just write a fairy tale about what I want to matter, right? It's a lot of people do this. I won't be a novel list. The fair tale I want to be true is that if I do national novel eighty month and I write every single morning for one hour at the end of IT, i'll be, you know, john grissom right now you have to actually go get the evidence.

How does this field I work, actually function? What matters? How are things judged? How do people get good at this? What distinguishes the top performers from, uh, the law performers? Because you almost always found on the mountain of success in a field, there's all of these paths and almost one of them go up and is like a very narrow path and is a hard one that traverse because it's steep, just like one path that goes up.

And if you're not having that really well blazed for you and know exactly what i'm doing, I know exactly how i'm training or what I need to do to try to sell this booker, whatever. If if, if you don't know exactly the path you are trying to go, you just wander around. The base and the you kind of just eventually burn out off of this could do some more email.

It's interesting to think about the people who do find success that haven't had that quite meticulous plan in advance, have basically closed the eyes and throwing a dart, then opened on a gun. Oh, go ahead, the boss. wow.

amazing. We don't leave your successful or to a fluke. Yeah.

because it's not going to happen. I mean, that might happen, but also might buy some lottery tickets kind of playing with similar art. This is like the youtube influence or effect know like everyone, my kid's age, elementary age kids, they all want to be youtube influencers. They grow up because .

there I don't do with kids.

And I look, I told my son as like I wanna give a talk at your school about the economics of youtube and what's actually involved in this works. And not difficult.

but occasionally .

people just blow up. Now the problem is, like with youtube influences, the people who sort of just accidentally blew w up into, like this huge audience says the main thing they had in common was they're very early IT was, you know, I just wandered into this. But IT IT gives this fair tale of its possible that you could just because I could, I have a camera, and this person who blew up was just talking so, you know, I could just talk into this camera.

I think, out of the obscurity. Well.

now this is the insiduous thing about tiktok, is they are actually explicit playing with that effect, because tiktok can control exactly how many people see whatever you, they can show your video to exactly how many people they want to show IT to, right? So they figure this out, oh, here's what you do when someone is new to tiktok, pretty really on yeah, hook your hook.

You're like, oh my god.

I am so close. I think people really like me, like I have something going on here and i'm going to be famous and keep growing on here. Yeah, it's a brilliant business model.

What does obsessing over quality look like practically? What are the rest of the state gies that people should rely on?

You got improve your taste is a big part of IT. So don't just assume you know what quality is. You have actually go out there and learn about the thing you want to do.

What makes IT what's good, what's bad? What makes a good stuff good and the bad stuff bad? That's harder than people think.

We often take IT for granted, right? So like this was irr glasses, famous youtube interview. I don't know when he did this thing, but I decided IT back.

And so good they can ignore you. Which was two thousand twelve. This interview he did about taste that everyone sites.

And in IT, he says, basically empathizing, the whole thing is if your creator is that at first your taste is going to be here and your output is going to be down here, there's this gap and is really frustrating because your stuff is a bad. And so you got to persist. If you persist, you eventually catch up to your taste.

And then that's like when things go really well. But then I found the interview from a couple years ago, ira glass talking to Michael Lewis, and they go back and listen to iron. Glass is very first in P.

R. Peace, which was at the orio factory at later anniversary or something. And in that retrospective, hourglass said, you know, like Michael, when that came out, he said, like, this is really bad.

First of all, this is bad radio. But when that came out, I thought I was the best thing. I was a guy really got this thing cry.

Standard move of a time. yes. So he didn't have this idea that you have this gap you're trying to close. No, the main people have is not. The gap between their taste and performance is that they are taste is so bad they think they are.

So you actually like what make ion glass succeed was um he kept pushing his understanding of what good could be. Yes, you gotto open the gap. So it's it's a little counter intuitive because people want to jump right into what's my deliberate practice plan, right? If I got ten thousand hours, I got a pile a up.

I want to get hours one, three, six done. You know, today, you know, like what's good after IT. But often the first thing to do is not forget your own creations.

Right now, you need to understand what you're trying to do. It's you're the despising filmmaker like maybe need to go to film school not to learn how to shoot. You could learn how to do that, but you need to be at watching a lot of films and be around a lot of other people watching films. You want to be a literary novels, maybe need to go the program not because you need to learn how to write sentences or how a novel works, but you need to be around a lot of other really talent Young writers who are uh writing experimental things and critick everyone's things left and right so that your taste can jump about .

and now when you pursue IT taste definition, you're .

understanding what's good. See you you, anna, Better understand and what's good and what's bad.

It's very autistic to think about things like that. And one of the problems is that taste popularity don't always corporate. Yeah it's. It's possible, especially in modern content creation, to do something which is untasteful but successful. However, i've found IT to be usually quite rare, that if something is done in very good taste and executed well, that IT doesn't end reaching some form .

of success well. And let's even complicate the term right, because because taste also has this um other connotation, the sort of high art connotation. So taste because a taste full, some people think to mean also um quality in a certain sort of artistic s sense.

But we can we can volga ze a term no IT just means, I know what good is in this field. And if we think about that way, for example, mr. Bee has incredible taste. No one would say that his videos are taste for right? And yeah, someone to have very effective.

But he knows exactly and .

he says this all the time in interviews. He's like, no, it's frustrated in to me when people struggle because I could tell you exactly how to make a video like be really successful because he has I think what he does understand as he has this um incredibly home sense of taste for algorithm ally driven youtube video so knows exactly what good is and what good is IT and you see someone else trying to do this from his perspective it's just like this is like a really bad ugly video because his taste is really home do you had that obsessive period of just like studying these things left and right that once a taskwork because it's not like he has some other skill that is the key to the success like he's not like a super like handsome on TV telegenic like I can't take my eyes off of this person type personality.

He's not a comedian and he doesn't have a great timing. He's not he's not a very effective communicator ah doesn't have like some sort of physical skill that's amazing or whatever he doesn't even have. I've been interested in i've been studying the suddenness of youtube of maker youtube play .

mark rovers yeah my is .

great ah yeah and but like in that world there, the whole key is you have to bring an incredible engineering talent to the table. That's how you sort of big time each other is like i'm going to build something even crazy you know this is like the stuff made here channel where you know he's just like i'm gona engineer something that is so crazy ah let me be so how many that but he does have this incredible taste for vue and I can just express that so I can be vulgar. Zed, to IT doesn't have to be a sort of hi, art aren't been that type .

of thing here. What one thing? I think that's a little bit of unclosed loop. One of the problems that people will get caught up with, an awful lot communication, this back and forth, the requirement for communication. What are your solutions from a slow productivity way, strategies for people to slow down the velocity of the communication?

Yeah, what first of all, just doing fewer things already are cut in that down because each thing brings with the communication. yes. So get rid of three things that, uh, three things less generating communication.

which is just ten times because .

you take what's left. I always say this goes back more to to my former book, but I think that applies here is like what you're really trying to avoid them with communication is you're not trying to avoid delays, you not trying to optimize efficiency.

Like what you're trying to avoid is unscheduled messaging that requires a response, right? So something coming in, in a chat or email that I wasn't expecting this, but now it's gonna require response. For me, the more stuff you have is generating unscheduled communication, requires responses more time.

You have to spend monitoring channels. So for the, the stuff that remains on your list have to do fewer things. You need to figure out other ways to collaborate.

Specifically, here's how we collaborate that is gone to generate as few unscheduled messages requiring responses as possible and that we get something like office hours, you know like you could have this in your company, like we have this twice a day, like this hour, that hour um almost everything to require some back and forth and just just deferred to those officers so you can implement these on slack. For example, a lot of people do this in the pandemic slack office hours, office hours channel. And just this channel is monitored during this half hour and this half hour, right? It's real time and go back and forth.

Let's figure this thing out. You can do on the phone. You can do IT in person. You start to get ideas like that or you put processes in place.

okay? Let's not just send unscheduled messages to each other about the video clips until they get done. We have a process in place.

They go to this file there in this folder by the end of day. On this day, this person, you what you're trying to do here not be fast. If you're not trying to be efficient, you are trying to reduce unscheduled things that arrive that require .

a response is IT. Presumably there must be some people whose jobs or roles are uh, on slow productivity antidote that they like the guy, that the enforcer, the Operations person, they will have a job whose their entire role is to basically be the on demand gatekeeper of whatever is happening so just thinking that maybe people who have confused their roles, then maybe people who see themselves as that enforcing, not you do social media manager yeah like you not supposed to be the person that does that thing.

So I might actually require reformulating of what people's expectations are internally yeah. And what you find, as in a lot of businesses, is that if you start to fill a gap, people will begin to lean up against you in that gap. I mean.

so I was just talking the ryan holiday about this because a long time ago, ryan wrote this thing. I guess he was an assistant at some point.

He was this system to Robert Green.

okay? Um and he was around some hollywood stuff for a while too. So he wrote this thing at some point, I I quote all the time and so we brought us up the other day um we said the key to being an assistant like especially in hollywood where you know they started you as an assistant and your whole job is to try to move up from there. If you want to be an agent, you start this assistance and then .

you move up to actually .

he said the issue is um if you're too good at the assistance stuff, you know to get moved up going, we want this.

we want this person super star.

you managed the phones like no one else you anticipate everyone of my needs is like the key is to be competent, right? So they don't want to think you're done, be competent on the phones and scheduling their dry cleaning. But where you really trying to show value is on the stuff that will be useful at the next level, right? And then they are like, okay, this person is like fine as an assistant, but they're showing like we want to move up .

to be in actually a little bit high.

They are pitching ideas. They're really good, like working with the the client like that. They're on that part. They're fine on the phones, but whatever great, we want to move them up.

So what I talked in the rye, mal, the other day is a lot of people who are not in those rules are accidentally making themselves into the in dispensable assistance. They're not at the desk at a hollywood agency. They're an executive somewhere. There are midnight, the middle of the higher archy in some marketing firm or something like this. And they've just accidentally turned themselves into the and dispensable assistant.

We couldn't live without cow. We live without cow.

Every email right away, he's always around. He jump in and they keep puts out the fire. He's always very in communication.

You've made yourself into the assistant when you really want to be the agent. No, you're not able to move up. So don't make yourself into the assistance or the upstate enforcer if that's not .

actually you're all yeah I often think about IT a kind of like a map from above and territory is being taken over by certain people and does that more. And what is one person who just keeps on eating a both of this territory and ever exercise? This is sweet, this is sweet and will lean on cow a little bit and we know.

And then if he thoughts to pull back, you feel H A second that didn't use to be the thing. So I think setting the tone is important. All of a burkman four thousand weeks phenomenal book is coming back on the show.

I so funny, all of her, a man who writes an awful lot about productivity and the pains of IT and being badly IT ages to respond to emails. I thought he was such a very costly signal of I live my philosophy and the chAllenges out myself. Precision ah he's got this great idea in four thousand weeks.

So he says, decide in advance what you're going to suck at basically what is the Price that I need to pay to go through to achieve this particular thing, to go through the process that i'm talking about? What are the Prices that people need to pay to be a slow productivity? St.

right? This is like Richard fine men saying, okay, here's my my secret for being good at doing physics work is i'm really bad at being on committees i'm bad at that um but because of that I am more time you know put on the physics work I sort like that idea yeah you got to figure what so here's here's why I think holds people back is they underestimated value, right?

So there's a mismatch, I think, between how employers see the world and how employers see the world. They they they understand each other differently. So the employers think from the employers point of view, they have all these people, uh, who they can hire to do the job really well.

They're really suspicious about you. They're kind of looking for like, are you showing any cracks that would give me an excuse to get rid of you? What's the reality? Employers are desperate for good people. They're desperate for people who are only professional, reliable and can do something valuable really well. Like that's IT like they're all they care about is how do I find these people right? So you actually have way more rain than you think to be like i'm not super on the ball necessarily about like the the assistance stuff, whatever.

But I do this thing over here really well and reliably and I turned these White papers I write are really good um and i'm getting Better at IT and i'm really on the ball and i'm competent and reliable and professional not not created email and don't like get involved in love other things that is an absolutely fine position to be in because you're good at something valuable in your professional. People will be desperate to hire you. I don't think people realize how hard IT is to hire good people.

And good doesn't mean there's nothing you never do anything, everything you do, you do well, there's nothing. Yeah, it's like you do something really well in your professional. So like people have more they have more levers than they think. If you get good at something, you have more levers than you think to be bad at other things.

Talk to me about from the individual perspective, what. How, how can they themselves, as they go through this process, what should they expect, what the pain points that they are going to encounter from where they are now frantic, urgent, always living in the immediate fix channel. What are the things, the common pitfalls and pains that they are going to pain points are going to encounter?

Yeah lot of soft out, right? Especially early on. You're beginning to obsess over quality, but you haven't really gain traction yet, right? That's difficult, jill.

I ohh my god, trying to do some things really well here he uses as the foundation for sloanes. You have a lot of self dout. Until that picks up. You are going to imagine you can be wrong about this.

But you are going to imagine everyone in your organization is very carefully studying how you reply to emails, how many things you're saying yes to and that they're all are having these conferences behind your back. They're complaining about, oh my god, you see, he told me his list was too folly in earth time. The reality is no one cares.

Everyone's very busy, that is trying to find people to do stuff that they they get off their plate. You said, you gonna do IT. They've already moved on to the next person. They haven't given that any second thought.

So the reality is no one, but in your mind, is a real big pit folies that, like everyone is carefully monitoring there's a bullet in board in the back where it's like they are telling my yes and nose and oh my god, the nose are up twenty percent what's going on um the third pitfall is uh people start talking too much about what they're doing and why they're doing IT don't talk about just do IT because people are gonna really notice until like your standing. Now, this is great. Don't announced the people.

This is my new system. This is why I read. Can I heard calling Chris show? I'm do IT don't tell them why don't like point towards the books, don't have definitely don't have auto responders that explain in .

great detail like I am following a slow productivity strategy.

Please expect a response for me. Just actually just do the things and adjust a lot. You're probably enough to adjust a lot. So this way, you don't want to announce IT because I going to change what you're doing fifteen times anyways and embarrassing.

So just like pull the trigger, start going, be ready for the self doubt and keep reminding yourself they're not having, uh like Chris, email response rates strategy sessions in the backroom like no one cares. No one's paying that much attention. Be professional, do your work, do well, put these things in place, gradually, experiment, adjust. It's like the march torch sonus. No one knows you're making that hike, you know and maybe when you get there like, oh yeah, you really a good situation like you really just do this now and like we don't bother you about that and you seem pretty happy they'll notice when you get there to know you margin on the way.

What are the places people should begin the this sounds great. So productivity, I i'm way too urgent and overwhelmed and I feel like i'm on the virgo burn out or have been burned out before, and I can see myself slowly sort of tracking toward IT. Now what is the initiation implementation way? How do people get started unwinding where they are to get toward life at slow productivity right now?

Overload first? Yeah but that's that's the emergency is that you have too many things you said yes to. So that's where that you should start. You should immediately start doing these ideas about like transparent workloads or quoted in ten plates or you want we didn't mentioned about this proper visioning. So every time someone ask you to do something, you have to go find a time and advancing your calendar, right?

And so that was just promising, yeah, yeah.

And you'll either tell you I don't have time for IT or I do have time for IT and it's going to be in two months or hey, this is urgent. So helpme choose between these two things to take off my calendar. So doing that makes that makes a really big difference as well.

So you start doing those type of things. Um you can also do like a one for me, one for you meeting scheduling strategy, which I like. Every time you put a meat on your calendar, you have to schedule the same amount of time for deep work somewhere within that same week. So like that, you have flexibility when you schedule meetings. But as you get more and more meetings, the available time on your calendar begins to shrink.

And you can exactly control that ratio, do that right away because the problem is, uh, your gasping for airline, the water is like up to your nose, like we got to like get a little bit closer to shore before we start thinking about seasonality and like, okay, now i'm going up this thing i'm going to really well and i'm going to say but even that's to glue like obsess over quality to glue that makes IT all possible is the third principle not the first? Because until you take that overload, um you can't fix the plane you know as is diving towards the ground, right, you've got to get the plane out of IT first so that that's why I think people started and then you're going to feel much Better, just you start taking some over lows like I can away with this. No one noticed you're going to feel much Better.

And then when you feel Better and have some breathing room you like now, what do I really want? I want to much slower worklife. Now it's like IT into the other details.

What's your relationship like with work? Now, you know, you are a guy who, for a decade now, pretty much has been talking about in some former another, this hot back to an aggressive, ety pace of life. Yeah, trying to do not anti technology.

But you made a you were quite well known for not having a facebook account when that came out. No instagram action. You know, if you got the podcast.

you've got books .

and you've got columns, what talk to me about your personal emotional relationship with work and the flow of things? Now all of us strikes me as somebody who is still very much in the trenches here. How do you like feel on a daily basis so you fully and out like David Allen or you still grappling very hard with new chAllenges .

grappling still i'm grab I mean, i'm more died in and Oliver, if we talk about this something, I mean my my systems are dialed in. You know like i'm i'm not falling from thing to think my biggest thing that i'm costly having to turned to knobs on the tight rope I walk is what too many things means for me right because I have all these opportunities and um and but i'm a productivity practice. I cannot like my the way I work best is uh IT doesn't matter what you do tomorrow but IT matters what you do this month, right?

It's like deliver a book at the into this year but I don't care how you do IT like that's that's my sweet s spot that's right that's right right um and I get worried about when I feel that i'm drifting too much towards I have too much to do and I know exactly when that feels because I already I mean, I blocked down a locked down fixed productivity and only worked in certain hours. I have know this is all of these clear shutdown routines um all of my work is out of my head and track very carefully. I planned on multiple scales like on my podcast.

We do all the concrete nerd stuff and we get in all this right so I have that all lockdown is that the commitment the number of commitments? Is this the right number not? And is something I went to. A big, real praise of life like this is part of what LED to me, writing this book is implicit. I knew a lot of these ideas and had roughly followed them, but I worried I was going to sink, going to think with the ideals. And part of what happened is my kids of three boys, um once they all got the elementary school age, they just needed every minute I have to give to them and I was like, I got to be calibrate now and so I really was thinking like and the promise i'm very ambitious and i'm like i'm finally getting good at things like i'm finally getting good at writing. You know like it's .

like the street unit of effort that you put in now the returns are greater than they ever work because you have a bigger audience and you have more leveraged and you have Better platforms to speak on your writing.

Tings of high equality. Yeah, exactly. And stuff matters.

Now, like if I write a really good new york piece, I might be called in the brief senators about IT like IT matters right? And if a book goes well, that could be a million copy soul um and but I realized that, okay, I got a retune art, what's calibrate and so writing this book helped me articulate the principles, go a explore them so I could Better understand them. And they go back and tightened the ship.

And like one of things I realized doing that is I need even less. I I have to be even more careful than one of the things I do is I can extreme seasonality like I disappear in the summers, for example, and I really just shut that down. My teaching is largely just one semester out of the year.

Um there's other things i've been changing my relationship with the university that move away from uh, computer sciences type stuff and really like this public writing about technology is like my main outset, reduces things. So i'm reducing. I'm in reduction mode for sure.

Wow, because what I .

want to produce, I care about writing basically I want to write. That's my obsession. I see my first book deal right after I turned twenty one.

Like, that's my I I wanted write. And for me, I wanted to be the craft matters to me and the impact matters to me. Like that's what I that's what I want to do.

And I think that our current world, a lot of what i'm writing, like a lot of my columns are trying to navigate technology, which I think it's like a huge issue right now. And so I wanted do that as well as possible. Like, I understand that I have a you know, i'm a computer science process for the doctor from mt.

Like I understand pretty deeply how like a large language model works, you know? And like why in two thousand and seventeen, the innovation of a transformer or what that change? And her self attention plays a role.

And I like, this is an area where I could be having my own lane in there, because I understand deeply how this stuff works. But also I can think about culture impact. And you.

So like, this is what I care about is writing stuff that matters, that moves things. Everything else I see sufficient sly. So that's why that IT took me ten years to start a podcast, because like, this is not writing. But eventually I realized, like this is the modern world. I need some way of a been in touch with my my blisters and I need a way of actually reaching people beyond who have just seen my but you know how to constrain IT half day a week like that's been the rule and .

that's very impressive. And shout out to whoever your right hand up producer is for being able to spend everything up so that you are ready to the head .

of just not only all the light around the cameras around in .

the script is in all the it's all yeah that's beautiful yeah I think i'm coming up writing now from the other side of the fence. A lidia who is your senior data is also my lady idea.

I am indeed yes.

outset we'll take a photo after another and .

to yeah talking with her today.

thinking about what happens from a right to first going into podcasting. I'm a podcast of first going into writing, but I started doing this newsletter about um four years ago. Let's say I think i've done about two hundred of them every single monday.

I look ture in the Kelly i'm so writing and i'm away and what I am right be correct two hundred thousand words of ah IT called three minute monday IT takes about three hundred words a minute issue people read slowly and my writing is influenced the podcast probably more than any other pursuit that I do even more than reading because once a week i'm forced to sit down and this know I give people this prescription of you should make a fake podcast, put your phone down on the table with a friend once a week for thirty minutes and just talk about something rigorously IT doesn t what IT is IT can be spot or Taylor swift conspiracies or what's going to have, whether the aliens. And I think it's very to exert forces you to focus in a way that Normal conversation doesn't. But once you've got that, I think that a really great next place to go to.

I think everyone should have a newsletter or a sub stack of some kind, because forcing yourself to get concrete about what you learn this week, go. Okay, here's this. Ever had this idea in my head about people have hidden observable metrics s in their life, and they often trade hidden metrics s for observer able metrics, which is why they will sacrifice that relationship or the piece of mind of the quality of the time that they get spent with their kids for an increase in pay packet or a more expensive car or bigger house.

So, oh, that's interesting. So so let's flash this out. And who do I think of like I think of that who who can I think from, you know, popular culture history and before you know, you go that that's that's like fun yeah but that's not something for all that.

I love conversations and talking about things. That's not an idea that you can play with quite so well verbally. You can come up with the genesis, and I probably did. In fact, I think I know that I did. I came up with the genesis of that idea talking, but IT really took form and writing, yes.

And for me, the synergy between the two is and I there's no reason for me to keep doing the newsletter part from the fact that the only audience you want you won't. And the second one being that IT makes the podcast so much Better to have that once every week and forced to find new things I do. Did you ever see the job advert, the earnest chat ton put in one thousand nine twelve in the british, in the in london times? And I found this thing because I needed got to find something the same as when you start journey, if you do gratitude journal. And the particular one that I use at the end of the day has three, three great things that happen today. I have to actively look the windom for great things during the day after while I I can't do another night when I look at the page and I don't have an idea, I.

I i'd Better to be looking for great things.

Yeah, yes, about that sentences between conversation and writing.

I think, is writing thinking? Yeah, like riding is thinking, is thinking that you can't be a sophisticated thinker if you don't write because our working memories, lot of reasons why, but I think i'm the main reasons our working memories are limited, right? So when you right, it's like your uh cyborg in in extending your brain.

You can now have a lot of ideas, hold a bunch of different points together and then start rearranging them. And like the great thing about writing is that when you're reading something you wrote and not quite right, so this doesn't click into this way. Why did you introduce this piece about shackleton? This is different in this, or this didn't pay off.

Uh, you feel that this ery like this isn't quite right and then you feel IT when the writing is right. It's like what your brain is like practicing is uh rationality and narrative and how to bring pieces together. I mean, I don't if you've noticed this in your uncurious, like you find what there's kind of two competing forces.

I was going to say you find that writers are interesting podcast guests because they think in terms of coherent thoughts to click together. Now account of avAiling forces. Some writers are very good at just, you know, interacting with human beings. So you have like two forces going against .

depends whether or not you've got a secret underground riding danger. Yes, most of the time people that are great right is fantastic podcast guests. You know, there have been a number of people that I found online.

One particular guy, wind the bogle, think he's been on the show seven times. It'll be in the top five of guest of all time. And like, he's nobody, but he is one of the best sub stack writers and tweet thread writers.

I saw this thread from this guy three years ago now, like, if he can talk a quarter as well as he can write, yes, he'll be phenomenon and sure have brought him on. And he was really good communication, and he had all of these ideas. And I just run this back all the time.

I like this guys, fantastic. Rob henderson, the same. David pinner, soft. So many of the people that I find on for the podcast come from blogs and and stuff, because I just think, well, I can see the proof of your ideas here.

And you know, if we can talk about if we get through even fifty percent of the insight i've learned from this you know three thousand word article, this is brilliant and that's a phenomenon episode, then we can play with that. Or what about this isn't interesting, you counter factual. So yeah um people that right well are often good pod casters and great podcast guests just need the communication side yeah .

and another hand like pure youtube people, for example who are like fantastic creating great youtube videos are often .

like really big podcast to cully good. Now tell you put ladies gentleman, tell I appreciate this is flum by it's been two thousand, absolutely flump. It's been really great to me you why should people go?

They want to keep up today with everything in ah can you tom? Yeah, I don't use social media, but have a website. Podcasts is called deep questions. A little productivity that all I am now.

Yeah, we did IT go.