“This Is Stealing Your Life Away!” (Unmotivated, Burnt Out, Unproductive) | Cal Newport

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In today’s fast-paced world, the pursuit of productivity often leads to overwhelm. In fact, one report suggests that 88% of UK workers have experienced some degree of burnout over the past two years. But what if there’s a better way to work and live?

This week, I’m delighted to welcome Cal Newport back to my Feel Better Live More podcast. Cal is a professor of computer science at Georgetown University and a founding member of the Center for Digital Ethics. He’s a New York Times bestselling author whose books have reached millions of readers in over forty languages. His latest book, ‘Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout’, challenges our current notions of work and offers a revolutionary approach to productivity.

In our conversation, Cal and I explore the concept of “slow productivity” and how it contrasts with our culture of constant busyness. We discuss why traditional productivity methods are falling short, particularly in the realm of ‘knowledge work’ – a term Cal uses to describe intellectually demanding professions – and how modern digital tools have exacerbated the problem of burnout.

During the conversation, he shares the three core principles of slow productivity: doing fewer things, working at a natural pace, and obsessing over quality. We delve into practical strategies for implementing these principles in various work environments, even for those who feel they have little autonomy in their jobs.

We also touch on the importance of solitude and reflection in living an intentional life. Cal emphasises how smartphones and social media have impacted our ability to be present and socialise, particularly for younger generations, and he offers insights on setting boundaries with technology and creating healthier norms around its use, too.

Our conversation also extends to the value of lifestyle-centric planning versus goal-centric planning, challenging cultural norms around constant connectivity and redefining success beyond professional achievements.

This episode is packed with actionable advice that can help you reclaim your time, reduce stress, and find a more balanced approach to work and life.

#feelbetterlivemore
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Connect with Cal:
Website https://calnewport.com/
YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@CalNewportMedia
Podcast https://calnewport.com/podcasts/

Cal’s books:
Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout, UK: https://amzn.to/3zoFh3t, US: https://amzn.to/3zBeEIn
Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World https://amzn.to/2UFqzva
Digital Minimalism: On Living Better with Less Technology https://amzn.to/2Gaw95o

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So Cal there was a recent report in the UK that suggested that 88% of UK workers have experienced some degree of burnout over the past two years what do you think an alarming statistic like that says about the state of society well I think it says about the state of knowledge work that is broken right I think the way we work in knowledge work has for a long time been a problem and the pandemic made it unmissable right so so what I think happened during the pandemic is we had already begun this descent in knowledge work where the introduction of digital tools like email like Zoom uh like mobile Computing like smartphones was increasing the not just the pace of work but increasing the amount of time we were focusing on talking about work work became more performative it’s the the the communication about work the back and forth the pandemic made all that worse in an acute way and I think it pushed a lot of people over the edge the term knowledge work comes up a lot in the new book slow productivity what is knowledge work well there’s a technical definition which has to do with adding value to information using the human brain uh but I think there’s an informal definition which is essentially if you get annoyed by how much time you spend with email uh if if the word Zoom generates mixed emotions you’re probably a knowledge worker yeah but it’s not everyone it’s that no it’s not everyone it’s not everyone because a lot of my writing a lot of my ideas at the base I think about technology and how technology comes in the different parts of our life and disrupts things and what we do about it so the the Techno story behind uh this new book is what happened when tools like email and laptops Network computers when they entered the workplace it really created a lot of problems and so it’s really the type of workplaces where those tools became prevalent that’s where we’re seeing the sort of specific burnout overload problems that I’m talking talking about is one of the problems with knowledge work or I guess more broadly work that is done on screens and using modern technology is one of the problems that you never see real world evidence for the completion of that work so so what I mean by that is if you were a brick layer for example and you spent 8 hours laying bricks at the end of the day you can see the fruits of your labor yeah whereas you could literally spend 8 hours just going back on forth on email feel like you’ve accomplished something yeah but in many cases you’ve not actually done that much yeah well okay you’re getting at what I think is the core problem with knowledge work we can’t count feet of a wall that’s been built we can’t count the number of automobiles that came out of a factory we can’t count the number of bushels of wheat that each acre of land produced this is actually the key issue so the notion of prod activity economically speaking was very well defined for about 300 years right so for about 300 years we knew that there was a a ratio situation going on we could count the output versus input this began in agriculture it really hit its stride in industrial manufacturing you know Henry Ford could say this is how many modeles produced per paid labor hour at my factory and they could tweak something about the production system and say that number got better so this new way of building cars is better now work comes along none of that works anymore because in knowledge work I might be working on a bunch of different things it could be different than what someone else is working on how I’m doing this work is not well- defined it’s off you skated it’s my own sort of personal habits how I actually like to organize my labor so we have nothing to really measure so productivity becomes a much more squirly Topic in knowledge work because we can’t just say when we do this we produce more model T’s and we do this the number goes down without the ability to do that we have to fall back back on rougher heuristics and that’s where ideas like well let’s just look at activity and being busy as a proxy for useful effort that’s where that emerges yeah what what I love the most about the new book slow productivity is it seems to kind of challenge a lot of the prevailing and accepted Norms the things that we’ve just sort of fallen into yeah as email and screens and technology has become a big bigger part of our lives and it reminds me a little bit of your book digital minimalism in the sense that the big take-home for me from that book was that what we need is an intentional approach to our technology and that was particularly about technology and our free time and on non-working time but it’s it’s not a dissimilar idea that you put forward in slow productivity yeah well I mean because the same issues happen in the world of work right so so we had these Technologies roll into work why did that create a problem problem well well here’s my argument is that when knowledge work emerged before we got these modern Technologies when it emerged as a major sector in the mid 20th century the definition we came up with for productivity is what I call pseudo productivity in the book but it’s the idea that a visible effort will be our proxy for for useful activity I love that term pseudo productivity it’s very evocative yeah we’ve all been in that situation I think or many of us have where someone is on their screen in front of a desktop or a computer between 9 to 5 yes and therefore it is assessed that they have been productive or they have been working but whether they were on Facebook Twitter sending the gas engineer an email or whatever it might be is kind of not being measured it’s just the simple fact that they were sitting in front of a screen what they were doing yeah is a different matter altogether that’s why we call it pseudo productivity pseudo productiv and this I mean this was the the temporary answer to that real hard economic question of how how do we manage productivity and knowledge work if we can’t count model T’s PUD productivity is what we came up with it was like a a Band-Aid or a heris stic like well at the very least if I see you’re doing something that’s better than you not doing something that’s what productivity became in knowledge work now where this becomes a real problem is when we get email when we get mobile Computing when we get smartphones because a visible activity is how I demonstrate to you that I’m being productive now that we have email the granularity at which I can demonstrate activity just got really small it’s no longer oh I see you’re at your desk for eight hours so like that’s how I know you’re doing something useful you’re here and you’re not obviously writing a magazine now it’s well wait a second how long did it take you to respond to this email how many emails that I see you send and respond to so that the speed of activity got faster and the scale at which you had to show you were doing things got much smaller so if visible activity is how we indicate we’re being useful and now we have a way of demonstrating useful activity minute to minute not just in the office but with us on our laptops with us on our smartphones that’s where you get this feeling of the pace of work starting to pick up it’s pseudo productivity plus these digital communication tools and so it’s really not a great way to think about doing stuff with the brain but again this the culture of of activity based productivity Pito productivity is deeply ingrained in knowledge work and we don’t realize it it’s fish not knowing what water is yeah but it is what we are what we’re swimming in it’s the only thing we know and when we think about knowledge work and his problems too often we just assume that’s the only way we have to measure productivity then we work from that assumption our options become really limited yeah it’s going more and more Upstream to go well you know where did this idea come from in the first place what if we didn’t subscribe to the idea what might our Working Day and our working life look like I think when people read your book They’re suddenly going to go of course I get it I get it that’s why I feel so frustrated going back to opening figure of 88% of UK workers saying that they’ve you know experienced some degree of burnout over the past two years what is it about pseudo productivity that is leading to burnouts yeah yeah because if if you’re if you’re working a lot but you’re working on something that’s tangible and meaningful it’s not going to burn you out what what’s burning people out is the fact that they’re busier than they’ve ever been before but they feel like they’re producing much less so what’s going to burn you out is is four or five hours of Zoom meetings plus 125 emails sent and received and yet the important report the piece of software the product strategy you’re trying to put together nothing’s happening there right it’s almost like a psychological experiment we’re going to have you spend your entire day talking about work no actual work is going to get done maybe if you wake up earlyer on the weekends you can make a little bit of progress and we’re all going to pretend like this makes sense that’s what I think is burning people out it’s the absurdity of the busyness not just the raw workload itself yeah when I think of burnouts because of course burnout is technically a term relating to work I keep bringing up your previous book digital minimalism because I don’t think it’s just work that is leading to maybe I I broaden out the term from burnout chronic overload and stress which many people are feeling let’s assume that work is frustrating and that we never feel that we’ve completed everything we’ve got to do because there an all always another email to answer always something else that we could be doing which is why or one of the reasons that infiltrates our evenings and our weekends is it not also though that when we are trying to switch off and relax We’re overwhelming ourselves by being digital maximalists yes we so so it’s not just the work it’s that that speed of life that we have at work we’re now taking into our relaxation time as well so no wonder so many people feel you know burnt out and overloaded oh I agree with that completely well I mean just to return briefly to to what the mechanic is that’s making the work particularly uh burning us out and then I want to get to what’s happening after work the the specific mechanic that’s at the core of a lot of this is I think of it as administrative overhead or an overhead tax right so uh as you say yes to more and more things right everything thing you say yes to in a a work context brings with it administrative overhead right so I say yes on this project we have to send emails about it we have to do meetings about it the thing that I think is particularly deranging for people is when they say yes to too many things all of that administrative overhead builds up it Aggregates and at some point you cross a threshold where all you have left is time to handle the administrative overload without actually getting to the actual projects itself and then you fall farther and farther behind on the projects right so that’s the that’s the mechanism I think that’s driving the knowledge work burnout more than anything else it’s the having too many things on our plate is creating the days of the sort of shallow busyness because you have to service the overhead so it’s it’s a kind of lowgrade busyness that doesn’t actually achieve the truly important things yeah and what’s important and I realized this working on this book and I hadn’t realized this in some of my previous work right so so I wrote a book before this just about email and I was saying okay this is really bad to switch your attention to an inbox every 3 minutes is bad from a neurological perspective our brain can’t Conta switch that fast it’s going to exhaust your brain you’re not getting much work done this is terribly unproductive but at the end of that book I said that the answer is to have different communication protocols that don’t require being interrupted by messages what I didn’t realize back then is the reason why we’re checking email so much is not just because we’re we’re choosing to do busyness instead of doing our work uh it’s because we said yes to so many things and each of those things brings with it administrative overhead that cannot be avoided right that’s how each of the the items of work is coordinated and it’s adding up to a point where we have no breathing room left there’s no room left to say hey let’s come up with a really smart process for how we’re going to communicate on this project because this Project’s one of seven and they’re all generating messages you can’t keep up with it you’re drowning it so the the overload is what’s generating the excessive busyness was was generating the ex excessive communication so as long as we’re doing to many things at once it our work is going to become increasingly more the busyness and less the actual substantive work so so the overload I think is the the driving factor is that we have too many things on our plate at which point all we can do is handle the overload and everything devolves into the communication but I do I want to get back to your digital minimalism point because I think you’re absolutely right the technology is squeezing us from both sides of the work life division so we have what’s happening in work with email and the overload the way I think about what’s happening at home is that when we have tools that are these attention economy tools like social media on our phone for example what they’re doing is subverting very deep human drives so we have these deep human drives that you know if we follow them help us be more fulfilled human beings these tools hijack and subvert those for their own means so like communication we’re super social like we’re driven to want to communicate with our fellow humans is very important to us to be part of communities social media comes in and hijacks that drive oh you want to communicate with people do it through the screen right and it feels enough it’s easier than actually talking to someone it feels enough about it that we think we’re being social but we’re not and we get more we get more strung out right uh what about the drive I’ve been thinking about recently the drive to be a a leader right we have this sense of I want to be respected in My Tribe I want to be a leader of my family and my community and of my my business social media can subvert that no no no be a leader posting things you have this sort of fake community that you feel and there’s likes happening and people are reposting your things and again it subverts this drive that otherwise would have been used to do things would have been really fulfilling like I’m actually going to emerge as a sort of a person of standing in my actual physical community so we get this again and again with these Technologies the drive to be you know entertained with novelty to go out and experience and be inspired by the world again our phone is no no we got a clip for you to look at so it hijacks these drives that like food right food same thing fast food I’m hungry let me just grab whatever a candy bar it’s hijacking the hijacking the drive in the end you don’t really get what you need and you get less healthy but in the moment it seems better it’s hyper palatable so I think that’s what’s happening in our life outside of work and so all of these activities that are hard but fulfilling that make humans humans are being subverted into uh these apps they’re being subverted into our phones so they can be monetized and so we feel less rooted more shallow because of that yeah in digital minimalism you wrote a lot about Solitude and the importance of solitudes and I think the definition you utilize in that book was freedom of input from other Minds yeah which was just beautiful why is Solitude so important yeah because people think of it as physical isolation which is not right the definition of solitude that matters is you alone with your own thoughts taking in the world around you and thinking about things right this is how people make sense of their lives in the world you have experiences that’s step one step two you sit there and you grapple with them right because we we build in our heads these sort of hidden schemas these Frameworks for understanding our life and our journey what has happened to us where are we going next uh how do we understand what’s important to us and what’s not important to us all of that takes time in your own head just thinking things through what’s going on what did I why do I feel this way um what do I want to do different in life so Solitude is is critical until recently it was completely unavoidable right you were just going to have time during your days where you were alone with your own thoughts because there was nothing else to do you were in line at the store you’re just thinking you’re you’re walking to you know the underground or something you just you’re there with your own thoughts smartphones ubiquitous highspeed wireless internet makes it possible for the first time in the history of our species to get all solit out of your life and I think it’s a real issue because without the ability to make sense of our lives in the world we feel unrooted yeah and that makes us more anxious so then we hide even further in the distractions of the phone and that’s not a cycle that ends up well yeah I mean I I couldn’t agree more I mean I’ve I’ve said on many occasions I actually believe that a daily practice of solitude is one of the most important things that we can do for our health and our happiness because without it as you say you you you don’t you know realize that sense of who you are you don’t really have the time and the space to reflect on your life to step outside to go oh that’s how I’m living you know I don’t want to live like that I want to I want to sort of live a bit differently I want to make different decisions and actually although I think soow productivity is probably at least initially written for the workplace because it’s about work and how do we yeah work in a much more meaningful way yeah in the 21st century to me it’s so much more than that I think it’s a a revolutionary Manifesto for a slower way of life yep but I also think there’s a huge health component which is really interesting to me as a doctor that if you are feeling overwhelmed every day at your job if at the end of the work day you feel a sense of incompleteness that nothing really meaningful got done well what do you do yes you go to social media you go to alcohol you go to Sugar you go to junk food you go to takeaways right and I’ve been really thinking deeply about what are the root causes of all these poor lifestyle choices that so many of us are making I don’t think knowledge is the answer giving people more knowledge about the harmful effects of too much sugar everyone knows that yeah it’s because of the state of our nervous systems because of the way we’re living and the way that we’re working we have to sooe it so I would argue that your book in many ways is a health but because if you can work in that much more slower and meaningful way I think you are naturally going to make better health choices as well I think that’s so right I mean if if you read uh a lot of the examples in the book and and I I make this choice in the book by the way like where did I want to draw my wisdom from and instead of doing uh what might have been the obvious thing which is well I just want to study companies that are doing this differently or I want to pull social psych papers and say researchers at Michigan show that you know I was like I don’t want to do that with this book um to be true to the idea of slow movements in general slow food slow cities slow medicine I wanted to look back at a traditional source of wisdom and then try to adapt it to our modern times so I study what I call traditional knowledge workers people in times past that Ed their brain to create value but had a huge amount of flexibility and autonomy to experiment with it try to figure out what did they land on and then I try to adapt at the Modern office jobs but if you read those stories there’s just this moment of these moment of recognition and inspiration it just feels somehow right that was my experience with these stories I mean hearing about Jan Austin or Lin Manuel Miranda or even going back to Galileo there’s these these intimations in their stories of oh that’s what work should be like it’s meaningful it’s slower it’s um it’s productivity measured on a big time scale like look what I produced this year look what I did this decade that I’m proud of not productivity on a minut at the minute scale not look how busy I was in the last hour the fact that those stories resonate I think tells us that what we’re doing now isn’t natural because we ache for what we hear when we hear these stories of times past about how people used their brain to create value it just seems right somehow yeah that they’re on the there’s something there of course we have to adapt it to a modern office job we can’t live the life of Jane Austin but like we can learn lessons and then ask the question of how do we make those lessons work in our Modern Life so resonance I think in those stories tells us that there’s something natural going on there one of the stories that really stood out to me in slow productivity was I think he the worker for HSBC who during the the pandemic during the lockdowns suffered a heart attack yeah it was very very powerful and particularly because we’ve covered on this show quite a lot recently because I’m very passionate about it the regrets of the dying you know from bronnie we the palive Ken she wrote the book The Five regret of the dying and one of those top five regrets on people’s Death Beds is I wish I’d work less yeah and I think this particular example kind of speaks to that yeah because he wrote out a list I guess it was 10 things that his resolutions to Revelations having survived the heart attack early the pandemic number one spend less time on Zoom which I me that’s just paus on that for a minute spend less time on Zoom because remember what happened and I think it’s important what happened because it shows a a deeper underlying Dynamic but remember what happened early pandemic for a lot of office workers their days got completely taken over by Zoom which if you think about it is absurd where you would have people would have an eight hour day back to back to back to back I mean I had calls into my podcast from listeners where their problem was when do I go to the bathroom like there’s not even a 20 minute break in my day that’s what I think emphasized the people okay something we’re doing is broken now now how do we end up I call it the zoom apocalypse a couple things happened when the pandemic erupted that I think made this sort of inevitable one is we were working right at the limit which is what we tend to do in a pseud productivity culture is we work right at the limit of what’s bearable because in a pseud productivity culture where activity is what matters it’s very dangerous we feel to say no so how do we then manage how much work we take on what a lot of people do is they wait until the stress of their workload becomes sufficiently acute that they feel like they have psychological cover to say no so their busyness has to be sufficiently painful to compensate for the pain of saying no so because of this we tend to work constantly at this level of having too much right that’s how we we get some sort of psychological permission to start saying no to things so if you perturb this at all it falls apart and I think that’s what happened in the early pandemic is everyone was already working at this peak workload where things were just barely possible the pandemic introduced 25% new tasks all you know overnight basically that was enough for this whole thing to to Tumble and then it was just endless meetings and endless email but to me the real lesson of that is not just how terrible the summer of 2020 was but how busy we were in the winter of 2020 right how busy we were in 2019 how at the red line we already were that any sort of perturbing any sort of inflation of our workload could lead people to have their lives completely fall apart the book’s been out for a little while now and you’ve been on many profile shows talking about the ideas in the book are people getting it are people thinking yes I can do this I can make a change or as I’ve seen in my job as a doctor time and time again it often requires people to get sick and to get a diagnosis before they start really looking at their life and going right you know what enough’s enough I ain’t living this way or it requires someone to to become burnt out and have to take 6 months off work to then recognize I’ve got to live in a different way I’ve got to work in a different way do you think it’s possible for humans to make those changes without going to that edge I hope so yeah I do too I hope so I mean what I’m seeing is there’s two major audiences for the book right so there’s entrepreneur types who are much more willing and able to make radical changes to their work and So within the entrepreneurial circles you have sort of a dividing line those who are constantly experimenting and they’re like yeah let’s do it let’s rock and roll I’m going to cut this back I’m going to do this let’s let’s see let’s see how this works and then there’s those who are living in fear of if I’m not hustling every minute this could all go away the clients could disappear the other major audience is people who work for large companies and again there’s sort of a split there those who are saying okay this is scary because I have to walk softly because I have bosses I want to be careful about this but I think this can work I mean most of the advice in the book is actually for that crowd and how you walk softly and make this work and then the other half of that crowd is saying I love the idea I’m just too nervous yeah I’m too nervous it’s too different and so it’s it’s a split kind of down the middle in both of these crowds between the like let’s rock and roll and the I hear you but I’m afraid of what’s going to happen well let’s get into some of those specifics then because that was one of my big questions is who is this exactly for if you have autonomy yeah over your work working day like a lot of entrepreneurs perhaps do perhaps they may feel it’s easier to make some of these changes as you say compared to someone who’s got a boss and they’re accountable for certain things so let’s go into those three core ideas in the book yeah maybe explain what they are and then let’s get into actually how do people do this in in real life yeah because I’ll preface it by saying so if you work for someone else you actually have a lot more autonomy than you think right so so autonomy is baked into knowledge work in in a very literal sense so so the the guy who coined the term knowledge work in the late 1950s Peter drer yeah the the very first management theorist he invented the field um he basically midwives the notion of knowledge work as a major economic sector he was responsible in his writings for explaining to the world of business this is what knowledge work is here’s how it’s different than industrial manufacturing here’s what you need to know to succeed and if you go back to his writings again and again he says autonomy direct quote autonomy autonomy autonomy you have to give autonomy to the worker yeah cuz he was making the point which was right uh this is not an assembly line you can’t break down the work of a adman into uh seven steps they always follow you have to give them autonomy it’s creative and it’s skilled work and so autonomy is baked into knowledge work so what we do is his his suggestion what we do today is management by objectives make it clear what I want you to do but how you do it is up to you right so knowledge work has a ton of autonomy that can cut both ways yeah so it’s what allows us to get super overloaded into these absurd workloads because again there’s no set system that we use of here’s how we manage how much you’re working on here’s how we decide you know what’s a reasonable amount to work on we don’t have any systems like that so people can get into a lot of trouble you keep saying yes to things the next thing you know you’re overloaded but it cuts the other way as well because there’s no set way this is how we work and here’s how many things you work on and here’s exactly how you do it you have a lot of flexibility right so we have more autonomy than we think it’s just a matter of flexing that autonomy in a way that is palatable that doesn’t bring negative attention to you and I think it’s completely possible and so like the three principles we can talk about um all three of them are very implementable within the autonomy that most knowledge workers already have okay great well let’s go through them okay so so number one this is the one that scares people the most when they hear it do fewer things right uh my the The quick summary of that is that it doesn’t mean accomplish fewer things but what it does mean is actively work on fewer things at the same time so your concurrent work reduce that focus on a small number of things at a time do those things faster do those things better then pull in something new that way of working small number of things at a time you pull in something once you finish something you’re working on as opposed to everything you agree to working on it at the same time uh is much more sustainable produces better quality work and you actually finish things faster so things come through this cue of projects actually much faster than if you try to work on them all at the same time right then we have work at a natural pace that’s the second one work at natural pace right and there there’s two elements to that one is you need much more variety and intensity humans aren’t meant to work all out every day all week long all year long’re we’re just not wired for that we need variation in intensity um and accompanying that we should stretch out the time scale in which we think about productivity and say what am I producing this season what am I producing this year make those productivity time scales longer changes the way that you you think about work it allows more of that variety yeah in Pace and then the third principle obsess over quality so for these two things to work you have to couple it with this third idea of I really care about how well I’m doing the thing I do best and I want to get better at that thing and craft matters to me and that’s ultimately going to be my ticket to autonomy is doing something really well uh that’s going to give you two benefits one it’s going to naturally make busyness seem anathema it’s going to make pseudo productivity and the freneticism that defines work that’s going to suddenly seem unnatural to you yeah at the same time as you get better at things that are valuable you get more control over your career and you can more fight back against the business because as you get better at things you’re more valuable you get more control so that’s kind of the engine that’s going to drive your ability to do these other principles to make sure you’re taking action after watching this video I’ve created a free guide to help you build healthy habits we can all make short-term change but can those changes become a fundamental part of our life often they don’t and that’s why in this free guide I share with you the six crucial steps you need to take they’re really really effective if you want to get hold of that free guide right now all you have to do is click the link in the description box below yeah I love it well let’s get into the first one do fewer things now as it happens my own internal Mantra to myself over the past I’m going to guess two or three years has been do less be more yeah whenever I’m not sure wher you know if I’m journaling or meditating or just reflecting on my life the thing that I often come back to is do less be more that’s just something I’ve discovered from being overloaded and from falling into many of these traps yes I think like many of us do I’ve learned that no wrong in there’s there’s a few high impact things you do that you can do really well yeah focus on those things that’s it and get people in to help you to do the stuff that they can do sometimes better than you yeah you know and but it takes a while to get into that so I very much resonate with with the idea of do fewer things the push back is though as you say people are going to go yeah but my boss has given me these 10 things that I need to do so what do you mean Cal when you say do fewer things yeah yeah so for for an entrepreneur it might be less initiatives right like these are the struggles you and I might have is like okay how do I prevent uh having a podcast for example from metastasizing Over the rest of my schedule do I want to add this new product uh I don’t know I want to do fewer things if you work for someone else this becomes less about saying yes and no and more about demarcating active versus waiting so so what I mean by this is imagine you work for someone else right and you don’t have a lot of leeway on saying yes or no imagine that you maintain a a public list like on a shared document and it’s split in half right um at the front of the list is here are the things the projects major tasks that I’m actively working on and there’s like two or three of those all right then big dividing line here’s the ordered cue of other I’m going to do in the order in which I’m going to do them as I finish my active work and so as I finish an active project I pull the next thing off the front of that list and I finish something else that’s active I pull the next thing from that list for me to actively work on so if you give me something to do and I say I’m going to do it you can see exactly what its status is and you can watch it March down that waiting list towards actively working on and you know as soon as it makes it on the actively working on I’m going to contact you okay I’m I’m working on this now let’s talk about it I’m here let me know your thoughts we can talk talk about it uh this thing for example this simple idea makes a major difference because what are you doing when you divide between these two categories everything in the waiting list is no longer generating administrative overhead those you’ve agreed to them but they’re not generating emails and they’re not generating meetings and they’re not pulling out your cognitive Cycles because they’re not on your active list yet yeah and you’re also making the invisible visible yes which I think is one of the the other big issues is that because it’s all screen and it it goes into that you know the big ether of the worldwide web no one knows what anyone else is doing no one knows so you can start making assumptions that that person’s not doing anything yeah but they have been slugging away at something or you know to speak to one of your ear BS deep work they’re doing the Deep work yes that that creative project may require but you don’t know that you know if you’re assessing them just on hours you’re not really seeing that so I think it’s a I mean I I really like that tip because then you’re making the invisible visible everyone around you knows what’s going on but I think you also gave this nice example in the book where if your boss gives you another task to do yeah you because it’s all open you can say hey no problem this sounds really really interesting want it when do you want it which one of these current tasks would you like me to stop working on yeah so that I can deliver on this yeah which are then goes back to your boss and your B oh actually you know what that one’s actually more important we don’t need that one so it’s it’s a very I think it’s a very clever way without you know you’re not you’re not trying to be problematic at work you just trying to be open and transparent transparency makes such a big difference I mean this this is one of the big drivers of overload is that workload management is Aus skated I have no idea what you’re working on you have no idea what I’m working on you’re just some sort of vessel that like receives work and and does it for me as soon as you make it transparent a lot of good things happen and what what’s key about these types of strategies I have a bunch of them but what’s key about these types of strategies is you’re not putting a burden on someone else right right so you’re not saying to someone else you now have to do something more complicated as part of my new system that doesn’t go over well but I’m not asking you to do anything different I’m just giving you more information if you choose to look at it right so you’re not adding a a burden um you’re also demonstrating that you’re organized and and I don’t want to underemphasize the importance of what you earn within a workplace when people see you as someone who has your act together yeah oh you’re really organized you’re keeping track of exactly where things is I can watch where it is you gain yourself a lot of respect and flexibility Adam Grant calls these idiosyncrasy credits you get the ability to be idiosyncratic about things um if you’re delivering if people trust you now here’s what I think is really going on in the workplace because one of the big fears I hear from people is that no no no what my boss wants is me to do something right away yeah cuz that makes his life easier and he won’t tolerate anything less I think that’s actually not true in most cases here’s what’s really happening the the problem you’re solving for your boss uh is that they have this thing that entered their world that needs to get done it’s a source of stress for them until it gets done right because it’s in their mind taking up space right and so if they’re going to enlist you to help them get this done the problem you’re solving for them is taking their stress away now if they don’t know anything about your workload if they don’t know anything about your work process if they just they don’t know anything about this they would rather you just did it right away because they can’t release this till you finish it because they don’t know what happens once they give it to you so like I’ve sent this to you but I don’t know if you’re going to do this or not I’d rather you just do it because I’m going to still be stressed about this if you’re organized if it’s sure I’m happy to do it I’ve put it in position seven on this list which you can look at and watch it but I’m happy to move it somewhere else if you want to you’ve solved the same problem they’re not stressed about it great you have this you’re taking care of it you’ve taken my stress away that’s what I needed from you not that you did it right away but that you took my stress away right away so if you’re organized your system can really work in your favor and people will be okay with it as long as it solves their problem as long as they trust when they give you something it’s going to get done they can see it’s going to get done they don’t need it tomorrow but they need their stress to go away right now yeah I I think that’s such a good point about sending out this signal that you’re on top of things that you are organized that you’ve got stuff you’re working on I think it’s really really important I think it’s also important in how you say no to things isn’t it I think you use that example in the book that again if you can very clearly and be transparent why you cannot say yes to something yeah it probably makes it go away faster is that fair to say yeah so so if you’re at a level where you can actually just turn things down so now you don’t have to entirely just rely on something like this transparent cue or everything goes Clarity is everything yeah yeah yeah so uh as they say uh apologize is fine but don’t give wiggle room on whether you can do it or not just be clear like what people need is Clarity uh I want you to do this thing for me it would be great if you could um don’t leave me dangling you know either come back and say this looks great thanks I can’t do it right now really sorry about that nice thing nice thing nice thing don’t come back and say for example well I’m really busy and you know I have this other thing going on and hope that the other person will then let you off the hook because the other person won’t they really want you to do whatever they’re asking you they’re not going to they’re not going to say no to themselves uh so if you just describe your busyness to like oh we could fit it in don’t worry about it or if you say well I’m really busy right now doing X they’ll like great I’ll get right back to you as soon as you know X is over yeah oh my god I’ve been I I have been there like many of us so many times so so what what are your tips and for someone who says you know we both acknowledge that not everyone are in jobs where they can say no to certain things sometimes you know depending on your position or your role in the company whatever it might be you can’t do that yeah but if you have as you say you have a degree of um autonomy yeah or you have a degree of decision making ability where you can say no to things yeah what are your top tips for saying no yeah I got two big Ideas all right so one and this is pretty straightforward is quotas so if there’s certain tasks that come up regularly and you need to do some of right but you get way more requests for these type of tasks you can handle just have a quota like okay this month or this quarter I do five of these you know I go to one conference per season I do uh three peer reviews per month or whatever it is right and then when you uh exceed that quota you say you know I appreciate that I I do a quota of this many per month this many per season I’ve already hit that quota so I can’t I can’t do this this puts you in a good position because it’s not an arbitrary no you’re not saying no to all of these things you’re giving out a lot of yeses and the only real push back to this can be your quot is wrong you said you do five of these it should be six right which is something that people don’t actually want to push back about because it sounds like you’re being very reasonable about trying to figure out how much all right here’s my other idea uh actually go and find time for something before you do the work right so what this allows you to do is that when someone comes up to you and says hey can you do this instead of giving a hard yes or no in the room you say oh that sounds really good or that sounds really important um I’m really careful about my time so I’ll tell you what as soon as I’m done here I’ll go to my calendar uh and I’ll I’ll look what’s going on with the time and where I might have time for this and you know what I’ll get right back to about it so it’s like you’re giving them a positive thing but what you’re really doing is setting yourself up to see what’s really going on and then actually go and look for the time how long will this take when am I going to do it let me schedule that time on my calendar and if you can’t find it now you have this much more uh systematic way of coming back and saying no so you know what I went and checked I keep track of everything very carefully it really is going to be like three or four weeks till I have like enough contiguous time to get this done that’s too late for what you need so I don’t think it’s going to work out so by not saying yes or no in the room but instead establishing I’m organized I’m going to go check my systems and then you come back four hours later that’s a much more effective no yeah I love that I mean this literally happen to be last week so um saying no is something I feel I’ve got much better at over the past few years out of necessity frankly yeah but I was very proud of myself like a week ago because my assistant got a request for me to come to London to do a talk and you know she knows that I just don’t like going to London to give talks much anymore you know what and part of that reason well this is I guess one of my one thing that’s really helped me not just in my ability to say no but just in many other aspects of my life is to measure the unmeasurably and for me personally having children is a brilliant way of doing that so my kids are now 13 and 11 yeah they’re an amazing age I love hang hanging out with them and doing things with them and so you know weekend events for me are pretty much always out yeah because kids are at school and they’re not at the weekend I don’t want to go off at a weekend when I can spend time with them yeah so it’s trying to quantify because we don’t really have metrics well you’re a computer scientist maybe you can tell me if we do but we have metrics to measure our salary yeah our follower count how many people downloaded this episode of the podcast right but we don’t have the same kind of metrics to uh measure quality time with my children at the weekend or my wife so that’s something I become very very aware of yes and also the other thing is your rule was never say yes in the room yeah my internal rule has been never say yes on the phone yeah so I got asked yeah it’s a very prestigious event and the only reason I was even considering it is because it was a good friend of mine’s wife was asking me yeah so I got on the phone with her and she made a really powerful case for it and I I’m such a people person that I nearly said yes yeah and I actually I just thought about I had this nagging feeling I just don’t want to do it yeah just don’t want to do it just don’t want to do I have to get a super early train I’ll be back late it will exhaust me the next day there’s other stuff going on my daughter’s musical is that week I don’t want to be tied for it and and then I communicated that in a way that I usually don’t which is a very clear hey it’s a great offer I genuinely cannot fit that into my schedule that week with everything else I’ve go I’ve got going on good luck with finding someone else yes and it was a really because I was so clear and transparent yes the the reply I got was also fantastic that I just I felt really good afterwards I thought rongan you’re growing up you’re learning how to do this stuff they moved on and and within five minutes like okay who’s the next person I’m going to ask yeah they’re not sitting there the next day with you know their whiskey in their hand like R I cannot believe he said no you know throw it into the fireplace they’ve moved on but even if they were that’s also their issue and not my issue I think that’s right well I’ll tell you uh my kids played a big role in this book as well right so I have three kids all boys uh 119 and six right so they all recently are now of uh like in the states we say Elementary School age right so they’re all sort of in school when they got to that age one of the things that changed is that they all needed basically like every minute of dad time possible which was a real change right because when kids are younger it’s much more of a sort of survival thing and making sure that like no one in the partnership has too much of a load but suddenly it was we need to spend time with our dad and that was one of the big Inspirations for I really got to figure out the the details of the slow productivity thing because I’m also you know I’m reaching the peak of my professional uh capabilities right the options are endless and so I had to answer this question how do I keep producing stuff I’m proud of leave a legacy support my family but also not let work take over because this is the time when they when they need me and so one of the mindset shifts I’ve made it it reminds me what you’re talking about here is shifting from uh away from the value of what the opportunity brings and more towards yeah what’s lost and this was key for me do I already have a good variety or amount of that value in my life like ation of enough I think you on Ryan holidays podcast recently you guys were talking about this yeah about I think he got a request one summer when he was well actually this is interesting I was listening to that podcast this morning and you and Ryan were talking about speakings and he was talking about I think one summer when he was having four weeks off and he was just not going to do any any work apart from his own writing at home and then he got you know offered a big payday to go and tour somewhere for a a big company now I want to acknowledge not everyone is in that position okay of course yeah so I want to be really sensitive to that some people are struggling to make ends me that is not necessarily relevant for them but Ryan said something really interesting to you because you were talking about how you guys make decisions and and he ended up saying in that in that podcast that ended up being one of the most expensive four weeks off I I’ve taken yeah and I thought that’s an interesting way of phrasing it isn’t it it’s not the way I would think about it yeah and again I found it fascinating because I thought it depends what is your mentality how do you look at life do you do you look at it as if something you didn’t say yes to and didn’t earn so it was never yours in the first place yeah do you see that as a loss yep you know it’s again it’s looking at what you can measure I’m not I love Ryan holiday I think what he’s doing is great so this is nothing anti- Ryan at all I it was interesting turn of phrase for me and I’ve had this conversation with a really good friend of mine from University who to me works way too hard and he also has that sort of phrase saying yeah but if I take a weekend off and I’m not doing a clinic at the weekend yeah I’m losing money I’m like May you’re not losing money cuz if you don’t say yes you’ve never made it in the first place yeah and also what are you doing with the money it’s it’s like the old of the the fisherman you heard the story like the fisherman Mexico right it’s the the billionaire who’s on the vacation and meets the small fisherman and says like a you should you should build out like a a company and get a boat and eventually you could hire other people and eventually you’ll be able to buy a whole canery operation for your own fish and you could build a huge company out of this and the fisherman said okay so then why would I do that and he’s like because you could sell it and move near the water and go fishing every day right it’s like money is instrumental uh so once you’re past a place like your friend probably where they’re past a place where they’re stressed about their finances a terrible place exactly and we have to be very sensitive and aware of that yeah but but I think these examples have a more General point so it’s it’s it’s useful right is uh what happens is when you don’t know what you’re building towards and it’s more your your the fear of what you might be losing in general There’s issues right so like for example I’m a big fan of what I call lifestyle Centric planning build your positive vision of what you want your life to be like not just profession all the time with family where you live what your typical day is like your you’re what you’re involved in what role work plays in your life this is your target right and your goal is like okay I want to get closer and closer to implementing this ideal lifestyle that changes the way you think about things like in this example doing extra clinics or speaking gigs because now you’re saying okay uh I’m pretty close to this lifestyle and maybe if I do a small number of these speaking gigs it it enables me to do something else like take the Summers off off or whatever but um to do a bunch of these gigs well that’s going to get in the way of the vision I have of my life because I’m going to be too busy on these sort of days and so then you begin to just think about some of these things more instrumentally how do they help or hurt what I want my my day-to-day life to look like if you don’t have these sort of clear lifestyle Visions you usually have an achievement or maximization based strategy more is better than less you know more money is better than less money more accolades is better than less accolades whatever it is and that never seems to work for people so like when you’re building when you’re trying to build the good life however you define that it makes you see these opportunities much differently I think Solitude again comes up here for me because without a regular practice of solitude you’re not asking yourself these questions you’re not asking yourself what is your perfect life how much is enough what are my values what do I actually require in life to be happy and content so you end up on this constantly moving train which you feel you have to be on you end up in this Rat Race which of course contributes to burnout yeah and at some point you have to ask yourself well what are you working for what’s the point of this and there’s there’s a wider point there for me caral which is I’ve been thinking deeply about your book yesterday and today and this idea of busyness and I wonder you know have you ever thought about whether there’s a there’s an East V West kind of demarcation here I mean you can’t really say you know specifically East V West but very generically speaking I kind of feel in a lot of Western cultures now UK and US yeah where we’ve become quite isolated we moved away from families we’re trying to do everything by ourselves a lot of the time we don’t feel that we’re a value to people we’re not of value to our communities so I I wonder sometimes is our over business an attempt to feel important to feel that we are actually of value whereas in some Eastern cultures let’s say very very broadly speaking with tighter family units where you you feel day-to-day that you are contributing that what you do actually matters I wonder if there’s less of a drive to fill yourself up with business at work yeah when you have that value in other places well I mean this is an idea I’ve been thinking about recently so I’m I’m sort of beta testing this here you can tell me if this if this makes sense uh I think in the west there’s been a major shift over the past 150 years or so when it comes to how do we think about the question of I sometimes call it the Deep life but uh building a life is very intentional right right let’s say that’s the goal I think this really is a lot of people’s goal I heard a lot about this during the pandemic from people is uh I want to feel like my life is lived on purpose it’s like sort of quietly remarkable in its own way like it reflects like I I constructed it and it’s cool it’s interesting it’s it’s you know I’m proud of my life that’s what people want they don’t want aimlessness so I call this the Deep life uh it used to be throughout basically all of human history we saw this as okay uh a lifestyle I’m going call lifestyle Centric approach you you what’s important what parts of your life are important make sure that you’re servicing those parts of life and and throughout most of History this would have been through philosophical or theological ritual and beliefs you would structure your life the role of family the role of uh spirit the role of community it was pretty structured but it was like I want to I want to focus on parts of my life that are important to me and live those rights How I Live is what matters um and then we get this sort of shift 19th century going into the 20 especially in the west where that Stripped Away because we we sort of had the the the shift to more of a post-enlightenment secular culture and we shifted over to goal Centric planning which was okay how do I make my life good we said well what I’m going to do is take a big swing at something like if if if something really good happens if my business becomes huge if I become the number one person doing this in the wake of that Big Goal being successful my life’s going to get better right just as a side effect of doing this one thing following my passion getting the to the top of the food chain whatever it is if I do this one big thing the rest of my life will fall into place and this of course just doesn’t work this way like why would pursuing one big thing to the point of obsession make all these other parts of life that important suddenly work out well we know this doesn’t work out well for people and so I think it’s like we have to ReDiscover or transport some of this lifestyle Centric planning that this was the way you know we thought about building the good life until you know a proverbial minute ago transport some of that to our current age and we can do it in a more modern secular way if we want to but just thinking about no no I need to think about all the parts of my life what do I want those to be and building my life around sort of satisfying those needs constru in an ideal life from the ground up as opposed to hoping that a single goal if sufficiently bold and brave will somehow fix everything yeah I love it it makes complete sense again something I’ve been thinking about recently is this idea if our life have that there are several buckets you know there’s friends there’s family there’s work there’s personal passions and projects there’s health and you know it may be hard to keep all of the buckets full at the same time yeah but you’ve got to at least try and at least be aware when you’re neglecting one of those buckets so that neglect doesn’t go on for too long yes and I think that’s the key isn’t it you know there are times in our life where actually you know we do get a little overwhelmed we do have deadlines and we do have a little bit tooo much going on I think we can handle that for short periods of time it’s acute stress we we are wired for acute stress but not for the chronic stress yeah yeah I think that’s the way and also when you’re looking at all those buckets at the same time you begin to find much more Creative Solutions for the problems of your life right so when you’re not just trying to maximize one thing and hope everything else follows in it in its uh footsteps you begin to see really interesting configurations where you’re like well in my work if I start building up this skill this skill is pretty valuable but also has a big freelancer uh potential to it right and if I could get to the point where I could freelance this well then we could live over here in the countryside like in the Lake District because there’s this we want to be quiet we want want to be in the fs and we have this other vision of our family life and well this would make that possible because this would be remote and it’s pretty well paid and it’s cheaper to live here and so we could actually do this uh I could do this 10 months out of the Year and have two months completely off and then our kids could then learn and you begin to find these multifaceted Solutions where you’re like oh if I do this it enables these three things which then supports these things that’s where the really interesting lives come out of those lives that when you encounter them you’re like oh that’s really cool like what you’re doing is really interesting you’re like writing poetry but also on like your sheep farm but a database admin that is like homeschooling your kids as you build up what you get these really interesting incredibly intentional configurations that are remarkable when you see them but you can only get there by looking at all the buckets yeah we’ll be back to the conversation in just a moment now many of us struggle to find time to eat all of these incredible Whole Foods that’s why I’m a big fan of good quality Whole Food ments like this one that’s been in my own life for over 3 years now it contains over 75 Whole Food Source ingredients vitamins minerals pre and probiotics and can help us support our energy Focus digestion and our immune system ag1 are giving my audience a fantastic offer one-ear supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your first order you can see all details at drink ag1 /li more or just click on the link below and now back to the conversation and trying to think how do I do this there was a lovely case study in the book which really spoke to this idea where you have to almost challenge the prevailing cultural norm I think that’s a big theme throughout slow productivity is that just because this is the way we’re doing things well it doesn’t mean that’s the way we have to continue doing things yeah and was it this computer designer I don’t know his name’s to hand where in he you did this thought experiment if if he was charging $50 an hour and being do you remember the case yes who was it yeah so this is from uh company of one Paul Jarvis that was it I thought that was great because it reminds me of the parable of the fisherman and the American businessman a little bit whereby conventionally in our UK and US Western cultures it’s always about how can you achieve more how can you earn more how can you scale up yeah right but this guy’s doing the opposite of when you scale up you get uh more ongoing projects which means more administrative overhead which means more busyness yeah Paul I love Paul Jarvis’s story so that book I love that book company of one I blured it when it came out years ago right uh I love that book but Paul story is basically he was in Canada and Vancouver sort of expensive apartment in Vancouver was a web programmer some sort of Technology guy right and he was getting better at what he was doing and there was a a demand for his services and he made this this important decision he said the typical thing to do is to build a business I’m in demand if I hired four people we could take on much more work we could grow this if it got big enough maybe uh I could sell this for you know a few million dollars or something like this instead he said no no no if I’m getting better here’s what I’m going to do uh I’m going to charge more per hour and work less he went the other way he like why not go that way with getting better is like if I’m comfortable living on this salary now why not if I get twice as good uh just have my hour same amount of money is coming in now I have half my time free and he’s like actually to me that’s much more valuable than 15 years from now getting a you know $5 million payday like what if right now I could be working half the week or whatever so that’s what they did him and his wife they moved to Vancouver Island which is a sort of uh really sort of rural natury place off of Vancouver and there’s a surf break there and she’s a surfer so they lived in this house in the woods this sort of modest house in the woods where you had extensive Gardens and he just charged more per hour they live cheaply and he had the life right away that you would imagine well this is where I could end up in 25 years if all of this busyness goes well so I love that mindset is that he as he got good at something he obsessed over quality right principle three of the book um he used The Leverage that gave him to take control of his life say great I’m gonna work less I think Cal if you got someone in a calm state so they’re not stressed out from work they feel the nervous system relaxed and you presented to them those two options yeah right in 15 years time you could sell your business for x million but the cost of that is going to be 15 years of hard work stress late nights potentially you know a denigration of your relationship with your friends and your wife and your partner but you’re going to get that 50 million or I don’t know half a million dollar payday what would you rather have I actually do believe that most people if they had the space to think about it would say you know what if I was going to earn enough to go on a holiday and feed my family and engage in my passions and I’d have a really good relationship with my wife and my children I’ll take that but I think the problem is and again I keep bringing up Solitude cuz I do agree with you that it’s a very very important foundational activity of every single human yeah without that you don’t have the intentionality to even think about your life so you end up doing what everyone else is doing yeah and if you look at that statistic from the start of the show well 88% of people are burning out so do you want to be doing what everyone else is doing in the first place yeah I I mean I love you emphasizing Solitude and I would add to it you need more time doing this than you think probably yeah right I spend hours hours on a regular basis alone with my own thoughts right like here’s a concrete example I fly into London uh get in I don’t you know I don’t have events that day get in the afternoon so I go for a three-h hour walk um I’m I’m staying over by like Parliament and traler square so like okay I haven’t been to London in a long time and I’m walking uh for hours just walking past all the sites just thinking right and so then I’m walking through St James’s Park which is beautiful and I come across the have you seen this the duck Keepers Cottage no oh it’s like a medieval tutor sort of small beautiful Cottage tucked in on the uh the pond and and St James Park and because there’s these exotic birds in that pond and I’m sure this was some Royal position where like Generations lived in this Cottage or whatever and it really resonated with me it was aesthetically beautiful it was uh in a natural environment you could imagine the um the the kind of the the Simplicity but meaning of the work of like this is and I do it well and from that random encounter I got hit by this wave of like oh there’s something there and I to think about writers I know have like a quiet house somewhere where they go and write that is like a reflection you get from Solitude and then I’m churning on that and like what does that mean why is that resonating with me what does that I’m not going to become a duck keeper but what does that tell me about Simplicity and Aesthetics and and a slowness and a purpose all of those type of insights which I’m now you know I’m processing it comes from I’m going to spend time time walking thinking just taking in the world around me you know I have a little field notebook with me field notes notebook with me you have to do that a lot to really start to make sense and so I do it a lot I also recommend if we’re going to talk Solitude that on your birthday each year you take like a full day go hike like be away from your normal things and really work through your vision for where is my life what do I want to what what do I don’t like what do I do like what am I going to do in the year ahead to push me closer to what I do like I do that every year on my birthday I have a birthday coming up I’m excited you know for it and in the weeks building up to my birthday I’m thinking and taking notes so I’m a huge believer in exactly what you’re saying is you have to have time to get your act together and the thing that’s keeping you away from doing that more than anything else is probably your phone yeah I’ve never heard that before to do that on your birthday I love that what a what a lovely idea what a lovely way of ritualizing your birthday to actually you know help you reflect on what that extra year means yeah and you know the accumulation of another year and where you’re going where are you going to end up if you keep living like this I think it’s a I think it’s a lovely practice that I may might try and adopt this August when it’s my birthday yeah yeah and also you feel it especially as you know we’re mid aged now you feel the time like that whole year passed that was a weird year you know I didn’t really I felt sort of stuck in that year it really does help like I’m going through some transformations in my life um they’re complicated right especially uh like in my academic role as I as I move more from Pure computer science and over towards digital ethics and thinking about technology and Technology’s impact and that transitions complicated what’s happening in my writing career is complicated right and I’ve really been working on this now for years where it’s just hundreds of hours of thought um making sense of what’s happened revising my plans for the future I mean a lot of effort goes into intentionally shaping parts of your life and I have diagrams and pictures that evolve over time and you know it’s a lot of time like I’m spending right now at this phase of my life trying to figure out okay I know what my 30s were about I knew what my 20s were about I’m figuring out now what my 40s are about and it’s a complicated question and I’m giving it a lot of time this is a practical piece of advice that is relevant for everyone isn’t it because whether you’re a knowledge worker or not creating time for Solitude is important yeah and I think a lot of the time people are so busy they think I don’t have time for solitudes without realizing that Solitude actually will give you so much more of your time back yeah yeah just don’t use your phone for a week you’ll find time yeah yeah I mean I I ran this experiment for digital minimalism we had all these people stop using their phone more or less for a month oh they had a lot of time time in fact the problem they had was how much time that generated and they didn’t know what to do with it that was the biggest problem and so this experiment I did for that book was 1,600 people and for a month that we called it optional digital activity so like you’re not on social media you’re not browsing the news you’re not watching video on the news the biggest issue was what to do with all the time that opened up so yeah we we we have time also Solitude is easy it’s not you don’t have to go to a meditation room you don’t have to like put aside time you don’t have to go to a gym it’s you’re already going to work in the morning just don’t put something in your ears you know you’re already walking the dog just like do a dog walk without you know uh reading something on your phone at the same time I mean Solitude is just about activities you’re already doing just be doing that activity and let your mind go where it’s going to go you know one thing that really if I can say it worries me about the state of society at the moment and it’s highly relevant for me because of the age my children are is technology smartphones with children yeah I I was literally speaking to Jonathan height about this last week and he’s obviously done a huge Deep dive into the issues here but when I Dro my son at the bus stop for example yeah most mornings to go to school I can remember when I was his age you know standing at the bus stop you’d have to talk to people right even if you didn’t know them and over a period of five six seven years of being at Secondary School you kind of figure out how to do it right even if you were nervous at first you’d figure out like how that actually works what what’s going on now no one’s chatting they’re standing there at the bus stop everyone’s staring at their phones and I’m not blaming the kids right I get how addicted these Technologies are but it does make me think about well what happens in 20 years or 30 years when these children children who were growing up without Solitude become adults like what are the consequences of this yeah yeah it makes me nervous I I’ll tell you what makes me gives me some hope though because I’m really worried about that right because it’s difficult to learn how to be a sort of adult socialized human like socialization is hard our teenage years is when we practiced you know I mean I don’t I don’t know what your teenage years were like but also remember parties mhm you had to walk into this room you were trying to navigate like am I cool enough to be here social so so I am worried what’s going to happen if you lose that training the one thing that makes me a little bit more optimistic is that the the University students I teach and maybe this is just a reflection of the school it’s a pretty elite school they’re pretty good communicators like they’re very polished okay so like okay there’s some hope there like maybe they’re they’re they’re still picking this up but I think John’s take on technology and kids is right that uh he’s been very influential I’ve known John for a little while so I’ve seen I’ve been following along his research over the years right and and I’ve been I’ve given talks at my kids school about it where I basically just simulated John on stage like I’m gonna show you his charts or whatever I think he’s right that we’re shifting and we’ll be there within the next few years to a cultural mindset that it’s it’s roughly 16 or older is the earliest for unrestricted internet access it’s post puberty yeah is when people should get uh unrestricted internet access that’s coming really quick now and I think we’re going to look back and say man you had a real Misfortune if you happened to be born in a time that got you to your adolescent years when we were still in the experimental phase of a new technology which is by the way what we do with all new technologies when it first comes around we spend a decade or so let’s just try everything and then there’s the next couple of decades we figure out okay maybe we should have traffic signals on the roads right like we figure out like once the technology comes along we’re just entering the traffic signal phrase of kids and smartphones so you know man if you were a teenager in 2015 or something like this you just got bad luck right I mean you were like the the the poor country farmer who got ran over by the first automobile in 1903 because we didn’t really know what to do with the technology and people just were driving everywhere well why I know Jonathan says as well in your view why after puberty why why should we wait until after puberty yeah I mean a couple things happen um one your brain has developed more um two you have a much more stable sense of identity so it it’s really dangerous when you’re trying to identify build your identity and where you fit into sort of like the world of social structures to be bombarded by these sources that can manipulate and play on your identities and early adolescence so by the time you’re post puberty you’re much more stable in your sense of self um also your social groups have already more set so you have you have a better understanding of here’s who I am here’s who my friends are here’s our connections we have to each other and now you’re in your interest all of this is more baked and then these things come in uh it’s not playing with wet clay as much right so it can’t it can’t do as much a 13-year-old man you just get buffered it around because so much is happening at that age but that’s particularly social media isn’t it because as I spoke about with Jonathan we we reluctantly I did with my wife get my son a Smartphone when he joined secondary school but there’s no social media and he’s really really good with his use actually and again we take it seriously to model good behavior at home so we’re also on our phones around them at home and that sort of stuff so so I think that’s another piece of it which we have to take seriously but yeah I appreciate your thoughts on that um you still don’t have any social media do you Cal I don’t no the people say I don’t think this counts our our podcast is put out on YouTube yeah but that’s not it’s not my social media it’s not a you know I don’t know I don’t understand the world of social media well um the one exception is I do reporting on social media especially my writing for the New Yorker it’s one of the Beats I cover so I will enter into various social media circles like an anthropologist going to like the distant Island yes so like I’ll go on the Twitter for a while to observe certain things to write about or I’ll I’ll see what’s happening on Tik Tok so I can write about it so so my understanding of social media comes uh as a thirdparty Observer I’m the only thirdparty Observer I think left in the world you know this point well it’s incredible because most people will say you cannot do what you are doing as a very successful author yeah and not have a social media account yet you have you have proven that’s simply not the case it may be harder for some people for sure I get all that but you’ve definitely proven that it is possible I think in digital minimalism you also made the case that well I don’t know if it was what you do or you recommended people do yeah that try not to have any apps on your phone that make money from your attention yeah did you say that you still s byy it I said that yeah don’t put anything on your phone where someone makes more money the more you look at it because you’re going to lose that battle right I mean look at that the capitalization of something like meta it’s market capitalization is somewhere between 500 to 800 billion dollars depending on the day I mean this is significantly larger than Exon Mobile that amount of resources if that’s being aimed at getting you to look at your phone more you’re not going to win that battle by just having like some good intentions of I want to look on these things uh less often you got to take it off your phone so yeah what I recommend is like okay if you have some professional reason you need social media um use it like a professional have it on your computer in the browser where it’s not at all interesting have a schedule where you go on there and I go on there on Fridays and it’s sort of tedious I post these clips that I’ve I filmed on this other day and I update these things and then I shut it back down again right because because a lot of what happens is someone will have a very narrow legitimate but very narrow use for a social media tool like I need to post um like let’s use Ryan holiday as an example like he’s like I’m gonna post a a stoic quote every day right so you’ll have some this is fine it’s a brand building exercise but then they’ll use that as an excuse Ryan doesn’t do this but someone who had a reason like that might use that as an excuse to great so I have to be on social media all the time yeah like no this is like a very narrow thing you’re doing uh so don’t put it on your phone that’s where all the attention engineering goes is the mobile apps the website versions of these things is boring for me I go onto the computer that post my quote every morning like Ryan I think has a big Google doc full of these things and there’s someone on his team it’s like the most mechanical thing every morning copy paste you know send and that’s that uh there’s no reason to be and there there’s reasons but it’s trouble there be dragons if it’s I want this on my phone and I want to interact with people or I want to see how well this thing is doing or I mean it’s just mind virus you also recently said which I found absolutely fascinating that but you do use a smartphone but because you don’t have any of those apps on it it’s actually not that exciting yeah which is I think is a it’s really the eye opening for a lot of people we will say that the phone is addictive perhaps it’s not the phone perhaps it’s what we’re putting on the phone yeah I I wrote this New York Times opad about this did you where I said we should use our our iPhone our smart phones the way Steve Jobs intended sorry to interrupt to make sure you are taking action after what watching this video I have created a free special guide to help you improve your sleep and reduce fatigue now in my clinical experience most people who are struggling to sleep are doing something unconsciously in their day to-day life that is negatively impacting their ability to sleep at night so in this free guide I share with you five of my very top tips tips that I have seen transform the lives of many of my patients so if you want to get hold of this guides all you have to do is click on the link in the description box below right and so what I did is I went back and I watched the original uh keynote address where Steve Jobs introduces the iPhone um I also went and talked to one of the original Engineers of the iPhone they had no notion of the idea that this device was going to be your constant companion the goal of the iPhone when it was invented was not people will look at this all the time that if you go to a bus stop or train people will be on all time if you watch that original keynote Steve Jobs uh intention is super clear he’s like I I don’t want you to carry a separate iPod and cell phone those should be in the same device and he thought the interface for smartphones was insulting he’s like no it should be a visual voicemail it should be really easy that’s what he was doing you have to get over 20 minutes into his keynote address before he even mentions uh other non-music or other non-phone uses so he was what jobs was doing was taking things we already loved music and communicating and said I’m just going to build you a better device for doing it so that’s what the iPhone was there was not even an app store when it came out wow then later they they introduced an app store and then Facebook really led the charge by realizing like oh wait a second we can get super high engagement on mobile because people have this with them all the time so if we engineer this thing to be really appealing we can get uh exponentially more attention minutes than we’ve ever gotten before that’s when it became a constant companion it’s not fundamental to the phone and perhaps that’s why my son at least up until now has good habits because there are no apps on his phone which make money off his time yeah the original Steve Jobs iPhone is fantastic like what do I do on my iPhone yeah I listen to audio right it’s podcast Audi books music it’s fantastic for that uh I don’t make a lot of phone calls I do a lot of text messaging with my family and I use the map and like I’m very happy to have this thing in my I can look up where I’m going I can listen to things um but the idea a that I would just be looking at it all the time it’s just not the way it’s not my relationship with it yeah I blame social media made the phone into a constant companion uh Steve Jobs would have thought that was inelegant he loved music it’s like I don’t want to be looking at this little screen all day I want people to spend $600 to buy one of these things because it’s beautiful and awesome but then once they have it I don’t need them looking at all the time Apple doesn’t make more money if you use your phone more often true it’s the apps yeah let’s go back to slow productivity yes okay uh in a nice little brief detour into digital minimalism which is a bloody fantastic book honestly I I really really enjoyed it when I read it in what 2019 when it came 2019 2019 um you mentioned the three principles one do fewer things which we’ve sort of covered to work at a natural pace can you talk about that yeah well one of the things that matters is we’re not wired to work all out all the time right I mean that was something that was invented by Factory and Mills that was really the first time in human economic history and my economic I mean that Loosely going all the way back to 300,000 years of foraging and hunting we were not wired to work at steady intensity all day long day after day week after week right that’s just not the way that that human beings actually operated um we had a lot more variation within the day but also within the seasons the if in the the agricultural period the Neolithic Revolution in the winter is going to feel very different than the fall if you’re a hunter and gather 150,000 years ago the migration period is going to have a different feel than the non uh I cite research in the book looking at extent foragers about what the daily rhythm of that looks like within the scope of the day it’s super varied it’s okay we’re we’re on a hunt but now it’s the midday Sun so we’re going to rest because the animals are resting and then we’re going so lots of variation but that was really interesting that was for me one of the most fascinating things in the book was this idea of us asking ourselves well what does work mean and if we look at our modernized through an evolutionary lens well how much did we even use the work and when you look at that go no wonder so many of us are burnt out because what we’re doing today is so unnatural it’s super unnatural so so it was Mills and factories came along and now for the first time in human history it was actually it makes sense it’s more productive for us who own the Mills and factories if you just work all the time the more you can work to better right and that’s where we got the idea of steady intensity all year round and it was a disaster it was terrible for people it was so unnatural to be doing this we eventually had to invent you know labor unions and Regulatory Frameworks and have a very antagonistic relationship between the workers and the owner of the fac factories because what we were asking people to do was so unnatural and unbearable that we had to have huge protections around it to even make it sort of survivable right remember Blake referred to those Mills dark and satanic uh knowledge work emerges okay how are we going to organize this new type of Labor and we like let’s do the factory thing we’ll just do yeah Factory shifts eight hours a day all year round no variation uh instead of now you putting steering wheels on the car or whatever moving the the shuttle [ __ ] through the loom you’re going to be in your office like send the emails or whatever but we want you clocking in and doing your shift and it should be all day long we’re very suspicious if you’re not working and just do this all year round no variation in the day no variation in the year we’re not wired for it and so we’re getting exhausted by it because we don’t even have at least in the industrial sector we recognize that way of working is unnatural and unbearable and we build huge Frameworks like okay if you’re G to make me do this you got to give me all these protections and we’re going to negotiate for pay and you have to give me brakes and all this types of stuff even drivers truck drivers Lorry drivers they’re only allowed to work for a certain amount of hours because it is deemed or one of the reasons is it’s deemed unsafe so they have to rest but in knowledge we get none of that so we get all the worst parts of this very unnatural way of working uh with none of the protections that that we do need for it the solution here is shouldn’t work that way and when I go back and study knowledge workers from a previous time where they’re just working on their own what did they gravitate towards huge variation intensity busy periods un busy periods Mary cury uh honing in on isolating radium from Pitch blend right this was going to be the first sort of formal identification of a radioactive substance this was no Bell caliber work honing in on this drops everything goes for a two-month vacation in France right comes back and starts working out some more and does it isolates it wins her first of two Nobel prizes it’s a different mindset it’s like yeah over the next few years I want to isolate this and make a big Discovery but also I need to put the brakes on a little bit I’m getting kind of exhausted so let’s go explore grados and you know the the French Countryside and then come back and try again like this was uh much more much more natural that things had much more variation that’s how we always naturally produce value with our brain until recently how does that apply this the second law as it were in the book work at a natural pace yeah how how can someone who doesn’t have the luxury of taking off two months in the summer yeah to reflect on a big idea or do something else and come back and get their Nobel Prize what can they take from that idea and apply immediately yeah so I can tell you first of all what I think companies should do and then what individuals can do even if their companies don’t do these things right so there are examples so companies are now starting to experiment with ways to have more variation which I I applaud right um one is the idea of sabatical more and more companies are introducing this idea of uh sabatical for employees you have a hard few years you do some cool things take two months off paid uh to to recharge and rethink and then come back again paid sabatical that’s becoming a bigger thing I think it’s a great idea uh another idea that’s out there base camp the company base camp does this they do Cycles so work unfolds in Cycles you’re on an on cycle which could be four to six weeks where you’re really focused on one or two things right then you have an off cycle that’s going to be like a two-e period where you purposely don’t do a lot of things it’s all about trying to close up the loose ends on what you’re just working about and more importantly thinking about with space to reflect what is most important for me to do next and the employee handbook for base camp says resist a temptation to just push more work into the off Cycles you have to actually cycle down your workload before you cycle it back up so I love ideas like that what can IND idual do if they don’t work for one of those companies you can do this internally without telling anybody pick times of the year these three weeks in the middle of the summer like before the holidays and you know whatever um I’m going to wind down a little bit during those periods I’m not going to make an announcement about it I’m just going to when I how I schedule things uh what projects I have end and when I have new projects start the hours I’m actually going to be like putting in work I’m just going to down cycle for a while right you sort of like quiet quit but just for a couple weeks at a time right at a smaller time scale you can do things like pick a day of the week and say I’m just not going to schedule any meetings on that day and again I’m not going to announce it it’s just when people ask me when I’m free I’ll offer lots of dates they just won’t happen to be on that day right so that that day can be uh quieter than other days or once a quarter once a month take an afternoon off and go see a movie and again don’t make a big deal about it just say have an appointment no one cares you know when you when you shed that tip in the book about seeing a mattin once a month and how great it would feel um I haven’t done this but midweek in the afternoon in a cinema I don’t know what how does it feel it feels I by the way I do this right um it feels great because you know the context of other people are at work right now and so it’s the most relaxing Movie experience you’re like this is great you really appreciate it it’s like cold water after a long stint in desert you’ll appreciate it a lot more I love that and actually the in the book which I I I really really enjoyed reading was that if you feel guilty about this just remind yourself how many evenings you’ve worked how many times You’ worked at weekends which is true because a lot of people do feel guilty about that kind of stuff if they’re able to do it but they forget like hey you have overworked loads you’ve probably given your company way more in the past yeah where where’s your overtime for working after yeah you don’t get it but also if you leave the pit productivity mindset this becomes psychologically easier so in the pseudo productivity mindset activity is value you think about any reduction in activity as taking value away from your employer right yeah this is it isn’t it because this is this is basically the fish not knowing what water is yeah it that example illustrates it beautifully the reason you feel guilty is because you have developed the belief somewhere that you are only measured in terms of your activ it and your visible activity if you didn’t have that belief in the first place there’s nothing to feel guilty about feel guilty about I mean what if instead the way you thought about your work is okay this year or this season I have this portfolio of projects I’m working on and I’m really proud of the work I’m doing on these and it really uses my skill and I think it’s going to move the needle and this is great I’m on track for it it going to a movie on this Tuesday is not going to negatively affect that right it’s a completely different way of thinking about it but if you imagine yourself like an assembly line work like well wait a second if I’m not at my spot on the assembly line putting the steering wheels on the car like the whole thing slows down it’s a problem for everyone else but when you when you switch from activity to outcome you realize well uh I’m producing stuff I’m proud of it’s why writers professional like novelist just write novels and I say novelist because it’s the one type of writer that we leave alone yeah for whatever reason not we don’t get to do this as non-fiction writers but novelists were very safe to say disappear write your book week book tour and then go write another book like we don’t make them do things right study the lives of a novelist they’re doing all sorts of things right because you can only write so much and they they have to like take down time and because what they’re thinking is am I going to produce a really good book yeah over this next that’s what they’re judged on that’s what they’re judged on how many hours they put into that book it’s like how good is the book so for them to say I’m not feeling it this afternoon I’m going to a movie yeah of course why not why is that a problem yeah so we can adopt more of that mindset we we’re not novelist I wish we were I love their their lifestyle but we could take this into other knowledge workshops like this is what I do that’s valuable here’s my portfolio of projects I’m working on I’m really doing well on these things right uh that’s what matters am I proud of what I produced this quarter am I proud of my my annual contribution to the company not how uh how’s my time card look I think one of the other differences between let’s say factory work and knowledge work you mentioned that individual who if they’re not at the factory putting on the steering wheel yeah then there is going to be a reduction in you know output for that company one of the upsides of that and I’m sure there’s many negatives of working in that environment is that when you clock off at 600 p.m. or 5:00 p.m. you’ve clocked off yeah you cannot be doing that at home right so yeah sure maybe the job is a bit monotonous maybe there’s things you don’t like about it you know everything has got upsides and downsides one of the UPS sides might be that you simply cannot work at home because that work can only be done at the factory whereas with knowledge work those emails that thing it can be done anytime it could be done on Sunday morning yep it can be done at any time which makes that um that switch off very difficult for many people yeah I mean imagine if you worked on an assembly line and you were like assembling magnetos for the alternator and now imagine that the company is like you know what we put a bunch of Magneto Parts at your house it’s up to you but like while you’re you’re at home you could probably build a few more of the now we’re not saying you have to but like you know we are counting the magnetos and and if you maybe build a few while you’re at home and and and by the way when you go uh when you go to like your your kid sports games or this or that we’re just going to have a guy who follows behind with a a cart full of Magneto hey it’s up to you but you might want to build a couple that’s what email is yeah and that’s part of why modern technology made pseudo productivity not work anymore I mean this is really the way I the Techno story here I keep coming back to is pseudo productivity was crude it kind of worked it wasn’t very accurate but whatever until we got modern technology in the office and then it spun out of control this is one of the reasons why it did because if activity is how I demonstrate my value and now I have the opportunity to do activity at any time in any place I now have to fight an internal battle constantly constantly I have to fight the battle and it’s draining yeah it’s draining that battle you know there’s research isn’t it it says if your smartphone is there on the table you are exerting willpower just to not pick it up and look at it yeah it’s not neutral well it’s like a torture I me think about it it’s almost like a torture device in the sense that what do humans care about they’re tribes right we’re we’re we’re a community based species right if someone in our our tribe historically speaking needs something from us we better take care of that we do not want to ignore in the Paleolithic Era some in our tribe is like I ta it on your shoulder you don’t want to ignore that person because it’s going to break perhaps the relationship and they’re not going to share food when there’s the next famine but what is an email inbox as far as our more primitive social circuits are concerned what is an email inbox if not a bunch of members of your Tribe need something from you and if you’re ignoring it now you’re in danger you’re in danger of not passing on your genes right because we’re wired don’t ignore when people need things from you because that part of our social circuits don’t know about norms and a knowledge work office space and asynchronous communication so like an email inbox that is slowly filling at all times is like a social psychological torture device it’s like I dare you not to go and check this it’s pulling on some of our deepest instincts it’s like having folders full of pornography around everywhere and it’s like don’t open that but by the way you know there’s you know pornography behind every corner you’re like oh my God all the Deep instincts like I I want to take a peek at that this is pulling out another deep Instinct the instinct to be social and so it really is sort of perverting this thing we have this Instinct we have in a way that makes that challenge is impossible do you have an email app on your phone yes so you managed to use that in a way that enhances your life if if we take the digital minimalism approach yeah has that been quite intentional that this email app helps you yes well well first of all I have like five or six email addresses so I I because I use specialized email for specific purposes so that I can have sort of specific expectations around those addresses so this is just for one of those accounts okay so I had an interesting uh experiment back in March the the app broke and I didn’t have access I got basically logged out of Gmail on my phone and for various reasons I couldn’t log back in so I went about a month month and a half with no email access on my phone uh and what I found is like oh there’s these very specific but frequent logistical reasons why I needed the email like coming here on the train I have the tickets in my email right so I have this one address with an email app so for these logistical purposes um but again you’re very intentional about super intentional yeah but also like with email I mean for me the key to email is uh it’s not what you do once you think about what do I do with all these requests coming in that I need to deal with how do I deal with all those requests you’ve already lost the battle the real the real war here is how do I stop so many of those requests from showing up in the first place like that’s you got to go Upstream so if you’re just like a standard knowledge worker that’s where having less active projects helps because now there’s less things generating emails for you to actually receive if you’re an entrepreneur if you’re Like Ur running like a little media concern there’s other types of things you can do to try to be very intentional about what goes where um but I’m I’m I really do not like unscheduled incoming messages that requires a response yeah that’s the killer third principle obsess over quality yeah we don’t have a huge amount of time to go through it the word obsess yeah I’ve been thinking about that words because of course the danger as you acknowledge in your book is that this can you know spill over into perfectionism actually doing because you’re soen to make it the thing how come you chose the word obsess yeah well because you have to care a lot about it yeah I mean if if I had said instead uh care about quality that’s too light everyone’s like yeah I care about quality I want to do good work it doesn’t capture the magnitude of what I’m trying to say which is this should be Central yeah this has to be Central to your story The perfectionism SL craft tradeoff is Central and unavoidable and in some sense like this is the challenge uh you can’t Sid step you have to confront it head on it is a real challenge anyone who’s ever tried to do anything well faces this Challenge and my approach to it is recognize that here’s some ideas about what to do with it yeah but don’t run from it yeah don’t run from don’t let your fear of like what if I procrastinate over perfectionism stop you from trying to get better because it is so important to try to get good craft is so Central to earning the ability to have a slower notion of productivity is that like you can underemphasize it yeah I completely agree I mean it’s that those three principles they really work beautifully in harmony with each other yeah right because if you take principle three obsess over quality without do fewer things you got a big problem if youve got 10 things that you’re obsessing about to be perfect yep you’re going to be overloaded so they they all kind of feed each other quite nicely don’t they and you get the flip side too which is if you’re just like say trying to do fewer things but not caring about the quality of your work then it work it just becomes a game where you begin to get this like of antagonistic relationship with your work of less is better than more and how many things can I take off my plate and that can have its own sort of nihilism to it like they you need the counterbalance I want to do fewer things so that I can do the things I care about better right you need those it’s the glue I call that principle the glue that holds the whole thing together in terms of my public face and career the two I guess most important things I do are my books and this podcast and all of these principles really apply to this kind of endeavor and if we just focus on obsess over quality for a minute one of the big differences between the podcast and the book is that the books come out every year or every two years yeah right so there’s a different yeah there’s a different timing to that where is the podcast is every week apart from six weeks every summer so we can obsess over quality and we do but we also have to be able to say that’s good enough yeah to press publish because otherwise you could literally spend six weeks crafting a podcast one show to be absolutely perfect yeah so yeah it’s interesting whereas with a book I can take longer but I still need a deadline you still need a deadline you still need a deadline but that that’s the whole that’s the whole game yeah is you need constraints and then you do the best you can within the constraints yeah ex that’s that’s the whole game with perfectionism and it yeah so podcast is a great example this has to come out every week uh I also have time constraints on my podcast yeah it’s half a day a week half a day a week yeah is that prep as well uh yeah wow so you’ve got half a day week to prep and record it yeah yeah and so you know uh I I I have to get help to do that and like as I add new things I have to figure out how to take other things off of my plate and my now I have a producer that helps like gather the questions for the prep or this or that uh but within that half day I’m like oh my God I want to make this as good as possible yeah I try as hard as possible yeah car honestly I’m I’m such a fan of your work um and have been for many years it’s really such an honor to have you in my studio and talking to you I think slow productivity is a game Cher for people I really do I think it’s going to help people really understand why their work may be overwhelming them and it is chalk a block full of practical tip that people can use that even an office worker who may feel as you said before doesn’t have much autonomy there are still things you can do I also want to shout out digital minimalism because I thought that was an absolutely fabulous book as well and I guess that deals more with the the kind of our of time or nonwork time but there’s a huge Synergy between the two of them yeah just to finish off Cal for someone who has heard this conversation and thinks yeah you know what I’m I am overloaded I’m one of those 88% my my life feels too much I’m sick at being overwhelmed all the time yeah where would you advise them to start I would start with workload doing fewer things at once is going to give you the most immediate benefits I mean I think when you say I’m going to look at this big list of things I’m actively working on I’m going to take 30% off my plate for the the 70% that remains I’m going to divide it between these are the two I’m working on for the next couple of weeks and the rest are just going to sit here and I’m not going to give them active work uh until I’m finished with something over here and I’ll pull it in do the workload changes first you’re going to get breathing room and then once you have breathing room everything else begins to seem possible because I you know I discovered this because I I wrote a book before um you I was talking about email and building processes and how to have a better ways of communicating that’s not so interruptive and what I learned working on this new book is that the biggest problem people were having is they had so much on their plate that they didn’t have breathing room to even step back and ask these type of questions like oh how do I want to communicate on this project oh is there a way we could collaborate on this that’s not just going to be slack all day when you have too much to do it’s like you’re drowning and when you’re drowning you can’t actually uh get enough air to make any changes so if you reduce that workload first it’s going to feel like I can finally catch my breath and you can get some solitudes some reflection you can think about your pace you can think about quality you can think about doing what you do best even better everything becomes possible once you get that extra space so I’ve been telling people if you’re going to start with slow productivity start with the number of active things on your plate Cal it’s been such a pleasure talking to you you’re doing fantastic work thank you for coming on the show oh thank you I enjoyed it if you enjoyed that conversation then I think you are really going to enjoy this one we live in an age of rings and pings and dings and app notifications social media alerts we’re rewi our brains technology is a tool for us to use but if technolog is using us then we become the tool