Speaker 1: Pushkin. The stock market crash of nineteen twenty nine and
Speaker 1: the great depression that followed quite reasonably scared a lot
Speaker 1: of people. Fortunes were lost, savings disappeared, factories closed, and
Speaker 1: jobs evaporated. The only places doing a roaring trade were
Speaker 1: soup kitchens and breadlines. Things looked bad, with no end
Speaker 1: in sight. But one man wasn't that worried.
Speaker 2: We are suffering just now from a bad attack of
Speaker 2: economic pessimism, so.
Speaker 1: Said famed British economist John Maynard Keynes.
Speaker 2: It is common to hear people say that a decline
Speaker 2: in prosperity is more likely than an improvement in a
Speaker 2: decade which lies ahead of us. I believe that this
Speaker 2: is a wildly mistaken interpretation of what is happening to us.
Speaker 1: People were having trouble keeping a roof over their heads
Speaker 1: and food on the table, but Keynes wanted them to
Speaker 1: look to the far horizon.
Speaker 2: My purpose is to take wings into the future. What
Speaker 2: can we reasonably expect the level of our economic life
Speaker 2: to be one hundred years? Hence, what are the economic
Speaker 2: possibilities for our grandchildren?
Speaker 1: You might recognize the voice reading Keyes's words. It's my colleague,
Speaker 1: the economist Tim Harford from the Cautionary Tales podcast. Tim's
Speaker 1: very familiar with Keanes's rosy predictions about what life would
Speaker 1: look like in the year twenty thirty.
Speaker 3: Kaines thought that the Great Depression was just an economic blip,
Speaker 3: albeit quite a painful one. He predicted that, thanks to
Speaker 3: industrial and scientific developments, the economy would boom, and that
Speaker 3: the standard of living enjoyed by people would improve dramatically. Indeed,
Speaker 3: he suggested that most people would be so rich their
Speaker 3: struggles to make ends meet would be consigned to history.
Speaker 3: At last, they'd earn more than enough money to pay
Speaker 3: their bills in just a few hours each week, with
Speaker 3: the rest of their time freedom up to enjoy life.
Speaker 1: To people in nineteen thirty, these predictions must have been
Speaker 1: mind blowing. Kines believed his grandchildren would enjoy a fifteen
Speaker 1: hour work week, with ample time left not just to
Speaker 1: relax in leisure, but to engage in a host of
Speaker 1: purposeful activities like increased kindness and civic participation. And Caines
Speaker 1: thought our whole attitude towards work would change radically as
Speaker 1: a result.
Speaker 2: When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high
Speaker 2: social importance, There would be great changes in the code
Speaker 2: of morals. For love of money as a possession, will
Speaker 2: we recognize for what it is a somewhat disgusting morbidity.
Speaker 1: Well, dear happiness lab listener, congratulations, because you are currently
Speaker 1: living in that utopian time that Caine's envisioned. How are
Speaker 1: you enjoying your fifteen hour work week? To Kanses's credit,
Speaker 1: we do have a much higher standard of living than
Speaker 1: our grand parents. We also have smart TVs, dishwashers, microwaves, iPhones,
Speaker 1: and the internet, fun and time saving gadgets the people
Speaker 1: of nineteen thirty could only dream of. But although Kaines
Speaker 1: was right about our increased incomes, he was wrong about
Speaker 1: what would happen to our sense of busyness. Rather than
Speaker 1: living relaxed lives of leisure, people in twenty twenty four
Speaker 1: are working harder than ever. Americans today worked ten percent
Speaker 1: more hours than they did in the nineteen seventies. Economists
Speaker 1: have also observed a shift in the last few decades
Speaker 1: and the usual relationship between a person's wages and the
Speaker 1: number of hours they work. Historically, people who earn less
Speaker 1: money tended to work more hours, but that relationship has
Speaker 1: now reversed. These days, it's higher paid individuals who are
Speaker 1: spending more time at work. They also report significantly more
Speaker 1: time stress than they did in the previous decades. If
Speaker 1: Kans had lived to see what workaholics we've all become,
Speaker 1: he'd be very sad. Instead of a utopian work life balance,
Speaker 1: our generation got side hustles and career cushioning and time
Speaker 1: hacks and over employment and burnout culture. I've been thinking
Speaker 1: about Kynes's predictions a lot these days, because lately I've
Speaker 1: feeling busier than ever. I'm privileged to have a great
Speaker 1: standard of living and a job I love, but my
Speaker 1: to do list feels endless. I spend a lot of
Speaker 1: time feeling frantic, fantasizing that any day now I'll finally
Speaker 1: be able to get through all the stuff on my
Speaker 1: plate so I can take a breather. But that fantasy
Speaker 1: day of rest never seems to come. And what's my
Speaker 1: solution to feeling so so overworked all the time. It's
Speaker 1: usually to double down on my business. I try to
Speaker 1: get through my to do list as quickly as I
Speaker 1: possibly can, so I work long hours and multitask whenever possible.
Speaker 1: But this endless quest to optimize my overloaded schedule usually
Speaker 1: winds up increasing my sense of overwhelmed rather than decreasing it.
Speaker 1: I end up feeling like everything is urgent, and not
Speaker 1: just when I'm at work. Somehow, this obsession with using
Speaker 1: time well leaks into my leisure time too. In the
Speaker 1: rare moments I do get a break, I feel anxious
Speaker 1: that I'm not getting enough productive stuff done, and as
Speaker 1: is probably obvious, none of this overwhelm is all that
Speaker 1: good for my quest to feel happier. This episode about
Speaker 1: the happiness challenges that I struggle with, I'm going to
Speaker 1: explore how I and so many others got this messed
Speaker 1: up when it comes to busyness and productivity. Are we
Speaker 1: doomed to our relentlessly overloaded schedules, or can we claim
Speaker 1: the leisure time that Caine's envisioned as our generation's birthright.
Speaker 1: Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to
Speaker 1: be happy. But what if our minds are wrong? What
Speaker 1: if our minds are lying to us, leading us away
Speaker 1: from what really make us happy. The good news is
Speaker 1: that understanding the science of the mind can point us
Speaker 1: all back in the right direction. You're listening to the
Speaker 1: Happiness Lab with doctor Laurie.
Speaker 4: Santos Okay, Wednesday May twenty nine, six am podcast interview
Speaker 4: with person in the UK.
Speaker 1: Nine am meeting with my lab manager, ten am brainstorm
Speaker 1: meeting for my new course. Eleven am Zoom podcast recording.
Speaker 1: Looking through my schedule on an average day, I'm pretty
Speaker 1: much doing ten plus hours of work. Oh and I
Speaker 1: have to make my husband's birthday cach. What happened to
Speaker 1: the fifteen hour work week that Keenes promised us?
Speaker 5: If you do well in a career a professional era,
Speaker 5: you can actually expect to get busier and busier and busier.
Speaker 1: Writer Oliver Berkman has shared my sense of overwhelm for decades.
Speaker 1: He always had too much on his plate, and like me,
Speaker 1: he tried many a hack to team his overloaded schedule.
Speaker 1: He even reviewed time management techniques and productivity tools for
Speaker 1: The Guardian newspaper in a weekly article called This column
Speaker 1: Will Change Your Life. Oliver desperately tried anything in everything
Speaker 1: to get his packed schedule under control.
Speaker 5: Fancy notebooks to organize your time in year, planners, pens
Speaker 5: that cost too much money, you know, all part of
Speaker 5: an attempt to try to reach this sort of position
Speaker 5: of feeling completely in control of time.
Speaker 1: Things finally came to a head one day about ten
Speaker 1: years ago. Oliver was sitting alone on a park bench,
Speaker 1: sxiously ruminating about all his undone tasks, when a scary
Speaker 1: thought occurred to him, None of this productivity stuff is
Speaker 1: ever going to work. In an instant, he realized that
Speaker 1: no matter how much work and self discipline and time
Speaker 1: management gear he marshaled, he simply was never going to
Speaker 1: feel on top of all he had to do. That
Speaker 1: dream of getting everything he needed to get done done.
Speaker 1: It was always going to remain out of reach.
Speaker 5: The reward for good time management is more work.
Speaker 1: Oliver christent this painful realization the efficiency trap.
Speaker 5: Anything you do to try to use time more effectively
Speaker 5: by becoming more efficient, seems to be a fairly general
Speaker 5: law that what will actually end up happening is that
Speaker 5: you get a lot more busy and a lot more stressed.
Speaker 5: The sort of abstract way of talking about it is
Speaker 5: that if you make a system capable of processing more inputs,
Speaker 5: then it will just attract a lot more inputs. A
Speaker 5: concrete example gives email. Right, if you get really good
Speaker 5: at answering email at a really fast tempo. You end
Speaker 5: up with loads more email because you're getting replies to
Speaker 5: your replies and you have to reply to that, and
Speaker 5: you get a reputation for being responsive. And it doesn't
Speaker 5: just apply to email. If you're in a workplace setting
Speaker 5: where there's some particular kind of project that needs to
Speaker 5: be done and you get a reputation for being really
Speaker 5: fast at completing that kind of project, you're going to
Speaker 5: get loads more of those projects to complete. So that's
Speaker 5: the trap of efficiency. It's an attempt to try to
Speaker 5: get everything done, to get to the end of everything,
Speaker 5: but because the supply is infinite, it's not actually a
Speaker 5: good way to build a more productive or fulfilling life.
Speaker 5: It's just a way to sort of get busier.
Speaker 1: Oliver argues that this sense of overwhelmed has begun to
Speaker 1: take over our entire modern existence.
Speaker 5: But we not only overwhelmed by work tasks, by email,
Speaker 5: by things that we have to do. We're overwhelmed by
Speaker 5: potential experiences. We could have bucket list places we could go,
Speaker 5: things we could be doing on any given evening, people
Speaker 5: to date, depending on your context, you know. So there's
Speaker 5: all these kind of different ways in which there's just
Speaker 5: more experience to be had in the world. So I
Speaker 5: think that leads to sort of permanent state of feeling overwhelmed, A.
Speaker 1: Permanent state of feeling of whelmed. Yep, that pretty much
Speaker 1: describes my life these days, and all of our's tough
Speaker 1: message is that if you're feeling that way too, it
Speaker 1: is at least in some ways, your own fault.
Speaker 5: I never want to underplay the sort of broader societal
Speaker 5: and economic reasons for this, but in some sense we
Speaker 5: do bring it on ourselves, or we at least collaborate
Speaker 5: with the situation, because we're presented with this sort of
Speaker 5: infinity of things to do, and the very first thing
Speaker 5: we say to ourselves is like, Okay, let's find a
Speaker 5: way to do an infinite amount of things.
Speaker 1: One reason is that being busy all the time makes
Speaker 1: us feel kind of important.
Speaker 5: If you are somebody who has your self worth wrapped
Speaker 5: up in your productivity, right, you think that you've got
Speaker 5: to do a certain amount or reach some kind of
Speaker 5: standard to sort of be okay, then being busy is
Speaker 5: proof to yourself that you're in demand, that the spigot
Speaker 5: of opportunities has not dried up, that it's all very
Speaker 5: much part of feeling that you are doing all you
Speaker 5: need to be doing to feel good about yourself.
Speaker 1: I definitely felt called out by this comment. How often
Speaker 1: have people asked me, Hey, how's it going, only to
Speaker 1: get my standard response of Oh, I'm just so busy.
Speaker 1: The frazzled feelings behind that reply aren't fun. But if
Speaker 1: I'm being honest, I do feel weirdly proud of myself.
Speaker 5: We've created this situation that makes busyness into a status symbol.
Speaker 5: So then obviously, by definition, you want to make sure
Speaker 5: that you've got some of that business.
Speaker 1: But there's a cost to seeking out busyness for the
Speaker 1: sake of busyness. We wind up stuck in a painful
Speaker 1: psychological state that the journalist Marilyn Robinson has called a
Speaker 1: sense of joyless urgency.
Speaker 5: I mean, I think that is just a very very
Speaker 5: widespread feeling, the sense that you've really got to get somewhere,
Speaker 5: but it's not really the place you'd necessarily want to
Speaker 5: be going, and certainly the process of getting there is
Speaker 5: not what you wanted to be doing.
Speaker 1: How did we all get so hooked into this joyless
Speaker 1: relationship with our busy schedules. Oliver suspects that at least
Speaker 1: some of the problem stems from how humans have learned
Speaker 1: to think about time.
Speaker 5: Going from introduction and widespread adoption of mechanical clocks and
Speaker 5: then into the industrial revolution, we'll get this very long,
Speaker 5: slow process that is characterized by people starting to think
Speaker 5: of time as a resource. And once you have this
Speaker 5: idea that like, there's you and then there's time, and
Speaker 5: you're living your life sort of lined up against the
Speaker 5: sort of a yardstick or a measure of some kind,
Speaker 5: you have to keep up. If you use a bit
Speaker 5: of time wrongly, you're wasting it. You can try to
Speaker 5: squeeze more things into that time, and all of this
Speaker 5: is kind of a spatial metaphor, right, It's all to
Speaker 5: do with time as containers and little boxes. When you
Speaker 5: really get right back down to the experience of being
Speaker 5: in time, it isn't like that at all. We just
Speaker 5: get this one moment and then the next moment and
Speaker 5: then the next moment. I think we really need this
Speaker 5: idea of being able to think about time as a
Speaker 5: resource for all sorts of things. But it's a little
Speaker 5: bit crazy, really when we try constantly to interact with
Speaker 5: time as something that it isn't, which is something we
Speaker 5: can sort of hord or endlessly fit more things into it.
Speaker 5: None of it quite makes sense.
Speaker 1: But there's another way that our thinking about productivity doesn't
Speaker 1: quite make sense, one that relates to the changing phase
Speaker 1: of modern work. These days, a lot of our jobs
Speaker 1: are a bit weird. The happiness lab. We're a turn
Speaker 1: in a moment.
Speaker 6: Up until about the mid twentieth century, we had really clear,
Speaker 6: well defined definitions of productivity.
Speaker 1: Best Selling author and computer scientist Cal Newport has spent
Speaker 1: a lot of time thinking about why modern work is
Speaker 1: so overwhelming.
Speaker 6: So if you're in agriculture, it was bushels per acre
Speaker 6: of land under cultivation, you could measure it. It was
Speaker 6: a number you could change how you planted your crops,
Speaker 6: that you could see if that number went up and down.
Speaker 6: When we got to industrial manufacturing mills followed by factories,
Speaker 6: we could do something similar.
Speaker 1: A factory manager on an assembly line can easily measure,
Speaker 1: say the number of Widgets or Model T Fords produced
Speaker 1: per labor hour. People could just tell if everyone was
Speaker 1: using their time efficiently and contributing to the company's bottom line.
Speaker 6: All that fell out the window with knowledge work, which
Speaker 6: really emerged as a major sector in the nineteen fifties.
Speaker 1: Knowledge workers create useful goods and services not through physical,
Speaker 1: assembly line style labor, but through their thoughts. The modern
Speaker 1: economy is full of such professionals scientists, doctors, writers, professors, attorneys,
Speaker 1: even podcast hosts. But professionals like these don't end the
Speaker 1: day with a bunch of widgets piled up on their workbench,
Speaker 1: and that means it's harder to assess their productivity. Take
Speaker 1: for example, what it would mean to define productivity in
Speaker 1: my own form of knowledge work, making a podcast. How
Speaker 1: could I make the happiness lab as productive as possible?
Speaker 1: I could try to take a mathematical approach and define
Speaker 1: productivity as the number of episodes we make. But should
Speaker 1: I go with the sheer number of episodes? Maybe longer
Speaker 1: episodes are better than shorter ones. Or maybe I should
Speaker 1: count AD revenue per episode or listener downloads. Each of
Speaker 1: these could be a reasonable metric for podcast productivity, So
Speaker 1: what should I choose? Similar kinds of questions pervade pretty
Speaker 1: much all knowledge work.
Speaker 6: We do not get a lot of direct feedback in
Speaker 6: terms of how well is what you're doing right now
Speaker 6: impacting what we care about. It's free floating.
Speaker 1: And things get even more complicated when you ask how
Speaker 1: you should be allocating your time to achieve whatever free
Speaker 1: floating definition and productivity you came up with.
Speaker 6: The typical knowledge worker has many different things they're working on,
Speaker 6: and what they're working on might be different than the
Speaker 6: person right next to them. It can shift. It's more informal. Also,
Speaker 6: how we do our work is very personal, which is
Speaker 6: a real innovation to knowledge work we don't see in
Speaker 6: other places.
Speaker 1: Supervising factory workers on an assembly line is easy. You
Speaker 1: figure out how to best build your widget, and you
Speaker 1: tell your employees, hey, make the widget like this. But
Speaker 1: none of that holds for a job like podcasting or
Speaker 1: teaching or programming.
Speaker 6: Knowledge work is too complicated. It's creative, it's skilled. The
Speaker 6: individual knowledge workers know more about what they're doing than
Speaker 6: the people supervising them. So we got to allow the
Speaker 6: individual workers autonomy. Allow them to have autonomy in figuring
Speaker 6: out how they're going to do their own work.
Speaker 1: But managers did want some way to determine and whether
Speaker 1: or not knowledge workers were putting in useful effort, so
Speaker 1: they came up with what cal thinks is a very
Speaker 1: problematic alternative pseudo productivity.
Speaker 6: So suitor productivity is a crude heuristic that says, visible
Speaker 6: activity that's going to be my proxy for figuring out
Speaker 6: whether or not you're doing useful effort. So the more
Speaker 6: I see you doing things, the more productive. In scare quotes,
Speaker 6: I'm going to assume you're being. This is the dominant
Speaker 6: way I think we measure effective work.
Speaker 1: This need to monitor visible effort led to other changes
Speaker 1: in the knowledge work sector, ones that had nasty implications
Speaker 1: for a worker's sense of autonomy and happiness.
Speaker 6: When the knowledge sector grew as a big sector and
Speaker 6: we said, how are we going to literally organize this work,
Speaker 6: we said, well, let's just do what the factories do.
Speaker 6: You will come to a building, we'll all gather in
Speaker 6: the same place. We'll be there for a long shift,
Speaker 6: so that we can just see that everyone is working.
Speaker 6: That's why I know you're working, because you have to
Speaker 6: come to this building and I can physically surveil you.
Speaker 6: That's suitor productivity. There's nothing about cognitive work that says
Speaker 6: the best way to do this is as many hours
Speaker 6: as possible, or to do it in one contiguous shift.
Speaker 6: But if our main metric for productivity is visible activity,
Speaker 6: then it made life a lot easier for the managers, But.
Speaker 1: Of course such surveillance didn't make life easier for the
Speaker 1: knowledge workers.
Speaker 6: Suit of productivity makes us miserable, and has been making
Speaker 6: us more miserable. It barely worked until about the two thousands.
Speaker 6: Then digital technology enter the scene, and it spiraled out
Speaker 6: of control. Because now I can leave a trace of
Speaker 6: me working or not working by doing emails, et cetera anywhere.
Speaker 6: Now there's an unlimited supply of work. Because one of
Speaker 6: the things the digital age brought to us was zero
Speaker 6: friction work assignment. I can just hey, can you handle
Speaker 6: this sin boom? It's off my plate.
Speaker 1: This emergence of email and slack channels and team meetings
Speaker 1: and group texts meant that workers had way more opportunities
Speaker 1: to show off their visible activity, and managers quickly took notice, Hey,
Speaker 1: I haven't.
Speaker 6: Really been seeing you in the email chains recently. You
Speaker 6: weren't at these zoom meetings. You are slow to respond
Speaker 6: to the slack chack. What's going on? Maybe you're not productive.
Speaker 1: But managers weren't the only ones to embrace pseudo productivity.
Speaker 1: Knowledge workers soon began to internalize this notion. Practices like
Speaker 1: clearing your emails. To achieve inbox zero and being on
Speaker 1: slack after hours became almost as important to workers as
Speaker 1: the projects that made up their true job descriptions, especially
Speaker 1: since incremental progress on the big projects will always be
Speaker 1: harder to show off.
Speaker 6: You don't know if I'm at home or I'm in
Speaker 6: my office, you're not in nearby. You don't know that
Speaker 6: I'm working deeply on an article that leaves no trace,
Speaker 6: but if I'm jumping onto email threads, that does leave
Speaker 6: a trace, And so it biased us towards what's going
Speaker 6: to leave the best trace through the environment of pseudo productivity, evaluation.
Speaker 1: And this desire to leave some tangible evidence of your
Speaker 1: efforts has a terrible effect on the actual output of
Speaker 1: knowledge work.
Speaker 6: So one of the consequences of pseudo productivity is that
Speaker 6: it gets in the way of the ability to give
Speaker 6: the most important things you do unbroken attention. How do
Speaker 6: we get our brain to actually produce value. It's the
Speaker 6: ability to focus intensely on some If you want to
Speaker 6: produce the best things you're capable of using your brain,
Speaker 6: you don't want to be distracted. I want to focus
Speaker 6: on this hard thing I'm doing until it's done. Pseudo
Speaker 6: productivity punishes that.
Speaker 1: I've totally been punished by my internalized pseudo productivity. I'll
Speaker 1: be in the middle of writing a podcast script or
Speaker 1: an academic paper when I'll hear a ding from a text,
Speaker 1: so I peek at my phone, get distracted, and take
Speaker 1: longer to finish the task I'm really supposed to be
Speaker 1: focused on. And that sense of distraction doesn't just bubble
Speaker 1: up during actual interruptions. Whenever I find myself deep in
Speaker 1: a writing project, I'll inevitably think, you know, I haven't
Speaker 1: checked my email in a while. I wonder if there's
Speaker 1: something important next thing. I know, I'm deep in my inbox.
Speaker 1: I've internalized the importance of visible activity so much that
Speaker 1: I start feeling anxious whenever I'm not engaged in it,
Speaker 1: and that anxiety gets worse when my bigger projects fail
Speaker 1: to produce an obvious output. For a while, it feels
Speaker 1: almost easier to spend my time on dumb, pseudo productive
Speaker 1: stuff like clearing my inbox.
Speaker 6: And now we have whole departments, we have whole teams
Speaker 6: and organizations producing a lot less valuable work because we
Speaker 6: are servicing this crude proxy that doesn't actually get to
Speaker 6: the core of what it means to be productive. It's
Speaker 6: completely cross purposes.
Speaker 1: But pseudo productivity doesn't just impair actual work productivity. It
Speaker 1: also increases our stress levels and decreases our happiness.
Speaker 6: There's an unavoidable consequence of pseudo productivity that you're going
Speaker 6: to get overloaded and you're going to stay overloaded. Saying
Speaker 6: yes to someone asking you to do something is very important,
Speaker 6: right because that's a very clear signal of activity. We
Speaker 6: have to get rid of pseudo productivity. We need much
Speaker 6: more humanistic, psychologically aware, and evidence based approaches for saying
Speaker 6: this is what we mean by productivity in the knowledge sector.
Speaker 1: Thankfully, Cal has come up with just such an approach,
Speaker 1: one that he outlines in his fabulous book Slow Productivity,
Speaker 1: The Lost Art of Accomplishment without Burnout. Accomplishment without feeling
Speaker 1: burned out, Sign me up. Cal's idea for slow productivity
Speaker 1: was inspired by the slow food movement, a campaign in
Speaker 1: the late eighties pushing back against fast food culture arguing
Speaker 1: that people should take the time to grow and cook
Speaker 1: their own healthy food.
Speaker 6: Slow food actually gives us a couple really good ideas
Speaker 6: for how to form a reform movement. One it says,
Speaker 6: when dealing with a cultural situation that's displeasing, don't just
Speaker 6: attack what you don't like, give a positive alternative. The
Speaker 6: second part of their reform program was don't just try
Speaker 6: to create the better thing looking forward, make sure that
Speaker 6: you're also drawing from wisdom that is accumulated in the past.
Speaker 1: Cal now applies the same approach to fixing our overwhelmed schedules.
Speaker 1: He turned to knowledge workers of the past, professionals who
Speaker 1: lived back in John Maynard Keynes's day and even before,
Speaker 1: to see how they produce their most effective work. Such
Speaker 1: insights led Cal to develop the three core principles of
Speaker 1: slow productivity, doing fewer.
Speaker 6: Things at once, working at a more natural pace, and
Speaker 6: then obsessing over the quality of what you do.
Speaker 1: Let's start with doing fewer things at once.
Speaker 6: Well, when we're doing fewer things, we are relieving ourselves
Speaker 6: of not just a lengthy task list, but the administrative
Speaker 6: overhead that comes along with each of those items on
Speaker 6: our task lists. And this is something I think people
Speaker 6: often overlook is that when I say yes, I'm not
Speaker 6: just saying yes to eventually, how many hours am I
Speaker 6: going to spend writing the report or doing the committee
Speaker 6: or whatever it was I said yes to. When I
Speaker 6: say yes to something, it's also going to come with
Speaker 6: persistent administrative overhead responsibilities. It's going to be emails back
Speaker 6: and forth with people who are involved in it. All right,
Speaker 6: every Wednesday we got to like jump on zoom, and
Speaker 6: it's going to be cognitive space taken up by the
Speaker 6: fact that, hey, this thing's ongoing in some part of
Speaker 6: your brain wants to think about it. So when you
Speaker 6: say yes the lots of things, even if you're not
Speaker 6: working on the actual projects at the same time, all
Speaker 6: of their administrative overhead begins to pile up. And so
Speaker 6: what happens is the more things I've said yes to,
Speaker 6: the less time I actually have to work on things.
Speaker 1: This hit me like a ton of bricks. When I
Speaker 1: look at my own calendar, I see days and days
Speaker 1: broken up with staff meetings and check ins and random appointments,
Speaker 1: cal calls, commitments like these productivity termites. They eat up
Speaker 1: the big blocks of time in our schedule, so much
Speaker 1: so that little solid foundation is left for the stuff
Speaker 1: that matters.
Speaker 6: And this is a negative feedback cycle that can get
Speaker 6: pretty nasty, because once you have enough of your day
Speaker 6: servicing commitments but not working on them, you fall behind.
Speaker 6: And the only way to escape from the spiral is
Speaker 6: to start reclaiming time outside of work hours, and they
Speaker 6: have to work on the weekends and late at night
Speaker 6: and early in the morning. Doing fewer things at once
Speaker 6: is not the same as doing fewer things overall. In fact,
Speaker 6: you're going to accomplish a lot more per year if
Speaker 6: you keep your plate much more sparse.
Speaker 1: But it's not enough to streamline what you work on.
Speaker 1: You also need to work at a more natural pace.
Speaker 1: As cal looked to the great writers and thinkers of
Speaker 1: the past, he realized they didn't work the way most
Speaker 1: of us do today.
Speaker 6: So a knowledge work emerged. We said, okay, how are
Speaker 6: we going to deal with this? We said, we'll use
Speaker 6: pseudo productivity as our metric for effective action. Well, what
Speaker 6: was the best way to monitor pseudo activity back then?
Speaker 6: We said, we'll run our offices like a factory.
Speaker 1: Managers brought knowledge workers into a building where they could
Speaker 1: be observed. Employees were stuck there for eight hours a day,
Speaker 1: working the entire time. But applying a factory model to
Speaker 1: writing good computer programs or academic papers or podcast scripts
Speaker 1: doesn't work that well.
Speaker 6: So Cognitive work is not something that you can just
Speaker 6: churn out of your mind like a widget, as many
Speaker 6: hours as you want in a row. It's not like
Speaker 6: putting steering wheels on a model T. It needs way
Speaker 6: more ups and downs. I have to get the right information.
Speaker 6: I need to think about what I want to do,
Speaker 6: and then there's periods of great intensity, But then that
Speaker 6: might need to be coupled with periods where I'm really
Speaker 6: pulling back. My brain is recharging and trying to find
Speaker 6: new inspiration. Our brain does not operate like an assembly line,
Speaker 6: but we run it that way, and now I think
Speaker 6: we have a lot of misery because of it.
Speaker 1: Kel argues we need to take a much more humane
Speaker 1: approach to our schedules. We need to build in the
Speaker 1: natural variability that thinking well requires. We need to expect
Speaker 1: that some days will be filled with more progress than others,
Speaker 1: and we need to intentionally build in time to recharge
Speaker 1: without beating ourselves up over it. And cal has a
Speaker 1: specific suggestion for doing this, a practice he calls small seasonality.
Speaker 6: Standard seasonality is what our Neolithic ancestors used to do.
Speaker 6: The winter, I don't do as much work as the fall.
Speaker 6: When I'm bringing into harvest, and you have these variations
Speaker 6: of seasons, so we can shift intensity at smaller scales.
Speaker 6: I'm going to take the three weeks in December before
Speaker 6: we get to the holidays, and I pull back for
Speaker 6: those three weeks. It's a lower intensity period that's not
Speaker 6: as big as a season, but it gives me some variation.
Speaker 6: You could do this at an even smaller scale. I
Speaker 6: don't schedule meetings on Mondays. Don't tell anybody this. When
Speaker 6: someone wants to set up meetings, you can propose all
Speaker 6: sorts of times, just never happen to propose a time
Speaker 6: on Mondays. So now every week you have this first
Speaker 6: day that has a fully different field than the other days.
Speaker 1: But working naturally also requires taking a healthier approach to
Speaker 1: your workspace.
Speaker 6: If our work primarily uses our brain, everything that impacts
Speaker 6: our brain is relevant to our work. So just like
Speaker 6: if I was an athlete and my work primarily involves
Speaker 6: my body, other things I'm doing to my body matters.
Speaker 6: If I'm sort of doing a bunch of squats right
Speaker 6: before a soccer game, it's going to matter. But we
Speaker 6: don't think about this with cognitive work. But the environment
Speaker 6: that our brain is exposed to impacts how our brain functions.
Speaker 6: And so when you see that laundry basket at your
Speaker 6: home office, there's a whole other part of your brain
Speaker 6: that says, we gotta do laundry. When are we gonna
Speaker 6: do laundry? Which means your efforts to write a book, chapter,
Speaker 6: whatever is going to be degraded. So if you make
Speaker 6: a living with your brain, you have to separate where
Speaker 6: you do this brain work from where you live. Location
Speaker 6: matters if you're a.
Speaker 1: Remote worker, Cal recommends finding a spot that doesn't remind
Speaker 1: you of all your other daily pressures. Find a coffee
Speaker 1: shop or co working space, even a large closet, anywhere
Speaker 1: that stops you from c and thinking about all the
Speaker 1: stressful stuff in life, so you can focus on your
Speaker 1: important projects. And once you're settled down to work, Cal says,
Speaker 1: you need to obsess over the quality of what you do.
Speaker 6: Obsessing over the quality of what you do is the
Speaker 6: glue that holds the other two principles together. There's two
Speaker 6: things that happen once you start caring about quality. One,
Speaker 6: it justifies for yourself going slower, because to do things
Speaker 6: really well, you have to slow down. On the flip side,
Speaker 6: when you get really good at something. Because you obsess
Speaker 6: over your quality, you get more leverage and control over
Speaker 6: your work life, and it becomes easier.
Speaker 1: Obsessing over quality can help produce burnout in other ways, too.
Speaker 1: Burnout typically emerges when we experience what clinicians call a
Speaker 1: values mismatch in our work. We want to produce work
Speaker 1: of a certain standard, but we just don't have the
Speaker 1: time or bandwidth to accomplish that. When we can't give
Speaker 1: meaningful projects our full attention and creative energy because we're
Speaker 1: doing so many other things, we feel cynical and overwhelmed.
Speaker 1: But obsessing over the quality of our work prevents that
Speaker 1: sort of values mismatch. We wind up able to put
Speaker 1: our full passion and energy into what truly matters. But
Speaker 1: this ability to focus on what truly matters requires one
Speaker 1: other important, but very painful realization. There may never be
Speaker 1: enough time to do everything we really care about.
Speaker 5: We've got minds that allow us to conceive of an
Speaker 5: infinite number of things we want to do, or could do,
Speaker 5: or should do, and yet we are these sort of
Speaker 5: animals who can only do so much of it.
Speaker 1: The happiness lab or return after the break.
Speaker 5: The desperate side of being a productivity junkie is that
Speaker 5: it is an attempt to sort of not have to
Speaker 5: confront certain truths about either one's own life or human
Speaker 5: life in general, and the fact that you know, in
Speaker 5: case of time management, there just isn't enough time for
Speaker 5: all the things that feel like they matter.
Speaker 1: Former productivity junkie Oliver Berkman now embraces all the tenets
Speaker 1: of slow productivity that Cal Newport described earlier. He does less,
Speaker 1: tries to work at a more reasonable piece, and focuses
Speaker 1: on high quality work. But Oliver thinks there's one more
Speaker 1: painful truth we must confront if we want to find
Speaker 1: the utopian work life balance promised by John Maynard Keynes.
Speaker 5: If you're convinced that in the end there must be
Speaker 5: a time for everything, then you're not going to say
Speaker 5: no to the right things. You're not going to make
Speaker 5: the right choices about what not to spend your time on,
Speaker 5: and as a result, it's just going to be more
Speaker 5: and more stuff incoming.
Speaker 1: Oliver explores this idea in four thousand Weeks Time Management
Speaker 1: for Mortals. The four thousand weeks in the book's title
Speaker 1: refers to the length of the average human life span.
Speaker 1: Pretty sure, right, The.
Speaker 5: Important point is just that it's finite that has an
Speaker 5: end point. It means that there's no reason to assume
Speaker 5: that there will be time in a day or in
Speaker 5: a life to do all the things that feel to
Speaker 5: you like they matter.
Speaker 1: No time in a life to do all the stuff
Speaker 1: that matters. I can't what Oliver is saying here, but
Speaker 1: I find the realization terrifying.
Speaker 5: I do think that humans have, since the beginning of
Speaker 5: humanity railed against their finitude. Most of our worst problems
Speaker 5: with time, the ways we end up procrastinating, distracting ourselves,
Speaker 5: feeling unfulfilled, feeling too busy, feeling overwhelmed, can be traced
Speaker 5: back to various forms of this avoidance. It's because we
Speaker 5: want to make ourselves feel unlimited that we try to
Speaker 5: set up ludicrous productivity systems that are going to enable
Speaker 5: us to do absolutely everything.
Speaker 1: Embracing the idea of a time limited life can help
Speaker 1: us come to terms with the fact that we're simply
Speaker 1: never going to get everything done, which forces us to
Speaker 1: become intentional about what we choose to do.
Speaker 5: You don't get to choose not making tough decisions about
Speaker 5: what you do with your time, but you can make
Speaker 5: wiser or less wise ones. First of all, ask yourself
Speaker 5: how much time you reasonably have available, and then decide
Speaker 5: what are the most important tasks to put into that box.
Speaker 5: So maybe that strikes people as very obvious, but in
Speaker 5: fact I think what people instinctively do instead is the opposite.
Speaker 5: They get up in the morning and say what has
Speaker 5: to be done by the end of the day, paying
Speaker 5: no heed to the question of whether there's actually enough
Speaker 5: time to do it, and then you make bad choices.
Speaker 5: You try to clear the decks, you try to do
Speaker 5: all the short stuff first, and you find you've got
Speaker 5: no time for the really important stuff. You end up
Speaker 5: feeling inadequate and dumb because you didn't get through the list.
Speaker 5: And it's just a sort of recipe for procrastination and psychodrama.
Speaker 5: So it's really just about saying, this is the time
Speaker 5: that is available, given that, what shall I do.
Speaker 1: Oliver admits to struggling with this level of acceptance from
Speaker 1: time to time. Luckily he has sparked time management gurus
Speaker 1: like his wife around to help him.
Speaker 5: I remember on a couple of occasions asking aloud in
Speaker 5: her presence, whether I really had enough time left to
Speaker 5: meet a deadline? On something that I was working for,
Speaker 5: and of course corresponds always like, that's the wrong question
Speaker 5: you have this time. The question is what's the wisest
Speaker 5: use of that time. All of our time is trade offs.
Speaker 5: You're always choosing not to do things, and so the
Speaker 5: question is, just, given this available time, what's the best
Speaker 5: way to spread my attention and energy?
Speaker 1: And Oliver thinks one clearly bad way to spend your
Speaker 1: attention and energy is with constant multitasking. Recognizing your finitude
Speaker 1: and embracing a limited life means coming to terms with
Speaker 1: the fact that you're not going to have time to
Speaker 1: take in every new tweet or blog post or news article.
Speaker 1: Monotasking requires sacrificing all that.
Speaker 5: It's strange how difficult it is. It shouldn't be that difficult.
Speaker 5: Just not always filling every available attentional channel. It's always
Speaker 5: going to feel easier to veer away from that challenging, difficult,
Speaker 5: uncomfortable thing to some pleasant and compelling source of distraction.
Speaker 5: This is especially the case now because we didn't used
Speaker 5: to have places to go when we got distracted that
Speaker 5: were explicitly designed by very well paid geniuses to keep
Speaker 5: us their as long as possible. On the other hand,
Speaker 5: we are part of the problem, right. I mean, it
Speaker 5: is not in my experience anyway that I'm sort of
Speaker 5: sitting writing a chapter filled with joy and absorption and
Speaker 5: then like somehow Edil Musk's Twitter comes and kind of
Speaker 5: grabs me from my desk and drags me kicking and screaming. No,
Speaker 5: it's more like I find the task difficult because it
Speaker 5: matters to me, and I'm not one hundred percent confident
Speaker 5: I can do it, and all sorts of emotions are
Speaker 5: brought up by doing it. On my better days, I
Speaker 5: can say that's that thing again. It's not actually that
Speaker 5: I can't write this chapter, or that I've got to
Speaker 5: go and waste an hour online. It's that writing brings
Speaker 5: up these feelings for me because I care about it.
Speaker 1: We also need to avoid those comforting but pseudo productive activities.
Speaker 1: A big one for me is my daily practice of
Speaker 1: clearing the decks.
Speaker 5: Trying to get through all your email and little stuff
Speaker 5: and all the bits of paperwork needs to be doing.
Speaker 5: People come in, they feel anxious about all this stuff.
Speaker 5: There's an itch that needs to be scratched, So you
Speaker 5: do with all that first, and then you're supposed to
Speaker 5: feel very calm and at piece, and you can really
Speaker 5: focus on the thing that matters.
Speaker 1: I can't tell you how many hours of my working
Speaker 1: life are spent on this stuff, just sending off one
Speaker 1: more unimportant message so I can get closer to inbox zero.
Speaker 1: We're doing a bunch of stupid errands just so I
Speaker 1: can cross something off my to do list. When I
Speaker 1: say it out loud, deck clearing is obviously not a
Speaker 1: smart approach, but it feels so scary to leave so
Speaker 1: much stuff undone.
Speaker 5: Prising that we feel anxious. But the wise response to
Speaker 5: that kind of anxiety is to do what one can
Speaker 5: to hang out with the anxiety, to tolerate the anxiety,
Speaker 5: and trying to wean yourself off the practice of clearing
Speaker 5: the decks in response to it, I suppose.
Speaker 1: Oliver admits that the strategies he recommends require emotion regulation,
Speaker 1: but he's come to appreciate how much a more realistic,
Speaker 1: more mortal approach to productivity increases what he's able to
Speaker 1: get done.
Speaker 5: Some people see it as quite depressing. I think it's
Speaker 5: incredibly liberating to be like, it is not your faults,
Speaker 5: that you are a finite human and from that basis
Speaker 5: you can then try and do the most meaningful things
Speaker 5: that you can do.
Speaker 1: I'm still a long way from enjoying the leisure filled
Speaker 1: utopia that Kent's envisioned, but making the show has helped
Speaker 1: me establish better habits. I've put cal Newport's slow productivity
Speaker 1: approach into practice. I started doing less at one time
Speaker 1: and saying no to more projects. And I've stopped checking
Speaker 1: my inbox as the first work task of the which
Speaker 1: gives me more morning hours for the projects I want
Speaker 1: to work on. And I'm already seeing the benefits. I'm
Speaker 1: happy to report that my calendar has slowly begun recovering
Speaker 1: from all of productivity termite damage, and I'll be trying
Speaker 1: out some small seasonality by taking a few weeks off
Speaker 1: from the show. But in spite of this progress, I
Speaker 1: have been struggling more than I expected. With one piece
Speaker 1: of advice you heard today, It was Oliver Berkman's idea
Speaker 1: that we need to embrace time management for mortals. You see,
Speaker 1: I don't really like the idea that I'm finite. I
Speaker 1: hate thinking that I ultimately won't have time for all
Speaker 1: the important stuff in life due to the fact that
Speaker 1: I'm going to die someday I find the idea that
Speaker 1: I'm limited to four thousand weeks utterly terrifying. But could
Speaker 1: my avoidance of my inevitable demise be doing more harm
Speaker 1: than good? Okay, it helps if I close my eyes.
Speaker 4: I am going to die. I am going to die.
Speaker 1: I am going to die. Could I wind up happier
Speaker 1: by accepting, maybe even well becoming my own mortality? How
Speaker 1: is it literally talking about it right now?
Speaker 5: Us together?
Speaker 1: No, seriously, I hate hate thinking about it. We'll get
Speaker 1: some answers and explore the benefits of memento mori in
Speaker 1: the next episode of The Happiness Lab with me Doctor
Speaker 1: Laurie Santos